Given how much the Media Research Center loves to blame liberals for every disaster that strikes the country and exploit them for right-wing gain (i.e., the death of Laken Riley), it’s somewhat hilarious when it accuses others of doing what it does. Jorge Bonilla kicked off the MRC’s coverage of the California wildfires by making that hypocritical complaint in a Jan. 8 post:
Leave it to MSNBC’s Joy Reid to indulge her Trump derangement with no restraint, even in the middle of an ongoing disaster. Such was the case when she and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) disgustingly politicized the horrific Los Angeles fires in order to score cheap dunks on President-Elect Donald Trump.
[…]There are legitimate policy questions to be addressed in the wake of the spread of these apocalyptic fires across the greater Los Angeles area. There is the matter of forestry management, to wit: the clearing of underbrush so as to prevent it drying out and becoming fire fuel. There is also the matter of ensuring access to water, as opposed to the continued grant of veto power to the delta smelt at the expense of Californians who’d like their homes not to be incinerated.
Reid chooses, as always, to oversimplify these issues and engage them in bad faith, hence her cracks about leaves not raked and water coming out of the faucet. To properly address these legitimate underlying issues makes Democrats look bad, so Reid demagogues.
Then there’s Schiff. Watching his response live was weird because you knew that there was going to be a “but” at some point. But, for a split second, it really looked like he was refusing Reid’s cheap dunk bait and speaking in a unifying manner. That didn’t last, though. As Laura Ingraham used to say on her radio show, Schiff brought the “But Monkey” out for all to see.
In the midst of unspeakable tragedy, Reid and Schiff chose demagoguery and rank partisanship over unity and good-faith dialogue. This is why the people have increasingly lost trust in the media.
But isn’t the reflex to put partisanship over unity and good-faith dialogue what Bonilla and his MRC colleagues do all the time? Shouldn’t the MRC be treated just as untrustworthy as it insists the “liberal media” is?
Bonilla served up more of that demagoguery he purports to hate in a Jan. 9 post:
It was evident that this segment would quickly go downhill, given that host Abby Phillip teased it with “Donald Trump points the MAGA hose at liberals. Sure enough, a significant effort was made to deflect away from the Democrats currently in charge at the local and federal levels.
There was an overall sense of indignation at the fact that Trump has called for reforms in forestry management and in the availability of water for the fire hydrants. Now that the unthinkable has happened, the media resist engaging in those portions of Trump’s remarks except to dismiss them as politics.
Bonilla offered no evidence that Trump’s complaints had any basis in fact — he was blaming liberals, and that was sufficient.
Michael Wnek joined the bash-a-thon later that day:
On Wednesday morning, President-elect Trump weighed in on the fires raging through Los Angeles County, blaming California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) for the disaster. Later during Inside Politics, CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson accused Trump of having “no sense that Californians are Americans” and lacking empathy because of his feuds with “Democrat[s] in general.”
Host Dana Bash first turned to NPR’s Tamara Keith to get to the bottom of Trump’s accusation. However, the reporter offered a weak excuse in response, stating that “trying to explain water politics in California is almost impossible.”
Keith further claimed the “larger issue” was a future president “seemingly trying to start a feud with the governor of a state in the middle of a crisis,” which she boiled down to Santa Ana winds and “it hasn’t rained. It’s been very dry in California.”
Incoming Puck reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell drew a little closer to an explanation on water control in California and the southwest, but drew back and settled on postulating about what would have been an appropriate response from Trump: “Usually what happens, as we all know, when there is a national and natural disaster, is that you reach out to the leaders of the state, you offer them public support and assistance, you say good things about them.”
Caldwell then pointed to reports that alleged Trump “would ask his team how many people supported him in that state and what else they could do for him in order to receive federal funds and federal assistance,” but, naturally, also failed to shed any light on an explanation for the president-elect’s post.
Wnek offered no explanation of why Trump would have anything intelligent to say about the situation. Instead, he touted Joel Pollak of Breitbart (identified only as a “longtime California resident,” not as the right-wing activist he is) who blamed Democrats for everything including “fire insurance rates capped by ‘Democrats us[ing] socialist price controls.'”
Bonilla returned to blame Democrats again in a Jan. 10 post:
As the Los Angeles wildfires rage on, the corporate media are compelled to cover some of the issues that have emerged. But as we see with NBC’s coverage of the shortage of water for fire hydrants, there is a reluctance to cover underlying political incompetence.
Watch as the water shortage is treated as though it were a supernatural mystery:
[…]By omitting any mention of the underlying problems at the local and state level, the report seems to absolve officials who should otherwise be grilled by the media- and perhaps would have been if the elected officials in question were Republican.
Wnek came back to be mad that “University of Pennsylvania professor and longtime climate alarmist” Michael Mann — at whom the MRC was most recently angry for winning a lawsuit against climate deniers who likened him to a child molester — was on MSNBC to point out climate change being a factor,” while insisting that “California had been suffering from poor water and forest management for years and the state neglected to initiate sufficient preventative measures”:
Dr. Mann asserted the fires were a “preventable tragedy” and that they resulted from the continued use of fossil fuels. This, according to him, led to an overlap between the fire season and the Santa Ana wind season as well as less rainfall, all of which he concluded “is tied to the large-scale warming of the planet from the burning of fossil fuels.”
He went on to characterize Trump’s response as a “classic deflection” because he simply “doesn’t want to talk about climate change.” He ironically accused the president-elect of “trying to distract the public by talking about anything else” when the media was doing just that.
Not a word was said about Newsom’s role in all of this or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ incompetence coupled with her obvious absence from the city during the outbreak of the wildfires.
Alex Christy chimed in with his comedy-cop routine:
NBC’s Seth Meyers and Comedy Central’s Desi Lydic both attacked President-elect Donald Trump on their respective Thursday editions of Late Night and The Daily Show for politicizing the Los Angeles wildfires with his attacks on President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Both argued such attacks were not only unseemly but factually wrong; however, both blamed climate change for the fires, which is itself incorrect.
Meyers introduced his Closer Look segment by lamenting, “I think it’s also important to say, again, in this moment, that climate change is real. It is an imminent and existential threat to the lives and safety of Americans, and we must treat it like the crisis it is. Unfortunately, there are politicians who would rather spread lies about the emergency response. And I’m not going to name names, but Donald Trump. His name is Donald Trump.”
[…]Meyers also added, “And by the way, I’m very aware that some on the right will accuse me of having Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he’s the deranged one, not me, you see? I’m just reacting to his derangement. That’s like saying Rick on The Walking Dead has a zombie derangement syndrome. Does he? Or is there just a zombie problem? And look, I realize I’m sounding a little deranged right now, but he’s not even in office yet, and it’s already starting again. The constant beat of his terrible behavior, and it’s never going to stop.”
Christy then showed off his own particular derangement:
While Meyers may have admitted to having Trump Derangement Syndrome, he, Lydic, and the rest of the left also have Climate Change Derangement Syndrome, where any horrible weather event is spun as a justification for progressive social and economic engineering.
Seems like Christy has Seth Meyers Derangement Syndorme.