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Friday, December 13, 2013
NewsBusters' Sheffield Wants To Know Why Author of Murdoch Book Didn't Write About NY Times
Topic: NewsBusters

A Dec. 8 NewsBusters post by Matthew Sheffield is a transcript of his interview with David Folkenflik, NPR media critic and author of a new book on Rupert Murdoch. The interview was actually surprisingly balanced for the most part, given that the MRC has generally dismissed Folkenflik as a liberal -- two months ago, Tim Graham was dismissing his book.

But there was one bugaboo that exposed Sheffield for the talking points-spouting right-wing ideologue he is instead of the new-media guru he'd like to be seen as: his obsession with the New York Times.

Sheffield asks Folkenflik why he doesn't consider the Times' Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in the same space as Murdoch as among the last of the old-style media barons. Folkenflik pointed out that Murdoch built his company while Sulzberger inherited it and, unlike Murdoch, has been shedding many of its non-core assets.

Later in the interview, Sheffield does his best to downplay the phone-hacking scandal Murdoch's British newspapers perpetrated,  asking Folkenflik why he wrote about something "most Americans have probably have never even heard of and probably don’t really even care about." Folkenflik repsonds that the papers at the heart of the scandal were Murdoch's first major purchases outside of Australia and were a springboard to his empire, and that the company officials tied to the scandal were close to Murdoch.

But that wasn't enough for Sheffield, who tried to drag the Times back into it again:

Yes but there is a real dichotomy between the coverage, and I’m not just saying in your book here since it’s about Murdoch, but Mark Thompson, the current head of the New York Times, he was in charge of the BBC during the time it was revealed that they found out about an ongoing, decades-long sexual molestation of children that the British celebrity Jimmy Savile did. I mean that was far worse than anything News of the World ever did and yet Mark Thompson—I mean the BBC knew about that he was doing this and didn’t tell the public, didn’t tell the police and so as a result, it’s almost certain that children were molested because that knowledge was kept from the public.

And yet Mark Thompson, even in your own coverage, you only covered him and his involvement twice. And yet—it seems to me—

[...]

Yeah, but you see what I’m saying here, right? Mark Thompson is in charge of the most influential paper, as you put it earlier, in the world perhaps and certainly within the United States and yet he was involved perhaps, and no one knows for sure to what extent he was involved compared to with Murdoch. I mean couldn’t you say that Mark Thompson set the culture that led to the suppression of that information about Jimmy Savile? I mean why aren’t we hearing about that?

Folkenflik patiently explains the difference to Sheffield:

FOLKENFLIK: But you can’t say that Mark Thompson created the BBC. Murdoch didn’t create News of the World but he utterly changed what it was. He completely changed what the Sun newspaper was. And it’s not a comparison because the BBC would be something approximating the BBC whether or not Mark Thompson had ever been born. And I just don’t think you can say that about Rupert Murdoch.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah but—

FOLKENFLIK: Murdoch took it from a paper in Adelaide [Australia] and made it something with a market cap in many tens of billions. That’s a very different proposition. So I don’t want in any way anyone to misconstrue my comments into suggesting that what happened with Mark Thompson wasn’t important. The BBC is not an American institution although it has a real presence here. The New York Times Company obviously is an important one. It’s a very important newspaper and news organization. And it was important to direct coverage of that but there’s been ongoing investigations and there’s been some coverage of the results of those investigations and those crimes are horrific as alleged and in some cases acknowledged but I think they’re just different stories.

If you want to go do a history of the BBC, I would think this would be an incredibly complex and brutal chapter and I would think it would be an appropriate one to do. And that’s not the story I set out to tell.

Sheffield's colleagues at the Media Research Center have long tried to downplay the importance of the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal and shield Fox News from its fallout.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:42 PM EST
Death Of Hawaiian Official Reignites WND's Birther Fire
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily has spent the past year following President Obama's re-election playing down its increasingly discredited birther obsession -- presumably because it was destroying what little was left of WND's credibility. But the death of a Hawaiian official has reignited WND's birther fire.

Loretta Fuddy, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, was killed in a small-plane crash on Dec. 11. Bob Unruh immediately hints at sinister motives in a Dec. 12 WND article, pointing out that she was "a key Hawaii official in the dispute over Barack Obama’s birth certificate – who lifted state restrictions to allow the White House to present the document to the public." Then he launches into a boilerplate recitation of birther talking points:

The one official law enforcement investigation into the issue, conducted on the orders of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, concluded the document posted by the White House is a forgery.

