CNS Article on Cain Withdrawal Doesn't Mention Scandals Topic: CNSNews.com
Last week, the Media Research Center's Tim Graham attacked the idea that the right-wing media should do any serious investigation of conservative candidate, claiming they should only be cheerleaders. The MRC's "news" division provides an example of Graham's theory of journalism in action.
A Dec. 3 CNSNews.com article, credited only to "CNSNews.com Staff," reported on how Hermain Cain "announced that he is 'suspending' his presidential campaign," repeating Cain's quote that "As false accusations continue, they have sidetracked my ability to present solutions to the American people."
What is completely, and curiously, missing from the article: Any mention of what those supposedly "false accusations" are, or any mention at all of the affair and sexual harassment allegations against Cain.
So the MRC is apparently so committed to Graham's biased vision that it will distort reality and ignore established facts to report the "news."
Newsmax's Trump-Fluffing Pays Off With Joint Debate Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax -- led by the sycoiphantic Ronald Kessler -- spent much of the early part of this year aggressively promoting the presidential ambitions of Donald Trump, which ultimately imploded amid Trump's rampant birtherism. Newsmax CEO proudly proclaimed that Trump "realizes the great potential of Newsmax and has been using it very adroitly. We're well aware he's using it, happy he's using it."
That sycophancy has paid off with Trump teaming with Newsmax to host a Republican presidential debate Dec. 27.
Newsmax's "news" article on the debate reads like a press release,touting how Newsmax is "the largest online conservative news outlet in the nation" and propping up the little-watched, rerun-laden TV network Ion Television. No mention is made of Trump's birtherism, nor of Newsmax's rampant boosterism of Trump. Newsmax has since trumpeted that Newt Gingrich will appear at the debate.
Newsmax is ramping up its self-promotion in the run-up to the debate. It has already created an email list where people can "get special notices about this debate, be invited to online VIP events before and after the Debate and have an opportunity to participate online in the event itself!"
Is it surprising that these two publicity-hungry entities are getting together to create such a media event? Nope, not at all.
It's the beginning of a new month, so you know what that means: A new, context-free CNSNews.com article on how many U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan.
The curiously unbylined article (most previous body-count articles have been written by Edwin Mora) again plays up that "U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan have more than tripled under the current administration," ignoring the fact that many more U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq under President Bush. For once, though, it doesn't lead with that, highlighting instead on how "71 percent of U.S. military combat deaths in that country have taken place in provinces bordering Pakistan."
WorldNetDaily's support for Herman Cain started out enthusiastic, but when allegations of sexual harassment broke, WND editor Joseph Farah went to radio silence (mostly), while his columnist apparatchiks tried to slime his accusers.
But a woman stepping forward to claim a 13-year affair with Cain seems to have finally marked the end of WND's Cain-gasm.
WND's attempting to unload Cain's book while it's still worth something is just the beginning. WND columnist Jane Chastain -- who just two weeks earlier was making sure people knew that one of Cain's sexual harassment accusers "twice filed for bankruptcy, had a child out of wedlock, can't hold a job for very long, was fired from the National Restaurant Association, hasn't been employed for two years and lives with an unemployed boyfriend was desperate for money" -- threw in the towel in her Nov. 30 column:
As a presidential candidate, Herman Cain is done. He is toast!
In the past, I and many others gave him the benefit of doubt. The sexual harassment claims against him that were settled by the National Restaurant Association appeared frivolous at best. Sharon Bialek's assertion was a "he said, she said" and appeared to be financially and politically motivated. However, Ginger White's allegation that she carried on a 13-year affair with Cain, backed up with records of telephone and text messages, is troubling. At best, it is a case of poor judgment on his part, and there is no wiggle room in that.
And Farah finally weighed in on the burgeoning scandal on his own website for the first time in his Dec. 2 column:
Herman Cain, a fresh face showed promise and raised the hopes of tea-party activists around the country with a strong popular showing. But, whether he knows it or not, his moral character and honesty has been questioned one too many times by one too many women for him to continue a serious bid for the presidency.
Farah then begs readers to "God for a little miracle this year" in the form of a "Michele Miracle." Why has Farah thrown his support to Michele Bachmann:
She's the real deal, folks. She's 100 percent. She's gaffe-proof. She's smarter than Newt, but doesn't brag about it half as much. She's honest. She's sincere. And she really believes in what she says.
CNS' Starr Shills Again for Oil Industry Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's resident oil industry shill, Penny Starr, comes through again with a Dec. 1 article uncritically repeating Republican claims that the Obama administration's delay of approval for the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline was "putting politics above job creation" and that the pipeline "will create 20,000 jobs."
