The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has now branded hundreds of counties, cities, schools and U.S. military bases as potential catalysts to “unleash more turmoil and bloodshed” – because of their names.
The SPLC website says it has compiled a list of 1,503 place names, monuments and symbols it wants its supporters to demand be eradicated:
[...]
“We will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination,” SPLC says.
But those quoted statements don't appear in the SPLC document to which Bannister links -- they are in a separate document.
And in neither of those documents does the SPLC assert that confederate monuments should be "eradicated," as Bannister claims. The document to which Bannister failed to link has a form letter stating that monuments should be moved to "an appropriate place," adding: "Confederate symbols belong in museums and on private property. In museums, we can learn their full history."
Bannister also asserted that the SPLC listed "The top 10 most hateful states, ranked by SPLC by number of offenses." IN fact, in neither document does the SPLC call these states "hateful."
Bannister is engaging in dishonesty that borders fakery. Ironic, since right-wingers love to attackk the SPLC for falsely labeling right-wing anti-gay groups as "hate groups."
WND Falsely Claims Hillary Took No Blame For Election Loss in Memoir Topic: WorldNetDaily
Alicia Powe rehashes a right-wing Hillary-bashing meme in a Sept. 10 WorldNetDaily article:
The odds were stacked against Donald Trump to win the presidency in a 2016 race with an entitled Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state and former first lady, spent her entire adult life preparing to become the first female president, and she was the establishment candidate.
Not only were the mainstream media blatantly in favor of Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and then Donald Trump in the general election, the Democratic National Committee brazenly admitted that it rigged its primary to ensure Clinton, even with all her scandals, would be its nominee.
At one point, she was projected to have a 90 percent chance of becoming the next president.
And when she lost, someone – anyone – had to be blamed.
Anyone but Hillary Clinton, of course.
In her upcoming 500-page memoir, “What Happened,” Clinton reportedly lists all the outside forces responsible for her stunning defeat.
Given that Powe's article appeared two days before Clinton's book was officially released, she was merely speculating about the full extent of it contents -- speculation she got wrong.
People who actually read the book before writing about it found that "Clinton doesn’t spare any of the major players from blame — and that includes herself." Mistakes she admitted making include running a "traditional" campaign against Trump's "reality TV show," as well as not realizing "how quickly the ground was shifting under our feet”" in the national mood.
Heck, even the Hillary-haters at Fox News admitted that she was "taking some of the blame" for her election loss.
In other words, the premise of Powe's article is lazy, fake news. No correction has been issued as of this writing.
CNS Inadvertently Lets Liberty Counsel Demostrate SPLC's 'Hate Group' Designation Is Correct Topic: CNSNews.com
It likely wasn't CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman's intent, but he gave Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver enough rope to hang himself.
In an Aug. 31 article, Chapman played stenographer to Staver's rant against the Southern Poverty Law Center listing "Christian and conservative organizations" as hate groups "is not unlike how the Nazis treated the Jews." Needless to say -- and we can assume this because Chapman did not transcribe it -- Staver didn't mention the fact that these groups' unambiguously demonstated hatred toward gays is the reason the SPLC gave them the "hate group" designation.
Chapman then touted Staver's own brand of malicious hate:
Earlier, [radio host Jim] Schneider asked about white supremacy and how an estimated 266 black children are killed every day in America by abortion.
Staver said, “Well, talk about white supremacy! That’s exactly what [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger was all about. She wanted ultimately to create a super race. She was a social Darwinist, and she wanted to eliminate certain populations, including the black population. That’s why she put her then-contraception, later-abortion clinics into these minority neighborhoods to stop the reproduction of these minority communities, and including the African American community."
In fact, Sanger was not a "white supremacist" and did not seek to eliminate the "black population."
Sanger also ranted:
"One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: 'Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.' When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League."
In fact, a review of Stoddard's book in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger ran for several hears, was critical of it.
Staver also invoked the Ernst Rudin article in the Birth Control Review years after Sanger let the publication, as well as an out-of-context reference to Sanger's speech to a KKK auxiliary.
