MRC, CNS Overstate ACA Subsidies As 'Illegal' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Rich Noyes writes in an Oct. 17 post:
On Friday and over the weekend, ABC, CBS and NBC reacted with their typical anti-Trump fervor to the President’s decision to end federal subsidies of insurance companies through ObamaCare, but only a meager portion of broadcast news coverage — barely three percent — tipped viewers off to the fact those payments were unconstitutional in the first place.
[...]
From Friday morning, October 13, through Sunday evening, October 15, the ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news shows aired a total of 38 minutes, 8 seconds of coverage of the Trump administration’s decision to end the illegal subsidy payments begun under the Obama administration. Only 71 seconds of that airtime — none of it on NBC! — was spent on the important point that these payments were being made without Congressional authorization, and thus unconstitutional, according to a May 2016 federal court decision.
The highly-regarded SCOTUSblog reported at the time on the “potentially crippling constitutional blow” delivered by federal Judge Rosemay Collyer. “Paying out reimbursement,” she wrote, “without an appropriation [from Congress] violates the Constitution. Congress authorized reduced cost-sharing but did not appropriate monies for it, in the fiscal year 2014 budget or since. Congress is the only source for such an appropriation, and no public money can be spent without one.”
But a single lower-court judge declaring something unconstitutional does not make it so -- the Trump administration put on hold an appeal of the ruling, meaning that its legal status continues in limbo. Indeed, the MRC has attacked lower court judges for making rulings that run counter to its right-wing agenda. In March, for instance, NewsBusters blogger Tom Blumer approvingly quoted lawyer Alan Dershowitz criticizing "district court interference in Presidential immigration policy." The judge who ruled against the subsidy payments was a U.S. district court judge.
MRC "news" division CNSNews.com joined its parent in overstating the facts. An Oct. 13 article by Susan Jones carried the headline "Trump Further Dismantles Obamacare Overnight, Ending Illegal Cost-Sharing Payments," and she later refers to "the illegal CSR payments" without even bothering to back up the claim and uncritically quotes others calling the payments "illegal" and "unlawful."
This is misleading reporting and commentary from CNS and the MRC -- the kind of sloppiness it would call out if a "liberal media" outlet had done it.
WND Tries to Deflect From Roy Moore's Questionable Dealings Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily loves Roy Moore -- former Alabama judge now running for a Senate seat -- so much, it published his autobiography in 2005, re-releasing it in paperback in 2009. So it has a vested interest in countering reporting about Moore that he (and WND) don't like.
Which is pretty much the reason for existence of an Oct. 20 WND article by Bob Unruh:
The Washington Post apparently has misfired in a political attack on former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, now the GOP candidate for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The newspaper accused Moore of not reporting or paying taxes on compensation to which he was entitled but did not receive.
The Foundation for Moral Law, which was paying Moore as its president for the years at issue, said in a statement that all transactions and arrangements were reported fully to the IRS. The foundation then charged the reporters essentially were working on a political hit.
“For the Washington Post to state that Judge Moore secretly ‘collected’ monies he never received or that the Foundation failed to properly report its indebtedness to the IRS is false,” a statement from foundation officials charged.
[...]
The Post article, published Friday morning, stated “the promised back pay ‘was not reported to IRS as income.'”
But the foundation’s tax filings for 2011 and 2012 did report the obligation owed to Moore.
But Unruh is simply in stenography mode; he doesn't offer any documentation to back up the foundation's statements. He also doesn't link to the Post article in question, which, unlike Unruh, provides copies of the foundation's tax documents to back up its claims.
Finally, Unruh fails to disclose his employer's clear conflict of interest in reporting on Moore -- after all, it wants to make hay while the sun shines in the form of Moore's current Senate campaign by selling copies of Moore's bio .Indeed, embedded in Unruh's article are two exhortations to "Get Judge Roy Moore's autobiography!" that are linked to WND's online store.
Unruh is serving as Moore's PR shop, and WND is his retail outlet.
Where's MRC's Bozell on Latest O'Reilly Sex Harassment Allegations? Topic: Media Research Center
We've documented how Brent Bozell and his Media Research Center effectively gave Fox News' Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly a pass on their respective histories of sexual harassment, even as they tried to make hay on similar allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
On Oct. 21, the New York Times reported on a previously undisclosed sexual harassment case against O'Reilly -- this time resuilting in a $32 million payment to Fox News analyst Lis Wiehl. What did Bozell and the MRC have to say about this hatest case of serial sexual harassment?