Arpaio has said the investigation is ongoing and more evidence has been discovered to bolster his team’s conclusion.

WND reported Mike Zullo, the lead investigator for Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse in Arizona, has contributed evidence to a court case pending before the Alabama Supreme Court.

He has testified that the White House computer image of Obama’s birth certificate contains anomalies that are unexplainable unless the document had been fabricated piecemeal by human intervention, rather than being copied from a genuine paper document.

“Mr. Obama has in fact not offered any verifiable authoritative document of any legal significance or possessing any evidentiary value as to the origins of his purported birth narrative or location of the birth event,” he explained. “One of our most serious concerns is that the White House document appears to have been fabricated piecemeal on a computer, constructed by drawing together digitized data from several unknown sources.”

Well, no. As we've noted, researchers have found that the purported anomalies in the PDF of the Obama birth certificate that  Zullo, Jerome Corsi and others have pounced on are easily replicated by scanning the image into a Xerox Workcentre 7655 multifunction printer. WND has never reported this development, nor has Zullo and Corsi acknowledgegd it.

Unruih goes to write:

More recently, Grace Vuoto of the World Tribune reported that among the experts challenging the birth certificate is certified document analyst Reed Hayes, who has served as an expert for Perkins Coie, the law firm that has been defending Obama in eligibility cases.

“We have obtained an affidavit from a certified document analyzer, Reed Hayes, that states the document is a 100 percent forgery, no doubt about it,” Zullo told the World Tribune.

“Mr. Obama’s operatives cannot discredit [Hayes],” the investigator told the news outlet. “Mr. Hayes has been used as the firm’s reliable expert. The very firm the president is using to defend him on the birth certificate case has used Mr. Hayes in their cases.”

[...]

Hayes produced a 40-page report in which he says “based on my observations and findings, it is clear that the Certificate of Live Birth I examined is not a scan of an original paper birth certificate, but a digitally manufactured document created by utilizing material from various sources.”

In fact, Hayes can be -- and has been -- very easily discredited. As we've also noted, Reed is an expert in handwriting analysis, and no evidence has been provided that he has any experience examining a computer copy of a document. Further, Zullo has so far refused to make Hayes' report public so others can examine his conclusions.

Unruh then writes:

Investigator Douglas J. Hagmann of the Northeast Intelligence Network reported this month that in October an affidavit was filed in a court case, under seal, that purportedly identifies the creator of the Obama birth certificate.

He said Douglas Vogt, an author and the owner and operator of a scanning business who also has an accounting background, invested over two years in an investigation of the authenticity of document.

Vogt, along with veteran typesetter Paul Ivey, conducted “exhaustive research of the document provided to the White House Press Corps on April 27, 2011 – not the online PDF, a critical distinction that must be understood,” Hagmann said.

In fact, as Dr. Conspiracy documents, Vogt's dissertation on the birth certificate fails to do something as basic as identifying or addressing the actual software used by the White House to create the PDF issued by the White House, thus giving him no basis to discuss the contents of a legitimate document. Vogt's dissertation also contains numerous factual and analytical errors.

Meanwhile, Irey has backtracked on some of the claims he has made about the birth certificate.

Of course, Unruh mentions none of the evidence that contradicts the birthers' claims or even the birthers' own admissions that some claims are wrong. But Unruh did find the space to reprint the opinions of non-experts like Donald Trump and Christopher Monckton.

The fact that Unruh is still dutifully regurgitating birther claims long after they've been discredited -- and won't even inform his readers there's another side to the story -- is just another reason nobody believes WND.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:35 AM EST
Thursday, December 12, 2013
CNS Fights Against Bipartisan Budget Deal (And Loses)
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com isn't even bothering to live up to its mission statement to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story" in its coverage of the bipartisan budget deal. The hate it, and aren't afraid of skewing its coverage to show it.

A "news" article by editor in chief Terry Jeffrey carries the overly long headline "Debt Up $3T In Less Than 3 Yrs Under Boehner's Deals; More Than Under All Presidents from Washington Through Reagan"  -- apparently, Jeffrey wanted his opinion made clear even if nobody read the article. Another CNS article goes after Boehner by highlighting his criticism of conservative opponents to the budget deal (like Jeffrey and CNS). CNS also scares up a right-wing congressman to criticize the deal.

