An Aug. 8 CNSNews.com blog post by managing editor Michael W. Chapman praises "rap artist and TV star Ice-T, who is liberal," for declaring that "right to bear arms is 'the last form of defense against tyranny,' and that the right is not about hunting animals but about protecting oneself from an oppressive government." Chapman rather benignly describes Ice-T's rap career this way: "Ice-T, born Tracy Lauren Marrow, started his rap music career in the 1980s and won the “Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group” in 1991."
Curiously, Chapman did not mention Ice-T's most notorious moment as a rapper -- though a fellow Media Research Center employee did not two weeks earlier.
Sarah Stites devoted a July 23 NewsBusters post to describing "The Five Most Vile Anti-Police Raps," harrumphing, "Long before the #BlackLivesMatter movement took hold, many rappers have been singing about police run-ins, alleged 'police brutality,' and their overall hatred and distrust of the 'system.'"
One of Stites' vile five: "Cop Killer" by Body Count, a rap-metal fusion fronted by none other than Ice-T.
So is Ice-T a vile cop-hater or a Second Amendment hero? Chapman and Stites have apparently decided he can be both.
NEW ARTICLE: CNS Does the Unemployment Shuffle Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com just can't stop playing up cherry-picked jobless statistics to make President Obama look bad while burying the good news about new jobs created. Read more >>
CNS Portrays False Attack on Hillary As Credible, Merely Disputed Topic: CNSNews.com
The idea that Hillary Clinton's emails outed an Iranian nuclear scientist, thus leading to his execution by Iranian authorities, is a myth -- but don't tell CNSNews.com that.
An Aug. 8 CNS article by Susan Jones uncritically repeated Republican Sen. Tom Cotton's suggestion that scientist Shahram Amiri was executed because "in the e-mails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisers about this gentleman. That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decision was to put that kind of highly classified information a private server. I think her judgment is not suited to keep this country safe." Jones quotes from the emails, but none of them mention Amiri by name, nore do Cotton or Jones back up the suggestion that Iranians had access to Clinton's private server.
On Aug. 9, Patrick Goodenough frames the claim as a mere dispute between the Trump and Clinton campaigns after Trump latched onto it:
The execution of an Iranian nuclear scientist surfaced on the campaign trail Monday when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested that his Democratic rival’s private server emails may have been linked to his death.
“Many people are saying that the Iranians killed the scientist who helped the U.S. because of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails,” Trump tweeted, in reference to Shahram Amiri, executed last week according to the Iranian judiciary.
Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state is a major controversy in her presidential campaign and Trump’s tweet referred to reports that a couple of emails – among thousands released by the State Department in line with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit – referred implicitly to Amiri.
The tweet drew a sharp retort from Nick Merrill, Clinton’s traveling press secretary, who said the GOP nominee was presenting a fabrication, under the cover of what other, unnamed people supposedly are saying.
“‘Many people are saying’ = ‘I made this up’” Merrill tweeted. “After a morning on the teleprompter, the muzzle was bound to come off.” (Trump gave a major economic speech in Detroit earlier in the day, reading off a teleprompter.)
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), for one, has raised concerns about the emails on Clinton's private server in relation to Amiri’s fate.
Not only does Goodenough fail to offer any proof of Iranian access to Clinton's server, he failed to mention the crucial fact that there's no link whatsoever between Amiri and Clinton's emails.
A Washington Post article posted before Goodenough's article -- so he had no excuse not to reference it -- debunked claims of a connection:
There are several possible explanations as to why Amiri decided to go home and face the judgment of the Iranian justice system, which concluded he was a traitor. The Iranian government may have threatened his wife and 7-year old son. He may have hated life on the run. He may have had a change of heart.
But there’s no reasonable connection between the discussion of Amiri’s case on email by Clinton’s staff to Amiri’s eventual execution. There’s no evidence her server was hacked. The Iranians knew all about Amiri well before the emails were released publicly. His kidnapping story never held water and his fate was sealed long before his sentence was carried out.
An Aug. 9 Washington Post fact-check by Glenn Kessler was even more definitive:
As can be seen with this timeline of newspaper articles, the defection and then return of Amiri was widely covered in the news media in 2009 and 2010. Iranian officials could have learned everything they needed to know about Amiri’s defection from reading The Post. Moreover, Iran first publicly raised questions about his disappearance. There was little to be learned from the cryptic messages in Clinton’s emails, even if Iran had somehow gained access to Clinton’s server.
Mystery solved! And four more Pinocchios for Donald Trump.
Will Goodenough correct his article? Will Jones explain to her readers that Cotton was wrong? Will CNS admit it's promoting a false, politically motivated attack and that it knows it's false? Does CNS even care about publishing fair and accurate journalism?
As usual, the CNSNews.com article by Susan Jones on July's unemployment numbers obsesses over the labor force participation rate:
94,333,000 Americans were not in the labor force in July, a slightly better showing than June’s 94,517,000; and the labor force participation rate improved slightly, increasing a tenth of a point to 62.8 percent from June’s 62.7 percent, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reorted on Friday.
In September 2015, the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.4 percent, its lowest point since 1977. The best it’s been since Barack Obama took office is 65.8 percent in February 2009, the month after Obama was sworn in amid a recession.
The labor force participation rate is the percentage of people in the civilian noninstitutionalized population, age 16 or older, who are either working or actively seeking work.
As noted by the Congressional Budget Office, the labor force participation rate reflects people’s decisions about the attractiveness of working or looking for work compared with alternatives such as attending school, caring for family members, or retiring.
