Despite talk that he would change his tune after his assassination attempt, Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was the same old rambling grievance-fest — which meant, of course, that the Media Research Center had to defend it no matter what and lash out at anyone who criticized it. Mary Clare Waldron groused about pre-speech criticism in a July 19 post:
As the final night of the Republican National Conference [sic] began, with a crowd overwhelmed with excitement, optimism, and successful polling, it seemed to become harder for the media to find any criticism. Yet as petty criticisms pervaded the networks, MSNBC turned to the never-Trumper Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, in order to find any legitimate scruples with the successful party.
[…]“Lost the plot,” states Longwell, not a surprising answer from a never-Trumper, and that is exactly why MSNBC had her on. No longer can the media dissect Biden’s failing campaign, and the Democratic ticket which seems to be questioned by more of its own politicians everyday. If they do it would surely mean a definite failure in November. Instead they look towards any and every alternative, highlighting an undeniable bias, and further damaging true journalism.
Of course, the MRC’s idea of “true journalism” is filled with right-wing bias and liberal-bashing. After the speech, a post by Nicholas Fondacaro conceded it was “longwinded” but denied there was anything else wrong:
In the wee hours of Friday morning, following former President Trump’s longwinded nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, MSNBC host Joy Reid continued her theme of the week of suggesting that Trump and President Biden were equal in most things from overcoming similar medical conditions (which weren’t) to being bad candidates.
When it was her turn to rail against Trump, Reid first instinct was to paraphrase a black supremacist character from the Marvel Universe, Erik Killmonger: “MAGA, is this your king?”
She followed up by suggesting that if Biden had given that speech, Democrats would be actively trying to removing him from office and not just their ticket:
[…]“That was proof that there is not just one old man in the race. Donald Trump is an old man clearly in decline,” she proclaimed, intending to suggest Trump and Biden were equals.
This was seemingly a continuation of her desperate argument from the previous night when she insanely suggested that Biden getting COVID again was “exactly the same” as Trump getting shot in the head.
Back on Friday morning, Reid ignored the fact that politicians repeat stump speeches at every stop they make and suggested that Trump deviating from the written speech (as he’s known to do) was a sign of an elderly “decline”:
Mark Finkelstein whined that an MSNBC host critiqued the speech:
In a bizarre bit of saying the quiet part out loud, on today’s Morning Joe, Jonathan Lemire, MSNBC’s Way Too Early host and Politico’s White House bureau chief, issued marching orders to the rest of the liberal media.
“I do think we need a moratorium here in the media about Donald Trump’s — praising Donald Trump’s new tone. That doesn’t ever happen on this show, mind you.”
So Morning Joe‘s worried that, after an incredibly successful RNC in which Trump struck a softer tone, the media might actually report that, giving Trump an electoral boost.
[…]Lemire continued to expose Morning Joe‘s theory of the case: Trump’s RNC speech was a missed opportunity in which, softer tone notwithstanding, he didn’t reach out beyond his base. And so, the keep-hope-alive Democrats are declaring, “this is the guy we can beat!” So don’t go messing that up by offering praise of Trump, faint as it might be!
Lemire ended with one more unsubtle point. The belief among some Dems that Trump is beatable explains, “why, of course, there’s so much scrutiny about President Biden’s upcoming decisions.”
Translation: We can beat this guy with the right candidate. All the more reason to dump Biden, STAT!
Tim Graham served up his own roundup of speech criticism to bash:
Staunch Republicans may have loved President Trump’s long speech on Thursday night, but it’s easy to suspect that the journalists watching it were going to go beyond skeptical. Here’s how the Associated Press summed up: “Rebranding Trump, former president recalls shooting details but avoids policy details.” There wasn’t any policy in that speech? Did they expect Trump to read paragraphs from the Heritage Foundation?
NPR.org summed up the media themes: First came “A temporary appeal for unity,” which felt phony to them, followed by “Trump returns to familiar rhetoric.” They absorbed Trump’s recounting of the shooting, but seemed almost relieved when it went back to Build the Wall and Drill, Baby, Drill.