Staver is spreading malicious lies -- thus demonstrating why groups like his are labeled as hate groups by the SPLC. (And we haven't even gotten around to mentioning Liberty Counsel's suspected role in helping a woman it represented flee the country with her child in order to avoid having to share custody with her former lesbian partner.
As a side note, it's telling about the state of journalism at CNS that Chapman couldn't be bothered to do a fact-check on Staver, despite the numerous falsehoods we found in his rant.
Shocker: WND Attempts Actual Journalism, While CNS, MRC Did Stenography Topic: WorldNetDaily
Conservative publisher Regnery Publishing was seeking fawning right-wing media coverage of its attack on the New York Times book bestseller list, and that's what it mostly got from the ConWeb.
The Media Research Center was totally in stenography mode. A CNSNews.com article by Craig Bannister touted how Regnery insisted that the Times list "has become so discredited and tainted by bias that it will no longer be trusted or cited." At the MRC's NewsBusters, Corrine Weaver totally bought into Regnery's storyline, accusing the Times' list of "inherent corruption" and attacked the Times for not ranking one right-wing book at its "correct position," though she has no idea whatsoever what that "correct position" was.
Neither the CNS or MRC items bothered to seek out, let alone report, the Times' side of the story.
By contrast, WorldNetDaily -- though still completely biased -- actually hinted at the core of the issue Regnery has with the Times list. In a Sept. 4 article, Art Moore claimed that the Times "did not respond to WND's request for comment," but noted, unlike tthe MRC stenographers, that the Times has previously said that its list excludes bulk sales.
This has been a longtime issue, since bulk sales have long juiced sales of conservative books through book clubs and to think tanks and PACs as free or deeply discounted promotional items. There are even businesses that organize people to buy thousands of copies of a book for the sole purpose of getting that book on the bestseller list (something Ted Cruz allegedly got caught doing).
Moore went on to quote Regnery author (and general buffoon) Dinesh D'Souza as saying that "there needs to be a way of taking into account massive bulk sales, but, ultimately, 'a book sold is a book sold.'" Well, not quite; in 2007, five Regnery authors sued the publisher over allegedly shorchanging them on royalites because of bulk sales of their books to book clubs with the same ownership as Regnery.
It's a sad state of journalism at the MRC when the division tasked with performing said journalism is being outdone by WND on that front.
MRC Shocked To Discover TV Show About Porn Has A Lot of Sex In It Topic: Media Research Center
In a Sept. 10 post, the Media Research Center's Lindsay Kornick is shocked -- shocked! -- to that the new HBO show "The Deuce," about the porn industry in the 1970s, has a lot of sex in it:
The description of the newest HBO show, brought to us by Marxist creator David Simon, The Deuce reads, “The story of the legalization and ensuing rise of the porn industry in New York beginning in the 1970s.” If a plot like that doesn’t make your stomach churn, get your supply of eye-bleach ready for what’s sadly up to be the latest hit show on HBO’s hands - because this story, along with HBO itself, is all too ready to remind us that sex sells.
The September 10th pilot introduces us to New York City in 1971 and follows a variety of characters ranging from mob members to street pimps to sex workers to college students. I would tell you the plot, but this show seems far more interested in sexual imagery than original characters and storytelling that might mean something. The gratuitous sex I can almost forgive (okay, that’s a lie, I never will), but the sheer and mind-numbing boredom is the waterboarding icing on top of this torture cake. And there’s a lot to cover.
Over the course of this way-too-long pilot, we are treated to not one, not two, but FIVE graphic sex scenes. Forget everything you’ve known about the old X-rating, apparently everything goes now on television. Naked breasts or even an exposed penis is no longer a taboo but a feature. This show may try to lean on the “realistic” element of it being based on a true story, but that assumes that people want to get these scenes seared into their brains on a Sunday night.
