AIM Falsely Portrays Franken As 'Illegitimate Senator' Topic: Accuracy in Media
A July 16 Accuracy in Media column by Gary Larson, under the headline "Illegitimate Senator Al Franken," embraces "an 18-month study of Minnesota voting in the ‘08 election" claiming that "Convicted felons and ACORN-driven voters handed the wacky “Saturday Night Live” guy a slim win in the 2008 election in Minnesota."
Unfortunately for Larson, the "study" by the right-wing group Minnesota Majority lacks credibility. As we've detailed, there's plenty of evidence debunking the study's conclusions, including the number of purported convicted felons accused of voting.
Larson also rehashes baseless attacks on the recount process in the election between Franken and Norm Coleman, claiming that "it was clear to all, even local DFLers, that rules for tossing-out absentee ballots were far stricter in Republican-strong precincts, tightly observing election laws, than in loosey-goosey Democrat precincts, where nearly anything went."
Larson offers no evidence to support this claim, perhaps because he can't -- experts agree that the election was extrordinarily fraud-free.
A July 12 WorldNetDaily article by Drew Zahn promotes evangelist Bill Keller's plan for a "9-11 Christian Center" in Manhattan to counter a proposed mosque near the site of the World Trade Center; according to Keller, he wants to "combat the lies of this world and Islam with the Truth." And it is a promotion: Zahn's article concludes with instructions on how to donate to it.
Zahn describes Keller only has head of "LivePrayer.com, an Internet ministry that claims over 2.4 million subscribers," which hides the extent of Keller's extremism. As Richard Bartholomew details, Islam is not the only thing Keller seeks to "combat"; he has also attacked Jews (he considers Kaballah a "cult") and Mormons "a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan").
Further, Keller is a rabid, WND-worther Obama-hater. Keller's website portrays President Obama as an "Enemy of God," andhe was also the producer of a sad little birther informercial starring Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation, a birther lawyer with close ties to WND.
Kessler Can't Stop Lying About Obama Topic: Newsmax
For at leastthefifthtime, Ronald Kessler has asserted that "In a Sept. 6, 2001, radio interview, Obama expressed regret that the Supreme Court hadn’t engaged in wealth redistribution." This time was in a July 15 Newsmax column.
It isn't any truer than it was the first four times he asserted it. Obama actually said that because the Supreme Court under Earl Warren did not address "redistributive change," it was evidence that the court was not as far-left as its critics have claimed. And Obama's "regret" was specifically aimed at the civil rights movement for overly relying on the court system to advance its agenda.
This latest assertion comes in a screed claiming that "Obama abhors capitalism. If you doubt that, look at his own words — and the words of his wife."
You only need to look at Kesslers words to know that he abhors Obama -- and, thus, cannot be trusted to write accurately about him.
CNS Still Pushing False Abortion Funding Claim Topic: CNSNews.com
We've previously detailed how CNSNews.com treated false claims that the Obama administration is funding elective abortions as fact, and when CNS finally got around to publishing the fact that it was not occurring, it was treated as a he-said, she-said claim instead of the correction it should have been.
Now, it's like that corrective article never even existed. A July 16 article by Matt Cover asserts that "Maryland will join Pennsylvania as the second state to use federal tax dollars to pay for abortions under the new health care law signed by President Barack Obama in March, according to information released by Maryland’s State Health Insurance Plan."
Cover cites no actual evidence for this claim; all he does is quote a Republican congressman and pulls parts of the Maryland law out of context. Nowhere does Cover note -- as his fellow CNS writer Susan Jones eventually got around to reporting the day before -- that both the Health and Human Services and Rep. Bart Stupak have pointed out that federal money going to the high-risk insurance program that the feds are funding in Pennsylvania and Maryland, which Cover is referencing, will not be allowed to pay for abortions beyond those allowed under the Hyde Amendment, which limits abortions to cases of rape, incest and the threatened life of the mother.
