MRC Heathers Right-Wing Website For Not Promoting Mark Levin Book Topic: NewsBusters
Fellow conservatives aren't the only targets of the Media Research Center's Heathering tactics for straying even slightly away from right-wing orthodoxy. The MRC's fellow right-wing media outlets are in the bull's eye as well.
In a Nov. 29 NewsBusters post, MRC official Tim Graham goes after the Washington Free Beacon for failure to recommend Mark Levin's new book:
Washington Free Beacon culture editor Aaron McLean scrunched as many book recommendations as one might expect in a single article – 66! But it might seem odd that such a 2015 Favorites list for conservatives would leave out a top seller this year – Mark Levin’s Plunder and Deceit.
It might seem possible for book reviewers to see the author is a popular talk-show host and not read further. But Levin’s books are deep explorations of public policy and political philosophy.
While Graham's tone is light at first, he turns snarky at the end: "The Free Beacon is linking to its own book reviews, but somehow they missed the Levin book earlier in the year. But they didn’t miss it when Levin touted its reporting on George Stephanopoulos and his $75,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation." Finally, he promotes his and boss Brent Bozell's column on Levin's book.
At no point does Graham mention that Levin has a business deal with the MRC, in which the MRC pays Levin to say nice things about it on his radio show, and the MRC recipriocates by saying nice things about him (and censors Levin's most offensive outbursts) on its network of websites. In effect,
Graham's Heathering of the Free Beacon is part of the deal to promote Levin.
MRC Blogger Is Sad Anti-Muslim Prejudice Is Being Criticized Topic: NewsBusters
In a Nov. 15 NewsBusters post, Dylan Gwinn takes issue with Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers' criticizing a fan who yelled "Muslims suck!" during a moment of silence for victims as displaying the kind of "prejudicial ideology that puts us in the position we are today as a world":
The first part of Rodgers comments there are fine. Clearly, if he wants to point out being personally disappointed in someone using that moment of silence to have an outburst like that, he can. That’s his right.
But to take it to the next level by then saying that anti-Muslim prejudice is somehow responsible for “where we are today as a world,” is beyond ignorant and not supported by any evidence of any kind. After all, where was the prejudice in France, when France brought in thousands and thousands of Muslim migrants over the past several months? And yet Muslims, including migrants, still attacked those who were welcoming them.
Now, if he meant that the prejudice of Muslims towards the rights of others to simply exist as non-Muslims is responsible for “where we are today as a world,” then he would really be onto something.
I’m guessing that’s not what he meant.
So Gwinn is saying there isn't enough anti-Muslim prejudice in the world? It sure looks that way. After all, this is the guy who defended Curt Schilling's likening of Muslims to Nazis.
MRC Is Mad Media Won't Take Obama Quote Out of Context Topic: NewsBusters
The Media Rsearch Center loves to complain about the media taking people out of context -- at least when it's not taking people out of context itself. Now, the MRC is complaining that the media won't take President Obama out of context.
The obvious pull quote of the day from President Obama's contentious press conference in Antalya, Turkey is this statement: "What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with ..." Obama then claimed that any ideas coming from those who believe in such a notion have "no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region."
Ed Driscoll at PJ Media believes that these words are "the president’s equivalent of Carter’s malaise speech" in the 1970s. Just in case he's right, related stories at the Associated Press and the New York Times have not mentioned Obama's statement, a clear indicator of his lack of genuine resolve, in their coverage.
Actually, if you put Obama's comment in its full context of his entire answer to the question he was asked -- something Blumer clearly has no interest in doing -- the president's reference to "some notion of American leadership or America winning" was clearly intended as a reference to an empty gesture done solely for posturing and which would not advance America's interest in the fight against terrorism, since he goes on to state (after Blumer cut it off) that such a posturing gesture "has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people" and that he to pursue what actually works.
But Blumer doesn't want to tell you about that, since it undermines the petty partisan sniping of his post.
Gutless MRC Blogger Hides Behind A Fake Name Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 30 NewsBusters post by someone named Bruce Bookter on ESPN's shuttering of Grantland predictably degenerated into an anti-liberal rant:
Make no mistake, ESPN likely, no, ESPN definitely supports and stands behind every wack-a-doo leftist take from every one of their leftist wack-a-doo personalities. Trust me on this.