Nothing, basically. Bozell's Twitter account was silent on this, as was the MRC's NewsBusters and CNSNews.com website.
The only mention at all on any MRC website was on lower-tier operation MRCTV, where Bryan Michalek published the full statement from O'Reilly's spokesman attacking the Times story. It wasn't until after this -- in the 11th paragraph -- that Michalek gets around to noting that the O'Reilly statement falsely claims that the Times article fails to mention an affidavit by Wiehl renouncing allegations against O'Reilly, as well as a statement by Times editor Dean Baquet that the statement "addresses everything but what the story actually says."
In short, Bozell and the MRC remain utter hypocrites.
Divine Donald Watch, WorldNetDaily Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
During an interview on the Fox Business Channel, the Rev. Franklin Graham told Lou Dobbs, “I think God intervened and put His hand on Donald Trump for some reason. It’s obvious that there was something behind this, and it was more than people understand.” And Graham added, “I just think it was God.”
Is it really possible God had something to do with it? The power of faithful prayer in times of crisis and change cannot be overestimated and, without question, the Trump administration has inherited a nation in crisis. Being surrounded by faithful prayer warriors, and repeatedly expressing his own gratitude for the men and women who joined together to offer a faithful defense through intercessory prayer, the president has been the beneficiary of a lot of fervent prayer and support. And for those who joined the effort, there can be no doubt that God put His imprint on the election and showed His favor on the nation.
Looking back, it was the willingness of evangelicals, charismatics and pro-life Roman Catholics to make the common-sense choice that made the difference in this election. According to the Pew Research Center, 8 out of 10 self-identified white, born-again, evangelical Christians said they voted for Trump, while just 16 percent voted for Hillary. This gave Trump a 65-percentage-point margin of victory among Christian voters of all denominations. White Catholics supported Trump by a 23-point margin (60 percent to 37 percent).
The critical element was that each of these communities decided to set aside their differences and disappointments to put Trump over the top. They weren’t looking for a pastor; they were looking for a leader they could trust – someone who shared their values. As Franklin Graham suggested, they voted for the only candidate who wanted to make America great again, knowing that a win by the Democratic candidate would change America forever – and would threaten religious liberty as we know it.
-- Stephen E. Strang, Oct. 17 WorldNetDaily column
(Strang is just the latest WND writer to credit God for Trump's win.)
CNS Obeys White House Marching Orders to Ignore Kelly's Falsehood Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's Melanie Arter serves up her latest bit of stenography on behalf of the Trump White House in an Oct. 20 article:
The White House said Friday that the media’s focus on President Donald Trump’s phone call to the widow of a soldier who died in Niger should have ended yesterday after White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly spoke on the issue, but instead, it’s the main topic of news coverage a day later.
A reporter asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders why Kelly felt the need to address Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) publicly and call her “an empty barrel” instead of calling her privately like he’s done with other members of Congress who were critical of the president and why Trump felt the need to tweet about Wilson again Friday.
“I think that it's real simple: You guys are the ones talking a lot about that story, and he felt it was important to address you and all of America directly. This story has been given an enormous amount of coverage over the last 48 hours, and he thought it was important that people got a full and accurate picture of what took place,” Sanders said.
It seems Arter took Sanders' complaint as marching orders, because CNS has indeed stopped talking about what Kelly said. That's too bad, because Kelly got some key facts wrong in attacking Wilson.
In his remarks, Kelly said this about Wilson at a 2015 dedication of an FBI building in Florida:
And a congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there and all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call he gave the money -- the $20 million -- to build the building. And she sat down, and we were stunned. Stunned that she had done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned. But, you know, none of us went to the press and criticized. None of us stood up and were appalled. We just said, okay, fine."
A video unearthed by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of the April 10, 2015, event preserved Wilson’s speech. While it does portray Wilson speaking animatedly and indulging in some braggadocio -- she is known as a colorful, outspoken politician with a soft spot for fashionable hats -- Kelly mischaracterized her remarks in significant ways.
[...]
Kelly said that Wilson "stood up there ... and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call he gave the money -- the $20 million -- to build the building. And she sat down."
However, in her speech, Wilson didn’t mention funding for the building, much less claim credit for it or tell the audience how she leveraged influence with Obama to secure it.
