Media Research Center executive Tim Graham started out this election year whining that fact-checkers fact-check conservatives (not that any of those fact-checks are actually wrong), and that whining continued as election season did. He groused in an April 29 post:
On Monday morning, Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler was tossing his “Four Pinocchios” Liar rating at Donald Trump again, this time over rent-support payments for migrants in the Democrat-run state of Michigan.
In recent months, Kessler has emptied a bucket of Pinocchios on Trump and his aides, but he’s conveniently avoided throwing a single Pinocchio at Joe Biden, not even when Biden blamed Trump for massive Covid deaths: “We lost over 1,200,000 people because of the slow start in all this [vaccination] process.”
Kessler ruled in February that “Biden’s phrasing is sufficiently subtle that a link is not so easily established.” That’s ridiculous. It looks like Glenn Kessler (D-D.C.).
[…]Then he relies on “the state” to break down their rental-subsidy handouts, with this loaded summary: “In any case, more than half of the people who have been approved for rental subsidies are Afghan and Ukrainian refugees — a far cry from the murderers that Trump claims are overrunning the country.”
Kessler also lined up the Biden administration to rebut Trump: “An HHS spokesman said the refugee office funds could not be used for asylum seekers….A White House spokesman also disputed Trump’s claims in a statement.” None of these statements were going the be challenged by Kessler. They were just going to be repeated.
But Graham offered no effort to factually dispute those statements, which makes it look like he’s trying to distract from his own laziness abut accusing Kessler of being lazy.
Graham began his May 8 column this way:
You can tell when the PolitiFact website is going to negotiate around the facts. On May 7, their top headline on the home page asked: “Are ‘outside agitators’ co-opting campus protests?”
This isn’t quite the right question. The media have presented these events as “student” protests, so if half the participants aren’t college students, how would they describe the non-students?
Graham made a big deal out of a notable number of protesters at the colleges being non-students, but he offered no evidence any of them fit the description of “outside agitators. Then he groused the definition used, with added whataboutism:
PolitiFact typically seeks out “experts” to match the narratives it wants to underline. They don’t like people suggesting these protesters aren’t local and they might be paid to protest. They found William & Mary law professor Timothy Zick to define the outside agitator spin: “It was used as sort of a phrase that would link protesters, no matter how peaceful they were, to Communists and other infiltrators who were causing disruption.” The term is used to cast doubt on protester “sincerity.”
Angus Johnson, “historian of student activism” at Hostos Community College in New York, explained, “The idea behind the concept of the outside agitator is that dissent can never be coming from the people who are expressing that dissent.” They also turned to Johnston to underline, “Some experts have been quick to note the main goal of a protest is to get others to join in.”
This spin is nothing like how the media spun the Tea Party protests against ObamaCare legislation. They sought to discredit them as donor-funded “Astroturf” (not grass-roots). They went looking for the most racist or ignorant-sounding sign they could find, to present protesters as a kooky “fringe” movement. NBC’s Chuck Todd decried “town hall madness.” The front page of The Boston Globe lamented the “quarrelsome masses hollering questions downloaded from activist websites.”
Graham didn’t dispute that outside agitators fueled tea party protests.
For his May 10 column, Graham spun away Trump’s lousy jobs record as president by invoking hte pandemic:
On May 8, President Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not a Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record – and Donald Trump’s.
CNN’s Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk – the global Covid pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached new records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 165.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics: for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic – most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies – drove massive job losses. Non-farm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
On the other hand, the MRC spent much of 2024 contrasting economic numbers under Trump and President Biden in an attempt to make Biden look bad, and at no point did it factor in a pandemic allowance for things like low gas prices or higher inflation in making those comparisons. No asterisks here, even though they’re as needed as the one Graham demands on on job numbers.
Graham then huffed that Dale fact-checked Trump further, which he dismissed as “brag checks” (as if bragging should never be fact-checked):
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose DA Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here, and declaring it “false” is lame spin.
On May 7, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor….and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying Soros is “a frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
Again, Graham is playing the lazy-partisan card (never mind, of course, that Trump is very much on record directly tying Bragg to Soros). Just because his conspiracy theory “looks obvious” doesn’t mean it’s actually true — he might try some of that “media research” he claims to be in charge of to figure out the facts. Graham concluded by whining that “CNN deploys Dale not as a ‘fact checker as much as a spin spoiler” — by which he means that Dale keeps spoiling Graham’s right-wing spin.