Case in point, ESPN has still not suspended Tony Kornheiser for comparing Tea Party Republicans to ISIS. Why? Because they see conservatives the same way Kornheiser does.
But you can get rid of Grantland without making declarative statements like “We’re getting out of the pop culture business.” Saying that signals a much deeper meaning than saying “Bill Simmons was a real tool, and he’s basically stealing all of our writers. So we’re shutting this puppy down.”
Look, I’m not saying conservative backlash against ESPN resulted in the network’s decision to stop trying to be MSNBC with highlight reels. Though, it could have played a part. But, do conservatives have to have caused this in order for it to be a conservative victory?
Then we get to the end and see the Bookter's bio: "Bruce Bookter is a sports journalist. This is a pen name."
That's right -- "Bookter" is a coward hiding behind a fake name, which means there's no reason to trust him.
Nevertheless, the Media Research Center thinks this fake "Bookter" guy is worth publishing (which is apparently defined by the intensity of his liberal-bashing). He's written five posts since mid-October, including the above-referenced attack on Kornheiser, and another whining that a sports website made a gay joke mocking a baseball player's anti-gay views.
At least Kornheiser and the other targets of "Bookter's" rants put their names out there. "Bookter," meanwhile, hides behind a fake name and hurls his poo. And the MRC encourages him to be a gutless coward.
A profile in courage he isn't. Put your real name on your blog post, Bookter, and maybe we can talk.
History Doesn't Matter To The MRC's Jeffrey Lord Topic: NewsBusters
We've documented how Ben Carson is completely wrong about the idea that gun control laws enabled the Nazis and the Holocaust -- turns out that unless you were a Jew or another persecuted class in Nazi Germany, gun control didn't really exist -- and how the Media Research Center's "news" division, CNSNews.com, didn't see fit to fact-check Carson, instead presenting his false assertions as if they were true.
The MRC is now going one step further by claiming the truth doesn't actually matter.
In his Oct. 10 NewsBusters post, Jeffrey Lord actually whines about Carson being fact-checked:
Media firestorm to follow - immediately. From the Huffington Post to ABC to Time and more (and more!) the liberal media was out there to dismiss Carson’s comments to Wolf Blitzer’s quite legit question as somehow as wacko as it was inflammatory. Even the Anti-Defamation League jumped in to say that Carson’s remarks were "historically inaccurate and offensive."
Stop.
One has to wonder, do all these media outlets have anybody working for them who is familiar with history?
Actually, yes, they do -- hence all the fact-checking. At no point in his post does Lord refute any of it. Instead, he declares that "In fact, to the question of whether gun-toting Jews could have impeded Hitler the answer was long, long ago answered. And the answer is a decided yes." And he cites the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as if that could be retroactive.
In other words? In other words what Dr. Carson is suggesting -- specifically that a massively armed Jewish population could have severely hampered Hitler’s Holocaust -- is supported by the true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In which a relatively small minority of Jews inside the ghetto, with a minimum amount of, according to the Holocaust Museum, “mostly pistols and explosives” managed to “sufficiently disorient” the Nazis and “suspend further deportations” to the death camps, at least delaying the inevitable. Even more importantly, as word spread of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising it “inspired other uprisings in ghettos (e.g., Bialystok and Minsk) and killing centers (Treblinka and Sobibor).”
One can only imagine the damage that could have been inflicted on Hitler’s thugs as they rose to power in the early 1930’s if the Jewish population had been as well armed as the American populace is today.
Lord's focus on guns ignores the fact that gun restrictions for Jews in Nazi Germany were far from the only thing that targeted them. Mother Jones reports:
"But guns didn't play a particularly important part in any event," says Robert Spitzer, who chairs SUNY-Cortland's political science department and has extensively researched gun control politics. Gun ownership in Germany after World War I, even among Nazi Party members, was never widespread enough for a serious civilian resistance to the Nazis to have been anything more than a Tarantino revenge fantasy. If Jews had been better armed, Spitzer says, it would only have hastened their demise. Gun policy "wasn't the defining moment that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights, and they were a minority group."
The truly hilarious thing is that Lord titled his post "Ben Carson, Guns, and the Holocaust: Doesn't History Matter?" Not to Lord, obviously.