And neither Cover nor Jones have ever mentioned that, according to the Pennsylvania insurance department, high-risk insurance pools are not exactly hotbeds of abortion, elective or otherwise, since the reason people are in the pool in the first place is because of pre-existing conditions that preclude them from getting health insurance anywhere else.
Let's not pretend that Cover, Jones and CNS care anything about factual reporting. All they're interested in is promoting right-wing talking points, and the truth doesn't matter.
Joseph Farah Is Still A Hypocrite Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember when we noted the utter hypocrisy of Joseph Farah in denouncing Fox News for having a Saudi investor but still being eager for him and his WND minions appear on the channel? Well, he's still at it.
Farah's July 16 column is yet another attack on Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for being "a major, one might even say pivotal, stockholder in Fox's parent company, News Corp." Again, it appears Farah's real beef is that Fox didn't cover a WND-published anti-Muslim book.
Is it possible the reason Fox never covered the breathtaking investigative book "Muslim Mafia" – a groundbreaking exposé of the Council on American-Islamic Relations – is because Alwaleed donated $500,000 to the group? Is it possible this is why CAIR, a group the U.S. Justice Department and FBI both say unequivocally is tied to terrorism, still finds the welcome mat rolled out at Fox?
And again, Farah's actions betray his angry words. Guess who appeared on "Fox & Friends this past week? Why, none other than WND columnist Chrissy Satterfield (she of the endorsing-vandalism-of-atheists).
Wouldn't a person who genuinely had the courage of his convictions forbid his writers to appear on Fox News in protest of Alaweed's investment in News Corp.? Yes, but that person is not Joseph Farah.
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Ben Shapiro Division Topic: CNSNews.com
The Obama administration is racist. They are using that racism to let black criminals off the hook, justify illegal immigration, hamstring law enforcement across the country, and push redistribution as a solution to supposed continuing discrimination against “people of color.”
[...]
Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to ramp up the anti-white rhetoric. This is nothing new. Holder famously called us a “nation of cowards” on racial matters last year; Obama himself called his white grandmother a “typical white person” and blasted the Cambridge Police Department for racial profiling; Michelle Obama wrote her Princeton thesis on how white folks were racists; Michelle and Barack went to Rev. Wright’s racist church for 20 years.
They’ve all just upped the ante recently. Now Holder says that the Arizona law will promote racial profiling; Obama agrees with him; and Michelle Obama visits the NAACP, where she tells the black audience to “increase our intensity.”
What’s their motivation? Supposedly, the Obama administration is simply fired up by the presence of the tea partiers, in the same way the KKK was fired up by the presence of voting blacks in the South. Black Democrats in the House have fabricated claims of tea partiers shouting the “n-word,” even as they ignore white union members shouting the “n-word” at black tea partier Kenneth Gladney. The NAACP claims that the tea party is “racist,” with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous telling members that his goal was to pour “ice on the tea party.”
That’s just an excuse. The Obama administration is racist. They are using that racism to let black criminals off the hook, justify illegal immigration, hamstring law enforcement across the country, and push redistribution as a solution to supposed continuing discrimination against “people of color.”
-- Ben Shapiro, July 15 syndicated column, published by CNSNews.com
Mark Crutcher writes in his July 16 WorldNetDaily column:
Let's see if I've got this straight.
First, the country elects a godless Marxist as president.
Second, in order to ram through one of his pet socialist projects, this moral degenerate stands in front of the American people and solemnly promises that his government-run health-care system will not pay for abortions.
Third, less than four months later, government funding of abortions is discovered to be already in place in at least two states.
To put it succinctly, Comrade Obama was lying through his blood-stained teeth. Of course, this is precisely what those of us in the pro-life movement were saying all along, only to be ridiculed and dismissed by the abortion-lobby stooges who dominate the media.
Crutcher is a hateful little liar. The government is not funding abortions beyond what is currently permitted under the Hyde Amendment.
In a July 15 WorldNetDaily column, Corsi asserts that President Obama has an “association with the New Black Panther Party.” How so? Because the NBPP once had a user-generated page on the website for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. No, really, that’s all Corsi has for “proof.”
