The Media Research Center is Trump Regime Media, and that was further demonstrated when it ran to the defense of a member of Trump’s cabinet in a May 10 post by Jorge Bonilla:
The Elitist Media never rests when it comes to pursuing partisan narratives that may help their preferred political tribe win an argument or a news cycle. Some of the angles they pursue are so transparently dumb and shameless, though, that you have to wonder.
Watch as CNN’s Manu Raju builds a weird reality TV angle only to bankshot it into a cheap shot against Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy[.] […]
Duffy has long been a target of Official Washington, seething at the fact that Duffy exposes how very bad his media-loved predecessor was. Duffy is targeted because of his recently-announced show The Great American Road Trip, which ties into America’s 250th anniversary celebration.
In order to make this tenuous segment work, Raju leaves out the fact that Duffy was a prosecutor and was elected to Congress where he served for four terms. Those inconvenient facts don’t bolster the “reality show star” narrative, though. So viewers get this slop instead.
Bonilla doesn’t dispute the fact that before his cabinet stint, Duffy was indeed best klnown as a reality show star.
The next day, it was Curtis Houck’s turn to rage about Duffy being held accountable:
On Sunday and Monday, ABC and NBC have been engaged in faux outrage over Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s upcoming reality series on YouTube to mark America’s 250th anniversary, discarding its very intermittent filming amid Duffy’s public-facing role in the administration and private funding to call it a “side project” falsely at the expense of crises such as the TSA shutdown and rising gas prices.
Duffy and wife Rachel Campos-Duffy announced The Great American Road Trip series on Friday’s Fox & Friends, so it was on NBC Nightly News by Sunday with anchor Hallie Jackson boasting of a “new controversy over a road tripping reality show featuring a former reality star: the transportation secretary, who’s been filming the new series with his family over the course of the last seven months.”
Correspondent Julie Tsirkin boasted Duffy was “going back to his reality TV roots…but this time, it’s not The Real World, the hit 90s show.”
Houck, like Bonilla, refused to admit that Duffy’s greatest claim to fame is, in fact, as a reality TV star. Instead, he continued to whine:
Duffy says all of the show’s production costs were covered by a nonprofit group instead of taxpayers. That group’s sponsors ranging from airlines to corporations like Google and Boeing. Comcast NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News, is also listed of one of the sponsors.
Nobles framed Buttigieg and Democrats as having “rais[ed] concerns” before sharing “the Transportation Department [said] that Duffy has worked to make cars more affordable, and [told] Democrats to ‘sit this one out.’”
Disney-owned ABC was its usual self, dripping with hate for the Trumps.
“As gas prices soar…backlash this morning over Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s series being called The Great American Road Trip,” said co-host Michael Strahan, purposefully using partisan “backlash” as proof of news.
Co-host Robin Roberts also used this deceptive framing as though the Duffy’s filmed this entire project during the war.
Tim Graham devoted his May 13 column to raging about Duffy being held accountable:
One of the games in scandal politics is about “optics” — when a public official does something that just looks bad. Barack Obama fans pretend that his only scandal was wearing a tan suit to a press conference in the summer of 2014.
The latest example is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy filming a video series for YouTube with his family over seven months called The Great American Road Trip, all to celebrate the 250th birthday of America this summer.
NBC’s Julie Tsirkin provided the Democrat talking points: “This road trip is facing backlash…at a time when many Americans are struggling with high prices at the pump…and amid a number of crises during Duffy’s tenure, including record TSA lines and the recent Spirit Airlines shutdown.”
ABC morning host Michael Strahan seconded the emotion: “As gas prices soar…backlash this morning over Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s series being called The Great American Road Trip.” Reporter Jay O’Brien underlined the series was privately sponsored, including by Boeing and United Airlines, which Duffy is in charge of regulating.
As he usually does, Graham played whataboutism:
So speaking of “brutally out of touch,” how did PBS handle the optics problems of Buttigieg under Biden? Their interviews were shoeshines, in July 2021, December 2022, and February 2023. They were facilitators, not investigators.
In the summer of 2021, Buttigieg went out on “paternity leave” for several months when he adopted black twins. Optics were out of the question. ABC News shamed conservative critics: “Criticisms of paternity leave, like those Buttigieg faced, show the stigma that still remains in the United States around men taking time off work to care for their children.” Instead, CBS Sunday Morning in 2024 did a seven-minute Fathers Day puff piece on the two Buttigieg dads. Optics were optimal.
Then consider the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, 2023. PBS aired a promotional interview with Buttigieg the night before the hazmat-spilling accident. But outside the liberal bubble, it became an optics issue when Buttigieg took 20 days to show up at the scene.
[…]Optics scandals are an easy way to measure how these networks are partisan. They tout “backlash” and “brutally out of touch” actions for Republicans, and paper over the “partisan flashpoints” Republicans push.
Graham didn’t explain why Buttigieg was not allowed to take paternity leave for his baby. Then again, it’s Graham’s job to explain away optics scandals when they involve a Republican but hang them around Democrats.
None of these writers mentioned that the sponsors for Duffy’s show spent $100 million on lobbying efforts last year. And a couple weeks ago, the series was quietly uploaded to YouTube, where it’s clear that those sponsors play a big role in the show — raising ethics questions the MRC just doesn’t want to talk about.