As Nikki Haley eventually became the only real competition for Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary, the Media Research Center’s limited defense of her evolved. A Jan. 15 post by Curtis Houck complained that the non-right-wing media focused too much on Donald Trump while talking to Haley:
Reacting to Monday’s results in the low-turnout Iowa caucuses, Tuesday’s CBS Mornings opened its second hour by demanding 2024 GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley to not only drop out, but harangue her with the usual issues that only the liberal media cared about as opposed to, you know, real Americans: the 2020 election and demanding Republicans say Donald Trump was “unfit” to return as president.
Ever-pious, fill-in co-host John Dickerson climbed aboard his high horse by first fretting Iowans voted for Trump in a blowout “despite all his legal challenges and what some call his extreme rhetoric.” Dickerson then turned his guns to Haley as she appeared live in New Hampshire: “Ambassador, all good presidents are tested by adversity. You have some. Why is this race not over?”
Haley noted “We’re just getting started” and votes in two more, totally different states in New Hampshire and South Carolina were up next on her docket for what’s actually “a marathon,” “not a sprint.”
Dickerson came off like the entire interview was a waste of his brain cells based on this ho-hum follow-up: “Anything you’re going to do differently, Ambassador?”
After Haley said she’s “a stone’s throw away from – from Trump” in the Granite State, Dickerson interjected to argue “30 points in Iowa is – is more than a stone’s throw.” Haley, to her credit, corrected him.
Having cried uncle, Dickerson returned to his pompous historian schtick and lectured Haley about how she and other Republicans were suffering from some physiological “obstacle” in being unable to say Trump’s “unfit to be president.”
[…]Haley went on and on about telling voters “the truth” and “hard truth” because “[t]hat’s what people want”, but King doubled down: “I’m wondering – governor – I’m wondering, governor, do they really want the truth? Honestly – honestly, I’m wondering do they want the truth because you give them the truth but they still say nope, nope, nope, it’s not legit.”
Haley doubled down, adding she instead speaks “the truth about the things they care about” (instead of the media) like the economy and immigration since “[n]obody’s talking about the election of 2020.”
Jorge Bonilla complained in a Jan. 23 post that Haley was being criticized for effectively attacking her main primary competition:
We are at the stage of the electoral cycle wherein drive-bys openly express their dissatisfaction at the insufficiency of an attack levied against a Republican- in this case, former President Donald Trump.
Watch as [Jen] Psaki and [Ali] Vitali commiserate over their dissatisfaction at Nikki Haley’s attacks on former President Trump, as aired on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki on Monday, January 22nd, 2024:
[…]Is it the role of a Republican presidential candidate to “satisfy” these Democrat apparatchiks with an attack on the GOP frontrunner? It would seem so, given Vitali and Psaki’s response to what Haley was putting forth.
[…]You never hear about such insufficiencies when covering campaigns against incumbent Democrats. It is at that point, precisely, that the journalists go from decrying the insufficiency of the attacks to decrying the attacks as disinformation. The naked partisanship is right there, on full display.
I don’t know what Psaki and Vitali were expecting from Haley, given that she is still competing in a (nominally) contested GOP primary. But such is the state of modern news analysis.
Given that Haley was running against Trump, why shouldn’t she be offering compelling reasons for primary voters to choose her instead of him? That’s doesn’t involve appealing to “Democrat apparatchiks” — that involves appealing to actual voters who want a reason to vote for her and not Trump. You know, the very thing campaigning is about.
When Haley did start to offer more pointed criticism of Trump, the MRC complained that it too was being praised. Mark Finkelstein groused in a Jan. 25 post:
CNN’s John Avlon has a habit that we’ve noted of cooking up a comment designed to focus attention on himself. But although he was on the CNN This Morning panel today, it was CNN host and commentator S.E. Cupp who grabbed the spotlight with a very vulgar line.
The subject was the state of Nikki Haley’s campaign. And Cupp argued that there is still demand within the GOP electorate for what Haley is offering.
Along the way, Cupp took a shot at Republicans who, in order to stay in the GOP “club,” sacrifice their principles and endorse Trump. She singled out Tim Scott, who endorsed Trump despite having, while Scott was still in the primary race, cast his campaign as a choice between “grievance and greatness.” In endorsing Trump, Scott claimed that his mention of “grievance” and “victimhood” was not a reference to Trump, but to Joe Biden. Riiight.