Then, Corsi approvingly cites David Duke to make a “point”:
The New Black Panther Party posting as an Obama fan on the campaign website was clearly polarizing, drawing at the time the criticism of yet another racial extremist in the person of David Duke, the Louisiana former state representative who discredited himself as an outspoken white supremacist and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
"Now that Obama has a real chance to be president and needs white support, he claims to condemn Rev. Wright," Duke wrote on his website March 25, 2008. "In fact, Obama's official website even welcomes the support of a racist, communist black organization such as the Black Panthers, an organization with a long history of violence against white Americans."
The point is not that David Duke is right. Clearly, Duke's racism demands to be condemned just as does the racism of the New Black Panther Party.
The point is that instead of making race a non-issue, President Obama's record is that he polarizes race issues, perhaps because deep down he intellectually agrees with the radical polemics he admits in his autobiography were his intellectual pillars growing up -- including anti-white firebrands such as Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon.
Is David Duke really the best example Corsi could come up with to validate his “point”? If so, that would seem to be further evidence of something we already knew about Corsi -- that he’s all too comfortable around white supremacists.
As Media Matters has detailed, Corsi had appeared in 2008 on a radio show called “The Political Cesspool,” which declares that it "represent[s] a philosophy that is pro-White." After word got out about Corsi’s follow-up appearance on the show to promote his Obama smear book, he canceled it. We don’t recall Corsi demanding any condemnation of racism then, which makes Corsi’s call for it regarding Duke more than a little disingenuous.
(This radio show, you may recall, is the same one on which WorldNetDaily’s latest birther hero, Tim Adams, first made his unsubstantiated claim that there is no Obama birth certificate in Hawaii; at the time, he was attending a convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as having a "white supremacy, white separatism" ideology. WND has tried to portray anyone pointing this out as running a “vicious smear campaign” against Adams, but it’s never been explained why he was on a “pro-White” show or at the convention of a white-supremacist group in the first place.)
If the best backup for Corsi's “point” is David Duke, then perhaps that point isn’t worth making.
Corsi goes on to write, “The issue of the New Black Panther Party has the potential to dog Barack Obama, much as the Rev. Wright issue did during the 2008 campaign and the professor Gates controversy did in the first months of his presidency.” Corsi most assuredly wants to make that “potential” into reality.
CNS Won't Treat False Claim on Abortion Funding As False Topic: CNSNews.com
A July 14 CNSNews.com article by Susan Jones began:
If you want proof that President Obama's Executive Order on taxpayer-funded abortion was a sham, look no further than Pennsylvania, says House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio).
Boehner and other Republicans point to reports that the Health and Human Services Department is giving Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new high-risk insurance pool that will cover any abortion that is legal in the state.
Jones went on to treat those reports as true, making no apparent attempt to verify the claim.
Guess what? It's not true.
Jones followed up with a July 15 article that's not exactly a correction, but it tells the other side of the story she couldn't be bothered to get the day before. Instead of properly portraying it as the correction it is, Jones framed it as a he-said, she-said. Her article began:
Several Democrats say pro-life conservatives have it wrong: They say the $160 million taxpayer dollars going to fund Pennsylvania's new high-risk insurance pool will not fund abortion, except in cases of rape or incest, or where the "life of the woman would be endangered."
Jones then spent the next four paragraphs repeating the false claim beforegetting around to statements by federal officials and Rep. Bart Stupak discrediting it.
Jones closed her article with a section titled "‘Elective abortions are not covered’ – or are they?" in which she repeats yet again the National Right to Life Committee's discredited assertion that abortion is covered.
If CNS is not going to treat facts as facts and discredited claims as discredited claims, why is it even pretending to be a "news" organization?
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Dehumanizing Terms Topic: NewsBusters
In a July 13 NewsBusters post, Tim Graham is upset that the AP described a 6-month-old fetus killed in an assult as, well, a fetus. Graham quoted a 2008 column by his boss, Brent Bozell, calling "fetus" a "cold, humanity-negating word."