Wilson did describe how she helped secure legislation to name the building for two slain agents, but Kelly’s description leaves out that the FBI pressed her to make that effort and that she shared credit with several other lawmakers, including the Republican House speaker and Florida’s Republican senator. Wilson also spoke at some length about the bravery of the slain agents and the FBI in general.
We rate Kelly’s statement False.
Since CNS has acceded to the Trump White House's demand to not report this story anymore, its readers are being deprived of the truth. Sad!
WND Tries to Find A Conspiracy in Hillary's Broken Toe Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily hates Hillary Clinton so much, it refuses to take even the most innocuous information about her at face value. Take this anonymously written Oct. 16 article:
Hillary Clinton rarely wears high heels.
She says she doesn’t drink coffee.
And at nearly 70 years old, she hasn’t been known to run.
But now Hillary wants the world to believe she was running in high heels down the stairs, carrying coffee when she apparently broke her toe. And many people simply aren’t buying it.
Hillary was spotted with a special boot on her foot Monday.
“I was running down the stairs in heels with a cup of coffee in hand, I was talking over my shoulder and my heel caught and I fell backward,” she told “The Graham Nortion Show.” “I tried to get up and it really hurt. I’ve broken my toe. I’ve received excellent care from your excellent health service.”
(Curiously, Hillary told Katie Couric in a 2008 interview for “60 Minutes” that “I drink tea, not coffee anymore.”)
Hillary has canceled several media appearances due to the latest injury. She failed to show up for a BBC interview Monday during which she planned to promote her new book, “What Happened.”
But not everyone is buying her explanation.
The anonymous WND writer is creating a bit of fake news here -- Clinton did not say she was wearing "high heels" as WND claimed. This shows the malicious intent of the article (and perhaps the reason the writer did not want his or her name associated with it).
WND's idea of "many people" who "aren't buying" Clinton's story, by the way, are rabid Clinton-hater Dolly Kyle and random commenters at the right-wing Daily Mail.
This is pretty weak sauce for a conspiracy, even by WND standards.
MRC's Declaring Time Mag A 'Liberal Dying Husk' Seems A Tad Exaggerated Topic: Media Research Center
The headline on the Oct. 11 Media Research Center post by Scott Whitlock declares, "Liberal Dying Husk Time Magazine to Slash Circulation." Whitlock then goes on to called Time a "liberal dinosaur," touting how the magazine is cutting circulation by one-third. But he then goes on to contradict himself, conceding that perhaps the publication and its parent not, in fact, dying:
Writer Kevin McCoy [of USA Today] explained of Time inc (which also includes other publications), “Revenue for the quarter that ended June 30 fell $75 million, or 10%, to $694 million compared with the same period last year, the company reported. The drop reflected declines in advertising and circulation revenues.”
So, no, not quite a dying husk. Also, Time's purported "liberal" leanings have nothing to do with its circulation decline -- like many other print outlets, the Internet is taking its toll on Time. Further, digital subscriptions are helping to fill some of the slack.
Whitlock's evidence of Time being "liberal" is rather meager; it noted the economic upheaval as post-Soviet Russia moved from communism to something kinda representing capitalism, and calling Barack Obama as "Obi-Wan Kenobi" but Donald Trump a "demogogue" upon their respective "person of the year" designations.
Besides, if being "liberal" is really what's killing Time, why was the first major newsmagazine to permanently suspend its print edition the right-leaning U.S. News & World Report?
WND Columnist Complains About 'Nonstop Lies' (But Not Those Published By WND) Topic: WorldNetDaily
Barry Farber complains in his Oct. 10 WorldNetDaily column:
Too many Trump adversaries are more belligerent than adversarial. And too many Trump supporters think being a supporter is sufficient when Trump really needs combative allies! The smarter Americans are already aware that powerful forces are out to get Trump. Those forces can’t stand losing the election of November, 2016, and they fully intend to reverse it by any means necessary! Some swamps don’t want to be drained, especially if they pay off so well to the swamp-masters!
The rhetorical ammunition being used to bring Trump down consists of exaggerations, distortions and lies. Too many Americans, however, blithely assume exactly what those forces want them to assume, namely that Donald Trump really isn’t fit to be the president of the United States. Nice speaker, to be sure. Entertaining, to be sure. “But now we all see the flaws, and we really can’t allow a guy who screws up so much and so monumentally to be the Leader of the Free World!”
