Tennessee State Senator Brent Taylor (R-Memphis) is pushing back against the Memphis-based online publication MLK50: Justice Through Journalism after the outlet published an attack-style piece against the state senator’s effort to remove Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy from office.
On July 3, MLK50 published a lengthy piece titled, “State Sen. Taylor is seeking to oust DA Mulroy. The move is rooted in misinformation” which accused Taylor of “misinformation” when it comes to his effort to oust Mulroy.
Taylor published a public response to the attack piece on July 31 in which he not only defended his effort to oust the district attorney, but also exposed MLK50 for its apparent financial incentives to advocate for Mulroy staying in office.
In his response, the state senator explained that MLK50 is a project of Muckrock, which he wrote “is an advocacy-based journalism outfit” whose primary donors “include Borealis Philanthropy, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and the Emerson Collective” – all organizations of which receive donations from politically-active billionaires who collectively donated more than $600,000 to elect Mulroy in 2022.
To this, Taylor said the overlap in MLK50’s donors suggests the publication “has a sizable financial interest” in keeping Mulroy elected.
On Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Taylor also revealed that MLK50 appears to have broken its own policy of not receiving money from government agencies by accepting a $25,000 payment from the Shelby County Health Department.
MLK50’s policy, as stated on its website, reads as follows:
As a nonprofit, we will avoid accepting donations from anonymous sources, and we will not accept donations from government entities, political parties, elected officials or candidates actively seeking public office. We will not accept donations from sources who present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence.
“We learned that the Shelby County Health Department contributed $25,000 to [MLK50]. So I sent a letter to commissioner Mick Wright asking him to investigate it, and the health department claims that they did an advertising purchase during COVID, during the China virus, that advocated for people to get the vaccine and such, and that it was not a financial donation but it was money they gave to MLK50 in exchange for advertising. MLK50 is misleading the public into thinking that they’ve conflated their advertisers with their supporters and put it on their support page to make it look like they have more support,” Taylor explained.
“Hell, the Shelby County Health Department is a governmental entity. It’s run by Shelby County tax dollars. So [MLK50] is in violation of their own stated policy…The reason I went public with all this is, they wanted to attack me by saying that I was spreading misinformation and disinformation, hell, if they can’t even accurately depict who their supporters are and they can’t tell the difference between an advertiser and a supporter, how can you believe anything they publish?” Taylor added.
Taylor went on to criticize MLK50’s journalistic “tenets,” saying, “No one should believe anything they have to say.”
“They’re a propaganda machine for the left. Matter of fact, their editor called me because they took exception with me calling them a racist organization. And she asked me, she said, ‘Why do you think we’re racist?’ I said, it says right there on your webpage, at the very top it says, ‘Supporting all black people.’ A news organization ought to be objective and ought to tell the news without fear or favor of what the race or political persuasion is of anybody. They inserted themselves in the story, which is a violation of the number one tenet of journalism is to never insert yourself into the story and they did and I think they drew back a nub,” Taylor said.
Moving forward, Taylor said he still intends to file a Senate Joint Resolution immediately following the November election requiring the removal of Mulroy, which would be debated by state lawmakers in the Tennessee General Assembly at the beginning of the next legislative session in January.
Taylor said his effort to remove Mulroy is not an “abuse” of the Tennessee Constitution, instead, describing it as a “use” of the Constitution.
“The only officials that are spelled out in the Tennessee Constitution that the General Assembly has the authority to remove are judges and district attorneys. I think the reason they are specifically spelled out is those are the only two officials in the state that have eight year terms. I think the framers of our Constitution knew that giving people an eight year term, that there needed to be a way that if they failed to do their job that they could be removed from office, and they gave that authority to the General Assembly. So with a two thirds vote of both houses – which would be 22 votes in the Senate, 66 votes in the House – we can remove the district attorney,” Taylor explained.
“This is not an abuse of the constitution. It’s actually a use of the constitution,” Taylor added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “State Sen. Brent Taylor” by State Sen. Brent Taylor.
