The Media Research Center fulfilled its role as Trump Regime Media through its desperate promotion of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary. It returned to that role in trying to distract from Hegseth’s irresponsible use of an unencrypted Signal chat to discuss military plans. Nicholas Fondacaro whined in a March 27 post that it was pointed out how the incident shows Hegseth isn’t terribly qualified for the job (complete with Fondacaro’s usual libelous smear that a certain TV host is “staunchly racist”):
Staunchly racist co-host of ABC’s The View, Sunny Hostin was at it again on Wednesday and Thursday as she was doing her part to compound the controversy surrounding a Signal group chat utilized by members of President Trump’s cabinet. On back-to-back days, she made racially tinged attacks on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth while simultaneously praising former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and boasting about his race. She would eventually suggest Hegseth was the mediocre DEI hire.
Let’s quickly put things into context. A month ago, while complaining about being called out as a “race baiter,” Hostin lashed out at white people for supposedly having easy lives: “It’s been about white mediocre men that are given opportunities…You have to be average if you’re white; if you are black, you must – your average must be excellent in order to compete.”
[…]Her whining seemed to betray her ignorance to the fact that defense secretaries often don’t stick around with new presidents. Former President Biden didn’t keep President Trump’s Mark Esper around. Or perhaps she was just trying to gaslight the viewers into thinking Trump’s hiring of a new secretary was racially motivated.
Fondacaro didn’t dispute any of the questions about Hegseth’s lack of qualifications.
Curtis Houck used a March 28 post to cheer how CNBC’s Joe Kernan quickly tried to change the subject when the Signal incident came up in a discussion with Sen. Chris Coons and “liberal co-host” Becky Quick:
Signal-gate came up thanks to Coons after Quick had asked how were Democrats trying to counter what she saw as a business community having doubted they would “get a fair shake at all under a Harris — a Kamala Harris presidency.”
After denying that was the case, he claimed business leaders were “also concerned about this Signal issue where the very top national security leaders were violating sort of the basics about classified information and the lack of truthfulness” and no “accountability.”
Coons played right into Kernen’s hands, leaving the latter to lower the boom:
You know what did have an adverse consequence was — and you know where I’m going — is Afghanistan. Did you call for Lloyd Austin’s resignation? Not only did we lose 13 service members, we left $70 billion worth of equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban. A couple of years later, he was out of pocket for two weeks and didn’t tell the White House. Did you ask for him to resign at this point? Are you actually asking for Hegseth and Waltz to resign when you didn’t ask for Lloyd Austin to resign?
“There’s nothing that Lloyd Austin did by getting health care treatment that put our national security at risk,” Coons replied.
The same day, Fondacaro hyped a claim by an anchor at its favorite non-Fox news channel that pretends it’s not biased:
NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo had had “enough” with the media’s obsession with the non-scandal of the Trump Cabinet Signal chat. Declaring “this is not a major scandal,” Cuomo knocked both sides for how they were and were not addressing it. He even called out the media for coveting “scalps” they would not collect from reporting on it.
“I’ve got one word for the Signal saga: enough,” Cuomo exclaimed at the top of the show. “We all get what this is and what this is not. I say ENOUGH because we don’t need to go through the same cycle of bologna that we did in the first administration.”
Cuomo huffed that “Trump won’t own it,” despite him not being involved at all with the Signal chat.
He broke the bad news to Trump’s detractors in the “media and the left” that their hyperventilating wouldn’t result in an apology nor the “scalps” their craved, and the best they’d get was some of those involved getting sent to the ends of globe for a little bit:
[…]Cuomo continued his rant by taking swings at “the non-Trump media” for ignoring how “the operation they were talking about was a success.” “No one was hurt by this comms error –and it was an error, but nobody got hurt because of it. So, this is not a major scandal,” he declared.
Mark Finkelstein found another distraction in a March 30 post:
Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend featured a clip from a town hall in Indiana’s 5th Congressional District. In November, Trump and Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz carried the district handily: by 16 and 18 points, respectively.
Yet the crowd overwhelmingly and raucously cheered the suggestion that the congresswoman should demand Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s resignation, given the Signal chat that mistakenly included a journalist.
Co-host Symone Sanders claimed the cheering people were district “constituents,” and co-host Michael Steele took it a step further, saying they were Republicans. The show provided no evidence to support either statement. Did MSNBC make any effort to confirm the residence or registration of the crowd members?
Bill D’Agostino whined in an April 3 post that the Signal incident got more coverage in non-right-wing media than the military operation that was discussed during it:
Last week, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent nearly 100 minutes covering leaked messages from a private Signal chat for Trump administration officials, in just the first 96 hours after the messages were published. But those same networks spent only 13 minutes covering the actual military operation that was discussed in those leaked messages.
In mid-March, the United States launched a still-ongoing series of airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, in retaliation for more than 100 reported attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea. The operation, which would ultimately prove successful, initially received moderate coverage from broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC — until two weeks later, when Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published screenshots showing Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other U.S. officials discussing the strikes in a private Signal chat.
The broadcast networks, which had long since dropped their light coverage of the strikes, immediately flooded the airwaves with the “Signalgate” story. That night, all three networks front-loaded their evening newscasts with lengthy reports about the mishap. In that single evening, the networks devoted more combined air time to the Signal messages than they’d spent on the airstrikes for the entire duration of the military operation two weeks prior.
D’Agostino then huffed that Hegseth’s critics may have a point, but it didn’t matter because the military operation wasn’t affected:
To say the least, it’s newsworthy that a journalist was able to gain access to a private channel in which officials were discussing an ongoing military operation. But fortunately, the operation itself was not affected by Goldberg’s presence in the chat, and it was executed without incident and with no casualties.
If the broadcast networks who relentlessly covered this Signal debacle were seriously interested in the national security angle, one might expect they’d have paid a similar amount of attention to the actual airstrikes that were discussed in the leaked messages. But that’s not what the numbers bear out.
Instead, they ran a deluge of reports about an incompetently-managed group chat, but showed nowhere near the same level of interest in the competently-executed military operation underpinning the whole story.
And that was pretty much it — meaning that protection of Hegseth was more important to the MRC than reporting the truth. When Hegseth got caught sharing a second conversation on Signal, the only reference to it at the MRC was an April 22 post by Finkelstein complaining that a CNN host asked whether the incident means that discussion of Hegseth should “move from it’s a joke to he’s a joke?”
This burial of a legitimate story shows just how dedicated the MRC is to being a loyal member of Trump Regime Media.