The opinion pieces are just as slanted. One carries the headline "Budget Deal Is a Huge Republican Cave-In," and another lists "3 Things You Need to Know About Congressional Budget Deal," none of which are crafted for right-wingers to like.

But CNS' blatant editorializing didn't work -- the House approved the budget deal in a landslide.

Perhaps CNS might have a little more sway if it actually lived up to its mission statement and reported in a fair and balanced fashion.


Posted by Terry K. at 10:33 PM EST
WND Fearmongers About Black Crime in South Africa
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The last time we saw Alex Newman writing for WorldNetDaily, he was whitewashing the racism of the white supremacist Afrikaners in South Africa he quoted fearing for the future of whites there.

In his Dec. 9 WND article -- with the alarmist headline "Can whites escape post-Mandela bloodbath?" -- Newman appears to have avoided quoting white supremacists this time around, but he doesn't skimp on the racial fearmongering:

With the death of South African revolutionary icon Nelson Mandela, outside analysts and locals alike are expressing fear of a coming genocide of European-descent Afrikaners.

So significant is the threat in South Africa, some genocide experts are urging Afrikaners to consider fleeing their homeland.

[...]

Moments after Mandela’s death was announced last week by current South African President Jacob Zuma, threats of killings and mayhem began appearing online.

Sources from South Africa told WND – and reporters on the scene confirmed – residents in many areas began taking up the traditional, so-called “struggle songs,” which sing not just of liberating the black population, but pledge the mass-murder of whites. There are many songs and variations on them, but among the most common themes are “kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” “bring me my machine gun” and similar genocidal topics.

While officially considered “hate speech” – even incitement to genocide – the songs advocating the mass-murder of European-descent South Africans were popular with Mandela and remain a regular feature of politics. Even the current president, Jacob Zuma, regularly sings the songs at political rallies.

Newman doesn't mention that South Africa's current murder rate is the same as it was in 1970 -- and it's likely lower given that crime data from South Africa's independent homelands were likely underreported or not reported at all during the 1970s.

Newman also doesn't mention that there are also racist whites in South Africa, some of whom are militant -- like the ones he quoted in his June WND article.

But that would have interfered with the race-baiting that has become such a staple of WND's "news" coverage lately.


Posted by Terry K. at 9:09 PM EST
Noel Sheppard's Laser-Guided Bias
Topic: NewsBusters

Oh, Noel Sheppard. You never cease to amaze us with all you do as NewsBusters associate editor, from having trouble with the truth to being shocked by the non-shocking to using anti-Semitic images (twice). Now we can only sit and marvel at your laser-guided bias.

In a Dec. 10 post, Sheppard goes off on Dan Rather for continuing to insist that his  2004 "60 Minutes" story about George W. Bush's National Guard service was true (never mind that he has a point). "The documents Rather presented that fateful night in September 2004 were clearly forgeries. Not one person has come forward since proving they weren't," Sheppard rants. "Yet here he is nine years later saying on national television, 'No question the story was true.'"

Sheppard plucked that sentence out of a much larger statement on a issue his Media Research Center employers are loath to talk about: Lara Logan's "60 Minutes" story on Benghazi featuring a man who was later found out to be a liar. The MRC has almost completely ignored the Logan scandal; even though Sheppard includes the full transcript of Rather's remarks, he doesn't comment on what Rather said about Logan.

Sheppard followed that up with more laser-guided bias in a Dec. 11 post that invoked more Sheppard standbys, the tired headline cliche (this time, "smacks down") and misleading about global warming:

For years, climate alarmists have dishonestly accused global warming skeptics of taking money from Big Oil to do their bidding.

On CNN’s 11th Hour Tuesday, when Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune made such a claim, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano marvelously fired back, “The Sierra Club took 26 million from natural gas and Michael has the audacity to try to imply that skeptics are fossil fuel funded”[.]

Sheppard forgot to mention one little thing: Brune was right. Morano's Climate Depot is sponsored by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a conservative think tank that has received funding from ExxonMobil and Chevron. And, like Sheppard, Morano is a climate change misinformer and gets paid handsomely for doing so.

Don't ever change, Noel -- you provide so much material for us.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:47 PM EST
WND's Farah Thinks Nobody Has Challenged His Mandela-Bashing
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Joseph Farah writes in his Dec. 10 WorldNetDaily column:

Forgive me if I don’t mourn for Mandela. I mourn instead for his victims. I mourn instead for those martyrs being persecuted, tortured and killed every day around the world for their faith in God. I mourn instead for the tens of millions of innocent victims of Communism and other forms of totalitarianism Mandela promoted.

