Barbara Hollingsworth does her best to puff right-wing activist Janice Shaw Crouse, describing her as "a social scientist and expert on women’s issues" in a Jan. 16 CNSNews.com article devoted exclusively to Crouse's attacks on Maria Shriver’s new report on women’s economic status.

But is Crouse who Hollingsworth says she is?

Public Eye notes that Crouse majored in speech and English in college, and that her doctoral dissertation in communications theory at State University of New York at Buffalo was on "the decidedly secular topic of who won the Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford 1976 televised presidential debates."

In other words, Crouse has no formal training in sociology, which one would think would be a prerequisite to being a "social scientist."

That's simply lazy reporting on Hollingsworth's part. That's in addition to her laziness in refusing to obtain reaction to Crouse's attack from the study's authors.

Hollingsworth's "social scientist" descripion of Crouse comes before a description of her that offers a clue to her ideology -- "executive director of the Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute." That's another clue to Hollingsworth's bias.

Posted by Terry K. at 1:53 PM EST

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Ellis Washington concludes his Jan. 17 WorldNetDaily column, which rants against LBJ and his Great Society, with this:

If America is to survive this existential Progressive Revolution (circa 1859, Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” to the present), which systematically seeks to replace Christianity, the Bible and intelligent design with evolution, natural law with positive law, capitalism with socialism and the rule of law with tyranny and executive decrees, We the People must tell Obama: Yes, President Obama, you have a pen and a phone, but we have a Constitution and a Congress and the tea party … and God.

Sic Semper Tyrannous – Down with the Tyrant!

First: It's spelled "tyrannis." (And this guy complains about not being able to get a job as a college professor?)

Second: Invoking the phrase, though it has some patriotic history, puts Washington in some unsavory company. From Wikipedia:

In American history, John Wilkes Booth wrote in his diary that he shouted the phrase after shooting President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, in part because of the association with the assassination of Caesar. Timothy McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt with this phrase and a picture of Lincoln on it when he was arrested on April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Does this mean Washington is joining the likes of Erik Rush in endorsing an overthrow -- or assassination -- of President Obama?

Posted by Terry K. at 10:57 AM EST

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The headline on Tim Graham 's Jan. 15 NewsBusters post read, "New York Times Story from Texas Repeatedly Drops the F-Bomb: 'Fetus'." Graham wrote:

The New York Times spent months debating before deciding not to ban the term “illegal immigrant” entirely (it’s simply discouraged), but the word “fetus” is used without any alarm. At the top of page A-14 on Wednesday is the headline “Suing to End Life Support for Woman and Fetus.”

It’s an update on the sad story of Marlise Munoz, who is on life support and whose family wants her and her baby removed from life support. The F-bomb (to pro-life people) was dropped three times in the Manny Fernandez story, in addition to the headline[.]

Yes, medically accurate terminology is the equivalent of a swear word in Graham's world.

At the end of his post, Graham linked to a 2008 rant by his boss, Brent Bozell, demanding that the word "fetus" be banned because it is allegedly a "humanity-negating" word. Like Graham, Bozell does not mention the term's medical accuracy (though he does concede that it has a "dictionary definition").

Neither Graham nor Bozell make any mention of the humanity-negating properties of the right-wing term "illegal alien." Or how they have a double standard on being politically correct word police.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:18 PM EST

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It appears that WorldNetDaily hasn't given up of promoting sleazy, unproven rumors that President Obama is gay.

WND drives the sleaze home in this front-page promo today:

Posted by Terry K. at 3:29 PM EST

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Penny Starr writes in a Jan. 15 CNSNews.com article:

A new report released by the Family Research Council (FRC) on the demographics of abortion in the United States reveals that when and if a woman undergoes the procedure once or more is tied directly to chastity, monogamy and the use of contraceptives.

The report shows that more than 99 percent of women who have had one or more abortions have used contraceptives.

Starr doesn't mention that the FRC has an anti-contraceptive agenda:

• The FRC has argued that contraception should be denied to unmarried couples, who should be punished for having sex outside marriage.
• The FRC has attacked Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision that legalized birth control, as "judicial activism" that resulted in "discrediting traditional Judeo-Christian norms about the meaning of human sexuality."
• FRC leader Tony Perkins has criticized the Griswold ruling for establishing a "right to contraception," arguing it was not "what the founders intended."

 Does this sound like a group that's capable of looking at issues related to contraception in a balanced and objective way?