NewsBusters Blogger Again Desperately Tries to Deflect Catholic Church Sex-Abuse Scandal Topic: NewsBusters
Dave Pierre uses a Sept. 23 NewsBusters post to complain that news reports on Pope Francis' visit to the U.S. are mentioning the sexual abuse scandal among Catholic priests, as he is prone to doing. Pierre dismissed the scandal as "stale" and "decades-old," suggesting that there's no real scandal here because most of the accused priests are dead.
Pierre might want to ask the victims of sexual abuse by priests if they think the abuse they suffered is "stale."
Pierre went on to try to smear groups that are trying to hold the Catholic church accountable for how it enabled the abuse. He sneered that the leader of one group is "cranky" -- "media research," folks! -- and he complained that Barbara Blaine, founder and president of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), "once wrote a letter of support on behalf of a child pornographer."
Pierre overstates the case and leaves out important information. The person in question, a doctor in Louisiana, was not a "child pornographer"; he had apparently downloaded images of child pornography to his computer. The doctor ultimately pleaded guilty to lesser charges after officials decided that they had concerns about evidence in the case, and a state medical board noted the doctor's health conditions making him "prone to confusion and poor judgment when stressed or after more than a half-day's work," and ruled that the evidence does not indicated that the doctor "intentionally downloaded child pornography." Further, Blaine's letter did not attempt to claim the doctor was innocent but, rather, noted that the doctor had been an advocate against sexual abuse and that the doctor's wife had founded a state chaper of SNAP.
Pierre runs the Media Report website, where he serves as an apologist for the Catholic Church on the sex-abuse scandal and attacks the church's critics, particularly SNAP. We'd complain about someone with such a obviously biased agenda being given a platform at the Media Research Center, but that's kinda what the MRC does.
NewsBusters' Gwinn: Paula Deen's Use of N-Word No Different Than Tarantino Topic: NewsBusters
Dylan Gwinn has shownhimself to be one of the less sharp knives in NewsBusters' "media research" drawer. He strikes again by venturing far out of his sports expertise in a Sept. 24 post that is ostensibly a review of the season opener of the sitcom "Blackish."
The episode centers on use of the N-word, and here's how Gwinn responds to a reference to usage of the word by Quentin Tarantino and Paula Deen:
Of course, the reason why Quentin Tarantino can use the n-word 87 times in a movie and get an Oscar while Paula Deen loses her show for saying it once has more to do with the hypocrisy of the media than anything else. Quentin Tarantino is loved by the left, and as such gets a free pass. The same kind of free pass that ABC will get for having a sitcom where a black man thumps a gun on the table. Meanwhile, Paula Deen doesn’t have those kind of connections to the politically correct crowd, and gets far worse.
So Gwinn really thinks there's no differene between Tarantino and Deen in their respective uses of the N-word, huh? Let's educate him, shall we?
Tarantino is a filmmaker. His use of the word came in a film he made, "Django Unchained," where it was a least somewhat justified given the film's historical context of 19th-century slavery and discrimination.
Deen, on the other hand, is a TV cook who may or may not have said the N-word in regard to a group of black waiters she wanted to have tap-dance Shirley Temple style as part of a Southern plantation-themed wedding she wanted to throw for her brother -- an idea (ultimately rejected) that reminded her of southern America “before the Civil War.” Deen's brother was also accused of using the N-word in the kitchen of their restaurant.
In short: Tarantino's use of the N-word occurred in fiction. Deen's use (and overall racism) occurred in real life, involving actual black people. That's the difference.
It seems that Gwinn can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
NewsBusters Conspiracy-Monger Mocks Someone Else's Conspiracy Theory Topic: NewsBusters
We got a chuckle out of Mark Finkelstein's Sept. 18 NewsBusters post:
Maybe next week, Chris Hayes will share his views on Area 51, whether fire can melt steel, and if the moon landing happened in a Hollywood studio . . .
On his MSNBC show this evening, Hayes floated the notion that the guy at a New Hampshire town hall who told Donald Trump that President Obama is a Muslim might have been a plant. According to Chris, although the moment seemed to have happened "organically" [yes, but was it free range?], "who knows?" Proclaimed Chris: "until they find the guy I'm going to reserve judgment on the origins of the question."
What makes this doubly hilarious is the fact that it's Finkelstein mocking conspiracy theories here. You might recall that Finkelstein used a NewsBusters post to forward the conspiracy theory that NBC host Matt Lauer wasn't just wearing a checkered scarf, he was wearing a "Palestinian support scarf." Because any checkered scarf must be seen as support for the Palestinian cause, you see.
