Media Research Center executive Tim Graham wrote in an Aug. 17 post:
Anonymous sources can cut both ways. After CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell sloppily tweeted an inaccurate claim that Trump was lying about the FBI taking his passports in the Mar-a-Lago raid, unnamed critics inside CBS pounced in a Tuesday New York Post story.
[T]he anchor attributed the information to a single source — a big no-no at CBS News, which has a strict two-source protocol, angry CBS sources told The Post. They added that the tweets also made it sound like O’Donnell was calling the former president a “liar.”“This is an embarrassment for CBS that the face of your network can’t even make a second call to a Justice Department rep,” one livid source said. “It’s Journalism 101.”
The loathing of Trump routinely leads to sloppy, rushed reporting to paint Trump as perennially engulfed in damaging scandal.
In fact, O’Donnell’s tweet was not incorrect; she accurately quoted an official stating that the FBI was not in possession of Trump’s passports, though it was murky whether it ever actually had possession of them. Trump claimed they were “stolen,” but he’s also an invetarate liar and there’s no real reason to trust anything he or his subordinates have to say about, well, anything — especially given that the raid was prompted by deception about Trump’s unauthorized possession of classified documents.
Of course, Graham is being a total hypocrite about anonymous sources, decrying them when the “liberal media” uses them but gleefully uses them when they serve his partisan agenda — as he does here in uncritically citing the anonymous source the New York Post used to bash O’Donnell. He will not apply the demands he makes of the “liberal” media to his own right-wing media operation — that’s cowardice and craven politics at work.
Graham is demonstrating another double standard as well: He will never call out erroneous tweets in his right-wing media bubble — and certainly not ones from his boss, Brent Bozell.
And, throughout all of this, Graham never explained why someone’s “incorrect tweet” deserved so much attention — outside of the MRC’s anti-media agenda, that is.
Graham’s dishonest behavior is yet another reason why his MRC shouldn’t be taken seriously as media critics.