The Media Research Center started out trashing John Fetterman for having suffered a stroke, though that didn’t keep him from winning his 2022 Senate race in Pennsylvania. But last year, Fetterman suddenly started spouting right-wing talking points — and the MRC suddenly flip-flopped. That flip continued in Nicholas Fondacaro’s Nov. 11 hate-watch of “The View”:
After blowing her lid about Democrats crossing the aisle to reopen the government earlier in the week, ABC News co-host Sunny Hostin found a target to direct the rage of her leftist extremism: Democratic Senator John Fetterman (PA). Hostin unloaded on Fetterman during Tuesday’s edition of The View, she literally yelled at him for flushing away all the leverage and political points the Democrats racked up by not paying federal workers and withholding SNAP benefits. And as Fetterman was schooling Hostin on her extremism, they conveniently had to go to a commercial.
Hostin wasn’t the first to question Fetterman, but she was the most confrontational and openly hostile. Something she likely felt comfortable with because Fetterman was appearing via a video connection and not actually in the studio.
“Well Senator, Bernie Sanders said the vote was a ‘horrific mistake.’ Governor Gavin Newsom called it ‘pathetic’ and ‘a surrender,’” she sneered. “Poll after poll found more Americans on both sides of the aisle blaming Republicans. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the GOP. As you mentioned, Democrats had big wins last week so you had momentum.”
Her rage was clearly percolating and she finally unleashed it via a borage of bitter, angry questions that she yelled hysterically into the camera:
[…]In his not-quite trademarked hoodie, Fetterman dismantled Hostin’s shrieking. “Well, first of all, you know, MTG is quite literally the last person in America that I’m going to take advice or to get their kinds of my leadership and values from. And now, if Democrats are celebrating crazy pants like that, then that’s on them,” he quipped.
Adding: “I don’t need a lecture from whether it’s Bernie or the governor in California because they are representing very deep blue kinds of populations and a lot of those things — a lot of those things were part of the extreme.”
[…]Fetterman articulated that the leadership fight wasn’t one of his concerns at the moment, but he was concerned by how the far-left wanted him to be more radical despite representing a state the Democrats lost in 2024.
Fetterman “articulated” something? That’s something Fondacaro would not have said about him in 2022 — indeed, he touted Fetterman’s “deterioration post-stroke” and grumbled that the show’s cast “defended the questionable mental capacities of a Democrat.”
Alex Christy complained in a Nov. 13 post:
Former CBS and NBC anchor Katie Couric unsuccessfully tried not once, not twice, but three times to get Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman to label President Trump as anti-democratic on Thursday’s episode of her Next Question podcast. It was just another example of former broadcast anchors and reporters confirming that they were not the down-the-middle reporters they claimed to be.
As Fetterman repeated himself about still being a good Democrat, Couric tried one more time, “No, I’m talking about Donald Trump’s some of the things that he’s doing. If you don’t believe we’re living in an autocracy, would you concede that some of the things that he is doing are clearly anti-democratic and also are potentially even unconstitutional.”
If doing unconstitutional things is anti-democratic then that is bad news for former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, who were rebuked by the Supreme Court several times during their tenures.
[…]Like a broken record, Fetterman insisted he is still a man of the left, but that doesn’t mean that rhetoric should lead to violence, “Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think we agree that we probably didn’t agree with much of what he said, but, and I think we, I’m sure we both agree that you shouldn’t shoot people, you know, and you shouldn’t execute them in public. And that’s, I think that’s two things must be true. That free speech—I’m an absolute free speech guy, and you have the right to say these things, and you definitely also have the right not to get shot by sharing your views.”
Fetterman is a Democrat who votes with his party around 90 percent of the time, but there are some in the media who keep trying to portray him as some sort of DINO. If the former broadcast anchors think that is insufficient, then how are they any different from MSNBC’s primetime hosts?
Then again, the fact that Christy and the rest of the MRC are suddenly saying nice things about Fetterman tells us something different from what Christy is asserting.
Our point is proven further the next day, when Clay Waters attacked a New York Times book reviewer for criticizing Fetterman’s book:
Jennifer Szalai, the nonfiction book critic for the New York Times, uncorked a nasty review of Sen. John Fetterman’s new memoir (D-PA) Unfettered in Wednesday’s edition (the review was written before Fetterman’s hospitalization after a fall). A petulant take-down which surely has nothing to do with Fetterman’s willingness to buck his Democratic Party at times, right?
[…]Meow. Szalai’s excessively hostile tone and callousness about Fetterman’s depression seems odd, given her paper’s previously supportive coverage of Fetterman’s mental health struggles, back when he adhered more closely to the Democratic playbook and wasn’t wandering off the reservaWaters tion on issues like Israel. His iconoclastic tendencies were recently on display when journalist Katie Couric failed to bait him into criticizing President Trump or the late Charlie Kirk.
Waters didn’t explain his flip-flop from bashing Fetterman’s mental health struggles to praising his “willingness to buck his Democratic Party.”
When Fetterman praised another Trump talking point, Jorge Bonilla cheered in a Dec. 16 post:
For the past few weeks and as part of the “Don’t Give Up the Ship” operation, we’ve been told that the United States military has been blowing up random drug boats in the southern Caribbean, particularly close to Venezuela. Today, for the first time, we hear a Democrat discuss Operation Southern Spear with a perspective that goes beyond party orthodoxy.
Watch as noted Sheetz enthusiast Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) goes on Chris Cuomo’s eponymous NewsNation show and completely destroys that narrative:
[…]A Democrat Senator debunking the left’s favorite talking points on Venezuela should be news. Cuomo, to his credit, allowed Fetterman to speak about what he saw and heard at the classified briefing, as opposed to just forcing a set of talking points upon his guest.
So much of our media are devoted to narrative and anti-news. But not anymore.
But narrative and anti-news is the entire reason for the MRC’s existence. It has yet to explain why it suddenly changed its narrative on Fetterman.