And he has the temerity to mock the conspiracy theories of others? The hell, you say.
UPDATE: Talking Points Memo has compiled a list of people engaging in the same speculation as Chris Hayes -- and surprise, surprise, most of them are conservatives like Laura Ingraham and Greg Gutfield. We're sure Finkelstein will get around to mocking them like he did Hayes any minute now.
Posted by Terry K.
at 4:13 PM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 2:49 PM EDT
NewsBusters Writer Bashes 'Liberal Media Narrative' With False Conservative Media Narrative Topic: NewsBusters
Jeffrey Lord -- who thinks it's a "legitimate conservative" tactic to smear people as Nazis -- spends his Sept. 12 NewsBusters column complaining about the purportedly dishonesty-laden "Liberal Media Narrative." He explains:
How does the Liberal Media Narrative game work? Like this.
Reported the New York Post of then-Senator Barack Obama during the fall campaign of 2008 in a remark that was instantly seen by Republicans as an attack on Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
“You know, you can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said, “but it’s still a pig.”
….Many in the Obama crowd leaped to their feet in delight – apparently taking the “pig” comment as a direct slam at Palin.”
The liberal media of the day was outraged. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC, Obama was pilloried for being a sexist and a misogynist. His poll numbers tanked.
Just kidding. The media didn’t care a whit, Senator Obama was not only elected president he was re-elected.
Except, well, that's not how that happened at all -- starting with what Obama actually said.
Obama was criticizing John McCain's policies by referencing a common saying, and Obama's full statement in context shows that he didn't reference Palin at all. The New York Post made up the part about the statement being a "direct slam at Palin."
Contrary to Lord's claim, MSNBC did, in fact, promote the idea that Obama was attacking Palin. Even the Associated Press, whhich Lord would most certainly count among the "liberal media," did it as well.
Media critic Howard Kurtz, now with Fox News, pointed out at the time that the right's narrative on the "lipstick" quote was a "manufactured story that was pushed by the right ... pushed along and made up by Drudge, Sean Hannity, and the New York Post," and yet the media did "segment after segment on it."
That's what you might call the Conservative Media Narrative -- and Lord fell for it.
Why is Lord doing this? To deflect from Donald Trump's recent misogynistic remarks toward Carly Fiorina and Fox News' Megyn Kelly. He's following the MRC playbook as Ted Cruz did by insisting that any criticism of Trump is, by definition, liberal:
Now comes the media dust-up over Trump’s remark’s about Carly Fiorina. And unlike the media’s treatment of then-Senator Obama’s attack on Sarah Palin with his “lipstick on a pig” comment, Trump gets no pass. As he did not with his comments on Fox’s Megyn Kelly after the Fox debate. The Liberal Media Narrative game is in play.
And it isn’t working.
What is the lesson here? It’s an easy lesson, an old lesson and a lesson that has nothing whatsoever to do with Donald Trump on Carly Fiorina’s looks or Ted Cruz on a government shutdown beyond the fact that they are Republicans. The fact is that no Republican - no matter who he or she is - will get a pass on anything the media decides is “controversial.” The Liberal Media Narrative must be served come hell or high water.
Despite the fact that Obama was definitely not referencing Palin in his remarks while Trump was directly and unambiguously directly his remarks at Kelly and Fiorina, Lord insists that Trump's fans -- himself apparently among them -- "understand why comments about the physical looks of a woman are bad if coming from Donald Trump, irrelevant and dismissed if coming from Barack Obama."
At no point, however, does Lord breathe a word of what Trump actually said about Kelly and Fiorina in his defense of them; he simply declares any atempt to hold Trump accountable for his words (never mind the fact that evenconservativescriticized his nasty jabs at Fiorina and Kelly) is part of the "Liberal Media Narrative."
But if there is a dishonest "liberal media narrative" that Lord believes exists, then there is also a conservative media narrative that is just as dishonest -- and Lord's column is all about furthering that dishonesty.
NewsBusters' Dylan Gwinn Whiffs Again Topic: NewsBusters
Poor Dylan Gwinn. He doesn't seem to know when to give it up.
