The Media Research Center still wasn’t done fretting about Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones. Tim Graham complained in his Oct. 17 podcast, featuring as a guest the right-wing media critic Joe Concha:
After weeks ducking the murderous text messages sent by Virginia Democrat [sic] attorney general candidate Jay Jones, the “mainstream” media appear to have finally found a text scandal they like. The Young Republicans’ group-chat scandal as broken by Politico gave the legacy news a reason to throw it in for a few seconds. NBC Nightly News pounced on the GOP youth making racist statements and “I love Hitler” cracks, and then threw in the Jay Jones scandal as the rebuttal offered by Vice President J.D. Vance for about half a minute. Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat nominee for governor, has faced no national pressure to disavow Jones.
Graham merely indulged in the MRC’s whining that the “Young Republicans’ group-chat scandal” was discussed at all — but refusing to disclose why it shouldn’t be. He also touched on a more manufactured story:
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yelled at a reporter to “shut up” when she was asked why she refused repeated requests for the National Guard to help on January 6. Pelosi shamed her for throwing “Republican talking points” instead of being a serious journalist. This is often what we would say about liberal reporters, who feed Pelosi and others with softballs and Democrat talking points.
As we’ve pointed out — but Graham curiously didn’t — Pelosi was asked the question by an employee of right-wing Lindell TV, and it was designed to be a gotcha question, ignoring the fact it was not Pelosi’s job to dispatch the National Guard.
Graham also threw in one more bit of misinformation:
As Jorge Bonilla reported, CNN’s much-hyped “Shutdown America” town hall sounded like an extended infomercial for socialism in America, with Kaitlan Collins acting mostly as a facilitator. AOC could say that the accounting firm Deloitte was poisoning waterways and say the air was “drinkable” and no one would feel compelled to “fact check in real time.”
We’ve documented how the MRC trashed CNN’s town hall while heaping nothing but praise on a similar one hosted by its favorite non-Fox channel, NewsNation, despite the presence of disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly.
After thee election — which Jones won despite the controversy — Alex Christy found something to whine about in a Nov. 11 post:
Sometimes the expression “better late than never” is not actually true. One such example came during a Tuesday Snopes article by Joey Esposito that fact-checked claims that Virginia Attorney General-elect Jay Jones “sent violent texts about GOP opponent and his children” and rated them “true” one week after Election Day.
Under the rating’s “context” subheading, Esposito confirmed, “Snopes has not reviewed the original text messages; however, speaking on camera in early October 2025, Jones publicly admitted to and apologized for sending the messages in question.”
[…]This was the first time Snopes had written about Jay Jones.
Given how the MRC virulently hates Snopes, it’s not clear why it felt the need to wait on its judgment; we can assume that it would never have acknowledged it had the results turned out differently. Christy did admit Jones’ victory, adding: “While it would be hyperbole to claim that Snopes waiting a week to confirm the Jones texts was the reason for Jones’s victory, as a matter of principle, there was no reason for Snopes to wait a week until after Election Day.”