By the way, though my commentaries on Mandela have been read by hundreds of thousands of people in the last week, not a single person has questioned even one of the facts I have reported that indict his semi-official narrative.

You wound us, sir. Perhaps you missed our item detailing how you took Mandela's refusal to accept a condition to renounce terrorism as a condition for leaving prison out of context, ignoring the fact that his freedom would be meaningless in a country that still practiced apartheid. (Not to mention the fact that your denunciation of Mandela for attempting to overthrow the government" doesn't extend to your own employees like Larry Klayman and Erik Rush.)

Apparently Farah did miss what we wrote, because it said again:

He was not a “political prisoner” for 27 years, as is often reported, but was convicted of specific acts of sabotage and revolutionary activity. He was offered many opportunities to walk out of prison a free man if he simply denounced violence and terrorism. He refused.

There's a reason we've gotten so mileage out of the graphic that accompanies this post -- Farah just can't stop telling lies, even when it's blatantly obvious he's lying. And Farah just can't seem to understand that his mendacity is just one of many reasons nobody believes WND.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:30 AM EST
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
NEW ARTICLE: Brent Bozell: A Profile in Hypocrisy
Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center head denounces Martin Bashir, but couldn't be moved to condemn Rush Limbaugh's misogyny against Sandra Fluke -- which he's now saying wasn't that offensive at all. Read more >>

Posted by Terry K. at 11:19 PM EST
WND Calls On Its Resident Race-Baiters To Predict Downward Spiral for NYC Under De Blasio
Topic: WorldNetDaily

When it came to predicting gloom and doom for New York City under newly elected mayor Bill De Blasio, WorldNetDaily knew exactly who to turn to: its in-house race-baiters Jack Cashill and Colin Flaherty.

Cashill -- who has been flailing to portray George Zimmerman as a civil rights martyr, and sell some books in the process, despite Zimmerman's growing record of unprovoked violence -- is sgiven a chance in an unbylined Dec. 4 WND article to push the idea of a spike in violence in New York due to De Blasio's election:

New York City could see a significant rise in violent crime in the next few years, warns Jack Cashill, author of “If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman,” a new book that looks at race and politics in the United States.

Cashill blames the expected policies of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio.

[...]

“There’s two sides to the progressive assault on civil security: On one hand, they are destroying families and creating criminals; on the other hand, they were visibly loosening the reins of justice so that you had an increase in criminals and a decline in crime and punishment. This all led to an absurd explosion in crime starting in the mid ’60s and lasting until Giuliani became mayor,” Cashill explained to WND.

He said that strong, conservative opinions toward crime were fully justified by the remarkable amount of crime the city had, and it led the city to elect Rudy Giuliani, a law and order Republican, as mayor in 1993

“The Archie Bunker mentality was fully justified in mid ’70s New York. Crime that had once been controlled and avoidable had now become ubiquitous,” Cashill said.

“The whole quality of life declined dramatically and it wasn’t just a part of the imagination. It declined so dramatically that the good people of New York finally broke down and elected a law and order Republican mayor! That’s how bad it got,” he said.

Cashill also ridicules the idea that the city's "stop and frisk" policy is harmful to minorities:

De Blasio has said that one of the main reasons he opposes tough police measures, such as “Stop and Frisk,” is because they unfairly single out young males, like his black son, and jeopardize their safety. Cashill countered that claim, insisting the policies ensure the safety of young, African-American males.

“‘Stop and Frisk’ policies protect people who look like De Blasio’s son, because they are the people who get killed. They don’t get killed by Neighborhood Watch coordinators, they don’t get killed by the police, they get killed by other kids who look like them. The notion that your child will somehow be safer because of its elimination is nonsense,” Cashill rebutted.

But that's not all. WND also calls on race-baiter extraordinaire Flaherty to pile on:

“The New York of the 1970s was a dismal, dark and dangerous place. Everyone said it was not governable, everybody said it was too big and unwieldy, it was just too dangerous, and people were just leaving. Then, Giuliani came in there and said: ‘Now we can fix this, we can start enforcing the laws,’” Flaherty told WND.

“I can’t understand why anybody would think that was a better time for New York, because it was terrible up there … this is not going to end well.”

A person who sees "black mobs" everywhere he looks -- even when they're not black -- would think that, wouldn't he?