Cupp brought the segment to an end with this:
“Maybe one of the only people who can sidestep the great emasculation of the GOP by Donald Trump is a woman. Maybe, just maybe, Nikki Haley has more balls than the rest of them.”
John Avlon clapped. Queried co-anchor Poppy Harlow: “Title of your next book?”
Nicholas Fondacaro brought the flip-flop back to defense of Haley in a Feb. 14 post:
The liberal media had given themselves the title of the defenders of democracy, but they didn’t want to see democracy play out. That was obviously the case on Wednesday’s Today when NBC anchor Craig Melvin tried to bully former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley out of the Republican nomination race for president. As he should, Melvin got an earful when Haley called him “ridiculous” and told him off for pretending to be concerned about the GOP for the general election.
“He is clearly head and shoulders above the rest in terms of front-runner status, right now you would concede. What does that say about the party? Why has your message not broken through so far?” Melvin sniped at her.
She pushed back, suggesting, “Well, I think my message has broken through. Not only are we getting Republicans we’re getting independents, we’re getting Reagan Democrats. The people who want the anger to stop, the people who want the division to stop, and the people who want us to stop having 80-year-old candidates.”
[…]This was another instance of the liberal media trying to meddle with the Republican nomination process and force it to end when they wanted it to.
The MRC, of course, had no problem when Republicans (and Rush Limbaugh) meddled in the Democratic nomination process with the goal of prolonging the campaign and making it end when they wanted it to.
Fondacaro was completely silent when Trump mocked Haley’s husband for being on military duty during the campaign, but he lashed out in a Feb. 23 post at “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin when she said that Haley “didn’t actually miss her military husband who was deployed in Africa. She called Haley’s emotions “inauthentic” and suggested she only cared about getting a bump in her approval rating.” He again spread the malicious lie that Hostin is “staunchly racist and anti-Semitic,” oblivious to the fact that he has been repeatedly proven wrong.
Tim Graham whined that the Washington Post accurately reported on the nature of the high school Haley attended, huffing in a Feb. 21 post that the Post article was a “hit piece”:
Over the years, we’ve witnessed many Washington Post hit pieces against Republican presidential candidates, and the most shameless ones are about what happened in their youth. One of the first ones to come to mind is Mitt Romney being attacked in May of 2012 for apparently being a vicious prankster who gave some other kid an involuntary haircut on the quad.
On Tuesday afternoon, Post reporter Michael Kranish – a man who used to buff the image of the lanky windsurfer John Kerry when he worked at The Boston Globe – put out a 3,000-word article trying to make Nikki Haley look bad. This was the headline:
Haley’s nearly all-White high school lacked lessons of racism, some say
Haley left her hometown’s integrated public school system and attended a high school newly created from the merger of two “segregation academies.”
An entire hit piece based on what “some say.” They mean what “liberals say.”
[…]Are they serious? Was South Carolina “segregationist” in 1986? If so, why was Nikki the Indian-American allowed? Kranish hammered on the alleged lack of “lessons in racism,” especially about the “Orangeburg Massacre” in 1968, when three young black men were shot and killed by cops at a civil rights protest.
Graham didn’t dispute the fact that the school’s history was as a segregation academy. He returned for a March 3 post in which he rehashed the old complaint that Haley wasn’t asked questions about President Biden, whom she was not actually running against and would never run against given that she dropped out a few weeks later:
On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker’s big interview was with Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, which took up more than 17 minutes in the hour, with around 25 questions…and not a single question was focused on President Biden or the Democrats.
Later, when Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) was on, all her questions were about Biden, about how he’s dealing with “pro-Palestinian” voters, air drops in the Gaza strip, the border crisis, and if Biden has “urgency” on the latest bad poll for him (from The New York Times). Haley would have enjoyed answering those questions. But Welker preferred to talk horse race – when are you getting out? – and whether she would endorse Trump. The first 11 questions were all horse-race.
Then Welker turned to January 6, and whether Haley agreed with Mitch McConnell that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the rioting. Haley argued that the pro-Trump rally demonstrated freedom of speech, but then it went wrong at the Capitol.
[…]This gave Welker the opening for the anti-GOP hardball: “What does it say about the state of the Republican Party that you’re saying that you don’t know if the GOP front-runner will follow the Constitution?”
Haley said “that’s not the Republican Party. That is Donald Trump,” and she repeated that the country could do better than Trump and Biden.
Graham didn’t explain why it’s “anti-GOP” to point out the fact that Trump has amply demonstrated he doesn’t particularly care about laws or the Constitution, given that he faces numerous charges for breaking the law.