The Media Research Center has always been a Donald Trump apologist — something that accelerated before the start of his trial on business fraud. One of the ways it does this is to impose the hoary old narrative that Trump is a victim of the big, bad media. Tim Graham pushed this narrative on his April 3 podcast:
Once again in 2024, journalists need to justify treating Trump as a deadly bubonic plague, an impending Hitler. Treating him as one side of an election is dangerous when he is the End of Democracy. Then they claim they only have a bias in favor of Truth. Yes, they’re totally not favoring the Democrats with this foam-flecked Evil Trump coverage.
On April 1, the New York Times podcast The Daily tackled the “Trump Problem,” which they defined as this: Why must we deal with business executives who want us to treat Trump and his voters like they are normal citizens and not a Death Star for Democracy? Host Michael Barbaro asked Times political reporter Jim Rutenberg about the impression Republicans have that the media are wearing a “jersey” for Team Biden in all of their hostility to Trump.
Rutenberg’s reply was simply awful: “No one wants to be wearing a jersey on our business. But maybe what they really have to accept is that we’re just sticking to the true facts, and that may look like we’re wearing a jersey, but we’re not. And that may, at times, look like it’s lining up more with the Democrats, but we’re not. If Trump is lying about a stolen election, that’s not siding against him. That’s siding for the truth, and that’s what we’re doing.”
This podcast airs on more than 300 “public” radio stations, which underlines how NPR is one big liberal sandbox. It wasn’t even the only NPR talk program making this preposterous argument.
Rather than provide actual evidence of a stolen election, Graham pushed his employer’s dubious conspiracy theory on the subject:
Both shows never touched on the Hunter Biden laptop or any other issue where the media suppressed and disparaged true stories. When they couldn’t suppress it, they lied about it, claiming it had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Then, in 2022, the New York Times and other leftist outlets admitted the laptop was a real thing. This apparently isn’t supposed to dent their “we’re not for Democrats, we’re for truth” spins.
Right before the election, NPR executive Terence Samuel infamously dismissed the Hunter scandal: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” It was a “pure distraction.” It was, he said, a “politically driven event.” As if all of their wild caricatures and speculations about Trump aren’t “politically driven”?
Once again, Graham ignored the fact that there was no reason to trust the Hunter laptop story at face value because it came from the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned right-wing rag, and the Post provided no independent corroborating evidence of the laptop’s veracity.
Graham’s boss, meanwhile, ran crying to his buddy Mark Levin that the big bad media is just too mean to Trump:
On Sunday’s episode of Life, Liberty, & Levin on the Fox News Channel, Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell explained to Mark Levin how the media are relentlessly negative in their coverage of Donald Trump, and focus largely on his legal troubles and avoid covering how President Biden is failing on the issues from inflation to immigration to crime.
Levin asked Bozell: “What do you make of the media’s coverage of Biden’s war on Donald Trump?”
Bozell began with Trump’s presidency: “Over a four year period we looked at that media’s coverage of Donald Trump when he was president. And found that on average every month it was 90% negative coverage they gave. No matter what his successes and his successes, you cannot argue his successes. But they just didn’t cover them.”
[…]Levin then noted the media want to compare Trump to Hitler, just as they did to Barry Goldwater, to Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. They engage in character assassination. Bozell agreed, and added the “end of democracy” spin.
Needless to say, Bozell and Levin are pretending that Fox News isn’t part of “the media” — if they were honest, they would have to admit that the channel that airs Levin’s show largely avoids reporting negative news about Trump, or explain why Trump’s legal troubles aren’t actually news.
As Trump’s trial drew nearer, an April 15 “study” by Rich Noyes served up a different angle on victimhood by pretending it was all a partisan sideshow:
Barring a last-minute hiccup, today a Democratic prosecutor — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — will begin his unprecedented criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s certain presidential nominee in November’s general election.
Despite the obvious political implications of such a prosecution, a new study of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage shows at least 90% of their coverage failed to inform viewers that Bragg and the other elected Democrats going after Trump are “Democrats.” It’s as if the networks prefer to disingenuously portray the indictments and civil lawsuits as the work of nonpartisan career prosecutors, rather than as partisan attempts to use the court system to hobble the electoral prospects of the country’s top Republican.
For this study, our analysts reviewed all broadcast evening news coverage from January 1, 2023 through April 10, 2024. Here’s a rundown of how the networks are failing to adequately disclose the partisanship of the three elected Democrats prosecuting Trump: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg; Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney Fani Willis; and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Again, needless to say, Noyes’ definition of “TV news” conveniently doesn’t include Fox News, since that would mean Noyes would have to admit Fox News has shown bias in covering the prosecutors, and it’s a key MRC narrative to never admit that Fox News has any sort of bias. Noyes served up more ranting:
From the beginning of these cases, journalists have had a choice in how they frame these various legal challenges to Donald Trump: Democrats vs. a Republican (i.e., a partisan food fight), or nonpartisan law enforcement vs. an accused lawbreaker. Clearly, the editorial choices made by these broadcast networks shows they are framing these cases as the actions of nonpartisan law enforcement officials — all of whom just happen to be Democrats.
But if it were a leading Democrat who had been placed under the legal microscope by a trio of elected Republicans, does anyone think that the media would be so reluctant to even mention the partisanship of the prosecutors?
Of course not.
By contrast, Noyes and the MRC will never admit that Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon — who has been overseeing a Trump case in Florida and has made numerous rulings before a planned trial that appear to show favoritism toward Trump — has any sort of bias