Posted by Terry K. at 9:40 PM EST
Newsbusters Heathering Watch
Topic: NewsBusters

It's been a whole few days since somebody at NewsBusters went on a Heathering tirade, so Matthew Sheffield fills the void in a Dec. 9 post:

With the departure of commentator George Will to Fox News, the person left to represent the conservative point of view on ABC’s This Week seems to have settled upon Matthew Dowd. Trouble is, Dowd is not really what anyone could fairly characterize as a conservative.

Beyond the fact that he was a Democratic strategist for decades before switching to work for former President George W. Bush in the late 1990s, Dowd’s own political views seem to be rather conventionally liberal. If there was any doubt of that proposition, Dowd dispelled it in a column published last week at the ABC News website focusing on the Obama White House’s latest pet issue: the supposed crisis of income inequality in the United States.

Echoing conventional left-wing bromides, Dowd argued that the fact that much of the capital growth that’s occurred in the past several decades in this country has made it nearly inevitable that many Americans are going to become violent to address this supposedly serious problem. Incredibly, Dowd decides to frame his argument by comparing economic inequality in this country to the government-forced racial segregation system that once prevailed in South Africa[.]

Sheffield huffs that Dowd's claim "was not appreciably different from the argument President Obama presented the day before on December 4 when he called income inequality the “defining challenge of our time,” then insisting that "there are many reasons that this is not nearly the problem that liberals like Obama and Dowd paint it to be. For one thing, everyone’s income in recent years has actually increased. It’s just that the very wealthiest have had a larger increase."

Sheffield doesn't indicate whether he factored inflation into his income increase. He's too busy pushing the logical fallacy that Dowd can't possibly be a conservative because he agrees with Obama on one issue.


Posted by Terry K. at 11:48 AM EST
WND Calls Obama A Nazi (Again)
Topic: WorldNetDaily

One of WorldNetDaily's go-to smears of President Obama is that he's some kind of Nazi. It goes there again in a Dec. 8 article by Bob Unruh:

Critics of Barack Obama, horrified at his “transformation” of America and particularly his government takeovers of large parts of the U.S. economy, have gone so far as to accuse him  of being a communist or neo-communist. However, those critics are mistaken, contends a conservative talk host and author whose new book “Was Hitler a Leftist?” examines the German dictator’s radical agenda in light of today’s leftist movement in the United States.

His conclusion? Obama is, at least in some ways, more akin to a “national socialist” than a communist.

“I have to be careful saying that,” said Chuck Morse, host of the IRN USA News talk show.

“I’m not suggesting [Obama] is an anti-Semite. I’m not suggesting he’s going to set up a Holocaust. But putting all that stuff aside, when you strip that away from historical Nazism and look at the political philosophy of Nazism, this is very much what Barack Obama is into.”

Of course, it's really impossible to separate historical Nazism from Nazi philosophy, so Morse can't really get away with accusing Obama of one and not the other. It's sorta like WND's Aaron Klein calling himself a Kahanist sympathizer but not about the extreme stuff -- it's all pretty extreme.

This being Bob Unruh, he simply performs stenography, failing to challenge Morse's seriously Godwin-y smear or seeking out other perspectives that might challenge his view.

If WND was looking for someone to replace the late Hilmar von Campe in reliably going Godwin all over Obama, it seems to have found its man in Chuck Morse.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:18 AM EST
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
CNS Attacks Catholic Official for Taking Ambassador Job
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com has a habit of demanding that Catholics in public life put their religion ahead of their country. That continues with a Dec. 6 article by Michael Chapman:

Ken Hackett, the new U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, previously headed the non-profit charity Catholic Relief Services (CRS), which receives hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government grants each year, and which paid him $384,013 in total compensation in 2011. He received similar compensation in earlier years.

Yes, that's the gist of Chapman's story -- a Catholic was well-compensated before accepting a job as an ambassador to the Vatican.

Chapman then undermines his attack by pointing out the large sums of money Catholic Relief Services receives -- more than $822 million in 2011 alone.

By contrast, Chapman's Media Research Center boss, Brent Bozell, makes more than $400,000 a year despite the MRC having only $11 million in assets. It seems that Catholic Relief Services got a good bargain in a leader compared to the MRC.

