The Media Research Center has its Trump Regime Media marching orders, and it is to defend Pete Hegseth no matter what (or whether it makes him look like a wuss that his mother has been forced into doing media for him). Clay Waters whined about more criticism of Hegseth in a Dec. 14 post:
Thursday’s PBS News Hour welcomed back Brad Onishi (host of the podcast “Straight White American Jesus”) to warn once again about scary Christian conservatism, this time encapsulated in Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, interviewed by the show’s most biased reporter, Laura Barron-Lopez. Onishi compared Hegseth to mass shooters and to white nationalists eager for a “holy war.”
Onishi smeared Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson as a Christian supremacist on the show back in February (also a Barron-Lopez interview) and PBS invited him back to do a similar hit job on Hegseth.
Anchor Geoff Bennett set Hegseth up for the double battering.
[…]PBS paints itself as an oasis of civil discourse — as its expert compares Hegseth to mass murderers Anders Breivik (77 dead) and Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch (51 dead). Onishi is the extremist here. The interviewer is pleased with all this.
Onishi simply pointed out that, like Breivik and Tarrant, Hegseth prominently embraces Crusader and Knights Templar imagery. Waters didn’t dispute the accuracy of the observation, just whined that “Guilt by association rolled down like water” — as if the MRC has never done such a thing.
Mark Finkelstein spent a Dec. 16 post complaining about another Crusades reference:
Presumably, even Morning Joe‘s fierce feminist warriors wouldn’t have ordered female soldiers to storm the beaches and scale the cliffs of Normandy on D-Day.
But that didn’t stop today’s panel from hammering Pete Hegseth for his views on women in the military. Retired Admiral James Stavridis, Joe Scarborough, and “MSNBC Republican” Elise Jordan misrepresented Hegseth’s position. They suggested that he opposes allowing women in the military, full stop. That’s entirely false.
[…]And when an agitated Joe Scarborough screamed that Hegseth would be taking us back not to the 1950s, but to “the 11th century,” Jordan specified, “to the Crusades!”
Opposing people using the military for woke crusades and “gender-affirming” surgeries makes you so “11th century.” All the Pentagon wokeness is surely seen as the Right Side of History.
What is a “woke crusade”? Has any military member been forced to fight in one? Finkelstein didn’t elaborate.
After the holidays, Jorge Bonilla spent a Jan. 3 post complaining that criticism and concern about Hegseth didn’t magically go away:
With the political news having largely died down over the holidays in favor of travel, Jimmy Carter remembrances, and the New Orleans terror attack, talk of the second Trump transition has subsided, leaving Friday’s Good Morning America to bring it back to the forefront as ABC boasted to viewers they still plan to try and sink Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth.
Co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos pivoted from President Biden blocking the sale of U.S. Steel and the speakership fight in the House to confirmations with this comment to ABC’s lead Biden apple polisher, Mary Bruce: “Many of President-Elect Trump’s picks for cabinet positions also facing controversy. Pete Hegseth, the choice for defense secretary, the Senate committee is now digging deeper into his background.”
Bruce shared the network had “learned exclusively that the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee has quietly been reaching out to that veterans organization that Pete Hegseth used to run, appearing to request additional information about those recently reported allegations of a 2017 sexual assault, also those accusations that Hegseth financially mismanaged the group.”
Cue to the dark, scary music!
[…]As one can sniff out here, ABC was trying to make fetch happen, which wasn’t surprising given the 96 percent negative network evening news coverage our Bill D’Agostino found last month in a study of Trump picks Hegseth as well as those for FBI Director (Kash Patel), and Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard).
Bonilla didn’t explain why committee members wanting more information on Hegseth was a bad thing. He wrote a similarly themed Jan. 13 post about a different network:
The media furor against the nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense seemingly died down for the holidays. But the malicious spotlighting of Hegseth has picked up ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.
Watch as CBS’s Nancy Cordes picks up where the media left off:
[…]It is a playing of the old hits ahead of the confirmation hearing: a chance to get one last smear in before Hegseth before the Armed Services Committee to get grilled. The unsourced sexual allegations and the allegations of heavy drinking serve as a convenient frame from which to push to disqualify Hegseth in the court of public opinion.
But right-wing media does the same thing all the time to attack liberals it doesn’t like (which is to say, all of them). Bonilla has never complained about that, which makes him a partisan hypocrite here. He’s never going to demand that, say, Fox News adhere to the same standards he expects ABC and CBS to follow.