Hang on, there’s more! One of those sex scenes just so happens to involve an underaged participant with "sex worker" Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal). For a sexually hungry boy’s birthday, his friends pool their funds together for some time in a motel where he fondles her bare breasts. We’re now throwing all forms of morality to the wind for, what theNew York Times reviewcalls, “Pure capitalism: desire quantified in $20 bills and in the quarters pumped into peep-show booths.” Sorry liberals, you don’t get to pawn off your failures to society onto capitalism this time. I’ve seen mud puddles less dirty than this show.
Kornick's evidence that Simon is a "Marxist creator" is a 2013 NewsBusters post on a speech by Simon in which he at no point calls himself a Marxist but says Marx accurately described the state of America now.
WND's Farah Lies About Margaret Sanger Topic: WorldNetDaily
Inveterateliar Joseph Farah spent his Sept. 8 WorldNetDaily column ranting that Margaret Sanger "had ties to the KKK and the Nazis and was a white supremacist." Shockingly, he provides what he calls evidence to back up his claims. Let's look at them, shall we?
She addressed the Ku Klux Klan, fans of Sanger because of her own racism and plans for reducing the population of blacks in America;
We'll concede that happened -- though it was actually to a meeting of the women's division of it, not the main KKK -- but speaking before a any group does not equal a "tie" to it. As we've pointed out, the KKK was something of a mainstream group, though still clandestine, at the time she spoke to. Sanger said in her autobiography that she would speak to any group that would have her.
Her eugenics plans inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1933 and the subsequent Nazi euthanasia laws;
While the 1933 law reportedly took its inspiration from American models, Sanger was far from the only eugenicist in the U.S. -- it was a popular belief in the 1920s.
In 1939, as Hitler was devising his “final solution,” Sanger proposed her infamous “Negro Project,” in which she wrote “the most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members”;
As we've documented, the context of that statement involved recruiting black leaders for the effort to allay suspicions blacks might have had about whites like Sanger being involved -- the complete opposite of what Farah claims.
Sanger was closely tied to Ernst Rudin, who served as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization. An April 1933 article by Rudin – entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” – for Sanger’s monthly magazine, The Birth Control Review, detailed the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene and advocated its replication in the United States. A subsequent article by Leon Whitney published the following June by Sanger, entitled “Selective Sterilization,” praises and defends the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust “race purification” program.
In fact, Sanger was never "closely tied" to Rudin. She had left the Birth Control Review a full four years earlier and no longer had any affiliation with the publication when Rudin's article was published.
Farah's efforts to tar Sanger as a "Nazi fan" -- a term he actually uses later in his column -- are ludicrous, given that the Nazis opposed contraception and burned her family-planning books. And there's no evidence Sanger was ever a virulent racist or that she coerced women into using birth control.
There's Plenty Wrong With The MRC's Latest So-Called Study Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has been getting some great right-wing press for its latest so-called study. For example, conservative media reporter Joe Concha gushed in an appearance on Fox News, "I get they're conservative, but no one challenges their data."
The MRC's new "study" by Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella arrived under the headline "The Liberal Media’s Summer of Pummeling Trump." And therein lies the MRC's first deception. The "study" does not examine the entire media, or even the entire "liberal media" -- it looks only at the evening newscasts on ABC, NBC and CBS. That's a very tiny sliver of the media, a half-hour on three channels. Throughout their report, Noyes and Ciandella repeatedly conflate this sliver with all of "TV."
Noyes and Ciandella then offered what they claimed was a "methodology":
Methodology: Our measure of spin was designed to isolate the networks’ own slant, not the back-and-forth of partisan politics. Thus, our analysts ignored soundbites which merely showcased the traditional party line (Republicans supporting Trump, Democrats criticizing him), and instead tallied evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story, such as statements from experts presented as non-partisan, voters, or opinionated statements from the networks’ own reporters.
Using these criteria, MRC analysts tallied 1,567 evaluative statements about the Trump administration in June, July and August, of which 1,422 (91%) were negative vs. a mere 145 (9%) which were positive. Since Trump took office on January 20, there have been 4,144 such evaluative statements, of which 3,712 (90%) were negative, vs. 432 (10%) which were positive.
