The Media Research Center normally freaks out at nudity in the media, real or suggested, such as with that Kanye West video, an anti-Trump book or Miley Cyrus in general. So you’d think that a major metropolitan newspaper running nude pictures of anyone, let alone the wife of the Republican presidential nominee, would crank up the MRC outrage machine.
Well, you’d be wrong.
On July 31, the New York Post published a nude front-page photo of Melania Trump from her modeling days, complete with stars over her nipples, with the headline “The Ogle Office.” The Post followed up the next day with an even steamier cover photo of Trump in a position the MRC might denounce as lesbian. The Post’s website featured even more pictures from the shoots those cover photos, with even less left to the imagination.
So, spittle-flecked MRC rants about a vulgar, sleazy attack on the wife of a Republican and prudish rants about nudity on the front page of a major newspaper, right?
Wrong. The MRC has published absolutely nothing about the Post’s nudie covers.
Why? Two possible reasons. First, the MRC may be exhibiting some passive-aggressive behavior regarding its support for Trump. While it’s being a good Republican tool and defending Trump most of the time, it will deviate from the script on occasion, as when it defended Ted Cruz for not endorsing Trump at the Republican National Convention.
The second: The New York Post, like Fox News, is a Rupert Murdoch-controlled property that is normally reliably conservative. That means, like Fox News, the Post can commit no “media bias” in the eyes of the MRC, even when it’s overly exposing the wife of the Republican presidential candidate, and even when it would have bashed any other non-conservative publication that published the exact same photos.
Such double standards make the MRC’s claim to care about media bias ring hollow. But at least the MRC finally found some public nudity it’s totally comfortable with (silence equals assent, after all).
UPDATE, 9/22/17: Image of New York Post cover removed because Google AdSense thought it was too explicit, despite the fact that it appeared on the cover of a relatively major U.S. newspaper.