Apparently it does to Starr; she simply regurgitates the findings of the FRC report and doesn't bother to contact any pro-choice groups for a response. She also fails to identify the FRC's political ideology, even though it clearly plays a role in skewing the focus of the report.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:40 PM EST

Updated: Saturday, January 18, 2014 11:51 PM EST

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WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh loves to write one-sided press releases masquerading as "news" stories, and he does so again in a Jan. 17 WND article in which he uncritically repeats the laughable assumption that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's signing of a bill that bans anti-gay therapy for minors is much worse than BridgeGate:

Christie has come under fire in the last week for the apparently malicious maneuver by staff members who reportedly created a massive traffic jam to punish a mayor who refused to endorse Christie’s last run for governor.

Christie has disavowed knowledge of the stunt and fired one of his staff members over the situation. He spent nearly two hours in a news conference denying that he knew what was going on.

But his recent signature on a state legislative bill, A3371, suggests he actually knows about the other scandal – the ban on counseling young people when they want to eliminate same-sex attractions.

“A3371 is far more scandalous than the George Washington Bridge lane closure,” said Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. “Gov. Christie signed a bill that blocks licensed counselors from providing and young people from receiving any counsel to change unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors, mannerisms, or identity. This law is causing immediate harm to young people and to licensed counselors.”

Unruh devotes his entire article to the arguments of anti-gay activists against the law, and as you'd expect from the gay-bashers at WND, there is no mention of the evidence that sexual orientation not only doesn't work but can be psychologically damaging.

But then, as we've noted, Unruh isn't getting paid to report the entire story -- only the parts that advance WND's right-wing agenda. That would seem to disqualify Unruh from representing himself as a journalist.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:37 PM EST

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Just because Newsmax has been broadly covering the Chris Christie bridge scandal doesn't mean it has abandoned its conservative agenda. As with the Media Research Center, that agenda is all that's needed to attack Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Fox News' Roger Ailes.

A Jan. 15 Newsmax article by David Patten highlights how "liberal media critic" Michael Wolff has criticized Sherman's book.  Patten notes that "Wolff is no friend of Ailes, Fox News or its parent company, News Corp. Wolff wrote his own controversial book attacking Fox's founder Rupert Murdoch." But he fails tomake the more likely connection that it's a competing book, not media analysis, that's making Wolff criticize Sherman's book.

Patten also makes this odd complaint about Sherman:

Sherman insisted fact-checkers carefully reviewed his work prior to publication and said that repeated requests to interview Ailes were declined.

But Sherman never bothered to contact Fox's press department to share his myriad number of allegations against Ailes for "fact checking" and Ailes rebuttal, a standard journalistic practice.

If Fox wouldn't make Ailes available to Sherman, why would they acknowledge his book by permitting him to fact-check it? Yet Patten identifies no fact in the book that anyone at Fox News has substantively contradicted.

Posted by Terry K. at 7:26 PM EST

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Erik Rush tells a whopper in his Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily column:

This week it was reported that Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett gave the “stand down” order during the Sept. 11 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. This would in the very least convict President Obama of negligence in delegating such responsibility to an unelected, inexperienced subordinate, as well as explaining “all of the serial lies and the cover-ups and the obfuscation and all of the efforts that were made to distract people’s attention from this,” as characterized by talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

In fact, the complete opposite was reported: Both the House Benghazi transcripts and the Senate bipartisan report found that no stand-down order was given, by Jarrett or anybody else. Rush is simply lying.

But when has the truth ever stood in the way of Rush's Obama derangement? (Remember, he thinks Malcolm X is Obama's father.) Rush blithely continues on to advocate a military coup:

There is the possibility that certain military personnel might lend their support to an effort by Congress to remove the president through methods other than impeachment, although this is less likely than it otherwise might have been given the widespread purge that has taken place within the military.

Rush has also avocated Obama's assassination.

Presumably, us pointing this out is more evidence that we'll first against the wall when the Erik Rush revolution/military coup comes.

Posted by Terry K. at 4:03 PM EST

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CNSNews.com has long cranked out highly biased reporting that smears Planned Parenthood. One of its favorite tricks is to falsely imply that federal money pays for abortions there.

CNS performs that dishonest trick again in a Jan. 14 article by Barbara Boland:

Planned Parenthood’s net revenue increased 5% to total of $1.21 billion in its organizational fiscal year ending on June 30, 2013, according to its new Annual Report 2012-2013, and about 45% of that revenue--$540.6 million--was provided by taxpayer-funded government health services grants.

In the same report, Planned Parenthood said that in the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2012 it did 327,166 abortions.

Nowhere does Boland feels the need to mention that no federal money pays for abortions at Planned Parenthood because it's prohibited under the Hyde Amendment, and she makes no effort to prove that any non-federal government money does. Instead, she allows the juxtaposition to imply something she can't prove.