First: "Spin" is not something that can be measured objectively -- it's an entirely subjective value. Similarly, "positive" and "negative" are subjective as well. Given the MRC's inherent bias against those very evening newscasts, it's predisposed to find negative evaluations, making its results even more biased and making that 91% number highly suspicious.
Second: The "evaluative statements" were only only positive or negative? There were no neutral evaluations? It's unlikely that all of the statements were so binary.
Third: Noyes and Ciandella make no evaluation of whether the Trump actions that were evaluated deserved the negative responses they claim to have documented, despite claiming that "All Presidents deserve critical news coverage from time to time." Instead, they assert without evidence that Trump is as "highly controversial" as President Obama was, but "Obama’s policies matched the liberal media’s preferences, while Trump’s agenda clearly clashes with the establishment media’s world view."
Fourth: Noyes and Ciandella don't provide a list of the "evaluative statements" they tallied, which makes this something of a black-box exercise. Perhaps they don't want people to know just how subjective their judgments are.
While Concha doesn't appear to think so, there's plenty to challenge about the MRC's data -- and it demonstrates that this study does not display scientific rigor and is too biased to be taken seriously as anything other than red meat for right-wing activists. You know, like most MRC "studies."
WND's Ignorant 'School Is Child Abuse' Smear Topic: WorldNetDaily
A pair of recent WorldNetDaily columns took on variations of an overused right-wing theme: that public schools are terrible to the point of "child abuse."
Anti-Kinsey obsessive Judith Reisman remains as obsessed as ever in an Aug. 31 column in which she, as near as we can tell, wants sex-education teachers arrested for distributing obscene material to children, claiming that such materials constitute "child sex abuse." Her evidence of this allegedly "obsecne" material is ... a 40-year-old pamphlet she does not prove was ever distributed in any classroom. She also bizarrely claims the sex-ed book "It's Perfectly Normal" has been "grooming child predators of every stripe."
Then, in a Sept. 4 column headlined "Sending kids to public schools is child abuse," Mychal Massie huffed that "The public school system has become a taxpayer-funded brothel where teachers have sexual relations with students and children are inculcated with deviant sexual depravity. It is our duty as Christians to provide avenues of rescue for children and families from the zeitgeist of sexual perversion extolled in public schools."
Massie then declared his preference for children to undergo forced indoctrination into Christianity:
I argued that as Christians, the summum bonum is to reach people for Christ and to manage well the resources God placed in our charge. I argued that we should advocate and then facilitate the coordination of resources to financially support private Christian schools. I contended that it was pointless to throw good money after bad in spending massive amounts of money in court battles regarding such issues as whether a grade-school child can give thanks for his food in the school cafeteria and to wage legal fights over whether children can wear a T-shirt to public school that says “Jesus Loves You.”
I argued that those sums of money could be used to bring children out of public schools and into a Christian education environment. I said that we could make it a nationwide effort and use it to evangelize. I spoke of how to implement the equitable funding of same and what it would mean for advancing the Kingdom of God on earth. As a coda to this point, I add that there were no paupers at this event. The attendees were in the top tax brackets. There was real money and real old money.
Massie doesn't explain how the forced indoctrination he advocates is any better than those public-school methods he despises.
Yes, The MRC Is Anti-Media Topic: Media Research Center
In an Aug. 29 post, the Media Research Center's Curtis Houck denounces the whole minor imbroglio over Melania Trump wearing stilettoes on her way to a presidential trip to visit victims of Hurricane Harvey. Houck insisted that this was "why people hate the media" and that the number of media outlets that reported the story "showed that many in the national and political media have no foresight for what actually matters." Then he added:
Liberal media defenders can claim that such criticism is delegitimizing the news media and that’s not what NewsBusters is dedicated to be doing. Rather, we’re simply bringing to light stories like these in which the media have done themselves a disservice to the public.
Wrong. The MRC's goal is exactly to delegitimize the news media -- or, more to the point, any media that doesn't mindlessly promote right-wing talking points. That's why there is a Fox News-shaped blind spot in its media coverage (plus, it doesn't want to alienate the main TV outlet for its talking heads).