It can be easily argued that the term " illegal alien" is also a "cold, humanity-negating word" -- after all, an undocumented person is not an "alien," he's human. But NewsBusters uses that term all the time. And even Bozell wrote a column headlined "The Pro-Illegal Alien Media."
Imposing conservative correctness on the issue of immigration, however, does not pay the politicial dividends that it does on the issue of abortion. Even Graham and Bozell know that.
WND's Schilling Lies About Reid, Illegal Immigrants Topic: WorldNetDaily
A July 13 WorldNetDaily article by Chelsea Schilling states:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims there are no illegal aliens working in the construction business in Nevada – the same U.S. state that is reported to have the highest percentage of "unauthorized immigrants" in the labor force.
Responding to a Pew Hispanic Center study that shows 17 percent of all construction workers are in the U.S. illegally, Reid told Las Vegas 8NewsNow, "That may be some place, but it's not here in Nevada."
Schilling is lying -- Reid never said that "there are no illegal aliens working in the construction business in Nevada."
From the full video of Reid's comments to a Las Vegas TV station:
BACA: But if you go to the unemployment office, though, there's many U.S. citizens who are unemployed construction workers, and they don't have specific jobs because right now, some of those construction companies find it easier to hire undocumented workers.
REID: I think that any information you have in that regard is absolutely without foundation.
BACA: The Pew Hispanic Trust, though, says that about 14 percent of illegal immigrants -- 14 percent of construction workers are unauthorized immigrants.
REID: That may be some place, but it's not here in Nevada.
Reid is clearly saying that he disagrees that 14 percent of construction workers in Nevada are undocumented -- not that there are no undocumented construction workers in Nevada.
This is just another in the long list of false and misleading claims Schilling has made that WND has not seen fit to correct.
New Article: David Patten's Army of Bias Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's managing editor slavishly follows the conservative line and sycophantically promotes top right-wing figures. Read more >>
Media Matters' Simon Maloy details how NewsBusters' Tim Graham expresses outrage that the New York Times committed the conservatively incorrect sin of reporting criticism of the killing of geese in order to increase airline safety, he treats a parody Facebook page supporting the geese, which has a total of 15 followers, as something serious and of national concern.
Graham now has a note at the top of his post saying, "I should have noticed that the "Stop the Goose Holocaust" page on Facebook is an animal-rights parody."
Another Aaron Klein Guilt-By-Association Classic Topic: WorldNetDaily
Gulit-by-associationmaestro Aaron Klein turns in another stellar effort in which he intimates much wrongdoing but proves absolutely nothing.
Here's how Klein's July 13 WorldNetDaily article starts:
A federal bill that seeks to restore voting rights in national elections to felons released from prison previously was a pet project of the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was briefed on state laws governing voting-rights restoration for former felons encountered during general voter-registration drives.
The information comes as a study released this week by Minnesota Majority, a watchdog group, found the six-month election recount that determined Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate seat may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally.
Klein offers no evidence whatsoever there's anything wrong with restoring voting rights to "felons released from prison" or advising former felons of their voting rights. Indeed, there's nothing at all wrong with it. Whether it was a "pet project" of ACORN is utterly irrelevant -- just another desperate attempt at guilt by association.
Regarding the claim that "convicted felons who voted illegally" gave the win to Franken, Klein fails to report evidence debunking the Minnesota Majority "study."
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that "[i]nitial reviews by state and local officials, however, indicate that the problem may be far smaller than the group found in a recent study being championed by the Minnesota Republican Party." The Star Tribune added that "the group's reports are likely inflated and hard to verify because of difficulties determining whether the suspected felon voters had their voting rights restored, if they knew they were ineligible to vote, or if they were actually the people whose names appear on voter rolls."