That Kool-Aid is being pumped at us from many formidable fountains. And we can excuse Americans dismayed by the steady tattoo of Trump’s failure. However, it’s a dangerous lie, and honest, patriotic Americans have to fight it.
Funny, we don't recall Farber being concerned by thenonstoplies being forwarded by the publisher of his column.
Farber then makes it clear what he really wants, and that's pro-Trump propaganda, 24-7:
Yet we hear so little about Trump’s achievements. Why are the media so bashful to report the many solid achievements this White House has handed to America? I don’t mean only the litany of stock market highs, recorded seemingly day after day. Much more important is the more than 3 percent growth in the latest report. Stock market highs are mere perfume, while a whole extra percentage point of growth is protein.
Respect for America has returned. Did Hillary’s diplomacy or that of her boss, Obama, ever yield America the 15 unanimous votes in the Security Council, including Russia and China, to slap sanctions upon North Korea?
It seems Farber is too bamboozled by his publisher doing things like suggesting that Trump was chosen by God to lead the country to understand that people want to read news, not propaganda.
Bozell's Less-Than-Full Disclosure About The MRC And the Mercers (And His Latest Soros Freakout) Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham rant in their Oct. 18 column:
Charles Pierce, the resident radical-left political pundit at Esquire magazine — that intellectual powerhouse best known for its Sexiest Woman Alive award — is lamenting the role of Steve Bannon in electing President Trump, as well as Trump financial backers "Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the reactionary New York gozillionnaires."
Pierce wanted everyone to read about a lawsuit filed in May (news that's almost half a year old is "breaking" if the targets are conservatives) by a former Bob Mercer employee named David Magerman who, reportedly against company policy, felt compelled to tell The Wall Street Journal that his boss had "contempt for the social safety net" and wanted "government be shrunk down to the size of a pinhead." (Horrors!) In his lawsuit, Magerman upped the ante and claimed that Mercer held racist views.
Full disclosure: The Mercers are not just supporters; they are friends. That kind of repugnant slur is undeserving of a response and will get none here.
Actually, Bozell and Graham's "full disclosure" is not so full. As we've documented, the Mercers are much more than "supporters" of Bozell and the MRC; they're among the largest donors to the MRC, donating $13.5 million between 2008 and 2014 and providing a full one-fourth of its annual budget in 2014 alone. On top of that, Rebekah Mercer is a member of the MRC board of directors, and she appears to be partly responsible for Bozell's and the MRC's big Trump flip in 2016, turning from a Trump critic to a Trump defender.
The rest of Bozell and Graham's column is dedicated to whining that politicaly active conservative billionaires get more scrutiny in "the media" than liberal ones, then lambasting longtime right-wing bogeyman George Soros, adding, "As we type these words, it has just been announced that Soros has transferred a cool $18 billion to his radical Open Society Foundations in recent years, making it instantly the second largest foundation in the world after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation."
The MRC has long lashed out against Soros to raise a few bucks, and his boosting of his foundation's finances has prompted it again. It has launched a new campaign with its patented combination of Soros fearmongering and plea for money:
Liberal puppetmaster George Soros is back to his old dirty tricks. And this time, he’s doubled down with a whopping $18 billion cash infusion across his tangled web of radical left-wing organizations, the Open Society Foundations (OSF).
The Media Research Center is once again taking a stand against Soros and his toxic influence on American society-- but we can’t do it alone. We need your help.
NewsBusters reported that the infamous left-wing financier has nearly tripled the size of his foundation by shifting an additional $18 billion in assets to the foundation he regularly uses to fund radical left wing causes.
This is on top of the more than $14 billion Soros has already funneled into “progressive” causes, such as abortion, open borders, radical environmentalism, opposing “hate” speech, and the Women’s March.
Soros has also given massive amounts of money— $103 MILLION! — to support the liberal media AND $10.5 million to Hillary Clinton’s doomed presidential campaign.
Please donate today. It is going to take an army of patriotic Americans to stand a chance against Soros and his liberal empire.
With a donation of $50 or more, you willreceive a mailed copy of the MRC’s latest Soros report.For all donors,of all amounts, you will receivefuture email updates from MRC Actiondetailing our efforts to take measureable action against ongoing liberal media bias.
The campaign does not disclose how much money it has received from the Mercers.