If the MRC really cared about "stories like these in which the media have done themselves a disservice to the public," where was its outrage when the right-wing media went crazy because President Obama put dijon mustard on his hamburger? Or when he mentioned arugula? Nowhere that we could find.
And if the MRC wasn't trying to delegitimize the media, it wouldn't be such a slavish acolyte to Donald Trump's even more hateful anti-media rhetoric.
Yes, Curtis, the MRC's job is to delegitimize any media that fails to advance a right-wing agenda. Until it can find it within itself to hold all media to account, let's not pretend otherwise.
NEW ARTICLE: Joseph Farah, The Right-Wing Zelig Topic: WorldNetDaily
Did the WorldNetDaily editor really march with Martin Luther King, pal around with radicals as a youth and dream up the "Left Behind" books first? That's what he'll tell you. Is it true? Who knows? Read more >>
MRC Tries To Make 'MSNBC Conservative' A Thing Topic: Media Research Center
Back in 2012 or so, the Media Research Center triedtofloat the idea of the "MSNBC conservative" -- an attempt to bash conservatives (in this case, the target was Joe Scarborough) who failed to be conservative enough for the MRC that was really just another form of Heathering.
Now, it looks like the MRC is trying to make "MSNBC conservative" happen again.
Brad Wilmouth tries to define the term in the midst of tagging someone as one in an Aug. 1 post:
The caricature of an MSNBC conservative is a commentator with a right-leaning background who -- when appearing as a panel member on the liberal news network -- either agrees with the liberal guests or fails to rebut liberal analysis while offering little actual right-leaning analysis to the discussion. Washington Post columnist and regular MSNBC guest Jennifer Rubin may have gone beyond caricature on Monday's Hardball as she actually seemed to enjoy reporting that "social conservatives" are "dying off."
In an Aug. 22 post, the person getting the "MSNBC conservative" tag from Scott Whitlock is P.J. O'Rourke, for mocking President Trump -- as if Trump had ever exhibited conservative tendencies before the 2016 election. (Remember, MRC chief Brent Bozell declared that Trump didn't "walk with" conservatives like him until a little Mercer money apparently changed his mind and he turned the MRC into a total Trump tool.)
Wilmouth took another shot at Rubin in a Sept. 4 post, calling her not only an "MSNBC conservative" but also "allegedly right-leaning."
This attempt at nomenclature comes with no acknowledgement whatsoever of its inspiration: the "Fox News Democrat," who actually lives up to the description Wilmouth ascribes to people like Rubin, who merely holds the same views on Trump Bozell did until mid-2016.
WND's Hohmann Doesn't Want To Be Cured of His Hatred of Muslims Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 30 WorldNetDaily article by Leo Hohmann starts off by detailing how "A group of researchers from Germany and the United States claims to have found at least a partial cure for xenophobia, a much heralded accomplishment in the wake of a historic migrant crisis that has swept more than 1.7 million Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa into Europe’s cities and led to fissures in social cohesion that some predict have sewn the seeds of civil war."
But seeing as how we're talking about an inveterate Muslim-hater here, Hohmann doesn't take long before he calls on his fellow Muslim-hating friends to reject in the nastiest possible terms this opportunity to be cured of their disease, portraying this instead as Nazi-esque brainwashing (because, you know, Germans):
The study was not well received among conservatives in the United States, whether inside or outside the medical community.
Dr. Andrew Bostom said the study amounted to junk science and “should never have received IRB approval.”
An institutional review board (IRB), also known as an independent ethics committee, ethical review board or research ethics board, is a type of committee used in research that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research.
“Leave it to the Germans, the first thing that came to mind when I read this news was the medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele and his ‘work’ at concentration camps like Auschwitz to create a ‘better’ society comprised of people he deemed to be quality people,” said Ann Corcoran, who blogs at Refugee Resettlement Watch and is critical of United Nations-backed resettlements in U.S. cities.