That's sloppy and slanted reporting. But that's how CNS rolls.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:07 AM EST

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Jerome Corsi introduced a new source in a Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily article:

An eyewitness to the attack at the main U.S. compound in Benghazi interviewed exclusively by WND from Libya via Skype confirmed the report released Wednesday by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that concluded the Obama administration misled the American public by maintaining the incident was not related to terrorism.

Speaking from Libya, Ahmed Salem, a young political activist opposed to radical Islamic terrorism who witnessed the Benghazi attack, told WND that al-Qaida and other radical Islamic militia groups, including some from Egypt, launched a pre-planned, well-organized, heavily armed attack on the U.S. compound.

Corsi tells us nothing further about Salem than the above. He does not explain how he became acquainted with Salem enough to Skype with him, and no picture of Salem is included in Corsi's article.

Curiously, a Google search for "Ahmed Salem Benghazi" uncovers no other reference to Salem being a witness to the Benghazi attack other than Corsi's article -- odd, since one would think that given how politicized right-wingers like Corsi have made the attack, Salem's story would have surfaced long before now.

That search, however, uncovers something else -- a November 2013 article in a magazine called the Libya Herald stating that a Libyan Special Forces officer in Benghazi named Ahmed Hamouda Salem was killed while manning a checkpoint.

Is Corsi's Benghazi source assuming the identity of a dead man? We have no idea. But given Corsi's history of substandard, vengeful reporting -- from going to Kenya to retrieve fake documents to pushing a story about Obama's wedding ring that was so false that Corsi's birther buddies were compelled to shoot it down -- there's no reason to take anything Corsi writes at face value.

Corsi is such a rabid Obama-hater, and he's put his agenda before the truth too many times, that he simply can't be trusted.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:45 AM EST

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It wouldn't be the Media Research Center if its writers weren't whining that gays are allowed to be on television, and Kristine Marsh keeps up the tradition in a Jan. 13 MRC Culture & Media Institute post:

ABC Family’s controversial lesbian drama “The Fosters” returns from a hiatus tonight, Jan. 13, with its two women stars in bed, kissing.  In Hollywood, that’s subtle pro-gay messaging.

The New York Times welcomed the show’s return with an interview with the creators in the Jan. 12 arts section. Apparently the show’s openly gay creators have been getting complaints from their gay audience about there not being enough sex scenes in the show. 

[...]

The Times neglected to mention that this “family drama” was created by two gay men, Bradley Bredeweg and Peter Paige, who were also  the creators and writers for the vulgar gay drama “Queer as Folk.” Bredeweg also recently joined the board for “Raise a Child,” an advocacy group that promotes same-sex foster couples, according to The Huffington Post.

Times critic Mike Hale called “The Fosters” the “most realistic” portrayal of same-sex couples on television. In an interview with The Times, Bredeweg and Paige admitted they sometimes get advice on how to convincingly portray a lesbian couple from their executive producer Joanna Johnson, who is a lesbian.

And because gays must somehow be tied to President Obama, Marsh obliges:

The show’s creators are well-connected in Washington. In a June 2012 interview with gay entertainment website, The Backlot, Paige revealed that the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center he works for “received a $13 million dollar grant from the Obama Administration to develop the first ever LGBT foster protocol, to protect gay and lesbian kids in foster care.”  A search on Open Secrets revealed that the group similarly gave more than $36K, collectively, to Barack Obama’s campaign and Democrats in 2012.

Marsh concludes by lamenting, "'The Fosters' is only the latest broadcast TV show to depict 'The New Normal' of gay couples on TV that has become commonplace." Marsh, along with her fellow MRC employees, apparently prefer the "old normal," when gays could be discriminated against with impunity.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:12 PM EST

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So much dishonesty in Joseph Farah's Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily column. Let's start with this:

I have been labeled by the Big Media as “the birther king.”

I have been systematically blacklisted by all cable news networks for raising the issue of Obama’s eligibility and trying to discuss it rationally and openly.

False. Farah has never been interested in discussing Obama's eligibility "rationally and openly."

If he was, his website would have reported that all the major birther conspiracies have been discredited. 

If he was, his website wouldn't have spent so much time trying to fluff Joe Arpaio and get a seat on his Cold Case Posse to ensure that the so-called investigation would be shoddy and biased.

If he was, his website would never have published a fake birth certificate without bothering to verify its authenticity first.

In fact, Farah's actions over the past five years have been all about ensuring that birther conspiracies wouldn't be discussed rationally and openly.

