Bozell Pushes Bob Hope Non-Controversy, Criticizes Exhibit He Apparently Hasn't Seen Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell's June 18 column is a regurgitation of an article at his MRC-operated CNSNews.com trying to create a controversy by baselessly accusing the Library of Congress of designing its exhibit on Bob Hope and politics to, in Bozell's words, "unveil a leftist political agenda, the likes of which Bob Hope would be the first to denounce."
But as we pointed out, CNS reporter Penny Starr provided no evidence that the exhibit is biased -- even she conceded that, in addition to liberal entertainers, the exhibit also includes conservatives such as Lee Greenwood, Pat Boone and Sonny Bono. Bozell doesn't mention that, nor does he note as Starr did that Hope became actively political during the Vietnam years; instead, Bozell insists that Hope "bent backward to keep politics out of his performances when entertaining troops."
Further, Bozell appears to be writing about something he has not seen. There's no indication that he went to see the exhibit himself -- nearly all the details he provides are straight from Starr's article, and nowhere does he claim that he personally saw the exhibit. Given that Bozell has previously ridiculed Attorney General Eric Holder for "insolence" and "laziness" in criticizing a bill he hadn't read, that is quite the double standard.
CMI Still Obsessed with WaPo's Reporting on Gays Topic: Media Research Center
The MRC's Culture & Media Institute continued its strange obsession with the Washington Post's coverage of gay-related issues with a June 14 article by Melissa Afable complaining about the Post's profile of conservative lawyer Ted Olson, who's working to overturn California's Prop 8, which banned gay marriage in the state.
Afable engaged in a healthy does of Heathering, portraying Olson's work on the case as "near-traitorous" to "social conservatives," adding that "Olson’s pro-homosexual stand has left many conservatives shaking their heads in disbelief."
Afable also demonstrates lack of knowledge about the profession she's criticizing, complaining that the "present-tense headline" on the Post article "made it seem as though Olson’s decision just came to light" when Olson wrote about his work for Newsweek last year. In fact, nearly all newspaper headlines are written in present tense -- that's basic newspapering practice that Afable and her fellow journalism illiterates at CMI (who are activists, not journalists) have yet to grasp.
Afable further sneered that "it wouldn’t be the first time the Post let its support of the gay agenda color its editorial decisions," rehashing CMI's previous attacks on the Post. But the Post has responded to CMI by pointing out that it used overly narrow parameters that ignored the Post's reporting on anti-homosexual activists.
Afable, of course, mentions nothing about that. She's not about to let the facts get in the way of her anti-gay agenda.
The Marxmeister in the White House now says he takes full responsibility for ending the oil mess in the Gulf. He also says he wants to "know whose a-- to kick," that he "can't suck it up with a straw," and … well, you know … the ongoing narcissistic spiel – "I, me, my … blah, blah, blah" – day after day, week after week, ad nauseam.
Watching his recent performances on the Gulf oil disaster made me think about a monster hit The Platters had in the '50s called "The Great Pretender." Little did they know that the champion Great Pretender wouldn't even be born until 1961 – probably in Kenya … but, then, no one is really sure about that because no one is allowed to see his birth certificate.
Everyone but 1) those on the far left, 2) Bill O'Reilly and 3) the loons (O'Reilly's word) who have yet to return from lunch realizes that The Great Pretender has had a Marxist agenda since even before his pot-smoking days at Columbia. Names like Wright, Ayers, Lloyd, Dunn, Sunstein, Holdren and Jones (both Jeff and Van) are well-known to those who have taken the trouble to learn about The Great Pretender's agenda.
[...]
Obama has been following FDR's dictatorial playbook to the T. In his 1937 inaugural address, at a time when unemployment was still rising (15 percent on Inauguration Day), FDR bodaciously said, "Our progress out of the Depression is obvious."
Mason's Latest Anti-Obama Rant: 'Does He Even KnowThere's A War in Afghanistan?' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jackie Mason unleashes yet another anti-Obama tirade in his June 17 WorldNetDaily video, which he begins by defending his anti-Obama tirades:
Is it my fault that he's doing something wrong? Why don't you evaluate what he's doing and if what I'm saying about him is true or false instead of telling me I should respect the president. I respect the presidency and I respect the president. He doesn't respect his own office.