The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell Tim Graham started their Oct. 6 column with a personal shot at him:
Dan Brown, the author of "The DaVinci Code," is back with another blockbuster anti-religion novel, and CBS "Sunday Morning" rolled out the red carpet on Oct. 1 to honor him and his massive commercial success.
The segment began with what he called his "fortress of gratitude" — his house loaded floor to ceiling, over several stories, with bookshelves ... stuffed with copies of Dan Brown's own books.
So we know who Dan Brown worships.
So Bozell and Graham hae never engaged in self-promotion in a media appearance before? They then rant further:
For all the folderol about "fake news," the media never found it necessary to challenge the veracity of Brown's scurrilous charges he posits as facts in his novels — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child; that the Catholic Church took the human Jesus and cynically invented him as a god at the Council of Nicaea in 325; or those nonexistent "monks" in the Catholic group Opus Dei. They spent hours on ABC, CBS and NBC elaborating on Brown's "intriguing" theories, when what they were enthusiastically broadcasting was an atheist version of birtherism.
Brown's new novel, "Origin," once again features his hero, Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who tries to learn what discovery computer genius Edmond Kirsch was prepared to reveal that (as The Washington Post explains) "boldly contradicted almost every established religious doctrine, and it did so in a distressingly simple and persuasive manner."
So Bozell and Graham are mad that Brown presents fictional things as fact in a book of fiction? Isn't that the very definition of fiction?
Meanwhile, WorldNetDaily was taking even more shots at Brown. Joseph Farah huffed in his Oct. 13 column:
How do I say this politely?
Dan Brown is a fool.
The author of “The Da Vinci Code” may have sold 200 million copies of a novel based on enormous lies about the history of Christianity, but that does not mean he has wisdom.
Farah goes on to complain that Brown "did his best to make news about his latest release, “Origin,” by explaining why the Creator of the universe will not survive science, which, of course, is another way of saying God never existed except in the imaginations of man."
The same day, WND gave a platform to various and sundry fellow travelers to trash Brown. Birther pastor Carl Gallups, for instance, declared that “Dan Brown has been used as a tool of Satan for many years" because "A big chunk of his life has been dedicated to the task of minimizing and marginalizing the pure biblical message of salvation in Jesus Christ.” WND managing editor David Kupelian groused that "Brown has sold 200 million books, which I guess says something about the low state of ‘consciousness’ in today’s world" -- which sounds a little like professional jealously on Kupelian's part, since his books haven't sold 1/200th of the number Brown's have.
WND also brings on right-wing radio host Jan Markell to assert, "“Brown mocks the God who ‘sits up there and judges us.'” ... Someday Brown will be judged by that very same God and he won’t be laughing – and he won’t be mocking. He will have to say he was wrong, but it will be too late. The fires of hell will not be pleasant.”
None of these writers, by the way, offer any proof whatsoever that they have read Brown's new book, let alone "The DaVinci Code."Which means they're just bashing an undeniably popular author without knowing what they're talking about.
Joseph Farah writes in his Oct. 16 WorldNetDaily column:
Somebody has to state the obvious when it comes to the political agenda of “transgenderism.”
There’s no science behind it. There’s no common sense behind it. There’s no morality behind it.
Yet, our society has embraced the idea of allowing gender-confused small children to determine for themselves whether they are boys or girls and want to choose chemical castration and/or sterilization – ignoring the dire medical and health risks such procedures pose.
That’s why I appreciate Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, for speaking out boldly against the advance of political correctness and for sound medical practices.
“Chemical castration is what you’re doing when you put any biologically normal child on puberty blockers,” she said recently. “It’s treating puberty like a disease, arresting a normal process which is critical to normal development and bad for kids.”
I’m not a doctor, but this seems like simple common sense to me. What about you?
Farah is quoting from an op-ed by Cretella published three months ago at the conservative Heritage Foundation's "news" website, The Daily Signal. He goes on to tout Cretella's attacks on transgenders, claiming that "Her credentials affirm her expertise in this area."
But Farah is lyining in portraying Cretella as someone without a political agenda. In fact, the entire existence of the group Cretella heads, the American College of Pediatricians, is politically motivated, and the Southern Poverty Law Center considers it an anti-gay hate group. The Daily Beast details the love for the group on right-wing websites (like WND):
ACPeds is a favored citation among the far right because the organization disagrees with most major medical associations on LGBT and other social issues. It is not the leading organization for U.S. pediatricians. That would be the similarly named American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has 64,000 members. The much smaller ACPeds was founded in 2002 to protest the AAP’s support for same-sex adoption.