Gwinn's nasty, uninformed sports-themed blog stylings continue in an Aug. 25 NewsBusters post defending ex-baseball player Curt Schilling's tweet likening Muslims to Nazis, which earned Schilling a suspension from ESPN:
Schilling may understand the reasons for his suspension. Yet, they remain a mystery to me. There is nothing factually inaccurate with the message of the tweet. It in no way compares “Muslims” to Nazis. It compares the number of Muslim “extremists” to the number of German extremists, with the point being that whether you accept the math or not, extremists need not have a numerical majority in any one country or religion in order to take control, and create catastrophic results for the rest of the world.
Which, is absolutely true.
Actually, it's not -- both Schilling and Gwinn got it wrong. As Vox explains:
Muslims are by far the number-one victims of extremist groups such as ISIS: They are the most likely to be killed by ISIS, and they are the most likely to actively fight ISIS. Nazi-era Germans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly supported and fought for the Nazi regime. So in fact the relationship between Nazi-era Germans and Nazi crimes is the exact opposite of the relationship between Muslims and ISIS.
Nevertheless, Gwinn concludes his post by writing, "But of course, truth is always the first casualty." Only in your work, dude.
NewsBusters Blogger Swings At Margaret Sanger, Whiffs Topic: NewsBusters
We've highlighted how much NewsBusters blogger and right-wing pundit wannabe Dylan Gwinn cheers for gay pro athletes to fail. Perhaps he should stick to his sports, because he's even worse when he ventures off that reservation.
Gwinn devoted an Aug. 17 NewsBusters post to whining about a now-deleted post by "billionaire lib" Mark Cuban defending Planned Parenthood over factually dubious attacks by Republican Ben Carson:
The limousine liberal Cuban might as well have deleted the tweet and distanced himself from the link, because the NPR piece made an atrociously disingenuous defense of Sanger and Planned Parenthood. After identifying Sanger as a member of the eugenics movement – a movement dedicated to ensuring that poor and poorly educated people did not reproduce – NPR described Sanger as “paternalistic” towards blacks, not necessarily racist.
The piece cites an article Sanger wrote in 1946 about “… giving ‘Negro’ parents a choice in how many children they would have.”
“The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America,” she wrote. “Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair.”
Hmm, if it’s important for “all parents” to only reproduce only from strength and never from weakness, then why did Sanger feel it necessary to pen a letter specifically referencing black people?
If Gwinn had bothered to closely read the NPR fact-check he cites in his mindless bashing of Cuban, he would have noticed that the 1946 Sanger piece on Negroes appeared in a publication called the Negro Digest. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Negro Digest "was similar to the Reader's Digest but aimed to cover positive stories about the African-American community."
In other words, Sanger was "specifically referencing black people" because she was writing the article for a publication targeted at black people. So much for Gwinn's sinister racist conspiracy theory.
Gwinn then added, "And NPR failed to mention Sanger’s characterization of blacks as 'human weeds.'" He doesn't explain that's because there's no evidence Sanger ever actually said such a thing.
Gwinn links to an anti-abortion website that claims this statement came from Sanger's "Pivot of Civilization." In fact, the term "human weeds" appears nowhere in the book.
Then Gwinn gets totally contradictory:
The fact check referenced a report from the Guttmacher Institute, which stated that 60 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are actually in majority white neighborhoods, as opposed to black, which would seem to refute one element of what Carson said. But Guttmacher was once the research arm of Planned Parenthood, and it is explicitly pro-abortion. According to an interactive map created by the pro-life group Protecting Black Life, “79% of [Planned Parenthood’s] surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.”
But if we shouldn't trust the Guttmacher Institute's because it's "explicitly pro-abortion," shouldn't we similarly distrust Protecting Black Life because it's explicitly anti-abortion?
Actually, there's a good reason we shouldn't trust that map: as we've previously noted, the map's very generous definition of "within walking distance" is two miles, and many of those black and Latino neighborhoods are on the far fringe of that radius.
Gwinn follows that up by getting really stupid:
Billionaire libs like Mark Cuban are so busy trying to take shots at Republicans, while making themselves appear to be so enlightened, that they miss both forest and tree. Abortion is phasing black people out in cities and states all over the country. Only when reactionary libs like Cuban start caring more about that than scoring points with other reactionary libs on twitter can we say that all black lives matter.
Actually, the black fertility rate is currently hovering around 2.0, which is effectively the replacement rate, meaning that the black population in the U.S. is steady, not that "abortion is phasing black people out."
