The aftermath of the presidential and vice presidential debates brought the usual rampant ref-working and bias from the Media Research Center — and it also brought out comedy cop Alex Christy to whine that late-night comedians (Greg Gutfeld excepted, of course) made jokes about them. After the presidential debate, Christy huffed in a Sept. 11 post:
Three of the five regular late night comedy programs were able to react to Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and all agreed that Harris was the big winner as they attacked Trump for spreading falsehoods while covering for the falsehoods told by Harris and the ABC moderators.
On Comedy Central, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart reacted to Harris’s facial reaction after Trump recalled her father being a Marxist economics professor, “Oh, [bleep]. She’s about to be like, ‘Motherfucker, let’s just do this. I’m going to,’ she’s about to—a Marxist? She’s about to open up a cup of Ass Kapital on Donald Trump. Linsey Davis, you better change it before the fingers on Kamala’s hand unite.”
[…]Fellow Paramount host, CBS’s Stephen Colbert, declared on The Late Show, “He was so nonsensical that she looked at him the way a parent looks at a kid giving a presentation on why they should be allowed to get a pet tiger. Then, when the moderators asked a basic question about Roe v. Wade, Trump lied so flagrantly that moderator Linsey Davis had to step in with this.”
In the video, Davis claimed, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born” and Colbert cheered, “Follow up question: Can a moderator win a debate?”
No, because Harris’s own running mate signed a law that removed the requirement that babies who survived abortions be given life-saving care.
Christy is falsely conflating whether to provide care to a fetus who survives an abortion — most of whom are pre-viability and would not survive anyway, and post-viability abortions are exceedingly rare — with anti-abortion scaremongering that liberalizing abortion laws means killing a normal child following birth. Still, Christy’s whining continued:
Over at ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the eponymous host welcomed actress Jane Fonda to the show to declare, “We saw someone that has empathy, who cares about ordinary Americans, who talks about kitchen sink issues.”
Later on, Fonda did attack the moderators from the left, “You know what I did not—what I didn’t like about the debate is that it took an hour and a half to ask a question about climate.”
Kimmel appeared to agree, “But this is going to affect everybody. This is not something that anyone can dodge. And this is something that rich people, their grandkids, don’t they care about—that this is something that we all should be focused on, absolutely.”
[…]For his second guest, Kimmel welcomed George Conway, who hyped, “Somebody tweeted tonight during the debate that, you know — they had discussion about late-term abortion and post-birth abortion. It’s like, well, Kamala Harris aborted a 78-year-old tonight. So, Donald Trump did have a point there.”
He did have an actual point, not just the jokey one Conway thinks.
The next day, Christy groused about a JImmy Kimmel man-on-the-street segment:
Do you know how many eggs a woman has? If not, ABC’s Jimmy “non-sequitur” Kimmel believes you are not allowed to be pro-life because on Wednesday’s show, Kimmel and his liberal audience guffawed at self-described pro-lifers not being able to answer questions about female anatomy that they certainly would not be able to answer themselves.
Kimmel teed up a man-on-the-street segment by hyping Tuesday night’s debate, “Kamala Harris forcefully defended a woman’s right to choose last night, it was very effective, and it got me wondering about how much some of these people who seem to know what’s best for women’s bodies, how much they actually know about the female anatomy. So, we sent a team deep into the heart of Texas to find out.”
[…]The problem with such segments is that viewers have no idea what is real or scripted for the sake of a laugh, nor do they see what was left on the cutting room floor because an interviewee gave the correct answer. Additionally, how many eggs a woman also has nothing to do with the ethical question of when life begins. If Jimmy Kimmel Live! ever asks you how many eggs a woman has, you can throw the question back at them by answering it depends on the woman’s age.
After the vice presidential debate, Christy huffed in an Oct. 2 post that Kimmel wasn’t spouting the approved right-wing narrative about it:
After Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel desperately tried to portray JD Vance as the weird one and Tim Walz as the “normal” one, to the point where he brought back the couch sex jokes and had a skit of Joel Osment as Vance incompetently making his way through a donut shop. However, later in the program, he welcomed Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who used Kimmel’s platform to talk about period empowerment, of all things.
From his military service to Tiananmen Square to his political origin story, Walz may have a history of making things up, but Kimmel declared, “Tim Walz is a very likeable guy, he’s very normal, which is a problem for Fox News, especially because he looks like all of their viewers. He looks like he—so, they are now desperate to exploit any tiny bit of oddness they can conjure up.”
In the clip, Jesse Watters scoffed, “Timmy was at the Michigan-Minnesota game Saturday and hugged the Gopher mascot like it was his husband returning home from war.”
After mocking Watters’s response, Kimmel switched to Vance, “There was a lot of pressure on JD Vance tonight. JD Vance hasn’t been under a microscope like this since his wife asked him why the couch was so sticky. But Trump had good advice, he told him, just have fun, and you know what? It seems like he did.”
Walz has also spread the fake story about Vance and the couch, but Kimmel thinks Vance is the weird one.
Christy didn’t mention that his MRC co-workers absolutely loved it when Vance lied about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. He served a fact-check of sorts on another late-night host:
On Wednesday, CBS’s After Midnight host Taylor Tomlinson claimed to have a rather Freudian reaction to Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. As Vance attempted to fact-check the CBS moderators’ fact-check, he had his microphone cut, leading Tomlinson to claim, “Yes, I masturbated to this.”
Tomlinson teed up a clip of the debate by claiming, “The only exciting moment was when one of the moderators fact-checked JD Vance.”
In the clip, Margaret Brennan declared, “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status, Norah?”
Vance then tried to get a rebuttal in before frustratingly reminding her and Norah O’Donnell, “Margaret, I think it’s important, Margaret, the rules were you guys weren’t going fact-check.”
Tomlinson ended the clip there, but Vance went on to explain the CBP One app, which he described as an “Kamala Harris open border wand.” Still, Tomlinson replied to the truncated clip, “This is like a guy getting caught cheating and then saying, ‘But you said you’d never go through my phone! The trust is gone!’ Vance went on so long that the moderators had to cut his mic.
Christy’s whining continued about not only Tomlinson’s admittedly crass statement (it’s late-night comedy, what did Christy expect?) but also her calling out Vance’s condescending tone:
The point about 1990 was a fact-check of Walz’s attempt to counter Vance, but a detailed policy discussion about CPB One is beyond the reach of a host whose show usually revolves around memes and TikTok videos, “And before anyone asks, yes, I masturbated to this. A woman, silencing men? Yeah, that’s going in the spank bank. Yeah. “Thank you for explaining the legal process” also sounds so familiar. If you’ve ever been on a date with a man, it’s all they want to hear. ‘Thank you for explaining Steely Dan’ or ‘Thank you for explaining crypto.’”
Most people, men or women, also don’t hide behind their gender when someone challenges them. Not only did the moderators go back on the word not to fact-check, the content of their fact-check was, as other fact-checkers like to say, “missing context,” which is why moderators shouldn’t fact-check in the first place. As for CBS comedy show hosts, they can spare us the details of what they do when they are alone.
It’s the MRC’s policy that conservative politicians should never be fact-check for any reason — to the point that it ridiculously considers fact-checking to be censorship.