While Tim Graham’s Media Research Center minions created an right-wing-friendly echo chamber over President Biden’s performance at the first presidential debate, Graham himself focused his anger on one thing: Donald Trump getting fact-checked. He began a June 30 post by ranting:
As we noted PBS tried hardest to support the Biden spin after their disastrous debate, on Friday night, the PBS News Hour strongly stuck to the Biden narrative that Trump lost the debate by unleashing a flood of lies. PBS turned to the badly disguised Democrats at PolitiFact for analysis, whose post-debate analysis couldn’t find anything Trump said was true. They loaded 16 claims that were all rated as false.
Graham then focused on one Trump claim that he tried to parse, that Democrats support abortion until birth, which Graham insists is true because it fits his partisan agenda:
As we’ve pointed out repeatedly, the 2020 Democrat Party [sic] platform opposes all restrictions on abortion. Where they pretend that they stand by Roe’s language about third-trimester abortions, in reality the Democrats pushed the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which would repeal all state restrictions on abortion and allow post-viability abortions.
[…]As always, they “fact check” the Democrat extremism on abortion by saying late-term abortions are rare, as Putterman added: “So medical experts say situations resulting in fetal death in the third trimester are rare. It’s less than 1 percent of abortions that occur after 21 weeks. And these cases typically involve fatal fetal anomalies or life-threatening emergencies affecting the pregnant women.”
Graham offered no evidence that is any mass abortion of fetuses after viability, which undercuts his argument. As a less biased news outlet pointed out, such abortions are rare and do, in fact, largely involve fetal abnormalities or health emergencies and they “often involve painful, emotional and even moral decisions.” He offered no evidence of any woman who has ever sought an abortion of a healthy fetus at birth. Graham didn’t explain why he’s denying that such abortions are rare or unjustified.
Still, Graham repeated his partisan complaint in his July 3 column:
Taxpayer-funded PBS is inaccurately branded as the fairest, most unemotional TV news outlet. Anyone looking at PBS right after Biden’s disastrous debate would have realized they were more favorable to Biden than anyone else. They steered clear of the dominant panic among Democrats. They sounded more like the DNC than MSNBC.
On the PBS News Hour on Friday after the debate, they offered a bland introduction: “Analysis of key moments and fallout from last night’s presidential debate.” Then the program aired 20 minutes of other news.
The last two-thirds of that hour were dedicated to underlining that Donald Trump unleashed a “torrent of lies,” so he lost the debate.
First came PBS White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez, a staunch Democrat: “Though praised by Republicans for his debate performance, Trump repeated lie after lie, including this one on abortion.” Trump said Biden’s willing to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.” PBS aired Biden yelling “you’re lying!”
That’s not a lie. The Democrat [sic] platform is clear that there should be no restrictions on abortion. It’s merely rude to point out the obvious.
[]…]Again, PBS co-anchor Geoff Bennett lamented: “Mr. Trump repeated a false claim that he’s made before that Democrats, in his words, will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth.” Putterman said it was false, and dragged out the lame argument that since late-term abortions are rare, it’s false to say Democrats permit them.
This time, though, Graham refused to acknowledge that such abortions typically involve medical issues and emotional and moral decisions in performing them. He also offered no documentation to support Trump’s wild description of abortion as “rip[ping] the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill[ing] the baby.” Instead, Graham ranted that Trump was fact-checked at all:
Bennett wrapped up: “What’s the consequence when a torrent of lies and mistruths delivered with verve and vigor go unchallenged as they were last night?” Putterman helpfully agreed. “I think that the consequences are quite high.”
They concluded the “Trump Lies Hour” with pundits David Brooks and Kimberly Atkins Stohr. She complained Biden failed to counter Trump’s lies, like on abortion! “I expected him to come out and make a clear layup on issues like abortion when Donald Trump was standing there lying about it, one of his many lies of that night, and he couldn’t even manage that.”Amna Nawaz pounded the line again: “David, as Kim noted there, Mr. Trump once again repeated a number of lies we have heard before on things like immigration and abortion and on January 6, all issues that really do resonate with voters. They went largely unchecked in the debate.”
You know who is unchecked? PBS. They tax our paychecks, then relentlessly trash-talk Trump as a liar, and imply Biden is never false. Biden’s only failing is he didn’t call Trump a liar enough. PBS made sure no one could lodge that complaint against them.
Graham didn’t dispute that, outside of his nitpicking over the abortion claim, Trump did in fact tell the lies he was accused of spreading. But he doesn’t explain why Trump’s lies should never be called out and that he should be given a pass for telling them (you know, like the MRC is).
Graham also doesn’t take the stance that would avoid Trump getting called out for his lies: telling Trump to stop spreading them.
P.S. Graham also displays his biased partisanship by using “Democrat” where “Democratic” is the grammatically correct word. It also discredits him from being taken seriously as a media critic.