We've fact-checked Mason, and found numerous falsehoods and misstatements in his hateful tirades, so he has discredited himself a long time ago. Needless to say, Mason keeps up the misinformation:
[Obama] told us at the beginning of this whole huge disaster with the oil situation, this huge disaster in the Gulf now, he told us that he couldn't do nothing about it, that's why he did nothing for the first nine days after it happened. The second nine days it wasn't his business either because there's nothing exactly he could have done, so he did nothing for the next nine days.
In fact, government officials were working on the scene almost immediately, and a quicker initial response was hampered by the fact that BP led the government to belive the spill was much smaller than it actually was.
Mason then went on to claim that President Bush was criticized for waiting "half an hour" to respond to Hurricane Katrina and that Bush "really couldn't do anything about it because constitutionally he can't move in the situation unless he has the invitation of the mayor and the governor. They both told him it's taken care of, there's no problem." In fact, two days before Katrina made landfall, then-Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared a state of emergency. Blanco also called Bush to say, "we need your help. We need everything you've got." While Mason offered no evidence that Bush could not help in Katrina recovery without a state and/or local invitaiton, the military is prohibited by federal law from performing local law enforcement operations, a law Bush never waived in the days after the storm.
Further, even Republicans concluded that the Bush administration waited too long to evacuate New Orleans by failing to act quickly enough to reports that levees had been breached.
Mason then lied again that Obama "did nothing forthe first nine days, the second nine days and the third nine days," sneering that Obama "thinks he was elected to the office as an entertainer, a greeter. ... Every time you saw Bush, he was talking to a general, or he was talking to a colonel, an admiral, or he was talking to the heads of the State Department. Every time you see [Obama], there's a basketball team, there's a baseball team, and there's another team." Mason added: "How often do you ever seen him talk to a general? Does he even know there's a war in Afghanistan?"
Mason then concludes that section of his rant by saying: "What did I say that's not true just now?" Well, a lot.
But Jackie wasn't quite done -- he declared that if you disagree with him, it's somehow you're problem: "You're picking on me if you disagree with me and you don't care if I'm telling the truth. So if you don't like what I just said, look in the mirror. There's something wrong with you."
Poor Jackie, not only refusing to take responsibility for his own hate but trying to blame others for his hate.
Mason's video concludes with a plug for an upcoming live appearance by Mason (with discounted tickets available for WND readers). Mason claims he will offer "real laughs" about "everything that's wrong with Barack Obama. ... everything that's wrong with this country." If Mason's WND tirades are any indication, the painfully unfunny anti-Obama hate will be everywhere, and "real laughs" will be few and far between.
Actual Shocker: WND (Belatedly) Fact-Checks Fox News Topic: WorldNetDaily
In one of its increasing infrequent spasms of actual journalism, WorldNetDaily published a June 17 article by Chelsea Schilling fact-checking a Fox News report falsely claiming that President Obama "is, in effect, giving a major strip of the Southwest back to Mexico." As Schilling writes, "law enforcement officials in the area are saying the state still belongs to the U.S. and is not closed off to Americans."
As can be expected when WND attempts actual journalism, it's behind the curve -- Media Matters was debunking the claim a full 24 hours before Schilling's story was published, and even obtained a statement by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official well before WND did.
This certainly makes Fox News look really bad -- when even theliars at WND are proving them wrong, what does that say about Fox News' brand of journalism?
Newsmax aired its Bill O'Reilly-starring "Economic Crisis Summit" yesterday, and -- surprise! -- it's yet another financial scheme designed to separate Newsmax readers from their money, this time a "hot commodities insider membership" for a mere $1,495 (it's worth $5,681!). The videocast host laughably claimed during the videocast that O'Reilly was not "here to endorse anyone's point of view or to endorse product or financial service," but was "joining us just to give us" his take.
MRC's Waters Tries to Pretend NYT Didn't Unercut His Reason for Existence Topic: Media Research Center
In writing about New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt's final column in a June 16 MRC TimesWatch item, Clay Waters does a poor job of pretending that Hoyt didn't blow Waters' reason for existence -- as stated at the top of the TimesWatch website, "documenting and exposing the liberal political agenda of the New York Times" -- out of the water.
