At the Media Research Center, writers must always be on the attack — even when those attacks contradict previous MRC attacks made just a few days earlier. Gabriel Hays wrote in a Sept. 13 post regarding comedian Shane Gillis:
For a group of entertainment producers who kill to come off as condescendingly woke, Saturday Night Live showrunners look super inept for hiring an apparent racist as one of their new cast members. One of the sketch comedy’s new talents has been labeled a racist by CNN journalists for making fun of Chinese people in 2018. SNL is in an even deeper pickle because another new cast member for the upcoming season is actually Chinese.
If only outraged libs could cut you a break because you’ve been so anti-Trump.
Hays suggested that Gillis “just may be fired before he even starts his new job”– and he was right. So Hays should have been happy, right? Wrong. In a Sept 16 post, Hays downgraded Gillis’ offensive comments from “racist” to merely “insensitive,” and complained that “SNL” fired him “although Gillis apologized for the insensitive comments.” He then downgraded Gillis’ offense even further by huffing that “NBC would never risk a politically incorrect liability even if it’s a talented rookie who could use just a bit of forgiveness.”
Thus, the narrative was changed. Hays wrote two posts over the next two days citing comedians who we’re pretty sure the MRC has bashed over the years criticize Gillis’ firing, in which he further downgraded Gillis’ offense to a simple case of “making fun of Chinese people” and invoked the new right-wing obsession of “cancel culture” — never mind that trying to get people canceled for saying thing it doesn’t like has been an MRC cultural staple for 30 years.
NewsBusters’ Randy Hall joined the narrative swap with one post also invoking “cancel culture” and another complaining about a claim that Gillis’ hiring was an attempt by “SNL” to appeal to conservatives, which made him concede that Gillis had made “racist remarks” — something Hays hasn’t mention since his first post on the subject — if only to insist that racism isn’t conservatism.
Hays returned with an Oct. 1 post wrestling the narrative back to its new track citing Gillis’ firing — not for racism, of course, but for “offend[ing] sensitive millennials” — among the examples of “woke culture” that allegedly caused director Todd Phillips to abandon “raunchy comedies” to helm the new “Joker” movie.