Jimmy Carter may have left the presidency 44 years ago, but the Media Research Center never stopped bashing him. Here are some examples of the MRC’s obsessive hatred of Carter just since 2020:
- NBC Celebrates Presidents’ Day By Hailing Jimmy Carter ‘Rock & Roll President’
- AP Promotes Young Liberals Claiming We’d Have No ‘Climate Crisis’ If Carter Won in 1980
- MSNBC Touts ‘Biden’s Success Story,’ Compares Him to REAGAN, Not Jimmy Carter
- Reagan-Hating/Carter-Loving PBS Pounces on Old ‘October Surprise’ Conspiracy Theory
- MSNBC Mourns Americans Didn’t Listen To Carter’s Sweater Speech
- NPR Spin: Trump’s In Legal Danger, Bumbling Biden’s Like the Second Coming of Jimmy Carter
When Carter died last month, the MRC unsurprisingly went on extended multi-part rants about how non-right-wing media don’t express the same hate for him that exists inside its right-wing bubble. Jorge Bonilla huffed in a Dec. 29 post:
The 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 100. Those who remain and are tasked with covering his passing have chosen to do so while putting a rosy glaze over his presidency. In doing so, they neglected history.
Carter’s passing forced the evening newscasts to reconfigure their rundowns on an otherwise slow news night. The media’s collective A-blocks were focused on Carter, with the aforementioned rosy glaze.
[…]Mary Bruce’s introduction is emblematic of the coverage accorded to Carter’s passing at ABC: big emphasis on Carter’s personal life, less so on his presidency- which many Americans who were around at the time considered to be the worst in the modern era.
CBS’s Norah O’Donnell sought to portray a more unvarnished version of Mr. Carter’s record, but misrepresented history in the process:
[…]ABC, CBS, and NBC made sure to paint as rosy a picture of the Carter presidency as possible, much to the detriment of younger viewers who did not have to endure it. Not mentioned at all on ABC, CBS, and NBC: Carter’s penchant for murderous dictators.
Bonilla concluded:
Jimmy Carter’s legacy certainly merits examination in the wake of his passing. Rather than examine the man, though, the media manufactured a recount of the Carter years that seems overly gauzy and not at all connected with the painful reality of the effects his policies wrought on the American public.
But isn’t that right-wingers do with Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump’s first term? We don’t recall anyone at at the MRC complaining about that revisionism.
The next day, Nicholas Fondacaro grumbled that Trump was brought into the conversation:
Even with former President Jimmy Carter’s passing over the weekend, Monday’s CBS Mornings still wanted their dose of President-elect Trump. So, while liberal co-host Tony Dokoupil was speaking with anti-Trump presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, the former teed up the latter to recount how Carter had supposedly “guilted” Trump into making a gift to the Carter Center, much to the amusement of all the liberals on set. But there didn’t seem to be any evidence that Trump had written them a check.
“Well, he wasn’t afraid of criticizing the former presidents, right? He didn’t think George H.W. Bush should have gone into Iraq, he thought Obama was wrong on surveillance issues, I mean, you name it,” Dokoupil said. To which Brinkley noted that Carter was “not part of that presidents’ club in those ways.”
[…]So it appears that the money requested was more for the founding of the Carter Library and not the Carter Center’s later charity works oversees, as CBS framed it. And while they boated that Trump was “guilted” into giving money, it didn’t seem as though a check was written. The Carter Center doesn’t list Trump as one of their “Funding Partners.” CBS also made it seem as though the guilting happened much more recently than the in 1980s as Trump wrote about it.
Thte MRC’s hateful whining continued:
- Here Are the Zaniest First Reactions in TV News to Jimmy Carter’s Passing
- NY Times Gushes Over Carter, ‘Great Peacemaker’ and Victim of Circumstance
- CNN Props Up Carter for ‘Courageous, Smart Effort’ in Hostage Crisis
- The Canonization of Jimmy Carter Has Officially Gotten Ridiculous
- New York Times Hints Reagan Beat Carter With Racist Appeals, Downplays Carter’s Own
- Telemundo Whitewashes Jimmy Carter’s Latin American Legacy of Chaos
- Carter Lauded for Israel ‘Apartheid’ Smear on PBS, Ignores Tolerance of Extremism
We suspect the MRC will not like anyone who points out Trump’s “tolerance of extremism” when he dies. Indeed, Alex Christy provided an example of that in a Jan. 4 post complaining about “the glow around” Carter after this death:
When Republicans die, the media will frequently portray them as controversial or complicated, so it should not be considered speaking ill of the dead to point out that while Carter’s post-presidency was more than just Habitat for Humanity. He also tried to legitimize Hamas, flirted with anti-Semitism, and tried to undermine President George H.W. Bush as he sought to work with a global coalition to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait by trying to convince America’s coalition allies to abandon the effort.
Christy will not likely remind us upon Trump’s death that he legitimized political violence by pardoning the Capitol rioters who aimed to overthrow a lawful election as well as anti-abortion extremists.