Starr failed to mention that independent assessments of the pipeline show that it will create far fewer jobs than supporters claim.
Starr also claimed that "the pipeline could reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil by bringing as much as 700,000 barrels of oil a day into the country from Canada." Apparently, Canada is not a foreign country.
As we've detailed, CNS' parent organization, the Media Research Center, has received a significant amount of funding from oil and gas interests.
Media Matters details an ad sent by a gun and ammo seller on WorldNetDaily's mailing list which portrays President Obama as just like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin (well, actually, Forrest Whitaker playing Idi Amin) in wanting to impose gun control.
Sheppard Likens EPA Chief to Hitler, Khomeini Topic: NewsBusters
In a June 7 NewsBusters post, Sheppard got all bent out of shape when CNN's Piers Morgan asked if the tea party was a "similar mob to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s in the modern democratic era." But Sheppard has no problemdoing the exact same thing when it suits his right-wing agenda.
In a fawning interview of fellow global warming denier Sen. James Inhofe ("If Margaritas were the official drink in Cancun, what would you and I be drinking if we were in Durban right now?"), as transcribed in a Nov. 30 NewsBusters post, Sheppard asked him whether Politico naming EPA chief Lisa Jackson as "Energy Policy Maker of the Year"was "kind of like Time picking Hitler or Khomeini as Man of the Year - whoever had the most impact whether for good or ill?"
Only Sheppard, it seems, is allowed to go Godwin. Do as he says, not as he does -- after all, he contradicts himself on a depressingly regular basis.
Later in the interview, Sheppard asserted that Jackson is "trying to set policy without oversight by the legislature" based on the "anthropogenic global warming myth." In fact, as Media Matters points out, the EPA is required to regulate greenhouse gases under the bipartisan Clean Air Act.
We thought Sheppard would run out of ways to embarrass himself in public, but he keeps proving us wrong.
Newsmax's Kessler Likens Obama to Soviet Leader Topic: Newsmax
We've detailed how Newsmax decried how President Obama will deploy "a $750 million wrecking ball to demolish the Republican opponent," even as Newsmax will deploy its own multimillion-dollar, Scaife-funded wrecking ball to demolish Obama.
Another swing of that wrecking ball came in Ronald Kessler's Nov. 28 column likening Obama to leaders in Soviet Russia:
“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you,” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev declared when addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow in 1956.
This was an assertion of the Marxist contention that capitalism as a system would collapse and be replaced by socialism. By this philosophy, wealthy people exploit the working class, and the capitalist system must be replaced by a socialist government that would redistribute the wealth.
If that philosophy sounds familiar, it’s the approach taken by President Barack Obama and the Occupy Wall Street movement he has embraced. At every turn, Obama demonizes those who have achieved financial success, and he has made hatred of the wealthy the key to his re-election campaign.
[...]
Obama rejects this underlying premise of the capitalist system that is a key to this country’s success. At the same time, he disses Americans for being “a little bit lazy” over pursuing foreign investment and for having “lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.”
His comment about “bitter” small-town voters who “cling” to their faith, along with their guns, and their “antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” suggests just how much disdain he has for a large segment of Americans.
[...]
Khrushchev was proven wrong when he said the Soviet Union will bury America. Obama will be proven wrong about this country and what it stands for when he is defeated in 2012.
For good measure, Kessler flogs the dead horse of Jeremiah Wright yet again:
Like his self-described mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama appears to despise America. On the Sunday following 9/11, Wright characterized the terrorist attacks as a consequence of violent American policies. Wright said America created the AIDS virus to kill off blacks.
“We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty,” Wright has said. “God d— America!”
Ninety-nine percent of Americans would walk out if they heard a sermon like that. Instead, Obama listened to such hate speech for 20 years and said he considered Wright a sounding board who was like an uncle to him.
Kessler will be rewriting versions of this anti-Obama tirade again and again until the election.
MRC's Graham Attacks NPR for Reporting News Topic: Media Research Center
We've detailed how the Media Research Center's Tim Graham has been one of the leading right-wing voice in trying to bury the phone-hacking scandal at British newspapers owned by News Corp. Even now -- with the reprehensible behavior of British journalists in the employ of Rupert Murdoch copious detailed and beyond doubt, Graham still wants to bury it.
Graham issued a Nov. 29 tweet aimed at NPR media corespondent David Folkenflik, who has apparently been committing the offense of reporting on the scandal:
Graham seems to have forgotten that Soros is an American citizen.
