The Media Research Center’s highly biased coverage of Hunter Biden’s trial continued with a June 7 “trial watch” post by Curtis Houck whining that the non-right-wing was again treating Hunter like a human being:
Aside from a zero Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC have had segments on every newscast this week about Hunter Biden’s gun trial, but like we’ve seen, the flavor skewed heavily toward seeking sympathy for the First Son as he’s had to endure “dramatic”, “heartbreaking”, and “painful” details about his life being made public.
Between Thursday night and Friday morning, the broadcast network coverage total clicked over an hour to 60 minutes and 55 seconds (excluding teases). As usual, that paled in comparison to where they stood through four and a half days of the Trump trial, which clocked in at 96 minutes (96:13).
ABC’s Good Morning America was back with its predictable tract of seeking sympathy.
By contrast, the MRC was quite upset that Donald Trump’s life of debauchery was made public during his New York trial, which centered on him paying hush money to a porn star to cover up their alleged affair. And again, Houck failed to provide coverage statistics for Fox News for comparison purposes.
The same day, Mark Finkelstein whined that it was pointed out that Hunter’s trial would have a negligible effect on the 2024 presidential election outside of a certain bubble of people, mischaracterizing the complaint in question:
You’d have to be some sort of hick from the sticks to take a Hunter Biden criminal conviction into account in deciding on your 2024 presidential vote.
That was Molly Jong-Fast’s gist on today’s Way Too Early, the Morning Joe pregame show. When host Jonathan Lemire asked the MSNBC political analyst whether there could be a negative political impact for Joe Biden stemming from a Hunter conviction, she suggested only hayseeds who can’t make fine moral distinctions could be misled:
“Yeah, I mean, I think, look, you know, there are low-information voters who are like, oh, they’re both in trouble with the law..”
Oh, those déclassé low-information voters! The kind who, unlike Jong-Fast, didn’t attend the Riverdale Country School and Barnard, and score a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College. And whose mother isn’t the best-selling feminist novelist Erica Jong.
[…]Note: Having viewed numerous MSNBC appearances by Jong-Fast, I’ve found myself bewildered by just what she is doing on national TV. Her diction is muddled, and the insights of this “political analyst” are pedestrian—at best.
This 2022 New York Times article provides insights on the matter. Entitled, “How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom,” it paints a picture of Jong-Fast that is admiring of her moxie in making the most of her connections, but not very flattering about her analytical chops.
At no point did Jong-Fast called people obsessed with Hunter’s trial “hayseeds,” as Finkelstein claimed. And Finkelstein failed to explain the relevance of his personal attack on Jong-Fast, given that he quoted her making no judgment on the education and income levels of the Hunter-obsessed; after all, one does not need to be a “hayseed” to be the type of “low-information voter” she was criticizing.
A June 8 post by Alex Christy whined that Hunter’s trial didn’t have the same implications for the country that Trump’s trial did:
When Washington Post associate editor and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart and New York Times columnist David Brooks recapped former President Donald Trump’s conviction on PBS NewsHour one week ago, they hailed it as a victory for the rule of law and warned that anyone who dissented was simply being political and a grave threat to institutions. When it came to discussing Hunter Biden’s trial on Friday, they sang a different song.
Host Amna Nawaz declared, “I think it’s fair to say it was a very tough week, a lot of personal and embarrassing anecdotes and details that came out from a number of people, Beau Biden’s widow and his ex-wife — Hunter Biden’s ex-wife as well.”
[…]Continuing in his lamentations, Capehart added, “Republicans have been trying to make Hunter Biden an issue for President Biden in an attempt to bring him down and the — quote, unquote — “Biden crime family.” But what we have in this trial in Wilmington has nothing to do with any kind of policy or any of the other things that Republicans have been talking about.”
And the falsification of business records to cover up an affair with a porn star was?
Apparently, Christy doesn’t believe that a current or former president should be held to a higher standard than a president’s son — and he certainly appears to believe that current or former president should be above the law.
Finkelstein returned for a June 10 post that reverted to the MRC’s weird anger that Hunter (along with his father) is treated like a human being instead of a partisan punching bag:
When it comes to making the case for Hunter Biden, Mika Brzezinski has managed to devise an alternative to pounding the table when the facts and the law are against you.
On today’s Morning Joe, Mika repeatedly got choked up when discussing the trials and tribulations of Hunter, and the Biden family at large.
And to be clear: the case against Hunter Biden is about as open-and-shut as can be.
[…]Note: Mika repeatedly tried to twang the heartstrings. She twice mentioned that Hunter is Biden’s last “remaining son.” She mentioned that Joe had lost a wife and a baby in a car accident, and that son Beau had died of a brain tumor.
But whereas she claimed that Americans think Biden is a “nice guy,” she failed to mention that, for decades, Biden falsely claimed that his wife and daughter had been killed by a drunk driver. Biden has also falsely claimed, as even the leftist Daily Beast has acknowledged, that Beau died in Iraq.
And as for Biden being the loving father of Hunter, for years, Joe helped Hunter make piles of cash that he squandered on crack and hookers. Voters or jurors could see him (broad brush) as an enabler, not a stern dad. And it can be imagined that Joe enabled Hunter in part because the Big Guy was getting his “10 percent,” or a piece of the grift.
Finkelstein really needs to address his partisan anger issues that force him into kneejerk recitation of anti-Biden talking points about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the trial at hand. Is he still bizarrely mad that Trump’s sordid amorality was exposed during his trial?