The Media Research Center continued acting as Trump Regime Media to deflect from the highly partisan (and Trump-ordered) motivation behind Texas’ Republican-benefiting mid-decade redistricting with an Aug. 5 post by Curtis Houck grousing that another Texas controversy got folded into it:
On Monday night and Tuesday morning, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC continued to trumpet Texas Democrats fleeing to Illinois, New York, and other blue bastions across the country because Republicans hurt their feelings by wanting to redraw the state’s congressional maps.
But in addition to the typical love notes, CBS and NBC went as far as accepting and peddling their spin that Republicans are the ones holding up needed relief for the Hill Country after the catastrophic July 4 weekend floods as opposed to Democrats and their indefinite temper tantrum.
You might remember that the MRC labored hard to distract from the Hill Country floods in order to protect the Trump administration and Texas Republicans from their missteps. Houck continued to rant:
Back on Monday, Chandler had help from anchor Tom Llamas who took his own shots at Texas Republicans by bemoaning “the Texas-size political battle” over “Republican leaders look[ing] to gerrymander congressional maps” and “open a whole new can of worms” because of their “controversial, gerrymandering redistricting map.”
Monday’s CBS Evening News similarly peddled this grotesque lie. After an on-screen boo-boo of putting up the current map when they meant to show the proposed one, senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe started with all the usual updates about this being a Trump demand and the state House was unable to meet quorum Monday due to the absent Democrats.
Houck offered no evidence to contradict the obvious fact that Texas is engaging in gerrymandering, let alone back up his assertion that pointing that fact out is a “grotesque lie.”
Alex Christy played gerrymandering whataboutism in an Aug. 6 post:
CBS’s Stephen Colbert’s invitation to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to appear on Tuesday’s The Late Show preceded the fleeing of Texas Democrats to that state in the wake of the state legislature’s redistricting efforts, but the developments were impossible for Colbert to ignore. Even Colbert, however, recognized the irony of complaining about gerrymandering to the governor of Illinois, but after Colbert asked Pritzker to explain himself, he let him off the hook after Pritzker made a meaningless joke about kindergarteners.
Christy failed to disclose that, as we documented, Illinois did not redraw its congressional districts mid-decade or do so on orders of the president — both significant differences from what Texas is doing. Instead, he tried to downplay the Texas gerrymandering effort: “To return to gerrymandering, Texas’s new map would give Republicans a 30-8 advantage. Illinois currently has a 14-3 Democratic advantage. As a percentage of seats, Illinois would still be more gerrymandered than Texas.”
Jorge Bonilla grumbled that the Democrats who fled Texas to deny the Republican-dominated legislature quorum to ram though the redistricting weren’t getting the full Fox News treatment on a non-Fox channel:
What the Texas redistricting fight has exposed is that there’s a huge (D)ifference in how liberals in the media react to partisan gerrymandering. The panel liberals on CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip had a very hard time defending Texas Democrats’ flight to gerrymandered blue states.
Watch as Scott Jennings and Shermichael Singleton laugh at panel liberals Julie Roginsky and Xochitl Hinojosa’s justifications for the fleebagging[.] […]
The libs’ arguments drew laughter from the panel conservatives as they struggled to make persuasive arguments in favor of protesting gerrymandering by running to very gerrymandered Democrat states. And it bears noting that this is in no small part due to Abby Phillip not being present to cut them off at every turn.
Bonilla didn’t explain why he’s playing whataboutism to defend Texas’ gerrymandering.
(UPDATE: It’s also worth noting that Bonilla’s headline called the Democrats who left the state “fleebaggers.” We remember when the MRC was upset — and was still upset last year — that some commentators “mocked the Tea Party by repeatedly deploying a slang term for a sex act called ‘teabagging.'” It wasn’t explained why alluding to a sex act to mock people is now acceptable at the MRC.)
Meanwhile, Nicholas Fondacaro served up his own whine:
Now that his book tour was over, CNN’s Jake Tapper was back to hauling water for the Democrats. During the Tuesday episode of The Lead, the former Democratic operative turned CNN “journalist” dismissed his party’s widespread gerrymandering in several states, suggesting infamous Illinois was an outlier, and falsely proclaimed “most of the worst offenders when it comes to gerrymandering are Republican states.”
Fondacaro whined that Illinois was “infamously gerrymandered,” but he offered no evidence to prove it beyond citing a right-wing podcaster who he claimed ” called out Tapper’s lies and countered them with the cold hard facts.”
Intern Ashley Taylor touted how NewsNation host Chris Cuomo “told Democrats to ‘stop crying foul'” over Texas’ redistricting and that “Democrats would be better served by focusing on policy, especially with a not-to-good outlook looming over their heads for the 2026 and 2028 elections.” That was followed by Craig Bannister checking in from the right-wing propaganda ghetto that was once the MRC’s “news” division CNSNews.com, with one post whining that the defecting Texas Democrats were “hiding out in three ‘sanctuary’ cities that already refuse to cooperate with federal authorities seeking to detain lawbreakers and send them back home,” and another hyping how “The Texas Supreme Court has now ordered the runaway ring leader of the derelict Democrats to respond to my lawsuit by Friday.”
It seems that the MRC has blatantly taken sides on a partisan issue — something that arguably violates its nonprofit tax status.