Chapman also plays the MRC game of religious Heathering, suggesting that Hackett is insufficiently Catholic because he donated a small amount of money to Obama's campaign:

Despite the Obama administration’s promotion of abortion on demand and same-sex-marriage, as well as the Obamacare regulation it issued mandating that health plans provide cost-free coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion drugs (which the Catholic bishops have declared “unjust and illegal” and a “violation of personal civil rights”), Ambassador Hackett told the National Catholic Register: “I don’t have a problem representing this administration.”

This is nothing more than a partisan political attack dressed in religious overtones.


Posted by Terry K. at 9:23 PM EST
Meanwhile ...
Topic: WorldNetDaily

-- Media Matters catches Dennis Prager buying into Matthew Shepard trutherism in his Dec. 2 WorldNetDaily column, repeating the dubious claim promoted by one of Shepard's convicted killers that it was simply a drug deal gone bad and not homophobia (which conveniently ignores the fact that said killer mounted a gay-panic defense at his trial).

-- Richard Bartholomew follows up on our earlier post about WND's highly dubious claim that a speech by WND fave Jonathan Cahn at a so-called so-called Presidential Inaugural Prayer Breakfast earlier this year was "suppressed." Turns out the actual problem was an apparent copyright dispute between Cahn and the breakfast organizers. That may be a lot of things, but suppression isn't one of them.

-- The Joe.My.God blog takes execption to Matt Barber's Dec. 6 WND column demanding that the blog be prosecuted for alleged threats in comment threads:

The almost-hilarious hypocrisy here, of course, is that anybody who has EVER endured five minutes on WND knows that they not only allow their own commenters to advocate for the death penalty for homosexuals and that they cheer on violent anti-gay hate crimes, WND columnists themselves have called for executing people who oppose the Christianist agenda, as, for example, when WND's Erik Rush did last year when he declared that journalists should be executed after Mitt Romney won the election. Erik Rush: "Trials for treason and the requisite sentences would apply, and I would have no qualms about seeing such sentences executed, no matter how severe." Earlier this year WND's Erik Rush declared that all Muslims should be murdered and underscored that sentiment with this tweet: "Yes, they're evil. Kill them all." And just last week WND's Erik Rush called for the execution of the president of the United States.

OK, coming back to the world of actual sane people, actual longtime JMG readers are well aware that for the near-decade of this blog's existence, I have posted regular pleas for civility in the comments and have demanded that no one make calls for physical violence against any person or any property for any reason.

[...]

One wonders how many tens of thousands of JMG comments Barber had to wade through before he could finally pounce upon the half dozen cited in today's World Net Daily column. One also wonders if Barber didn't plant those comments himself. You'd think Matt Barber would be SUPER busy getting repeatedly smacked down by the Supreme Court or helping the Liberty Counsel with the RICO Act lawsuit which alleges that they abetted the kidnapping of a young girl. Instead, he's got time to troll JMG and cherry-pick a handful of ugly comments. What a sad clown.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:55 PM EST
MRC's Graham Is Happy That Katie Couric Scaremongered on HPV Vaccine
Topic: NewsBusters

The Media Research Center has long had a double standard on vaccines. You're a crazy person for fearmongering about them -- except in the case of Gardasil and other HPV vaccines, in which you can scaremonger away even though they've never been proven to be exceptionally unsafe.

Tim Graham plays into that in a Nov. 7 NewsBusters post in which he applauds Katie Couric for annoying liberals by baselessly scaremongering about Gardasil:

Katie Couric put herself on the wrong side of liberals Wednesday with a show questioning the safety of the Gardasil vaccine to prevent the Human Papilloma Virus that causes cervical cancer.

Liberals have pushed parents of junior-high girls to get the vaccine with the assumption that they’ll be sexually active at 12.

That last statement is an utter lie. The vaccine works best on someone who has never had HPV, and the best way to ensure that is to vaccinate early -- as the decidedly non-liberal WebMD and the Centers for Disease Control recommend.

Further, as the not-liberal Children's Hospital of Philadelphia notes, there's no evidence that receiving the HPV vaccine causes girls to be more  promiscuous or engage in sexual activity at an earlier age.

While Graham quotes from a Los Angeles Times article featuring "liberal" critics of the vaccine, he doesn't note other criticism from several sources that Couric's show "creates the false impression of balance when in fact there is little divide about the safety of Gardasil within the scientific community." As Slate's Phil Plait -- whom Graham would likely dismiss as a "liberal" -- summarizes:

[T]he evidence is vastly on the side of the vaccine having extremely little risk, and no solid evidence at all that it causes harm. It’s not as though the research on this is split. Dedicating most of the segment to the stories of people who claimed it harmed them is not real balance or responsible journalism.