While Hoyt played into Waters' hands by conceding that "the editorial page is liberal and the regular columnists on the Op-Ed page are heavily weighted in that direction," and that the Times "shares the prevailing sensibilities of the city and region where it is published," Hoyt added:
But if The Times were really the Fox News of the left, how could you explain the investigative reporting that brought down Eliot Spitzer, New York’s Democratic governor; derailed the election campaign of his Democratic successor, David Paterson; got Charles Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in ethics trouble; and exposed the falsehoods that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another Democrat, was telling about his service record in the Vietnam era?
Waters' incredibly lame response: "Of course, as the Times is always reminding us, the Republican Party has been decimated in the Northeast in recent years, meaning the region is dominated by Democrats, meaning most political scandals will involve Democrats."
Waters misses the point. If the Times was "the Fox News of the left," it would have ignored or downplayed these stories, and it certainly wouldn't have broken them.
Waters also seems to be conceding that Fox News is egregiously biased, which the MRC has been loathtoadmit in the past. Yet he's not offering to conduct the one bit of research that would settle the question once and for all -- compare a day's worth of content on Fox News to the content of that day's Times.
Perhaps that's because Waters knows that the bias on Fox News is much more plentiful and egregious than it is in the Times. Or perhaps because Waters' research methods are a tad suspect -- as we've detailed, Waters' measure of bias in the Times' reporting on political scandals is how prominently the politician's political affiliation appears in the article, not the length or placement of the article.
MRC's Baker Launches Personal Attack on Couric Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center VP Brent Baker has apparently gotten so lazy he's not even bothering to do actual media research anymore -- he's just launching personal attacks against people.
Take this June 16 NewsBusters post, headlined "Katie Couric Boasts She’ll Be Buying a Prius, the Favorite Car of Obama-Loving Liberals." Baker sneers that Couric will be "confirming her membership in Manhattan’s liberal elite" by buying a Prius, "the favorite of conspicuously superior liberals, or at least a hybrid."
What does this have to do with anything? That's not analysis -- that's hate. Baker is being more elitist than he accuses Couric of being.
And Baker and his fellow travelers wonder why the MRC isn't taken seriously...
The decline of marriage is the major cause of the growth of the welfare state. This year, we the taxpayers are spending $350 billion to support single moms, and this amount increases every year.
That's only the start of the costs because social problems come out of female-headed households: crime, drugs, sex, teen pregnancies, suicides, runaways and school dropouts.
The left is content to let this problem persist, because 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama for president. They vote for the party that offers the richer handouts.
The American people – like me and those celebrated analysts – believe that Obama is simply using the Gulf oil spill crisis to further his agenda, that being the comprehensive government takeover of as many areas of the private sector as possible and implementing big-government collectivism. Some call this communism.
[...]
Well, I have said it before, but it bears reiteration. Serving the American people is the furthest thing from this administration's collective mind. We're dealing with a bunch that creates crises, exploits crises and has been working toward the fall of the republic since their youth. Discounting their capitalizing on tragic (but timely) occurrences, it's pretty much sabotage.
But guess what? The incompetence and corruption for which Illinois is so famous now has its tentacles in the White House. After all, didn't Illinois send its "best and brightest" to Washington, D.C.? And didn't he assemble a cadre of his corrupt, career cronies to help him rape and pillage the whole of America for the benefit of his friends and the Chicago machine?
Of course he did! So here's a prediction. For his next miracle, after calming the water and walking on the oil in the Gulf while planting windmill seeds, Illinois' anointed one will find a way to cover the pensions of state workers in distressed states (that will be almost all of them, soon) under federal guarantees. For which you will pay. And pay. And pay.
This will, of course, cause the public-employee unions to resume kissing the appropriate cheeks of the anointed one, come this fall's elections. And you thought what happened in Chicago, stayed in Chicago!
Why Is Environmental Group 'Left-Wing'? MRC, WND Won't Tell You Topic: Media Research Center
A June 15 Media Research Center item by Brent Baker stated that Ed Chen, current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, "is leaving Bloomberg News to lend his shallow liberal advocacy to the left-wing Natural Resources Defense Council."
