The Media Research Center’s Bill D’Agostino whined in a Dec. 18 post:
Well, it finally happened. CNN has come out in opposition to the First Amendment.
On Monday, Inside Politics fill-in host Jim Acosta and internet blackmail enjoyer Andrew Kaczynski took turns scoffing theatrically that Donald Trump had dared object to the prosecution of a private citizen for posting a meme. The defendant in question was one Douglass Mackey, who posted an anti-Hillary Clinton meme (pictured to the right) on his Twitter account in 2016 under the name Ricky Vaughn.
The prosecutors seeking to jail Mackey for wrongthink claimed that, following his posting of the meme, around 4,900 people texted the number provided. However, they were unable to find a single person who hadn’t voted as a result of his tweet.
Guess which part of that story Kaczynski left out in his report.
“They say at least 4,900 people texted this number,” the KFile reporter exclaimed, adding:
Now, Mackey and the Trumps have sort of claimed this is a joke that no reasonable person would believe, but prosecutors allege this is part of a much more sinister plot to deprive people of their right to vote.
Again, Kaczynski didn’t mention the part where prosecutors couldn’t prove that even a single individual had failed to cast a vote after seeing Mackey’s tweet. Context be damned, these two men were determined to convince all fourteen of their viewers that Mackey belonged behind bars for literally carpet bombing Our Democracy.
Speaking of context, D’Agostino made some glaring omissions of such in order to portray Mackey as an innocent victim of oppressive government “censorship” — starting with the fact that he censored the actual content of Mackey’s tweet. Mackey sent out two tweets designed to look like they came from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign urging people to vote by text, which is not allowed in the U.S. One featured a black woman, the other featured a Latino woman and was in Spanish. It wasn’t necessary to prove that anyone failed to vote because of Mackey’s tweets since it was proven that thousands of people responded to the tweet. Mackey’s intent to deceive was clear.
As we documented when WorldNetDaily’s Jack Cashill mounted a similar defense, Mackey has a history of racist tweets that put this particular tweet in context — something D’Agostino also censored. Mackey had claimed that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that black people are easily deceived, and around the time he made those fake Hillary tweets, he was sending tweets suggesting that it was important to limit “black turnout” at voting booths.
D’Agostino did concede that some of Mackey’s views were “indefensible” — though he refused to go into detail on exactly what those view were — yet proceeded to defend them anyway, because free speech:
Indeed, some of the stuff Mackey tweeted was downright indefensible. But one would hope that any journalist — the real kind, not the CNN kind —would defend aggressively the right of any person to express whatever sick opinions he wished. Instead, these two self-styled “journalists” tried to justify Mackey’s political persecution on the grounds that he had harbored some odious political opinions.
The segment then morphed into a political hit job, with Mackey recast as a cudgel. “So, now that you have heard and seen some of that stuff, take a listen to what Donald Trump, Jr. said about him when he had a Ricky Vaughn, Douglass Mackey, on his podcast earlier this year.”
Then came a clip of Trump Jr. telling Mackey his account was “awesome,” and calling it his “favorite Twitter account of all time.”
It’s not a “hit job” to hold someone accountable for their clear election interference, no matter what D’Agostino thinks. But, of course, he thinks Kaczynski and Acosta the bad guys for reporting on Mackey:
It’s hard to be surprised by the news media anymore. They’ve worked pretty hard to prove that there’s no depth to which they’re unwilling to stoop. The KFile guy has always been a censorious little creep, but it really is wild to see Jim Acosta, who shrieked like a rabbit in a bear trap back when the Trump White House revoked his press pass, vehemently defending the imprisonment of a man for sharing an image on social media.
Journalism has been dead at CNN for a long time, but today Andrew Kaczynski and Jim Acosta danced on its grave.
Again: Mackey was imprisoned for interfering with the rights of voters, not “sharing an image on social media” or wrongthink.” It’s telling of the MRC’s right-wing ideology that D’Agostino can’t tell the difference.