The Media Research Center believes that anything that makes President Trump look bad is not worthy of media coverage — witness its complaints about coverage about the Trump-Elon Musk feud. So when the Jeffrey Epstein scandal resurfaced, more complains about coverage were inevitable. Nicholas Fondacaro groused in his July 9 hate-watch of “The View”:
Only after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that there was no client list linked to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which divided elements of America’s political right, did ABC’s The View really care enough to talk about it. Of course, they used it as an opportunity to smear their favorite hate object: President Donald Trump. Far-left ABC News co-hosts Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin used part of Wednesday’s episode to suggest, without evidence, that Trump was on the client list.
With moderator Whoopi Goldberg teeing the segment out to mock and further drive divisions within the MAGA coalition, Hostin was the first to hint that Trump was involved in Epstein’s pedophile ring:
[…]Behar followed up by showing off her own rhetorical conspiracy theory corkboard and telling the audience “you guys do the math”:
[…]This kind of guilt by association wasn’t employed against former President Bill Clinton when he was on The View in June. He too had some sort of friendship with Epstein.
Mark Finkelstein tried to distract from Trump in a July 12 post:
Morning Joe had a barrel of snarky, skeptical laughs [see screencap] on Wednesday over the report that the video survey surveillance in the federal prison where Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, during the first Trump term, systematically skipped one minute of recording every night at the same time while the system was being reset.
Attorney General Pam Bondi mentioned that in a clip the show played at the beginning of the segment.
Scarborough & Co. stopped short of making what would have been an extremely inflammatory accusation. But their implication seemed clear: that Bondi was lying, and that the Trump administration, for nefarious purposes, had doctored the video.
Thus, Scarborough twice claimed that “they,” i.e., the Trump administration, set up the system to work that way.
However, Bondi also stated that it’s an old system, set up by the federal Bureau of Prisons in 1999, and that she intends to release the recordings to show that the one-minute gap occurred every night—not just the one when Epstein died.
Hmm, 1999. Checking with ChatGPT. In 1999, the President of the United States was . . . William Jefferson Clinton.
From there, the grousing that Epstein was being covered really kicked in:
- A July 13 post by Jorge Bonilla grumbled that some non-right-wing shows “filled their time with other matters such as the kerfuffle over the Epstein Files” instead of marking the first anniversary of the assassination attempt on Trump.
- A July 14 post by Curtis Houck complained that “ABC, CBS, and NBC combined for nine minutes and 28 seconds on the split inside the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement over the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
- In his July 16 hate-watch of “The View,” Fondacaro complained that the hosts were “seemingly mocking Trump supporters for caring about the crimes of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.”
- Houck whined in his biased review of the July 17 White House press briefing that some in the White House press corps “show[ed] sudden concern about transparency in the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
- A day later, Houck grumbled about “gleeful Epstein coverage” in non-right-wing media.
Fondacaro returned for a July 18 so-called “study” of how “The View” focused too much on Epstein for his liking:
The liberal ladies of ABC News’s The Viewhad a field day the week of July 14 as they tried to divide Republicans with the Jeffrey Epstein documents snafu. Smelling blood in the water, they kicked off nearly every episode that week talking about Epstein. Meanwhile, at the same time, they cut out a chunk of time to decry liberals who dared to criticize the Democratic Party’s messaging.
In total, The View spent over 40 minutes (42 minutes and 25 seconds) talking about Epstein and boasting about how Republicans were at each other’s throats over the client list.
“It looks like some conservatives are getting behind you-know-who’s push to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein … Not everyone, however, on the right is falling in line, and some Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are chiming in as well.” moderator Whoopi Goldberg boasted on Tuesday.
Fondacaro closed with one more whine: “It’s obvious that The View co-host saw it as their mission to try to keep Democrats together by putting down intern decent [sic], while trying to stoke divisions among their opponents.” As if Fondavcaro and the rest of the MRC is not trying to stoke divisions among their Democratic enemies and putting down internal dissent among their fellow right-wingers.
No mention, of course, of how its friends at Fox News had been almost completely ignoring the Epstein scandal.