“It is creepy,” she said. “Will the Germans demand their citizens get their daily dose of oxytocin?”
James Simpson, a journalist who has also written extensively about the dark side of refugee resettlement, was taken aback by the study.
“This reveals a deeply entrenched official agenda to push refugee resettlement at all costs and thoroughly discredit any and all opposition to it,” Simpson told WND. “It reinforces my belief that official Germany is carrying out the Russian plan to take over Western Europe using the refugee crisis to create chaos. Chancellor Angela Merkel is the Russians’ agent-in-place – a member of the East German Communist Party before coming to the West who inserted herself into West German politics by pretending to be a pro-West moderate leader.”
Simpson reminded WND of the old Soviet KGB methods of controlling the Russian population. Under the Communist Party, “refusniks” who failed to submit to the party’s dictates were considered one of two types of people – they were either jailed as prisoners of conscience or institutionalized as mental patients.
Hohmann even called in his boss, WND managing editor David Kupelian, to rant about how "“The left politicized the science of psychiatry, and the top levels of the social sciences are all dominated by the far left, whether it be the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, or whatever; they are all dominated by the left, and that’s why they came out and de-pathologized gender identity disorder in 2013. They did it despite there being a 41 percent suicide rate, cutting off healthy body parts, etc.”
Hohmann talked to no actual expert in psychiatry for his highly biased and hostile article.
Did Mercer Money Make MRC Bury Bannon's Catholic-Bashing? Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Reserarch Center is usually quick to pounce on any real or perceived slight of Catholics made in the media. After all, the MRC's leaders, Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, are Catholic, and Bozell is a member of the advisory board of Bill Donohue's right-wing Catholic League.
But when that anti-Catholic slight comes from a trusted adviser to a Republican president, the MRC decided to look the other way.
In an excerpt from a "60 Minutes" interview released before its airing, recently departed Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon -- who claims to be a Catholic -- said that the Catholic Church has been "terrible" on the subject of undocumented immigrants, adding: "You know why? Because unable to really to come to grips with the problems in the church, they need illegal aliens, they need illegal aliens to fill the churches. That's -- it's obvious on the face of it. ... They have an economic interest. They have an economic interest in unlimited immigration, unlimited illegal immigration."
Now, that's the kind of anti-Catholic insult that normally gets people like Bozell and Graham in a froth. But the MRC did everything it could to distract from it.
In a Sept. 7 post, Scott Whitlock didn't criticize Bannon's Catholic-bashing -- the remark was noted only in the transcript and written around in the body of the item, in which Whitlock stated only that "Bannon shot back that the 'Catholic Church has been terrible about this' issue" -- but instead attacked Bannon's interviewer, Charlie Rose, for questioning if Bannon was being a "good Catholic" since even influential Cardinal Dolan opposes the Trump administration's stance in trying to end DACA. Whitlock huffed: "Apparently, the CBS position is that a 'good Catholic' supports the liberal agenda and conservative Catholic positions are to be ignored or dismissed." He didn't mention that it could be argued that CBS and Cardinal Dolan are on the same side.
A Sept. 8 post by Kristine Marsh bashed late-night comedians for mocking Bannon, but she would concede only that "Bannon admitted he disagreed with the Catholic Church’s stance on DACA" and not offer a direct, full quote of Bannon's remarks. Rather, she actually complained that Stephen Colbert "bashed Bannon for implying the church had ulterior motives for wanting to help 'strangers who desperately need help'" -- the same thing the MRC would be bashing Bannon for if he wasn't a key Trump adviser.
A Sept. 11 post by Nicholas Fondacaro complains that Rose "lectured and berated Bannon about America and his worldview." Fondacaro is careful to edit out Bannon's Catholic-bashing from the transcript, replacing it with ellipses:
ROSE: Can I remind you, a good Catholic, that Cardinal Dolan is opposed to what's happened with DACA. Cardinal Dolan!
BANNON: The Catholic Church has been terrible about this.
ROSE: OK.
BANNON: The bishops have been terrible about this.