[...]

The HPV vaccine has been tested both for effectiveness and safety, and it has been shown to be an effective preventative measure against the virus with extremely small risk. No fatal injury due to the vaccine has ever been proven, and in fact the evidence presented in cases where girls died is anecdotal; no link to the vaccine other than timing (which can be coincidental) has been presented.

Graham reproduces a comment from Couric's show insisting that "we presented the facts supporting the potential of the vaccine" and "We do not want to leave our viewers with an irrational fear of the vaccine." The latter, of course, is exactly what Graham would like to see.


Posted by Terry K. at 11:53 AM EST
WND's Unruh Whitewashes Phill Kline's Misconduct, Law License Suspension
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bob Unruh writes in a Dec. 7 WorldNetDaily article:

A Kansas Supreme Court that recommended former Attorney General Phill Kline’s law license be suspended indefinitely for his investigation of alleged criminal activity on the part of abortionists is being petitioned to correct its own ruling.

The fight over the abortion industry in the state, which included Wichita late-term abortionist George Tiller as well as Planned Parenthood, the American abortion industry’s biggest player, has gone on for years, pitting Kline, in his office as attorney general and then in the position as Johnson County district attorney, against the whole of the abortion industry including state officials who ardently supported abortion.

Among those was Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now Health and Human Services secretary, who went way beyond being pro-abortion to being “pro-death,” according to attorneys who worked on the brief.

The petition was filed by attorneys working with the Life Legal Defense Foundation, and seeks a rehearing or modification in Kline’s case, in which the suspension of his license was recommended over issues such as his alleged failure to make certain grand jurors understood state law after he explained it to them.

Wow -- way to whitewash what Kline did, Bob. Needless to say, Kline did much more than commit a "failure to make certain grand jurors understood state law after he explained it to them," and his law license was not suspended merely for "his investigation of alleged criminal activity on the part of abortionists." Let's see what a real news organization reported about Kline:

Citing “clear and convincing evidence” of professional misconduct, the Kansas Supreme Court on Friday indefinitely suspended the law license of former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline.

The court found that Kline violated 11 rules governing the professional conduct of attorneys during his tenure as the state’s highest law enforcement officer and while he served as Johnson County district attorney.

[...]

The court cited three aggravating factors to support the indefinite suspension: selfish motive, a pattern of misconduct and his refusal to acknowledge the wrongful nature of any of his misconduct. Those outweighed mitigating factors: absence of prior disciplinary record, previous good character and reputation, and cooperative attitude toward the proceedings.

[...]

The court found Friday that when he was attorney general, Kline committed misconduct by instructing members of his staff to attach sealed documents to a publicly filed document in violation of a Supreme Court order. He also told staff to file a court pleading that contained misleading information.

The court further found that as Johnson County district attorney, Kline failed to properly advise members of a grand jury about Kansas law and sought to enforce a grand jury subpoena against the grand jury’s wishes.

It also found that Kline gave false testimony to a judge and made “false and misleading” statements to the Supreme Court about the handling of patient records obtained during the criminal investigations. He also did not correct a misstatement to the state’s disciplinary administrator regarding the storage of patient records.

Unruh doesn't mention that Kline lied to a judge and the Kansas Supreme Court. Nor does he mention that Kline, despite his law license suspension, still teaches at the right-wing Liberty University law school (where, by the way, his online bio does not reflect his law license suspension).

Being the one-source wonder he is, Unruh quotes only people defending Kline, and makes no apparent effort to get a reaction from anyone else abouty his appeal.

This kind of "reporting" is obviously the norm at WND -- he could never get away with it at his old employer, the Associated Press -- but all he's doing is creating more evidence for why nobody believes WND.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:34 AM EST
Updated: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 12:34 AM EST
Monday, December 9, 2013
AIM's Kincaid Writes About Mandela, Doesn't Say 'Apartheid'
Topic: Accuracy in Media

Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid has managed to achieve what one might have thought impossible: write three entire articles about Nelson Mandela that omit the word "apartheid."

No, really. Check 'em out for yourself -- this article, this article, and this article. The word's not there.

You will, however, find the word "communist" at least 69 times over these three articles.

The boy's just a tad obsessed, isn't he?


Posted by Terry K. at 9:16 PM EST

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