How does Baker know that the NRDC is "left-wing"? He doesn't say -- no evidence is offered to support the claim. Baker has simply engaged in lazy name-calling, which, sadly, is the kind of thing that passes for "research" at the MRC.
Following in Baker's lazy footsteps is WorldNetDaily's Chelsea Schilling, who repeats Baker's claims in her June 15 article asserting that Chen is going to engage in "leftist environmental advocacy." Like Baker, Schilling can't be bothered to identifiy exactly what NRDC policies are "leftist."
Since Chen, as head of the the WHCA, refused to allow WND to take over the White House Correspondents' Association banquet, Schilling rehashes all that whining and self-victimization -- and tells a lie in the process.
As WND reported, Chen was at the center of a WND complaint against the White House Correspondents' Association following the association's rejection this year of WND's request for three tables at the annual dinner, a news event as well as a social event in Washington. WND requested and submitted payment for three tables, but the association allocated only a couple of seats, cashing the check for one table.
However, the two seats were unusable because WND had planned to invite personnel and guests to honor Les Kinsolving's tenure as a distinguished White House correspondent and announce the publication of a book, "Gadlfy," about his career, written by his daughter, Kathleen Kinsolving Willmann.
In fact, WND claimed in an April 13 article that it was offered three seats, not two. In Schilling's defense, she's merely copy-and-pasting from a later WND article falsely claiming only two seats were offered.
Further, at no point does Schilling explain how two (or three) seats were "unsuable" for the banquet's primary purpose of eating a meal and enjoying the evening's entertainment. The seatscould easily have been occupied by Kinsolving, Joseph Farah and either Kinsolving's wife or daughter, which would have also sufficiently served the purpose of honoring Kinsolving.
CNS Can't Stop Baselessly Claiming Judge Is 'Lenient' Topic: CNSNews.com
Remember last week, when CNS' Fred Lucas insisted that Obama judicial nominee Robert Chatigny had a "Record of Leniency for Sex Offenders," despite the fact that he offered no evidence of "leniency"? Well, Lucas isn't done baselessly smearing the judge.
In a JUne 15 article headlined "Obama Appellate Court Nominee Gave Lenient Sentences for Sex-Related Crimes," Lucas again tries to promote the idea that Chatigny was "lenient," this time highlighting cases in which Chatigny gave lower sentences than proscribed in federal guidelines. But as before, Lucas blows it, not only by not explaining how that equaates to "leniency" but by providing Chatigny's explanations for the sentences he gave, which sound reasonable to anyone familiar with the law enforcement system.
Lucas makes no effort to counter Chatigny's arguments -- indeed, the word "lenient" appears nowhere in his article.But slapping a headline with the word "lenient" on a story explains nothing.
This looks like another CNS failure to create a controversy where none exists.
WND Mum on Racist Ties of Its New Birther Hero Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has been reduced to cavorting with people with racist ties in order to further its birther obsession.
As we noted, WorldNetDaily's newest birther star, Tim Adams -- a temporary election worker in Hawaii who claims based on what little he saw as a temp worker that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii -- is claiming that Obama was not born in Hawaii, based on his purported (and unverified) searches of databases he claims he had access to as a temp. WND claimed that Adams was "briefly interviewed by James Edwards, host of a weekly radio show on WLRM Radio in Memphis, Tenn." In fact, Edwards is the host of a radio show called "The Political Cesspool," which claims as its philosophy: "We represent a philosophy that is pro-White ... We wish to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races." Further, Edwards taped his interview with Adams at the 2010 National Conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a decendent of the openly racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s that the Anti-Defamation League describes as having a "white supremacy, white separatism" ideology.
Now, Media Matters reports that Edwards wrote on his blog that he was "working in cooperation" with WND news editor Joe Kovacs to promote the Allen story, which resulted in "tons of new visitors" and "huge national exposure."
As if that behavior wasn't unsavory enough, Media Matters also notes that the white-nationalist website Stormfront.org have enthusiastically reposted WND's articles on Adams.