But despite its small size, the Gainesville, Florida-based ACPeds makes frequent appearances in conservative news articles, especially stories about LGBT issues.
Further, the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine has refuted all eight of the "hard facts" from Cretella Farah touts in his column, pointing out that Cretella repeatedly cites correlated claims without establishing causation, concluding of Cretella: "One cannot claim to be an unbiased medical professional writing for the greater good when one’s entire article is predicated upon gender dysphoria as a choice."
Farah concluded: "This crazy cultural tide needs to be reversed – with real science, real common sense and real morality." Too bad he offers someone who ignores the former to push the latter.
Crappy MRC Media Study Watch Topic: Media Research Center
It's another month, so it must be time for another terrible media "study" from the Media Research Center! Take it away, Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella:
With September’s news coverage now in the record books, the latest Media Research Center analysis finds TV’s hostility to the Trump presidency continues unabated. According to our analysts, the President received 92% bad press, vs. just 8% good press on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows last month.
Since Inauguration Day (January 20), the broadcast networks have tilted 90% anti-Trump, vs. 10% pro-Trump, not counting partisan statements or neutral/informational coverage. (See our methodology statement at the bottom of this article for details.) While coverage has pivoted from topic to topic — the travel ban, Obama wiretap claims, Russia investigation, ObamaCare repeal, Charlottesville — there’s been little variation in the negative tone of coverage each month.
[...]
The networks focused most of their evaluative coverage on immigration, the NFL and the private jet flights of cabinet officials (especially Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who resigned September 29).
Not surprisingly, 100% of the coverage of the expensive jet flights by Cabinet officials was negative, as was nearly all (96%) of the coverage of the administration’s immigration policy. On September 5, for example, CBS Evening Newsanchor Anthony Mason framed the President’s decision to end the Obama-era DACA program as “a dream lost for thousands of undocumented immigrants,” while a subsequent story by correspondent John Blackstone focused only on the negative reaction of those who benefited from the policy.
In other words: Noyes and Ciandella are once again complaining that stories are being accurately reported. They don't explain what possible "positive" coverage should have been given to, say, those private jet flights by Cabinet officials.
As before, Noyes and Ciandella have ensured their results are biased by narrowly focusing only on network evening newscasts(and pretending they're representative of the entire media) and refusing to acknowledge the existence of neutral coverage, forcing everything into a binary narrative in which everything is either "negative" or "positive" -- their so-called "methodology" states it counted only "evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story." And once again, they refuse to back up their work with a complete list of the actual statements they claim to have evaluated.
It's bad research specifically designed to reinforce a political agenda -- the only kind the MRC is apparently capable of doing.
WND Wants You To Know Shooter Had A 'Muslim Name' Topic: WorldNetDaily
When WorldNetDaily called on Leo Hohmann to write about a pair of shootings in Maryland and Delaware, he knew what his job was: to demonize the shooter as a Muslim, even though he had no idea of his actual religion.
So, while the gunman was still on the loose, Hohmann wrote an article carrying the headline "FBI hunts gunman with Muslim name in 2-state shooting spree." It carried the subhead "'Armed and dangerous' Radee Labeeb struck in Maryland, Delaware."
Actaully, the shooter's name is Radee Prince -- somewhere along the line, Hohmann forgot he had a last name, because he had to sell Prince as a Muslim:
“Labeeb” is one of Allah’s 99 names, according to Islamic tradition. Al-Labeeb means “the one with passion and heart” in Arabic. “Radee” means approval. The whole name Radee LaBeeb means “an approval or agreement of Allah.”
Never mind that at no point does Hohmann offer any evidence at all that Prince actually is Muslim. He sounds like a Muslim, and that's all the "fact-checking" Hohmann can be bothered to do.
After prince was captured, Hohmann updated the headline but kept the Muslim-baiting: "Shooter with Muslim name kills 3, now in custody."ANd he was mad that authoritiesdidn't immediately rush to judgment and declare Prince a jihadist without bothering to do an investigation:
Police initially called it a “workplace shooting” because Labeeb Prince is reportedly a machine operator at the Advanced Granite Solutions in Edgewood, a little over 25 miles northeast of Baltimore. He has worked there about four months, according to company owner by Barak Caba.
At a 4 p.m. press conference, Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy was still trying to sell the attack to the public as work place violence.
“Every one of the victims that this individual shot, the victims and the offender knew each other. So these were targeted shootings, for whatever reason,” Chief Robert Tracy told reporters.
Rather than work place violence, it’s also possible that Prince was carrying out a planned jihadist attack on multiple soft targets.
Again, Hohmann offers no evidence -- none -- that Prince is a jihadist or even a Muslim. Merely having a Muslim-sounding name is enough for Hohmann to spew unfounded conspiracy theories.
That's extremely lazy and biased journalism, even by WND standards.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Selective Outrage on Sexual Harassment Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is happy to lecture about Harvey Weinstein -- but was mostly AWOL when prominent conservatives were exposed as sexual harassers and misogynists. Read more >>
After Vegas Massacre, WND Still Doesn't Want To Talk About Dylann Roof Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've previously documented WorldNetDaily's reluctant to hae a serious conversation about Dylann Roof, the young man who murdered several black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 -- WND would rather talk about anything other than the white supremacist views he held, and which WND was working on the fringes of prior to the shooting.
After the Las Vegas massacre -- which seemed like a good time to rehash previous mass shootings -- WND made sure not to talk about Roof.
Shortly after the shooting, WND's Alicia Powe wrote an article declaring that "Over the last 20 years, the perpetrators of nearly all the deadliest mass shooting in the United States have shared one of two traits: Besides killing innocents with firearms, they either were Muslims or were using mind-altering psychiatric drugs." The article included a list of those perpetrators -- a list that curiously omitted Roof, despite the fact that WND has previously argued that Roof was "a young man who was into long-term and hard-core drug abuse" and allegedly using the "powerful narcotic" suboxone, and published another article placing Roof on its "big list of drug-induced killers."
WND managing editor David Kupelian followed with an Oct. 8 column that rushed to blame "the left" for somehow making Stephen Paddock commit the Vegas massacre:
Within this nihilistic worldview, a person like Stephen Paddock, who for whatever reason decides to shoot hundreds of human beings, is arguably just changing the form and configuration of their energy and matter from one form into another. Not that Paddock consciously thought this way; demons controlled his mind. He was extremely angry at whatever had gone wrong in his life and wanted revenge – and, probably, also to be remembered as a notorious mass-murderer.
Friends, this is a dangerous realm into which the left is ushering us, this place where there is no objective meaning, no absolute right and wrong, no good and evil, no moral and immoral, no male and female – where everything is relative and means whatever you choose it to mean, all because you demand ultimate freedom. Because when nothing means anything, even murder is reduced to rearranging matter and energy in other people from one form to another.
Kupelian doesn't mention Roof in his article -- he can't, because he can't blame "the left" for Roof's racism.That's a phenomenon of his side of the ledger.
WND did do an article that referenced Roof, albeit a few days before the Vegas massacre. An anonymously written Sept. 30 article noted the claim that a black man who killed one person and wounded several others at a church in Tennessee did so in retaliation for Roof's massacre. WND called Roof a "white supremacist" but didn't note how his views on black crime and South Africa paralleled that of WND.
The Media Research Center's Rich Noyes writes in an Oct. 17 post:
WorldNetDaily loves Roy Moore -- former Alabama judge now running for a Senate seat -- so much, it published his autobiography in 2005, re-releasing it in paperback 
We've documented how Brent Bozell and his Media Research Center 
During an interview on the Fox Business Channel, the Rev. Franklin Graham told Lou Dobbs, “I think God intervened and put His hand on Donald Trump for some reason. It’s obvious that there was something behind this, and it was more than people understand.” And Graham added, “I just think it was God.”
CNSNews.com's Melanie Arter serves up her latest bit of stenography on behalf of the Trump White House in an Oct. 20 
WorldNetDaily hates Hillary Clinton so much, it refuses to take even the most innocuous information about her at face value. Take this anonymously written Oct. 16 
The headline on the Oct. 11 Media Research Center 
Barry Farber complains in his Oct. 10 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham rant in their Oct. 18 
he ConWeb really, really hates author Dan Brown.
It's another month, so it must be time for another terrible media "study" from the Media Research Center! Take it away, 
We've previously 