If Gwinn really thinks black lives matter, he might want to try and do something about the black infant mortality rate, which is more than double that of whites and Hispanics and has nothing to do with abortion.
Those black lives probably don't matter to Gwinn since he can't reduce them to a sound bite-friendly right-wing talking point.
NewsBusters Blogger Roots for Failure of Gay Athletes Topic: NewsBusters
Lower-tier sports radio guy Dylan Gwinn wrote a book, the Regnery-published "Bias in the Booth," whining about alleged liberal bias in sports journalism that the Columbia Journalism review dismissed thusly: "This book is not worth your time. This book is very dumb. This book exposes nothing except its author’s own rhetorical limitations. A keening, bitter catalog of slights and allegations of willful journalistic malpractice, Bias in the Booth is less an analysis than a screed, reliant on ad hominem attacks, suppositions, and generalizations in its bid to document the purported liberal bias of American sports media."
Naturally, all that seething hatred landed Gwinn a blogging gig at NewsBusters. And as befits someone writing for a website of the anti-gay Media Research Center, gay athletes serve as a berzerk button for him.
Gwinn devoted an Aug. 15 post to gloating that openly gay pro football player Michael Sam was taking a break from his Canadian Football League career for mental health reasons. Commence the gloating:
No, the sports media didn’t make Sam a slow, “tweener,” and a bad scheme fit for an NFL defense. It was more sinister than that. They made him unlikeable. In their zeal to turn Sam into the gay Jackie Robinson, they made him arrogant. They took a likeable kid and made him a diva with the sense of entitlement that drives NFL-types nuts.
If the New York Times had been honest about where Sam stood in the draft, as opposed to saying he was “projected to be drafted in the early rounds,” something no scout worth anything believed, then maybe the sense of entitlement that turned NFL scouts off at the Veterans Combine wouldn’t have set in. If Sam hadn’t been told he was making “incredibly brave decisions” and “breaking longstanding barriers,” the arrogance might not have taken root. Perhaps if ESPN hadn’t shown Sam kissing his boyfriend on a loop for 87 hours, Sam would have seen himself as more football player than gay man.
[...]
America’s first openly gay football player was always more of an LGBT activist than he was a football player. Now, he’s just one of those things.
In a stunning coincidence of epic proportions that no one could have possibly seen coming, ESPN has found another gay professional athlete less than three days after Michael Sam’s announcement that he is walking away from football. This most recent out-of-the-closet jock comes to us by way of baseball. David Denson, a minor league first baseman in the Brewers organization, recently came out to his teammates, a process he explained in the ESPN article:
[...]
Could that be the reason why Denson decided to come out, believing that his announcement would make it politically impossible for the Brewers to release him? I have no idea. But how many minor league first basemen get articles in ... Slate? And there’s precedent for that. Remember that the NFL called several teams, urging them to sign Michael Sam after the Rams cut him, to prevent a media/PR backlash.
Is it too far-fetched to believe Denson would want to repeat that recent history now?
I wish it was.
Is it too far-fetched to believe that Gwinn is such a homophobe that he roots for the failure of athletes who do not share his sexual orientation? I wish it was.
Jeffrey Lord spent his Aug. 8 NewsBusters post bragging about how CNN just hired him as an analyst and that is happy to promote his "legitimate conservative" views on the network.
Apparently, it's a "legitimate conservative" view to smear people as Nazis.
As Media Matters notes, Lord used a column at the right-wing American Spectator to go Godwin big time, claiming that Donald Trump's critics are engaging in a "Goebbelsesque Big Lie technique" by criticizing Trump's recent "blood" remarks about Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly. He calls it "a plu-perfect example of the insight of Hitler's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels" and adds in case anyone missed the point, "This is -- there is no other word for it -- a Goebbels-esque lie."
Lord has a history of dubious ranting, whether it be getting fooled by a fake Twitter account for Seth Rogen or making false claims about an Obama adminstraton appointee or insisting (then doubling down on his insistence) that a black man beaten to death in segregation-era Georgia wasn't technically "lynched" because his assailants didn't hang him and there weren't enough of them to form a proper mob.
This is who CNN hired as a commentator. And this is who NewsBusters has hired as one of its "star" bloggers.
