Jorge Bonilla kicked off a Feb. 15 Media Research Center post with a dose of Trump-fluffing (well, Rubio-fluffing) and typical right-wing media-bashing:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an address before the Munich Security Conference that was warmly received and met with rapturous applause. And if you were waiting for the Elitist Media’s Sunday shows’ analyses, you might think the speech never happened at all.
The sole mention of Rubio’s speech was on CBS’s Face the Nation, where substitute host Ed O’Keefe referenced the speech in passing before throwing to an interview with Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) recorded before the speech was delivered:
[…]That’s it. Nothing on CNN’s State of the Union or ABC’s This Week (NBC’s Meet the Pressremains in Olympics hiatus). Both of those other shows were focused 100% on domestic matters as Rubio reemphasized the Trump administration’s European policy.
[…]This lack of coverage marks a stark contrast from how the networks covered Vice President JD Vance’s remarks the year prior, which were similar in substance if not tone. CBS’s Margaret Brennan had a full meltdown and tried to attribute the rise of Nazism to free speech. And it was Secretary Rubio who took her to school:
Actually, Rubio’s speech was not quite “warmly received and met with rapturous applause.” As one observer reported:
Half the hall in Munich gave US Secretary of State Marco Rubio a standing ovation following his speech – out of relief at his declaration that ‘the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own’. This at least was not another fight picked by the Trump administration with its NATO allies.
But there was immediate unease too, at the explicit limits Rubio placed on American support for Europe and Ukraine. And non-European countries were furious at what they saw as a tribute to white European civilization and a call to protect it from the rest of the world.
The MRC doesn’t want you to know about this. Instead, Clay Waters offered up more defense of Rubio in a Feb 17 post, with a dash of racism thrown in:
Trump Administration officials are contemptible in the eyes of the New York Times Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley. For two years running, he has dumped on the speeches of the American representatives at the annual Munich Security Conference.
In 2025, he framed Vice President J.D. Vance as a quasi-Nazi and insufficiently respectful to his European colleagues. On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was mocked for being respectful in an ignorant fashion.
Sounding strangely triumphant, Tankersley implied that it’s too late to save European culture from the cultural diversity of migrants from Islamic nations, indirectly suggesting the very arguments he smeared Vance for making were actually right – that Europe’s centuries-old culture is at risk from excessive migration – but that it’s too late to reverse this actually historically recent trend.
[…]As if a trend that began in earnest in 2015 with migrants from war-torn Syria is both inevitable and welcome, despite the ruinous government spending necessary to support the migrants, many of them military-age men from Islamic cultures that don’t respect women. But the New York Times isn’t wild about Western civilization.
Actually, non-white people have been coming to America for centuries — something Waters appears not to be aware of.
Waters followed up with a post the next day:
Monday’s PBS News Hour virtually skipped over Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s performance at the annual Munich Security Conference to wail over his subsequent trip to endorse “far-right prime minister” Viktor Orban of Hungary. The online heading to the segment after Rubio’s speech impressed even European leaders: “Rubio bolsters Hungary’s far-right leader days after push to mend U.S. ties in Europe.”
[…]The episode, presumably taped before Rubio’s speech, mentioned the Secretary of State just once (Rubio also appeared unidentified in a separate file photo). Then again, weekend PBS has never been a fount of breaking news.
Waters claimed in his headline that Rubio’s speech was a “Munich triumph” — but he didn’t explain how that could possibly be.