(…)
ROSE: Boy, that's a tough thing to say about your church.
(…)
ROSE: You will not be attacking Donald Trump?
Meanwhile, over at the MRC's "news" division CNSNews.com, no stories were published about Bannon's remarks. CNS did, however find the time and space to highlight twoother alleged Catholic slights, plus a column by David Limbaugh attacking one of those slights.
The Catholic League's Donohue even wrote an article critical of Bannon -- but neither the MRC nor CNS published it despite both having no problem givingspace to Donohue in the past.
Why did the MRC give Bannon a pass? One possible, if not likely, explanation: Mercer money. We've already noted how Mercer family interests are the single largest donor to the MRC; likewise, Bannon is heavily tied to the Mercer empire, which began when Bannon worked for the Mercer-owned data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica and continues through Mercer's part-ownership of the Bannon-headed Breitbart.com.
As with their stance on Donald Trump, Bozell and the MRC have proven they're not afraid to flip-flop and put money ahead of previously declared principles.
WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian devoted an entire Aug. 27 column to ranting about how liberals are literally insane and delusional because they don't believe the same things he does. We're not making that up; the headline on the column is "Why so many leftists are genuinely delusional."
The column begins with a definition: "Delusion: a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact."
So, let's talk about delusions -- specifically the ones Kupelian loves to perpetuate as a top official of WND.
WND's eight-year war on President Obama (the first four we summarized here) was always an exercise in delusion -- so delusional, in fact, that Kupelian, his boss Joseph Farah, and writers like Jerome Corsi destroyed what little credibility WND had -- so much so that Farah tried to rebrand his far-right-fringe WND as "the largest Christian website in the world" (it's not). So utterly beclowned was WND that Farah was reduced to begging for money from readers in mid-2016 to keep his operation afloat.
It took mass delusion on the part of Kupelian and Co. to continue to run their website into the ground in the face of that cratering credibility. It took even more delusion for them to double down on the strategy.
For some reason, WND ramped up the amount of fakenews on its website, even as it inveighed against the "fake news" of others.It also decided that spewing hatred of Muslims was a sound business strategy. Its fealty for Donald Trump has been embarrassing, to the point that it portrays him as being divinely guided (as compared to maliciously comparing Obama to Nazis and even the Antichrist).
Meanwhile, Kupelian is living his own personal delusion. Obama sent him into paroxysms of delusion, and he happily jettisoned his self-proclaimed sense of Christian morality to back a thrice-married adulterer for president.
Kupelian writes at one point in his column:
Hate – rage, resentment, extreme bitterness – quite literally opens up your mind to delusion and whatever dark spirit serves up that delusion. There’s a reason the word “mad” means both angry and insane. If you’re very angry, your mind will attract thoughts and feelings from an exceedingly dark realm.
Hate, all by itself, is a form of madness.
Kupelian has just described the motivation of WND's editorial agenda, as well as his personal mindset, during the Obama years. He, of course, remains so caught up in those delusions -- he actually asserts that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be "sheer horror" -- that he is unable to recognize this.
MRC Rushes to Limbaugh's Defense (Again) Topic: Media Research Center
Is there anything Rush Limbaugh can do that the Media Research Center won't defend? It seems not.
The headline of a Sept. 7 MRC item by Tim Graham declares: "Al Roker Uncorks False Charge That Rush Limbaugh Said Irma Was 'Fake,' Not 'Dangerous'." Actually, it's Graham who's making the false charge: The Roker tweets Graham includes in his post makes it clear that he was saying that Limbaugh was downplaying warnings about Hurricane Irma, not that the entire hurricane was "fake." Nevertheless, Graham goes on to rant:
Neither of these tweets stand up to an actual reading of the Tuesday Limbaugh transcript. Read it. Nowhere did Limbaugh say Hurricane Irma was "fake" or "not a dangerous storm." He never told anyone to "ignore" the forecasts. No one should expect the liberals at PolitiFact/PunditFact to award Roker with a big "FALSE" on the "Truth-o-Meter." But he deserves one.