MRC Names Blogging Award After A Terrible Blogger Topic: NewsBusters
Tonight is NewsBusters' 10th anniversary party, complete with party at a swanky downtown Washington, D.C. nightclub:
The celebration will be held at The Hamilton in downtown Washington, D.C., on Monday, August 3 from 6 to 8 p.m.
As part of the festivities, emcee Ann Coulter will announce our first annual Noel Sheppard Media Blogger of the Year Award. In honor of Noel's memory we established this award to go to a media blogger "who best reflects the spirit of Noel Sheppard’s energetic blog postings in pursuit of exposing the news media’s liberal political agenda."
Note that the Media Research Center is celebrating how "energetic" a blogger Sheppard was -- not how accurate he was.
We've been documenting Sheppard's work for NewsBusters since 2007, when we first noted his history of double standards, incomplete reporting, misleading claims and nasty attacks. He was also a factually challenged climate denier, to the point of telling lies about Al Gore to his infamous appearance on a conspiracy-theory TV show hosted by Jesse Ventura in which he delcared that global warming is all about “power and money and control of the population."
When he wasn't issuing corrections for his blog posts -- which was surprisinglyoften -- he was slapping cliched, recycled headlines on 'em. If you wanted to hear how somebody was "smacked down" or "schooled," Sheppard was your guy.
Given that, it's rather fitting that Ann Coulter will be giving out the Noel Sheppard award. She's turned herself into a performance artist who must continually say offensive things in order to stay in the headlines, to the point that she's effectively taking a eugenic approach to immigration (no fatties!), which used to be a bad thing when right-wingers accused Margaret Sanger of it.
The fact that MRC thinks Sheppard 1) deserves an award to be named after him and 2) is being "honored" by having Ann Coulter give it out says volumes about the MRC.
MRC Is Mad Hillary Tried To Correct A False Story Topic: NewsBusters
Clay Waters sure tried to make it sound as sinister as he could in a July 24 MRC NewsBusters post, asserting that "after pushback from the Clinton camp," a New York Times story claiming that inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a "criminal investigation" into Hillary Clinton's handling of "sensitive government information" on a personal email server while secretary of state because a "laughably evasive, indirect accusation." Waters highlighted how "the Hillary team had complained to the Times about the initial Thursday night story, and the paper (surprise) complied."
Waters doesn't explain why it's such a bad thing for the Clinton camp to complain about an inaccurate story and try to have it corrected. And as the following days after Waters' post shows, it was very much inaccurate.
The Times has now corrected its story to state that there was, in fact, no criminal referral, let alone any request for an investigation. A second correction states that what happened was a "security referral," not a criminal referral. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan adds that the referral wasn't even targeted at Clinton specifically, but a general referral into how classified information was handled regarding Clinton's personal server. Sullivan said of the story: "So it was, to put it mildly, a mess."
Yet Waters' post has not been updated to reflect that the Times story's central claim has been retracted, nor has any other MRC article admitted that the story is false. Indeed, another NewsBusters post coming shortly after Waters', a July 24 item by Kyle Drennen, repeats the now-discredited claim that the "Justice Department was considering launching a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal" and that "the Times altered the story after being pressured by the Clinton campaign."
Will Waters, Drennen and the MRC ever tell their readers that the Times story they hyped was false and that Hillary was absolutely correct to push the Times to get it right? Don't count on it.
UPDATE: A July 27 NewsBusters post by Yuri Perez admits that the inspectors general's recommendations "did not lead to a 'criminal referral' as initially reported by the New York Times, but rather to a 'security referral.'" But Waters' and Drennen's posts touting the Times' original article falsely referring to a "criminal investigation" remain uncorrected.
Fellow conservatives aren't the only targets of the Media Research Center's Heathering tactics for straying even slightly away from right-wing orthodoxy. The MRC's fellow right-wing media outlets are in the bull's eye as well.
In a Nov. 15 NewsBusters 
The Media Rsearch Center loves to complain about the media taking people out of context -- at least when it's not 
An Oct. 30 NewsBusters 
We've 
Dave Pierre uses a Sept. 23 NewsBusters 
We got a chuckle out of Mark Finkelstein's Sept. 18 NewsBusters 
oor Dylan Gwinn. He doesn't seem to know when to give it up.
Tonight is NewsBusters' 10th 
Clay Waters sure tried to make it sound as sinister as he could in a July 24 MRC NewsBusters 
