If it wasn’t clear already, Media Research Center executive Tim Graham made it explicit with his syndicated columns this year: He’s a right-wing partisan, not a “media researcher.” He actually spent a June 5 column arguing that liberals are not allowed to invoke the Founding Fathers:
The front page of the June 3 New York Times was topped with an editorial – labeled “News Analysis” – from their White House correspondent Peter Baker. He picked Patrick Henry as the Trump opponent.
“The revolutionary hero Patrick Henry knew this day would come,” Baker began. Henry “feared that eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency and use his powers to thwart anyone who sought to hold him accountable.” In Henry’s words, “Away with your president, we will have a king.”
Never mind that historians pointed out Henry was inveighing against the Constitution before it was ratified. Baker channeled the Democrat line: “The notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate for commander in chief upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.”
[…]The Democrats and their media enablers use “History” to establish how there is a “right side,” and that is their leftist agenda. Undercutting democratic norms and co-equal branches of government is admirable when the ends justify the means. The Founding Fathers are just yellowed paper puppets in their relentless power games.
And Graham isn’t playing a power game by advancing the anti-media agenda — backed by millions of dollars each year — of his employer?
Graham groused in his July 19 column calling coverage of Trump’s legal problems “endless hours of noise”:
On July 15, the opening day of the Republican convention, federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump for misuse of classified documents. Legal arguments aside, it cast a shadow over all the breathless media hype that came before it.
Year after year, partisan “legacy media” outlets have churned out thousands of stories full of anticipation that the walls of scandal would close in on Trump. Once again, a litany of Trump “legal woes” haven’t damaged his political standing.
A new Media Research Center study of 2023 and the first half of 2024 by Rich Noyes revealed that the evening news shows of ABC, CBS, and NBC produced a whopping 1,608 minutes of airtime on Trump legal matters, and as you might expect, it was fiercely negative (95 percent).
[…]In the end it can feel like endless hours of noise, like…Fake News. That’s not to say every fact is false, but the promotional hype turns out to be false. The Robert Mueller probe never achieved the expected Trump indictments that journalists so deeply desired.
We don’t recall Graham ever fretting that his employer’s years of obsessing over Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes was “endless hours of noise” — indeed, he doesn’t mention Hunter at all, even though that is a logical comparison to make.
Graham’s Aug. 14 column was yet another whine that Trump gets fact-checked:
How do voters know the prestige press is hopelessly partisan? For three weeks, Kamala Harris has been refusing all requests for interviews or press conferences, and that goes unpunished. Donald Trump held a press conference, and he was absolutely punished.
Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio demonstrated their ultraliberal tilt for the millionth time – at least that’s how it feels. NPR political director Domenico Montanaro organized a team to pore over Trump’s August 8 press conference transcript, and “found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”
This scandalous figure had all that Glenn Kessler energy from The Washington Post. Remember when Kessler made a database that identified 30,573 “false or misleading claims” from President Trump? When Biden was elected, he proclaimed the Database Days were over. Kessler proclaimed on MSNBC, “I assume the Biden presidency will be a lot like the Obama presidency, and that they will be responsive, and will be able to quickly back up what they’re saying.”
The crucial word there is “assume.” Democrat journalists assume Democrats tell the truth.
As usual, Graham made no effort to prove his underlying assumption that Democrats lie as much as Trump does, nor does he disprove the accuracy of any of those Trump fact-checks. He does faux-graciously concede that “some of these 162 statements were inaccurate – Trump overstated his support in polls, and there’s some trolling Trumpian braggadocio, like suggesting his crowds are bigger than Martin Luther King’s.” He then nitpicked by inventing new standards: “Trump said Harris is ‘a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen.’ NPR’s “fact” guy argued ‘It’s debatable how liberal Harris is.’ That’s not a fact check. That’s just an emotional reaction.”
Graham concluded by huffing: “The hard-earned dollars of non-liberal taxpayers help fund NPR launching emotional ramblings over how the Democrats aren’t radicals, and they won’t ruin the economy. As often happens, ‘fact checking’ is actually a lot of spin control and denial.” Graham’s column is all about spin control and denial to help Trump. Indeed, the headline on his column stated “NPR Proves They Despise Trump 162 Times.” Only in Graham’s right-wing bubble is fact-checking Trump considered a hate crime.
Graham used his Aug. 9 column to parrot the mandated right-wing narrative that Tim Walz is a “radical”:
Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her Democrat running mate, offering a balance of different races and genders – if you’re one of those traditionalists who still believes in those binaries. But their ideology is a pretty strong match. Walz is especially “progressive” on abortion on demand, on pushing “gender-affirming care” for kids, and on fawning over illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded benefits like free college tuition.
They’ll claim Walz represents “Midwestern values,” and then you see he supported tampon machines in the male bathrooms in public schools, and he couldn’t oppose the idea that pedophilia can be blurred into a list of sexual orientations.
In his Aug. 28 column, Graham whined that “the pro-Democrat press just want to defeat Donald Trump” — as if he, as a member of the pro-Republican press, is not trying to defeat Harris.
Graham spent his Sept. 25 column complaining about a New York Times op-ed in support of Harris written by longtime “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi that made cooking comparisons that Graham didn’t like: “If Kamala’s cooking qualities naturally carried over to her political duties, wouldn’t she have a better record as vice president of uniting Americans? Instead, Democrats have spent their time in the White House bitterly dividing Americans.” And Republicans have not been trying to bitterly divide Americans by pushing anti-DEI propaganda that suggest anyone who’s not a white male is not deserving of the job they have.