Farah continues:

Having never scrutinized the basic facts still surrounding Obama’s questionable case for eligibility, the news media are already in a feeding frenzy over the potential eligibility of conservative Republican Ted Cruz, who has not even announced his intentions about running for president in 2016 or thereafter.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is transparent now: It was never a matter of what the Constitution said for the news media. It was never a matter of the established facts of Obama’s parentage and birth. It was all about protecting Obama.

We will presume that by making this statement, Farah is admitting the opposite -- that his birther crusade was all about destroying Obama, not about the truth.

Farah makes that even more clear by writing the following:

So if anyone has the right and the duty to weigh in on Ted Cruz’s eligibility, it’s me – even though no one is asking.

My answer is, “I don’t care.”

I don’t care because the Constitution was not written and ratified to be applied to some and not others. If no one cared about Obama’s questionable eligibility, despite his shocking lack of transparency and thin paper trail, then they have no business questioning Ted Cruz – who has released his birth certificate, renounced his Canadian citizenship and upheld every provision of the Constitution to the best of his ability throughout his life.

For the record, I would have preferred if the issue of natural born citizenship were openly debated and discussed before Obama assumed office and began his all-out jihad on the Constitution. I would have preferred if my colleagues in the news media had taken seriously their responsibility to be watchdogs on government and hold all politicians accountable to the rule of law. I would have preferred if the motivations of those of us seeking the truth about Obama’s eligibility status and life story had never been impugned.

But now that’s all water under the bridge.

Our country is in shambles.

“The new birthers” got their way.

For better or worse, they set the standard of eligibility by precedent.

They can’t have it both ways – revising the standard up when they don’t like the candidate and down when they do.

Actually, it's Farah who's trying to have it both ways. He raised a stink for five years about Obama's purported non-eligibilty, all the while censoring any research proving otherwise. He has never proven his main conceit, that Obama was not born in the U.S. -- the one thing that might make Obama ineligible for the presidency -- and whines that he's been blackballed for putting conspiracy theory ahead of facts.

Now that Farah has a potential candidate who aligns much closer to his right-wing ideology than Obama does, but is by his own definition arguably ineligible to be president becuase he, unlike Obama, was not born in the United States, Farah is taking his ball and going home. He won't be sending Jerome Corsi to Canada to wave around fake documents, nor will Aaron Klein be devoting a WND-published book to Cruz's radical associations.

WND has long refused to get involved in the issue of Cruz's eligibility like it did Obama's, which only proves the hollow, dishonest partisan intent of the whole enterprise.

Farah doesn't give a damn about the Constitution. All he was ever interested in was bashing Obama by turning the birther issue into Obama's Vince Foster. Farah should stop lying to the public by pretending otherwise.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:30 PM EST

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CNSNews.com, it appears, will not stop doing Afghanistan body counts in order to attack President Obama.

Ali Meyer writes in a Jan. 9 CNS article:

Seventy-four percent of the U.S. military personnel who have given their lives serving in the Afghan War died after Feb. 17, 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his first increase in the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, according to CNSNews.com’s database of U.S. casualties in the war.

In the more than twelve years that have passed since U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan with the aim of removing al Qaeda from its sanctuary there, 2,162 U.S. service personnel have given their lives in and around Afghanistan in support of U.S. military activities in that country.

As has been typical of CNS' Afghan body-count obsession, there's no mention of the far higher U.S. troop death toll in Iraq, the vast majority of which occurred under President Bush. Meyer doesn't explain why she's ignoring the Iraq death toll.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:47 PM EST

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You can count on WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh to uncritically forward right-wing talking points without bothering to check them for accuracy, and he serves up another slice of lazy reporting in a Jan. 13 WND article:

The Media Research Center reported late last week just after the news broke that aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a presumptive front-runner for the 2016 GOP nomination for president, apparently were involved in a traffic scandal, there had been 17 times more coverage on that issue than in the last half year over the IRS misbehavior.

The organization reported that the story broke Wednesday and accused the governor’s aides of punishing a mayor with a huge traffic jam after he refused to endorse Christie.

Within 24 hours, ABC, CBS and NBC flooded the airwaves with 34 minutes and 28 seconds on the topic.

MRC reported that since July 1, the networks allowed 2:08, that’s two minutes and eight seconds, coverage of the IRS scandal.

As we've documented, the MRC coverage study relies on a dishonest apples-and-oranges comparison --  the breaking news of the Christie scandal vs. a story that broke two months before the MRC started counting. Also, the lack of coverage also meant that the networks ignored news that the scandal was overblown.

Unruh mentioned none of that, of course -- it's not his job to tell the whole story, just the part that advances the political agenda of his employer, no matter how dishonest it is.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:28 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:28 AM EST

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