As further evidence that it’s a partisan attack organization than any sort of legitimate “media research” outfit, the Media Research Center loves to link random bad people to Democrats (even as it vociferously denies that bad behavior — i.e., flirting with anti-Semitism — by the leader of the Republican Party is an accurate reflection of the party itself).Scott Whitlock seized on another such case in an Oct. 11 post:
Kudos to CBS and reporter Mark Strassmann for fairness. Strassmann, on the CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings shows, was the only journalist to repeatedly note that the powerful Los Angeles politician who went on a racist rant is a Democrat. ABC barely noticed it. NBC briefly covered the story on Monday and Tuesday mornings, but made no mention of party affiliation.
Nury Martinez, who just resigned as the President of the Los Angeles City Council, in a secretly recorded audio tape from 2021, complained abut “the blacks,” the “dark” Koreans and sneered at the child of one council member as a “monkey.”
Journalist love to generalize all Republicans as guilty when there is a comparable scandal. When it’s a Democrat, the party affiliation is often hidden.
Nicholas Fondacaro similarly seized on the situation while also exposing a hole in the MRC’s attack:
Twenty four hours after suggesting that only white people could be racist because of “a power dynamic,” ABC’s The View suddenly decided “minorities can be racist against each other, too” on Tuesday. This hypocritical flip-flop came after the Latina Democratic president of the Los Angeles City Council, Nury Martinez made racist remarks, captured on a secret recording, against “the blacks,” “dark Koreans,” and a black child who she called a “monkey” in Spanish.
Of course, the fact Martinez is a Democrat wasn’t mentioned on the show but Sunny Hostin opined about the incident “as Afro-Latina” and how she “grew up” experiencing “anti-blackness, anti-black hatred in the Latino community.” “And that’s always been a painful thing I have dealt with, the anti-blackness in the Latino community, and it has to stop. It has to stop with this,” she declared.
After Hostin noted her mother is a “white Puerto Rican” and her father is “a black man,” self-described Republican Ana Navarro sympathized with her saying that kind of racism “exists” and that “minorities can be racist against each other, too.” “Yes. Yes,” Hostin agreed.
While the “View” ladies were quick to call out Martinez’s racism, the MRC was much more reluctant to directly criticize Donald Trump’s dipping his toe into the fetid pool of anti-Semitism — again, they’re more mad that people made logical conclusions that if the leader of the Republican Party is cool with that, the Republicans who don’t or won’t criticize it are cool with it as well. Fondacaro will never admit that difference. Instead, he repeated the MRC falsehood that Vice President Kamala Harris said, in his words, “hurricane relief funds should be given out based on race.”
Kathleen Krumhansl did the same thing for Spanish-language media (and also in Spanish):
How can you say that a Democrat is in trouble without saying that a Democrat is in trouble? Just skip the word ´Democrat´.
This is exactly what the national Spanish-language newscasts did, not in one report, but in report after report – a solid 39 minutes of airtime in a little over 24-hours – about the scandal involving four “Latino politicians” from Los Angeles. The public officials, considered to be the apex of Democrat Hispanic power, were caught red-handed on a recorded conversation where they made racist and disparaging remarks about other Latinos, and about the Black son of a fellow white Democrat council member who is also gay. Telemundo, Univision and CNN En Español, all skipped mentioning their political affiliation, a fact that raised many red flags.
[…]It’s amazing how little is said on air when a controversy involves elected DEMOCRAT public officials. Were they Republicans, can you imagine the uproar? From MAGA ultra-right-wingers, to fascists, to you name it; the coverage would contain the word Republican every other second.
It’s hard to take Krumhansl seriously as an authoritative voice when she’s using the right-wing pejorative of describing someone as “Democrat” instead of the grammatically correct “Democratic.”
Clay Waters also hyped “the notorious leaked audio of Democratic Latino members of the Los Angeles city council making offensive remarks about blacks and Jews” in an Oct. 16 post, followed by Larry Elder emphasizing in an Oct. 21 column that Martinez was part of an “all-Democrat (plus one independent) Los Angeles City Council.”
None of these posts mentioned that nobody is defending Martinez — even as they continue to defend Trump no matter what he does.