Folkenflik responded by setting Graham straight on basic news principles:
Given that Graham likes his attacks on Democratic presidents laundered through notoriously unreliable British newspapers, bashing Folkenflik for reporting on British newspapers is a strange attack for him to make.
NEW ARTICLE: WorldNetDaily vs. Gardasil Topic: WorldNetDaily
WND finds another vaccine to fearmonger about, this time one that protects against cervical cancer. But to do so, it must rely on fringe medical groups and a man once described as "Austria’s most notorious abortionist." Read more >>
Oil-Funded MRC Defends Oil Industry Again Topic: Media Research Center
We've detailed how funding from the oil and gas industry appears to be fueling favorable coverage of the industry at the Media Research Center.
That fossil-fueled bias pops up once again in a Nov. 29 MRC Business & Media Institute article by Iris Somberg, in which she complains that the villain in the new Muppets movie is an oilman:
Muppet fans around the world were excited to see their childhood friends reunite; only to find out it was to save their studio from a rich oil executive. Liberal Hollywood loves an evil oil company - better yet, make it a successful business man that runs an oil company. The movie industry has repeatedly bashed businessmen and gone after gas and oil.
Tex Richman, a wealthy man that plans to demolish the Muppet studio after the National Geological Survey finds oil directly beneath it, has his plans foiled by three Muppet fans. They "discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath the Muppets' former stomping grounds," as described by "The Muppets" website.
Muppet fans around the world were excited to see their childhood friends reunite; only to find out it was to save their studio from a rich oil executive. Liberal Hollywood loves an evil oil company - better yet, make it a successful business man that runs an oil company. The movie industry has repeatedly bashed businessmen and gone after gas and oil.
Throughout the movie, Richman cackles maniacally and shows just how heartless he really is by denying Kermit's personal plea to give back the studio. He even tells the Muppets its "time to give up your dream," which is one of the worst things anyone can say to a Muppet (or a Hollywood liberal).
Yes, it's a Muppet movie - farcical and silly. But how sadly predictable that the villain is the perennial bogeyman of liberal environmentalists, and how sadly telling that the writers politicized a children's movie. Again.
Somberg doesn't mention her employer's not-insignificant funding from oil interests.
WND's Klein Baselessly Implicates Obama Nominee In Medicare Fraud, Ignores GOP Gov's Role Topic: WorldNetDaily
Aaron Klein keeps up his long series of dubious hit pieces on the Obama administration in a Nov. 29 article, in which he attacks Marilyn Tavenner, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for her longtime employment at the hospital conglomerate HCA:
Tavenner is a 31-year veteran of HCA. She began with the company in 1981 as a nursing supervisor at Johnston-Willis Hospital in Richmond, Va. After serving in a number of supervisory positions, she became CEO of the hospital in 1993.
In 1996, Tavenner became president of HCA's Richmond Division and in 2001 was appointed the company's Central Atlantic Division president.
In 2004, Tavenner was promoted to group president for HCA's Outpatient Services.
In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies. The company reportedly admitted to overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable; striking illegal deals with home care agencies; and filing false data about the use of hospital space.
HCA also reportedly admitted to defrauding Medicare by billing the agency and other health programs using exaggerated diagnoses and by filing false cost reports.
HCA agreed in 2002 to pay the U.S. government $631 million, plus interest, and pay $17.5 million to state Medicaid agencies, in addition to $250 million paid up to that point to resolve outstanding Medicare expense claims.
First, Klein offers no evidence whatsoever that Tavenner was ever implicated in any of those HCA scandals.
Second, Klein makes no mention of who was the CEO of HCA at the time those settlements over Medicare fraud were reached -- Rick Scott, currently the Republican governor of Florida.
A search of the WND database reveals that WND has never reported on Scott's links to Medicare fraud. But severalarticles have highlighted Scott's opposition to health care reform.
Noel Sheppard Doesn't Know What Crowdsourcing Is (And Neither Does Brent Bozell) Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard uses a Nov. 28 NewsBusters post to howl that Washington Post is "looking for dirt on the current Republican presidential frontrunner," New Gingrich. How? By tweeting that he is seeking "outlandish/incorrect predictions and quotes from Newt Gingrich's past."
Um, Noel? That's called crowdsourcing. And checking the veracity of statements Gingrich has made in the past isn't "dirt" -- it's fact-checking.
Sheppard went on to howl, "What would one expect from a newspaper that only five months ago called for readers to sift through former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's email messages?" That's crowdsourcing too, Noel. If you had a large cache of documents you wanted to sort through quickly -- like the 24,000 Palin emails -- you would do the same thing.
