Reacting on Friday to the Comey hearing from Thursday, the Media Research Center’s Tim Graham and FBN’s After the Bell co-host Melissa Francis lambasted both The New York Times for a dubious story about Trump associates speaking to Russian intelligence and Jim Comey for his multi-layered media operation leaking information to The Times.

“No longer just reporting the news. The mainstream media becoming part of the story during James Comey's hearing, the former FBI director calling some reports nonsense and denouncing a New York Times story from earlier this year,” Francis explained in the segment’s intro.

Speaking in terms of the behavior by both Comey and the liberal paper, Graham minced no words:

[B]oth sides look a little silly, which is they all have an objective here. Comey had an objective, which was to ruin Trump. New York Times has an objective, which is to ruin Trump. So they figure out how to do it, but yeah, you get to the point now where they end up saying, well, somebody doesn't know what the other guy is saying.

Graham noted that The Times exerted little effort to cover their rears on Friday following Comey’s denouncement of a story about claims Trump officials communicated with Russian intelligence, instead “wandering around blindly for a whole column, saying we don't know what he’s talking about.”

“What your readers want, what the American public deserves is for you to actually get the story right, not just to say the objective of our story is ruin Trump and accuracy comes down the list five or six,” Graham added.

When asked by Francis why Comey couldn’t give his notes about his Trump meetings to The Times instead of have a friend do it, Graham responded:

This is the way that the senior officials of the U.S. government, current and former wage war and this is — and New York Times and Washington Post and CNN, every other anti-Trump media outlet is perfectly willing to accept all these conditions all these games, all this I'm going to send it through my law professor buddy — you know, gamesmanship. Nobody has to be honest. Nobody has to be transparent because politics is the only objective!

Francis also pointed out that this problem shouldn’t be “a left or right thing” because of its seriousness when it comes to journalism’s credibility, Graham noted that it’s important and “what we're trying to do at NewsBusters.”

“This is what a lot of people in conservative media are doing in the era of Trump I saying they're shameless. They don't have any standards of behavior and they should be judged by whether their stories are accurate,” Graham concluded.

Here’s the transcript of Graham’s appearance on FBN’s After the Bell from June 9: