MRC Denies Russian Bots' Influence on #ReleaseTheMemo Campaign Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center really, really, doesn't want you to believe that the who #ReleaseTheMemo Twitter meme had no connection whatsoever to the Russian-linked Twitter bots that promoted it.
In a Jan. 20 NewsBusters post, P.J. Gladnick dismisses a Rolling Stone story about how Russian-controlled Twitter accounts heavily promoted the hashtag as nothing but a "Boris & Natasha bot fantasy," adding: "Even if there were 500 'Russia-influenced' Twitter accounts posting that hashtag, it would only be an infinitesimally small number of the total. Of course, [Rolling Stone writer Bob] Moser could do what I did and check out at random the authenticity of those posting the hashtag but it would ruin the premise of his fantasy."
Gladnick concluded: "So go ahead Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Investigate these supposed Russian bots tweeting on Twitter for evidence of collusion. Somehow I think he would be just as lucky proving Russian bot collusion as he has so far for proving Russian collusion in general."
Tom Blumer followed up in a Jan. 26 NesBusters post, attacking the Rolling Stone article as "a bogus report from the far-left media fever swamp." He highlighted a Daily Beast report citing "a knowledgeable source" about Twitter's internal analysis who claimed that "authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo."
Blumer admitted that the Daily Beast noted "skepticism" about the finding, but he downplayed the extent that skepticism was stated. The Daily Beast pointed out that "Russian troll farms use cutout accounts to launder their message in order to appear authentically American" and that "Measuring engagement on a hashtag shows influence that may indeed be authentically American – but can simultaneously obscure the origin of that message." It also admitted that "Russian influence accounts did, in fact, send an outsize number of tweets about #ReleaseTheMemo—simply not enough for those accounts to reach the top of Twitter's internal analysis."
Further, as Politico has since reported, the second Twitter account to retweet the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag is an apparent bot of undetermined origin, and the third account to retweet it as a suspected Russian bot. It also references an earlier Politico article about "Twitter rooms" in which pro-Trump activists coordinate messages and then retweet each other, creating an online groundswell that doesn't really exist. Politico makes it clear that, in its words, "#releasethememo is carried forward by automated accounts overnight after it begins to trend. It continued to do so from its appearance until the memo was released," adding that the bots target "key influencers with these messaging campaigns—media personalities, far-right brand names, and elected officials who might pick up the info or hashtag and legitimize it by repeating it."
The Politico article concludes:
Regardless of how much of the campaign was American and how much was Russian, it’s clear there was a massive effort to game social media and put the Nunes memo squarely on the national agenda—and it worked to an astonishing degree. The bottom line is that the goals of the two overlapped, so the origin—human, machine or otherwise—doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that someone is trying to manipulate us, tech companies are proving hopelessly unable or unwilling to police the bad actors manipulating their platforms, and politicians are either clueless about what to do about computational propaganda or—in the case of #releasethememo—are using it to achieve their goals. Americans are on their own.
This is the truth Gladnick and Blumer -- and the rest of the MRC -- want to deny.
WND's Farah Embarrasses Himself Praising Trump, Promoting His Thank-Trump Website Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah's love for President Trump knows no bounds, as demonstrated by his thank-Trump e-card campaign. Farah's sycophancy reached new levels of embarrassing in his Jan. 31 column on Trump's State of the Union address:
OK, was that a great speech or what?
For me, I can only say it was the greatest State of the Union delivered in my lifetime – and I LOVED every one Ronald Reagan gave.
But this was remarkable, a triumph, it brought tears to my eyes, it sent chills down my spine.
Donald Trump has drawn a line in the sand: If you don’t think it’s not too much to expect your fellow Americans to stand silently and respectfully when the national anthem is played, you’re on the right side. And we witnessed nearly half the House chamber in the Capitol on the wrong side.
He gave the speech, but they showed their true colors.
They despise America and everything it stands for.
So much for Trump reaching across the aisle. He showed them up, without even trying.
And that’s what you have to love about this guy. He’s plain spoken and sincere. He’s a true believer in this country.
[...]
I couldn’t write this column last night because my hands were shaking, my eyes were teary and I was too busy tweeting!
This, of course, turned into a more emphatic than usual appeal for readers to partake of WND's thank-Trump campaign:
So, let me ask you this: Are you now ready to THANK HIM for what he has achieved in his first year and for that triumphant speech?
Then make your way over to THANKTRUMP.us and DO IT! Do it now!
You will hate yourself a few years from now if you don’t.
I should know. I’ve been around a long time. I started on the wrong side. Ronald Reagan showed me the way back home. And Trump is doing it again – for a new generation.
I tell you this sincerely. I believe he could be responsible for a political, cultural and social realignment of unprecedented proportions. But we need to get behind him – all of us.
Put aside your minor differences. He’s a phenomenon. He’s a rock star. He’s a natural. This kind of person comes along once in a lifetime at the most, if you’re lucky.
Encourage him. Thank him – at ThankTrump.us.
[...]
I’m not sure there is anything more important for you to do today than to spread the word about the ThankTrump.us campaign. If you can think of something, I’m all ears. If you have a better idea, let me know. In the meantime, this is what we have. So, if you’re as excited as I am, get on board.
Go to ThankTrump.us and express your gratitude.
Send your friends there – everyone you know.
Make it go so viral that the Democrats start a new conspiracy tale about Russian collusion being behind the campaign.
Doesn't Farah have anything better to do -- like, you know, revenue-generating activities that will help pull WND out of its current downward spiral toward nonexistence?
Walmart announced Thursday that it will raise its hourly starting wage, give bonuses to eligible employees, expand maternity leave and provide adoption aid – thanks to the passage of President Donald Trump’s tax reform plan.
The combined wage and benefit changes will benefit its more than one million U.S. hourly associates at Walmart, Sam’s Club and other related enterprises, the company says.
Notice that Bannister is relying on nothing but a statement from Walmart itself (which we can't access because the link he embedded is broken).
It also means that Bannister doesn't tell readers that, on the same day those Trump-linked pay raises were announced, Walmart also closed 63 Sam's Club warehouse stores, eliminating thousands of jobs -- which would seem to undercut the message.
But Bannister's mission isn't to report the full truth; it's to be a Trump suck-up and to ignore the truth when it conflicts with that mission.
Where Are They Now? Working At Breitbart And Buying Twitter Followers Topic: WorldNetDaily
We haven't heard much from Aaron Klein around these parts since he departed WorldNetDaily for Breitbart in 2015. We did notice he got shipped to Alabama last fall to pull a Weinstein on the women who accused Roy Moore of perving on them as teenagers by trying to dig up dirt on them, but that's about it.
It turns out, however, that this wasn't the only shameful behavior Klein has engaged in. The New York Times recently reported on companies who sell Twitter followers -- at least some of which are stolen identities -- to clients willing to pay them for the privilege of pumping up their follower count, with particular focus on a company called Devumi. And guess who is among those clients?
The Times reports that "Aaron Klein, a radio talk show host and the Jerusalem bureau chief for Breitbart News, bought at least 35,000 followers from Devumi, according to records. A Times analysis found that the majority of his followers were bots." The Times also charts the "unusual patterns" in how he accumulated his followers, particularly the presence of a known fake follower that appears in numerous accounts.
As we noted when Breitbart hired him (without, apparently, looking very closely into his work for WND), Klein has a bad habit of playing fast and loose with the facts. It seems some things haven't changed.
With Its SOTU Coverage, CNS Is A Total Trump Suck-Up Topic: CNSNews.com
Being the loyal Trump stenographers they are, the crew at CNSNews.com turned the sycophancy on full-blast for its coverage of President Trump's State of the Union address.
First, in a combination of padding and ego-stroking, CNS cranked out a whopping seven articles on the speech itself and things directly related to it when they could have been combined into one or two:
CNS followed this with an article parroting Paul Ryan's praise of the speech, followed by an article about how "conservative leaders" loved the speech.
From there, CNS goes into attack mode, courtesy of a couple of sneering opinion pieces presented as "news" by Susan Jones, who's prone to this sort of thing. In the first, Jones takes a shot at the ACLU because "The American Civil Liberties Union -- note the word 'American' in its title -- complained Tuesday night about President Trump's repeated use of the word "America" in his State of the Union speech" because Trump's vision of America is dramartically different from that of most people. Jones' idea of a response is to rehash Trump's proposed immigration policy. This was accompanied by a reposting of a 2014 article by editor Terry Jeffrey complaining that President Obama "used the first person singular--including the pronouns 'I' and 'me' and the adjective 'my'--199 times" in a speech. (CNS had a thing about counting Obama's words.)
In the second, Jones recounts a Fox News segment in which Tucker Carlson bashed a Democratic congressman who left the chair next to him at the speech empty in honor of an Ohio resident who was deported, cheering how Carlson was "cutting off [the congressman] with the video equivalent of a mic drop."
That's the way "journalism" works at CNS these days.
WND's Farah: Evangelicals Will Ignore Trump's Personal Life As Long As He Delivers The Goods Topic: WorldNetDaily
We previously pointed out that WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah effectively abdicated any moral authority to pass judgment on the personal behavior of others by giving a pass to President Trump's alleged affair with a porn star. He doubled down on that position in his Jan. 23 column, effectively saying he doesn't care about Trump's sleazy personal life because he's delivering the political goods:
The Washington Post Sunday called evangelicals “moral relativists” for supporting President Trump, but unless you subscribe to that fake news outlet, you can’t read the story.
I would not suggest doing so, but, instead, read it for free here. Or, just take my word for it.
Is that assertion true?
No, it is wholly a lie.
That’s not to say some evangelicals are not moral relativists.
But people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and Tony Perkins are not.
In American politics, we have choices to make. When “candidate A” supports 99 percent of what you believe and his or her opponent, “candidate B,” supports none of it, the morally responsible thing to do is to vote for “candidate A.” And when “candidate A” is elected president of the United States and fulfills his promises in record time, as President Trump has, you praise him, thank him, pray for his safety and continued good health and thank God for the blessing He is pouring out on your country.
It’s really that simple.
But, you know, there are some people who call themselves “evangelicals” who don’t see it that way. I would suggest to you that if they are truly supportive of life, liberty, religious rights, Israel’s self-determination and security, national sovereignty, the Constitution, the sanctity of marriage and the rule of law, that they should be as supportive of President Trump as I am in his dedication to those issues to date. If he falters in his second year or third year of fourth year, we should criticize him for doing so. Right now, however, there is very little to criticize. It’s quite simply, from an evangelical worldview, the best start to a presidency in modern history.
And here, we get to the part where Farah once again gives Trump a mulligan on his past, something he has never done for anyone named Clinton:
Those who attack evangelicals for supporting Trump are being disingenuous at best. Why shouldn’t they? He listened to them. He’s doing what they asked him to do. This is not a mystery. And it’s certainly not moral relativism. They didn’t change their positions. Trump changed his.
The Washington Post story, in making its case for evangelical moral relativism, cited one of its own columnists, Michael Gerson, described by the piece as “a leading evangelical.” Gerson wrote, according to the piece, “At the Family Research Council’s recent Values Voter Summit, the religious right effectively declared its conversion to Trumpism.”
That’s a lie and an insult.
When one “converts” to something, it suggests leaving behind one’s previous beliefs.
If anyone “converted” from his previous political beliefs, it is clearly Trump. From the perspective of the evangelical majority, that’s a good thing. We love converts to life, liberty, religious rights, Israel’s self-determination and security, national sovereignty, the Constitution, the sanctity of marriage and the rule of law. We make no apologies for that. We love it even more when people embrace God. And, whatever his past suggests, President Trump has demonstrated at least a public respect and reverence for the Creator of the universe and His ways.
In the world of politics, that is reason for praise, enthusiasm and thanksgiving.
Just as Farah provided no evidence in his previous column for his claim that Trump "was a very different Donald Trump" when he had his alleged porn-star fling, he provides no evidence for his new claim that Trtump has "converted" from his previous views.
Farah betrays a little skepticism by acknowleding that "whatever his past suggests, President Trump has demonstrated at least a public respect and reverence for the Creator of the universe and His ways" -- indicating that he at least suspects Trump is being insincere. But, again, Farah doesn't care Trump's personal life the way he cared about, say, Bill Clinton's, at least as long as Trump continues to do Farah's bidding.
And that was the whole point of the Washington Post article Farah is attacking -- that evangelicals are placing access to power before character. Not only does Farah avoid actually engaging in that argument beyond saying, "Damn straight we're putting power before character!" he attacks anyone who makes it as a "Trump hater."
Spoken like a true believer. That dogmatic attitude shows that Farah really is a Trump convert after all.
CNS Tries to Credit Trump for Fewer Suicides Aat Golden Gate Bridge, Or Something Topic: CNSNews.com
How deeply is CNSNews.com in the pocket of the Trump administration? It seems to want to credit Trump for fewer successful suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge.
A Jan. 22 CNS blog post by Craig Bannister carries the baffling headline "Golden Gate Bridge Suicide Attempts Set Record in Trump’s First Year, But Police Ensure Fewer Succeed." Baffling because the article itself doesn't mention Trump, and also because we're not sure exactly what Bannister is trying to credit Trump with. Is he blaming the higher suicide attempts on Trump, or thanking him for fewer successful ones?
Bannister notes that "In May of last year, construction began on a $211 million project to build a suicide deterrent system," but he offers no evidence that Trump had any role in that. In the press release to which Bannister links as part of that statement highlights the commemoration ceremony to start contruction of the deterrent system featured Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Jared Huffman -- all Democrats. Bannister clearly could not give them any credit.
So, it appears that all we have here is an attempt by Bannister to create some clickbait by putting Trump in the headline for no reason at all. Is this what CNS has come to?
I almost forgot how surreal it was for eight years when [Barack Obama] was in the White House. The arrogance, the smugness, the effete snobbiness, the petulant know-it-all-ness. I realized how liberating it has been over the last year. To think so many people would prefer to return being led like lambs to the slaughter of liberty is astonishing to me.
[...]
Amazing. Stunning. I’m almost speechless. Notice I said “almost.”
I wonder how many hurricanes and natural disasters he thinks he prevented in the eight years of his presidency.
He thinks he’s a god! But, what’s worse is too many others still fawn over this kind of gobbledygook.
All I can say is: Thank you Donald Trump for delivering us from this kind of superciliousness.
A top-secret memo that has been released to members of Congress, but still is being withheld from the American public, characterizes Barack Obama as “the vengeful narcissist” and alleges surveillance abuses by his administration that one representative likened to the work of Russia’s KGB.
[...]
Author, former Secret Service agent and former congressional candidate Dan Bongino tweeted: “Take it to the bank, the FBI/FISA docs are devastating for the Dems. The whole image of a benevolent Barack Obama they’ve disingenuously tried to portray is about to be destroyed. The real Obama, the vengeful narcissist, is going to be exposed.”
And now let’s examine the myth that Hitler’s great Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force, metamorphosed from the crop-dusters and glider clubs still permitted under the Versailles Treaty that banned military aviation after Germany’s surrender in World War I. Barack Obama’s birth certificate may not be the only one in error as to place of birth.
Nixon’s White House plumbers included five men, a few of whom once shifted to Nixon’s re-election campaign, who bugged the opposition Democratic National Committee headquarters with the listening devices of that day.
Barack Obama’s efforts were orders of magnitude larger, more sophisticated and damaging. He very nearly succeeded. Based on their reporting, the mainlining media seem to think that a permanent Obama-offspring government would have been just fine.
Obama employed the United States’ secret security apparatus, which is surely in the hundred-thousand-plus employee range, its budget unimaginable, to spy on his enemies and accumulate blackmail evidence on those who would someday be political opponents of himself or his party successors.
Leading Democrats know this. They’ve seen the same evidence as the Republicans on these committees. The mistake the Democrats have made is the same mistake Nixon made. Cover-up.
MRC Pushes Bogus Attack on 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' Production Topic: Media Research Center
Apropos of apparently nothing, the Media Research Center published a curiously worded Jan. 23 press release:
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell delivered remarks at the National Press Club on Tuesday calling on the National Endowment of the Arts to withdraw its funding of the "gleefully profane"Jerry Springer: The Operain New York City. He issued the following statement at the conclusion of the press conference:
“The NEA must withdraw its funding of the wildly anti-Christian, especially anti-Catholic, hate-filled production entitledJerry Springer: The Opera.As Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has pointed out, this so-called ‘opera’ receives the majority of its funding from public sources, including the NEA. This is an outrage which must end.
[...]
The play is ugly, unadulterated hate. The current tenure of the NEA chair ends in April and President Trump must appoint a new chairman who will once and for all put an end to taxpayer funding for anti-Christian ‘art’ such as this piece of garbage.”
You have to follow the embedded link to fingure out what, exactly, Bozell is so worked up about. It's a production of "Jerry Springer: The Opera" put on by a theater company called The New Group.
Bozell's mention of Donohue obscures the fact that this whole kerfuffle is spearheaded by Donohue and his right-wing Catholic League. Bozell fails to disclose that he's a member of the Catholic League's board of advisers, which would seem to be important and relevant.
Beyond that, however, the whole thing starts to fall apart. Donohue is attacking the musical and its producers because, according to his own press release, "the New Group receives most of its funding from public sources, led by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)." But he doesn't identify exactly how much funding its gets from the NEA, nor does he identify whether any of that NEA funding went toward this production.
Donohue has since been trying to milk this evidence-free story -- with the MRC's help, of course. Donohue sent a letter to President Trump about it, but again he offered no proof to back up his claim, vaguely stating only that "The New Group is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts."
A Jan. 25 CNSNews.com blog post by Craig Bannister regurgitates another letter Donohue sent to a House committee claiming "potential guideline violations by the NEA." This is all Donohue has to offer:
The nexus between NEA and the New Group is more than disturbing: it is so incestuous that it is in violation of NEA’s own strictures. In 2009, the NEA gave the New Group $50,000, "To support the preservation of jobs that are threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn." Yet under NEA guidelines, "General operating or seasonal support" is explicitly prohibited.
That's apparently the only "evidence" Donohue has -- a small donation nearly a decade ago that has nothing whatsoever to do with the group's current production. That's the opposite of "incestuous."
But the MRC will never admit that emperor Donohue has no clothes here -- he's just a hateful old man with some money to throw around to push his right-wing agenda and a few friends in the media (and on his board) who will help him spread his bogus claims.
Farah Admits Issues In Trying To Save WND, Still Won't Admit Its Bad-Content Issues Topic: WorldNetDaily
As WorldNetDaily tries to save itself from going out of business, it's been sending out regular fund-raising appeals from editor Joseph Farah -- part of its current campaign to raise $200,000 to get it through March -- that, on occasion, offer insight into how WND has been run over the years.
Some of it has been dishonest, of course, as one would expect from Farah and WND. Farah has previously blamed Google for stealing ad dollars away from WND (actually, WND is a Google AdSense client, and it remained so even after Google forced WND to abandon its Colin Flaherty-fueled obsession with "black mob violence" by threatening to cut off that particular avenue of revenue) and "Amazon, the owners of the Washington Post" for hurting its e-commerce operation (no, Amazon doesn't own the Post; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos does, about whom Farah has spun a factually challenged conspiracy theory).
WND has always been undercapitalized compared not just with the big corporate media, but even with our friends in the independent media. I’ll share some amazing stats with you. No more than $5 million has ever been invested in WND over 20 years. With that meager investment, WND has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over two decades.
Sounds like a gravy train, doesn’t it?
But it’s not. Because when we bring in revenue, we pay our bills, try new things, and invest the rest back into the company. That’s what we have always done.
Well, if you generated "hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue" but only spent $5 on the operation, it's not unreasonable to ask where all that money went and why it's not helping WND now. (Not to mention how much of that went to the Tennessee car dealer it falsely defamed during the 2000 election.)
Farah then added a little surprising insight about how its revenue patterns align with who the president is:
Political years are generally good for WND. Non-political years, not so much. In addition, when you feel danger from your elected officials, we’re like your best friend in the media. But, conversely, when you feel like your best friend is in power, some of you don’t think you need us so much anymore. It’s ironic, but the Clinton years were a boom for WND – the Bush years, not so much. The Obama years were good for WND, the first year of Trump, not so much.
I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about that phenomenon.
Remember, WND was founded in order to attack President Clinton. And this explains why it fought so hard (and failed miserably) to destroy Obama -- its revenue depended on being always on attack, regardless of whether any of those attacks were true. It also raises the question of why Farah felt the need to start a "thank Trump" campaign when WND's finances were so precarious.
In his Jan. 30 letter, Farah made another admission, in the midst of announcing that WND's online store would take payment through PayPal for the first time in several years (he admits dropping the PayPal option may have been "really stupid"):
The WND Superstore was once WND’s No. 1 source of revenue – for years! It was reliable. It was steady. But because of the “Amazonization” of our culture, fewer people think of any other place to go for their books, Bibles, movies, gifts, preparedness needs and even unique products not carried at Amazon.
Yes, merchandising has tended to be the savior of other operations whose main content loses money. Yet on Jan. 31 WND sent out a promotion for Farah's book "The Restitution of All Things" which reprints favorable reviews of it from ... Amazon. So Farah is clearly not entirely displeased with how Amazon does business if he's trying to ride its coattails.
But throughout all of this, none of Farah's letters has mentioned the elephant in the room, the real reason why Google ranks WND so low in its searches: it's not credlble because of its fake-news-riddledcontent.
Instead of teasing us with possible site redesigns and secret projects, Farah should be talking about WND's biggest issue -- its bad content -- and telling us what he will do to fix it.
CNS Hides Bad News About Trump With Attacks on Mueller, FBI Topic: CNSNews.com
As bad news piled up against President Trump as week, culminating in the revelation that Trump actually tried to fire the special counsel investigating him, Robert Mueller, CNSNews.com -- like the good little pro-Trump stenographers they are -- knew what it had to do.
Almost as if acting on marching orders from the Trump White House, CNS began pumping out story after story attacking Mueller's investigation and the FBI for having a role in it, as well as obsessing over personal texts between two FBI agents:
A couple notes on these articles: CNS never bothered to report that the "secret society" reference that conservatives like Ratcliffe freaked out about last week was a joke, and it didn't report that Trump's complaints last June about Mueller's investigation coincided with a campaign by Fox News' Sean Hannity and other Fox News commentators to demand that Mueller be fired.
That's a lot of chaff being thrown in order to obscure facts CNS doesn't want reported.
WND Goes Easy on Trump In Magazine Issue on Sexual Harassment Topic: WorldNetDaily
The new issue of WorldNetDaily's sparsely read (if it had a significant readership, WND would never let us hear the end of it) Whistleblower magazine is about sexual harassment, and WND claims it "not only exposes the entire iceberg – it also points the way back to moral sanity."
But it looks like that, according to its promotion, it's trying to conceal a good portion of it. Here's the introduction:
Sex. It’s the sacred entry point for human life into this world, yet it frequently appears in the form of grotesque criminality. As such, sexual abuse has become the focal point for one of America’s most sensational mega-stories over the last year.
The story – actually a never-ending torrent of reports implicating almost 100 different men since accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein surfaced in October – chronicles an epidemic of prominent men allegedly using their power and authority to seduce, manipulate, bribe, bamboozle, intimidate, coerce and physically force women into sex.
Beyond Weinstein (accused of sexual abuse by 84 different women), the alleged offenders range from entertainment icons like actors Dustin Hoffman (8 accusers) and Kevin Spacey (15 accusers), comedian Louis C.K. (5 accusers) and director/screenwriter James Toback (38 accusers) to news media big shots like CBS/PBS host Charlie Rose (8 accusers), NBC “Today” anchor Matt Lauer (7 accusers), MSNBC’s Mark Halperin (12 accusers) and New York Times White House reporter Glenn Thrush (4 accusers) to U.S. Appeals Court Judge Alex Kozinski (6 accusers) to Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine (4 accusers) to New Orleans-based TV chef John Besh (25 accusers) to – of course – politicians including Rep. John Conyers (6 accusers), Sen. Al Franken (8 accusers) and many others. Indeed, it was recently revealed that millions of taxpayer dollars have been quietly doled out to settle harassment claims against members of Congress in recent years.
Notice anything about that list? Nearly all of them are eitherconsidered political liberals or in entertainment (and, thsu presumbed to be liberal). The only apparent conservative on the list is Kozinski, who was appointed to the appeals court by President Reagan. Somehow, WND didn't see fit to mention, for instance, any of the numerous hosts and executives at Fox News who have been accused of sexual harassment.
The promotion does get around to noting that conservatives -- and President Trump -- have been accused, but WND is eager to gloss over that inconvenient fact with a quick Clinton Equivocation:
Notably, the vast majority of those implicated over the last few months are on the political left, though at least one – former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (8 accusers), a conservative Christian – narrowly lost December’s Senate election because of decades-old sexual allegations against him, one involving a 14-year-old girl. And of course, multiple women have accused President Donald Trump of having committed various sexual improprieties over the years.
[...]
For example, Juanita Broaddrick credibly accused Bill Clinton of forcible rape, a heinous crime once punishable in the U.S. by death. At the other end of the spectrum, 2006 Miss USA contestant Samantha Holvey told CNN that the pageant’s then-owner, Donald Trump, “personally inspected each woman” beforehand and would “step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people.” Unseemly, perhaps, but there’s a world of difference between He raped me and He looked at me like a piece of meat.
WND managing editor David Kupelian's magazine essay on the subject, published at WND on Jan. 29 and hyperbolically titled "The left's ongoing sexual assault on America," plays the same game; the above promotion excerpt is actually the beginning of his essay. But Kupelian never mentions Trump -- or any other conservative recently accused of sexual harassment (he references Bob Packwood but doesn't mention that he was a Republican) -- at any other point. Instead, it's a version of his usual liberal bashing harangue, ranting that "The left, which has been obsessed with removing Judeo-Christian morality from our schools, culture and minds for several generations, now claims to be shocked – shocked – at the inevitable excesses and crimes they themselves have brought about."
Meanwhile, Kupelian has published the same old attacks for years, and is presumably shocked -- shocked -- that the website he runs with Joseph Farah is going down the tubes. He doesn't seem to get that maybe his content -- and, more specifically, that he refuses to hold conservative sexual harassers to the same scrutiny and scorn as non-conservatives -- is a big part of the problem.
NEW ARTICLE: The Stenography Factory Topic: WorldNetDaily
CNSNews.com gives up journalism to serve as servile stenographers (and a damage-control squad) for the Trump White House, as well as for friendly opinion-mongers and pro-Trump legal groups. Read more >>
Drinking water for more than 170 million Americans in all 50 states contains radioactive elements that are carcinogenic, according to a nonprofit group’s investigation released this past week.
The report examined the levels of six radioactive contaminants in drinking water, including radon, radium and uranium. Its primary focus was on radium because it is naturally occurring though a dangerous carcinogen, according to Newsweek.
[...]
From radioactive carcinogens to lead poisoning, could our tap water be another contributor to the increased rates of cancer in children and adults today?
Friends, this should not be, especially in the greatest industrialized nation in the world with the greatest of health resources. Once again, we the people are left on our own without the government’s help to right the national wrongs.
This countrywide drinking water disaster is one more reason I’m super proud that my wife, Gena, established CForce Water Bottling Co. on our own Texas Lone Wolf Ranch in 2015. Gena is actually the CEO and majority owner and is registered as a National Certified Woman Owned Business through NWBOC/ WOSB Certified and HUB – historically underutilized business.
On Jan. 11, 2018, Newsweek ran the headline, “170 million Americans have cancer-causing radioactive elements in their drinking water.” This headline was very similar to those run by many other news outlets – but are the headlines justified, or is it just another example of the ineptness of the media?
First: The original information was not peer reviewed or published in any scientific journal, but generated by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). So, the first point here is the media’s sloppy coverage of the EWG reporting science or junk-science. Have reporters taken the time to validate the reliability of EWG’s source?
[...]
The bottom-line: If you believe all the food phobia fears the media and purported consumer groups would like you to embrace, you had better learn to enjoy your anorexic diet, because all foods contain potential carcinogens, and you would croak from water intoxication long before you would perish from the infinitesimal amount of radium in your water.
MRC's Bozell Falls for O'Keefe's Bogus Twitter 'Shadow Ban' Story Topic: Media Research Center
James O'Keefe screwed the pooch when he got busted for trying to fool the Washington Post with a bogus sexual harassment "victim" of Roy Moore -- and even then, the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell was slow to denounce O'Keefe, if only to preserve his self-proclaimed "moral standing" in the conservative media and hide the fact that the MRC has been an enthusiastic promoter of O'Keefe's previous charades.
When O'Keefe did another goofy sting -- in the form of secretly recorded videos of a random Twitter employee who said something about "shadow banning" conservatives -- he managed to un-screw the pooch in Bozell's eyes. Cue Bozell's usual pop-eyed freakout mode:
I have been a critic of some of James O'Keefe's work in the past, so I have the credentials to say the following: What O'Keefe has produced is not just extraordinary but it demands national attention. If social media is the communications vehicle of the future — and it is — then this represents the most sinister threat to free speech in history. That is no exaggeration. The radical left is out to censor the voices of all with whom they disagree. O'Keefe has proven it. Every American needs to watch this — if, of course, Twitter will allow it.
Yes, Bozell really did claim that this purported "shadow banning" was "the most sinister threat to free speech in history."
Bozell followed this with an open letter to Twitter's CEO insisting that "Project Veritas’s videos provide evidence which cannot be disputed."
Well, actually, it can. As tech news site Ars Technica details:
If you talk to enough people at an organization with thousands of employees, it's inevitable that you'll catch some of them saying stuff that at least sounds bad. We don't know how many Twitter employees O'Keefe's organization talked to who didn't say anything embarrassing—or even directly contradicted O'Keefe's thesis that Twitter is systematically censoring conservatives.
[...]
The group definitely established that Twitter's workforce is predominantly liberal—something that will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the politics of the Bay Area. Given the power of Twitter's content moderators and engineers, there's an obvious danger that the company's liberal biases will cause them to treat conservative content more harshly than liberal content.
What Project Veritas hasn't uncovered, however, is any evidence that Twitter is systematically using its platform to silence conservative voices. When an engineer talked about "banning a way of talking," he was clearly not referring to conservatives. The same is true of another former engineer's discussion of "shadow banning"—and it's not even clear if Twitter still engages in shadow banning at all.
[...]
Project Veritas did find one person involved in Twitter's content moderation policy who said he saw the policy being used more strictly against conservatives than liberals. But that's about it. O'Keefe didn't find any evidence of systematic anti-conservative bias in Twitter's policies or filtering algorithms.
Which might explain why we haven't heard much about this non-scandal from Bozell and the MRC since his initial rage. Bozell probably doesn't want to admit he got burned by someone he should never have trusted in the first place.
The Media Research Center really, really, doesn't want you to believe that the who #ReleaseTheMemo Twitter meme had no connection whatsoever to the Russian-linked Twitter bots that promoted it.
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah's love for President Trump 
Craig Bannister, blogger for the 
We haven't heard much from Aaron Klein around these parts since he 
Being the 
We previously 
How deeply is CNSNews.com 
I almost forgot how surreal it was for eight years when [Barack Obama] was in the White House. The arrogance, the smugness, the effete snobbiness, the petulant know-it-all-ness. I realized how liberating it has been over the last year. To think so many people would prefer to return being led like lambs to the slaughter of liberty is astonishing to me.
Apropos of apparently nothing, the Media Research Center published a curiously worded Jan. 23 
As WorldNetDaily tries to save itself from going out of business, it's been sending out regular fund-raising appeals from editor Joseph Farah -- part of its current campaign to raise $200,000 to get it through March -- that, on occasion, offer insight into how WND has been run over the years.
As bad news piled up against President Trump as week, culminating in the revelation that Trump 
The new issue of WorldNetDaily's sparsely read (if it had a significant readership, WND would never let us hear the end of it) Whistleblower magazine is about sexual harassment, and WND claims it "not only exposes the entire iceberg – it also points the way back to moral sanity."
James O'Keefe screwed the pooch when he got busted for trying to fool the Washington Post with a bogus sexual harassment "victim" of Roy Moore -- and even then, the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell was 
