The Media Research Center’s Rich Noyes writes in a May 17 post:
In the past 18 months, CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta has suggested President Trump is a “racist,” while whining that Trump’s complaints about press bias were doing “real damage to the First Amendment,” speculating that some day we might see “a dead journalist on the side of the highway, because of the rhetoric coming out of the White House.”
Then on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Acosta said this about his Trump coverage: “Listen, when I covered Barack Obama, I was just as tough on him. People might not believe that.”
As tough on Obama as he’s been on Trump? Let’s investigate.
OK. For most legitimate researchers an “investigation” being presented as a “reality check” (per Noyes’ headline) would involve some sort of comprehensive analysis of eight years of Acosta’s reporting.
But this is the MRC we’re talking about here, where shoddy, biased research is the norm. Instead, Noyes cherry-picks a handful of cherry-picked, Acosta-bashing posts out the MRC’s own archive and baselessly presents them as fully representative of Acosta’s work during the Obama years. Of course, the MRC never clipped anything from Acosta that didn’t reinforce its anti-media agenda, so any Acosta work that was critical of Obama never made it into the MRC’s archive.
In other words, this is the laziest “reality check” ever, designed only to further the MRC’s agenda and not to enlighten anyone with facts.