Seconds after it ended, the taxpayer-funded PBS News Hour anchors Amna & Geoff were dismissing it as grievances and “falsehoods.”
[…]On CBS, John Dickerson underlined the “fact checkers” would be extremely busy chasing down the lies. (But after Democrats speak, they’re too emotionally invested to worry about facts.)
They also broke out into their own Fact Checking mode. ABC anchor David Muir and justice correspondent Pierre Thomas were trying to “correct” the idea that crime is worse under the Democrats.
Graham made no effort to disprove that fact-check or to rebut any other critique. Curtis Houck, meanwhile, had his own whining fit:
Like its competitors on CBS and NBC, ABC’s Good Morning America took time on Friday to get to former President Trump’s Republican National Convention speech and the hubbub surrounding President Biden’s cognitive and physical impairment thanks to the global Microsoft outage. But when they did, they denounced Trump’s “anti-immigrant”, “dark”, and “divisive” speech while continuing to dig Biden’s political grave.
“Former President started with a call for unity and recounting the attempt on his life, but the bulk of his 92-minute speech was a repetition of false claims about the 2020 election and familiar attacks on immigrants and his rivals,” co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos complained in a tease.
Correspondent Rachel Scott bemoaned from the convention in Milwaukee that “Trump said he wanted this speech to focus on unity, to turn the page from the divisive rhetoric after the attempted assassination on his life” but “[t]hat message of unity did not last long” as he went “off script, launching into partisan attacks and making false claims.”
Scott only briefly focused on Trump’s rapturous recounting of Saturday’s assassination attempt on his life before pivoting to “dark rhetoric to paint the U.S. as a nation in decline, and attacking his opponents” and ad-libbing on everything “from inflation to ISIS, trans athletes, to not taxing tips”.
Her most seething comments came in bashing Trump for engaging in “anti-immigrant rhetoric, falsely claiming there’s a surge in violent crime by undocumented immigrants when crime rates have declined in the last two years and promising to create a massive militarized force to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.”
Amazing. The liberal media want to downplay and thus poo-poo the families of those who lost loved ones to incidents caused by illegal aliens.
Later, Stephanopoulos huffed that, “in the end, Donald Trump gave the speech he wanted to give last night” with Scott replying Thursday “was typical Donald Trump” and “just couldn’t help himself” but launch into “false claims and also partisan attacks.”
Houck spent another post complaining that another news outlet pointed out Trump’s lack of unity in his speech:
Though not as bombastic as ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today still made their point Friday about how they viewed President Trump’s Thursday speech at the Republican National Convention, crediting him for his vivid retelling of Saturday’s assassination attempt and the tribute to the late Corey Comperatore, then knocking him for “riffing” and “repeating…grievances, conspiracies, and insults”.
Co-host Savannah Guthrie said in a tease that Trump gave an “emotional description of that attempted assassination” before throwing “fiery red meat” to “the party faithful” then later offered the same notes in tossing to senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson.
“[I]n many ways, it was also a tale of two speeches with the former President returning to the controversial rhetoric more familiar to his campaign remarks, even after promising a departure from the divisions he had a hand in stoking. But at the outset of that 93-minutes speech, he positioned himself as a unifier, describing in dramatic detail, the attempted assassination against him,” Jackson began.
[…]In the analysis portion, Guthrie told Jackson that the RNC “was…really interesting…because it really — I was so struck by the way convention organizers seem to be pulling off a real softing of Donald Trump” until Thursday with “Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt”, “Kid Rock and the crowds yelling, fight,” and Trump’s stemwinder of a speech that “many, many, many people love, but he’s trying to reach across and get new voters.”
Jackson agreed and said this signaled the belief in the Trump camp to boost base enthusiasm so their “loyalists…show up” so “then maybe they don’t need quite as many of those independent, suburban, swing state voters as well.”
Houck didn’t dispute the accuracy of any of these analyses; instead, he cheered that NBC also served up “devastating” coverage of President Biden’s campaign.