The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham served up some crankiness in recent columns. He grumbled in his April 18 column that non-right-wingers have different views of religious movies than he does (and spoiled a movie in the process):
The Easter season can remind people of classic Hollywood movies with religious themes. Every year, ABC still airs The Ten Commandments. People might break out The Passion of the Christ from 2004, or head to the theater to see The King of Kings or The Chosen: Last Supper, building on that streaming TV series on the life and ministry of Jesus.
But taxpayer-funded National Public Radio is inevitably going to come at the subject from a secular perspective. On Palm Sunday, their badly named newscast All Things Considered included a conversation among three NPR journalists about their “favorite (and not so favorite) religious films.”
The segment ended with the NPR reporters lauding the recent movie Conclave, which indulged a libertine-left fantasy by having the Catholic Church tricked into electing a pope with a uterus.
Actually, the film’s new pope is intersex; he was raised as a male and would continue to identify as such. Graham then ran to the defense of religious movies that lack a certain historical credibility:
Weekend host Scott Detrow began: “Even for those of us who live more secular lives, movies continue to offer a bit of a cinematic catechism with stories from the Bible and other religious traditions.” He asked NPR religion reporter Jason DeRose: “What is your general view of that genre? Does it work for you? Do you have some problems with it?”
DeRose replied: “Yeah, they just don’t really work for me. I respond badly to them. For instance, biblical epics, I find them incredibly hokey. This is where I will admit that I have never seen the film, The Ten Commandments.“
It’s easy to describe this 1956 film as “hokey,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful. NPR anchor Michel Martin took a different view: “To me, that’s not a religious film. That’s like a family film that you see with your grandma.” This is like saying Rocky isn’t a boxing movie.
DeRose continued his lament about religious films: “But the ones that I have seen, such as, you know, The Greatest Story Ever Told, I’m kind of confused by who really watches them and who really loves them and finds them, like, religiously meaningful to them because I just…I focus on, like, they wouldn’t have been doing that, or, you know, Jesus didn’t have blue eyes.”
In that film, Jesus was played by blue-eyed Swedish actor Max von Sydow, but that’s a strange reason to choke on the whole movie.
Graham huffed in his April 23 column:
Is there any political schtick more tedious now than comparing President Trump to Hitler? Politico posted an article noting Al Gore did this at a Climate Week event in San Francisco, and Real Clear Politics co-founder Tom Bevan tweeted with a smirk, “Gore says the same thing Democrats have been saying for a decade.”
The Democrats campaigned heavily in 2024 claiming Trump represented an end to democracy, and they lost the election. But it hasn’t slowed them down in the slightest.
The “independent fact checkers” who act as a publicity arm of the Democrats never “fact check” anyone calling Trump a “fascist” or comparing him to Hitler or Mussolini or Pol Pot or “insert mass-murdering dictator here.” PolitiFact screeches “Pants On Fire” when a Republican calls a Democrat a “socialist,” but “fascist” is always fair for categorizing conservatives.
Funny, we don’t recall Graham or anyone else at the MRC crying foul or issuing a fact-check when their fellow right-wingers likened President Obama to Hitler and other Nazis.
Graham spent his April 25 column whining that the far-right reporters invited to take part in White House briefings were called out for being Trump toadies:
The New York Times recently published a hissy fit about the White House allowing reporters into the Briefing Room who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. Here was the amazing protest sentence: “Longtime White House reporters say the result has been an erosion of their independence.”
The presence of a reporter who didn’t vote Democrat doesn’t “erode” the anti-Trump animus (“independence”) of liberal activist journalists. It might balance it, suggesting journalism and liberalism are not exactly the same thing.
This spurred a trend. Politico’s Ian Ward profiled these invaders under the headline “Meet the 8 MAGA Outlets Disrupting the White House Briefing Room.” It carried the usual labeling about “the divide between the MAGA-friendly media and their more mainstream counterparts.” The extreme hatred of Trump is “more mainstream.”
Graham didn’t explain why he thinks any and all criticism of Trump is “extreme hatred” that’s “mainstream.” He also doesn’t seem very concerned that a reporter who “didn’t vote Democrat” is expressing the same kind of media bias that he has long accused non-right-wing journalists of engaging in — and he refused to defend his double standard.
This was followed by whining that right-wingers’ softball questions were also called out:
Then came CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, who loves to wade into MAGA crowds trying to find the dumbest-sounding Trump supporter he can find. In this case, he went looking for the dumbest-sounding White House reporter. The headline over the video was “‘Do you consider yourself a journalist?’ CNN meets MAGA media at White House.”
O’Sullivan showed clips of these pro-Trump reporters admitting their bias, and he proclaimed “These are White House correspondents like you’ve never seen before.” Really? He spotlighted Cara Castronuova of Lindell TV asking if they’ll release Trump’s fitness routine, since he “actually looks healthier than ever before.” In 2009, a Washington Post reporter touted Obama’s “chiseled pectorals.”
Then O’Sullivan replayed Real America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn asking Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky “Why don’t you wear a suit?” He suggested to Glenn he was “trolling,” but it’s a question lots of Americans would ask.
Actually, that “chiseled pectorals” remark was made in 2008 — as Graham well knows, since he wrote the original post about it — and was made in reference to Obama’s exercise routine, something Graham did not disprove and which Trump is not known to have, meaning that the Lindell TV reporter was engaging in pure toadyism (something Graham will never admit). And who are these “lots of Americans” whom Graham thinks have as their main concern about a man fighting off an armed invasion of his country is whether he wore a suit for Trump?
Graham ended by griping: “Reporters asking softballs at the White House is nothing new. It’s okay when the “mainstream” does it for Democrats.” But he will never hold his fellow right-wingers accountable for asking those softballs — and he thinks this is just fine.