But because the Media Research Center is so paranoid and unaware of legitimate newsgathering methods, Sheppard's stupid meme was picked up by his boss, Brent Bozell, who went on Fox News to rant about it and demand that Blake be fired:
This is what we've been saying for a year. The Obama team can't run on its message. The only thing they can run on is character assassination. Fine, that's politics. That's something that the Obama team might do. But for the media to be complicity in this, for the media to be participatory. And now you've got this person just putting it out on the Internet in open, help me crucify Newt Gingrich, we want him next. You feel like they got fangs or something and blood coming down the sides of their mouth.
If Bozell is really serious about the media not getting involved in politics, he should tell the person who runs his own "news" organization, Terry Jeffrey of CNSNews.com, to stick to reporting the news and stop his character assassination of President Obama and his wife.
WND's Massie Attacks Colin Powell Topic: WorldNetDaily
Mychal Massie's Nov. 28 WorldNetDaily column is dedicated to bashing Colin Powell for alleging going from "a conservative who saw the world as true conservatives see it" to an "Obama supporter and apologist." Massie ranted about one Powell interview:
Powell's praise for Obama's mythical economic recovery also failed to mention that, instead of focusing on jobs, he was focused on destabilizing the Middle East and squandering money on green technology companies that went bankrupt literally weeks after being given billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. He also failed to mention that Obama's was a manic pursuant to seize control of one-sixth of the economy, when the federal government has been unable to run the U.S. Postal Service competently and has mishandled Social Security to the brink of insolvency.
And even more deplorable, his reference to Obama not being "Superman" was code-speak to blacks who could later be told that told Obama hadn't been given enough time.
Massie then attacks Powell for not being as reactionary and close-minded as he is:
Where would Powell be today, and what are the chances that the black family in the White House today would, at best, be there as servants if Lincoln had decided to compromise and let the South and New Jersey have slaves? What would America be today if our Founding Fathers had worked a compromise on taxes and minerals with King George? Obama claims to be a Christian – where would Christianity and God's plan of salvation be if Jesus had decided to compromise on sin and the cross? What if Churchill had compromised with Hitler, telling him he could kill all the Jews he wanted if he didn't advance against England? What if Everett Dirksen had compromised on the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
In every instance above, the groups/persons leading the charge were called extreme right-wing and accused of being unwilling to compromise, but they held their ground and we are better off for it. Compromise has brought us nothing but a downward spiral of society. Compromise has brought us the homosexual agenda and abortion on demand. Compromise has brought to the very brink of destruction of our nation.
Maybe instead of fomenting racial and societal discord, Powell would be better served by remembering there is a reason the military has been inflexible in its training regimens. It's because the military understands that compromise is the surest way to disorder and defeat.
Powell worked his way through the military to become a general, secretary of state, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Massie writes a hate-filled column for a fringe website. Whose opinion is more trustworthy?
CNS Highlights One Paper's End To 'Ugly' Anonymous Comments -- But Not At CNS Topic: CNSNews.com
A Nov. 28 CNSNews.com blog post by CNS senior editor Susan Jones notes how one newspaper is requiring that comments be made through Facebook, thus minimizing anonymous comments, which the newspaper states has "encouraged a few readers to engage in some pretty ugly behavior."
Jones curiously didn't mention CNS' own comments policy, which allows for anonymous commenters and, needless to say, vile comments.
For example, here are some representative comments from readers of a Nov. 28 CNS article on the retirement of Rep. Barney Frank, the vast majority from anonymous commenters:
Damn...With Ted Kennedy dead and Barney retiring to write his pornographic memoirs...It seems to have left Mass-a-two-shits in a lurch...Oh what a dilemma?
While it is good to say goodbye to this pimp, make no mistake. The state that has sentenced the nation to the likes of John Kerry and Splash Kennedy for all these years will have an ample supply of moonbats taking aim at that seat.
Focus on fighting his AIDS infection, you mean.
Writing what? Homo porn? Bad checks?
Of all the well educated, urbane, Ivy League graduates in Massachusetts it is so hard to believe that this crude, slobbering homo is the best they have to fill a congressional seat.
I'm glad the queer is retiring. He should be in prison, not writing books.
Barney's Book Title "Barney's Frank in Boys Town".
Limp wrist excuses if you ask me. Barney Fagggggggie would never win an election given the redistricting included a conservative area. In any event Mr. Frank, when your signing your new claim to fame academia books and blabbing about how great you are, please pass out raincoats.
I think barney boy is a bottom bunk guy!
Apparently, CNS has no problem with such anonymous slurs residing on its website -- which makes it curious that it would highlight how another website has banned them.