If WND is working with sources to create news as opposed to reporting the news, it is no longer a news organization. If WND is working with racists and white supremacists, that raises serious questions about the motivation of WND's incessant opposition to Obama.
Needless to say, Kovacs' latest WND story on Allen doesn't say a thing about his racist connections or Kovac's cooperation with a white supremacist to advance the story.
If WND has to rely on racists to promote the birther story, doesn't that mean there's no reliable evidence to support it? And doesn't that mean that Joseph Farah and his WND crew are more than a bit racist themselves?
The MRC's Lazy, Biased 'Reality Check' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center doesn't really believe in media research; its goal is to track right-wing talking points (or the lack of them) in the media.
An excellent example of how this works is a June 10 "Media Reality Check" by Tim Graham, in which he complains that "the network news bosses at ABC, CBS, and NBC" have not referenced a ginned-up "scandal" in which Obama administration officials allegedly offered Joe Sestak a job as encouragement to quit his challenge of Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic primary.
Graham howled that Graham "kept any mention of this possible quid pro quo off the airwaves of their morning and evening news programs for more than three months." But there's no depth whatsoever to his analysis. There's no mention of the fact that the Bush and Reagan administrations also made offers to prospective candidates to keep them out of races, let alone any examination of how the media covered those accusations.
Graham tries to deflect such criticism by claiming that the Obama administration is unlike other administrations: "The networks cannot plausibly claim that this job-dangling is not a news story because it’s a commonly sleazy practice – not after years of claiming the choice of Obama was so idealistic and inspiring." That's a cop-out -- Graham is not only trying to justify his laziness, he's tacitly admitting the Republican administrations he's so fond of are so corrupt that such actions were not newsworthy when committed by them.
It's the ultimate double standard -- actions deemed scandalous when conducted by a Democrat are not worthy of mention when conducted by Republicans.
That shallow and craven commentary is what passes for "media criticism" at the MRC.
So WND was incredibly eager to jump on a claim that some Egyptian official is claiming that President Obama told him that he is a Muslim, with Bob Unruh -- WND's king of biased reporting -- pounding out a story treating the claim as if it was real.
It's not until the 15th paragraph that Unruh hints there may be a problem: "There was no independent verification of the statement."
Even the right-wing Hot Air proceded with caution on the story, pointing out that the video supplied "will not confirm that Barack Obama made the statements claimed."
WND and Unruh don't need no stinkin' verification. They hate Obama so much, they no longer care about the truth (if they ever did).They will spread every smear and lie about him because they can.
Another Right-Wing Zombie Lie in the Making? Topic: WorldNetDaily
We’ve previously written about zombie lies in the right-wing media -- claims long ago disproven yet still cited as fact. It seems there’s a new zombie lie in the making: the claim that the cap-and-trade bill was written by BP.
Several days after PolitiFact declared Sen. Mitch McConnell’s claim that BP wrote the energy bill sponsored by Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman to be false, Janet Porter was repeating it in her June 15 WorldNetDaily column:
What you may not know is that the BP candidate [Obama] will address the BP spill with a bill written by … BP!
No kidding. According to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., "a major part" of the Kerry-Lieberman cap-and-trade/global-warming bill was "essentially written by BP."
What to do about the BP oil spill? Let's pound on the podium about it. Let's take some pictures about it. And let's … pass the BP-drafted tax bill for government control!
In fact, as PolitiFact explained, while BP was one of many parties who floated ideas for the bill, “saying that the senators listened to BP's case is not the same as saying that ‘a major part’ of the bill ‘was essentially written by BP.’ " Further, three major initiatives pushed by BP do not even appear in the current version of the bill.
Porter went on to quote from a June 9 CNSNews.com article that quoted McConnell claiming “BP actually helped write” the cap-and-trade bill. But that was merely a report on McConnell’s remarks, and no apparent attempt was made to verify what he said. To the contrary: CNS quoted Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe endorsing McConnell’s claim.
A search of CNS’ archives indicates that CNS has yet to report the fact that McConnell’s claim has been shown to be false.
Between right-wing columnists’ embrace of this false claim and the right-wing media’s apparent disinterest in correcting the record, we may have ourselves a new zombie lie in the making.