Actually, as the Washington Post's Callum Borchers summarizes:
Limbaugh, a fellow Trump booster, didn't say the deep state causesstorms, but he did say “you have people in all of these government areas who believe man is causing climate change, and they’re hellbent on proving it, they’re hellbent on demonstrating it, they’re hellbent on persuading people of it.”
Limbaugh didn't say the deep state directsstorms toward major cities, but he did say “hurricanes are always forecast to hit major population centers because, after all, major population centers is where the major damage will take place and where we can demonstrate that these things are getting bigger and they’re getting more frequent and they’re getting worse — all because of climate change.
Thus we have two of the president's biggest promoters in the media [Limbaugh and Alex Jones] telling people that news about a storm — or perhaps even the storm itself — is fake. There could be serious consequences to Trump's ceaseless effort to lower trust in institutions such as the government and the press — consequences that the president and his team might not have fully considered.
But tell that to Graham, who was too far into full Limbaugh defense mode -- with an added healthy dose of mindless media-bashing -- to be concerned by the facts:
As for the "profit" part, Limbaugh also drew media ire for suggesting the local media and local advertisers profit from driving panic about an incoming storm: "the TV stations begin reporting this and the panic begins to increase. And then people end up going to various stores to stock up on water and whatever they might need for home repairs and batteries and all this that they’re advised to get, and a vicious circle is created. You have these various retail outlets who spend a lot of advertising dollars with the local media."
Limbaugh told listeners that you can't find any bottled water in his Palm Beach area, days before an accurate storm track. He talked about his experience of living in Florida since 1997 and he wasn't just talking about Irma, or Harvey, but about both the storm forecasts that are real, and those that turned out to be overhyped, because the hurricane track moved or the storm weakened.
But the media always take offense when someone says they profit from tragedy. Broadcasting before a hurricane or a snowstorm is a public service....and it naturally causes a big ratings increase. It naturally also causes a run on the stores for supplies. All of that is true. It's just....insensitive to suggest anyone consciously benefits from tragedy -- or the fear of tragedy. As the old Don Henley song "Dirty Laundry" implied, the media thrive daily on the worst news...because it's much more interesting than planes landing safely on time.
The Left certainly accused the major media of putting profit ahead of stopping the election of President Trump. Was that a bizarre conspiracy theory, that the media's dramatic and heavy coverage of Trump meant profit came ahead of public service?
Of course, Graham and the MRC repeatedly complained that the media wasn't publishing enough bad news about Democrats, real or fake. (Graham and the MRC never did apologize or correct the record after enthusiastically promoting Fox News' fake-news story before the election taht Hillary Clinton's indictment was imminent.)
Meanwhile, Limbaugh didn't have the courage of his own words to ride out the hurricane whose threat he downplayed; he evacuated from Florida before Irma hit.
CNSNews.com blogger Craig Bannister is a terrible media analyst and desperate Trump spinmeister. Now he's peddlling badly researched fake-ish news. He wrote in an Aug. 31 post:
Alicia Powe rehashes a right-wing Hillary-bashing meme in a Sept. 10 WorldNetDaily 
It likely wasn't CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman's intent, but he gave Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver enough rope to hang himself.
Conservative publisher Regnery Publishing was seeking fawning right-wing media coverage of its attack on the New York Times book bestseller list, and that's what it mostly got from the ConWeb.
In a Sept. 10 
The Media Research Center has been getting some great right-wing press for its latest so-called study. For example, conservative media reporter Joe Concha 
A pair of recent WorldNetDaily columns took on variations of an overused right-wing theme: that public schools are terrible to the point of "child abuse."
In an Aug. 29 
Back in 2012 or so, the Media Research Center 
An Aug. 30 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Reserarch Center is usually quick to pounce on any real or perceived slight of Catholics made in the media. After all, the MRC's leaders, Brent Bozell and Tim Graham, 
WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian devoted an entire Aug. 27 
Is there anything Rush Limbaugh can do that the Media Research Center won't defend? It seems not.