MinnPost quoted a county election official saying that "much of their data is not good," adding, "Of the 475 cases Minnesota Majority questioned, 270 examples were just not accurate":
There are reasons for so many inaccuracies, Carruthers said. For example, because of data privacy laws, Minnesota Majority was able only to get year of birth of many of the people they claimed had voted illegally. But, for the group to be sure it had the right individual, it would have needed the actual date of birth.
“In a state with so many Johnsons,’’ said [county prosecutor Phil] Carruthers, “you have many people with the same name born in the same year. You have to have date of birth, to be sure you have the right person.’’
[...]
Additionally, Carruthers said, Minnesota Majority would not have had access to changes in sentencing. For example, a person who initially had been sentenced to 10 years of probation may have had that probation reduced during the period of the sentence. At that point, the individual’s civil rights - including the right to vote - would have been restored.
Of course, Klein doesn't believe in telling the truth when the truth interferes with his anti-Obama agenda.
WND's White House Coverage Is About Kinsolving, Not White HOuse Topic: WorldNetDaily
Most news organizations, when covering a press briefing, treat what is said by the person in the briefing as news. WorldNetDaily, however, is more concerned about whether its "reporter" gets to ask questions.
Thus, WND's coverage of White House press briefings is totally centered around whether Les Kinsolving is called on. Such is the case in a July 13 article complaining that Kinsolving, "WND's correspondent at the White House and the second most senior reporter on the beat, was bypassed today at the daily news briefing with press secretary Robert Gibbs."
This descended into a third-person view of the situation: "Kinsolving, who has been at the post since he began covering the executive branch during the Nixon administration, reports that he has been excluded from daily access to the White House more under President Obama's spokesman, Gibbs, than during the tenures of any of the 14 other press secretaries with whom he has worked." Who did Kinsolving say this to? Why is he unable to report this himself?
The answer is that Kinsolving is not, in fact, a "reporter." As Eric Boehlert has noted, Kinsolving is a radio host who pushes right-wing talking points masquerading as questions. He hasn't done any real reporting in years and certainly doesn't do any for WND, where his byline appears only on an opinion column.
WND helpfully serves up the questions Kinsolving would have asked, which only proves the point that Kinsolving isn't interested in actual reporting:
Kinsolving was prepared to ask: "Does the president think it was right -- or wrong -- for the authors of Medicare to exempt Congress?" and "Does the president agree or disagree with officials of the Health and Human Services agency advisory committee on blood safety and availability, who in a 9-6 vote decided against allowing MSM (men who have sex with men) to donate blood?"
Kinsolving has a longtime obsession with homosexuality, repeatedlydenouncing what he calls the "Sodomy Lobby."
As Boehlert pointed out, Kinsolving is similar to Helen Thomas in that they are both opinion-based writers and not actual reporters. While WND has repeatedly demanded that Kinsolving be accorded respect for being "the second most senior reporter" in the White House briefing room, it offered no such respect to Thomas; for instance, when the syndicator of Ann Coulter's column eliminated a description of Thomas as an "old Arab," WND restored it.
Meanwhile, WND launched a hissy fit -- well, more to the point, a lawsuit -- over not getting as many seats as it demanded for the White House Correspondents Dinner. WND claimed it "needed three tables in order to bring its personnel and distinguished guests to the event, [to honor] Les Kinsolving's tenure as a distinguished White House correspondent, and his daughter, Kathleen Kinsolving Willmann, has just written a book about his career, entitled 'Gadfly.' " When WND didn't get what it wanted, Joseph Farah took his ball and went home and wouldn't even allow Kinsolving to attend.
Boehlert and others have noted that an offensive comment by Thomas caused her to hastily give up her seat in the briefing room, while Kinsolving makes similarly outrageous comments -- like promoting birther conspiracy theories -- without any apparent repercussion, let alone cries for him to lose his press pass.
Neither Kinsolving nor WND seem to have put two and two together -- that it's questions like those (not to mention WND's vehementlyanti-Obama agenda) that keep him and his employer from being taken seriously by Gibbs. Or, indeed, anyone else.