But Jones failed to report that the labor force participiation rate is -- as we've noted -- a poor measure of unemployment. As even the conservative American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, 41 million of Americans not in the labor force are retired, a number boosted by retiring baby roomers, and an additional 15 million are not looking for work because they are in school.
If Jones is putting so much emphasis on a bogus number, that means the real number must be good. And it is -- but Jones waits until the fifth paragraph of her article to mention that 255,000 jobs were cfreated in July.
Jones also penned a sidebar highlighing that "government employment increased by 38,000 in July." But had Jones bothered to look into the numbers at all, she would have found -- like Reuters did -- that much of the employment in the government sector had to do with hiring teachers.
Such laziness and dishonesty not only shows us that Jones is a terrible reporter, but also that CNS cares nothing about fair and accurate reporting.
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman really, really hates gays and transgenders. So much so, in fact, that he publishes -- and republishes -- articles by discredited anti-gay and anti-transgender psychiatrist Paul McHugh.
Chapman's still at it. In May, Chapman devoted an article to telling us that "Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and former psychiatrist–in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, who has studied transgendered people for 40 years, said it is a scientific fact that 'transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men.'"
Chapman states this particular McHugh rant came from "an article for The Witherspoon Institute," but he doesn't mention that it was published 11 months earlier -- meaning it had no news value and that he's very late in getting around to rehashing it. Or that CNS -- presumably upon Chapman's request -- republished McHugh's piece shortly after it appeared at Witherspoon.So Chapman is not only rehashing a nearly year-old piece, it's a rehashed nearly year-old piece CNS itself republished.
Then, in a July 21 article, Chapman tells us once again that McHugh is "the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University" -- an appeal to authority that means nothing -- and that he now says "it is a scientific fact that 'there is no gay gene.'"
According to Chapman, McHuch states of his claim:
"The best data, of course, [comes from the Framingham Study],” said Dr. McHugh. “If you are a man and you grow up in a rural environment, you are four times less likely to have homosexual relationships than if you grow up in a metropolitan area. That's not left-handedness.”
“If you are a lesbian, you are much more likely to be college-educated,” he said. “That's not something that happens at conception.”
McHugh appears to be referring to the Framingham Heart Study, which is a study of heart disease, not homosexuality.
Oh, and these statements are even more out of date: the interview Chapman is quoting from was published in January 2010. That's right -- Chapman is presenting a six-year-old article as something new.
Nedless to say, in neither article does Chapman present a view counter to McHugh's, despite the fact his anti-LGBT views have been widelydiscredited. That violates the mission statementof the "news" organization he runs, which "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."
It seems Chapman cares nothing about journalism despite running a "news" organization, interested not in news or even current events but, rather, pushing a biased, partisan agenda and silencing opposition. But we knew that already.
CNS Buries Trump's Attacks on Parents of Deceased Soldier Topic: CNSNews.com
As we'vedocumented, CNSNews.com is simply not interested in publishing -- or, when it does publish, giving any meaningful promotion to -- negative news regarding Donald Trump.
For days, CNS refused to mention the story of Donald Trump's attacks on Khizr Khan, father of a deceased American soldier who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, on its front page -- no mention of the attacks or the bipartisan criticism of them. CNS did enter a few AssociatedPressarticles on the controversy into its website, but they never appeared on the front page. Given that it's highly unlikely that most CNS readers venture beyond the front page, that means CNS effectively censored the story.
It was only when President Obama commented on the controversy in a way it disapproved of that CNS deemed the story worthy of its front page - and even then, Trump's attacks were not the focus of the story.
Note the framing used by Melanie Hunter in her Aug. 2 CNS article, under the headline "In Front of Foreign Leader, Obama Denounces Trump as ‘Unfit to Serve’":
During a joint White House press conference with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, President Barack Obama spent more than five minutes explaining why he thinks GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is “unfit to serve as president,” pointing to recent statements Trump made about the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, a decorated Army veteran who was killed in Iraq.
Thus, CNS makes the issue not Trump's attacks on the parents of a dead U.S. soldier but Obama criticizing the attacks in front of a "foreign leader."
While Hunter went on to summarize the back-and-forth between Trump and Khan, she failed to report that Trump's (and, presumably, Hunter's) fellow Republicans have criticized Trump's attacks -- something she knows exists because she linked to an AP article documenting that criticism.
Hunter's bias and incomplete reporting would seem to be yet another violation of CNS' mission statement, which claims that it "endeavors to fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."
CNS Touts MIchael Vick Praising God, Ignore His History of Animal Cruelty Topic: CNSNews.com
Michael Morris writes in a July 27 CNSNews.com blog post:
For National Football League (NFL) fans it’s the offseason, but that doesn’t mean you won’t hear some players making a buzz in the media about games, stats, past performances and how they stack up against the competition.
In a recent interview on The Dan Patrick Show, NFL free agent and all-time NFL rushing leader for quarterback Michael Vick confessed that he felt bad for some defenders who had to play against him in the league and noted that he is “just thankful that God seen me through.”
According to Fox Sports, Michael Vick has rushed 6,109 total yards, averaged 7.0 yards per carry and 42.7 yards per game, picked up 343 first downs and scored 36 touchdowns on the ground.
But the 36-year-old doesn’t think he’s done just yet.
“You know, I’m just thankful that God seen me through up until this moment and still give me the passion to want to go play and want to perform at a high level,” said Vick. “And I still have the work ethic now, and even more, to, you know, try to put myself in that position, so, you know, I just got to be patient from here and wait for things to happen.”
Morris doesn't mention that Vick's God-guided football career was interrupted by a 21-month prison sentence for running a dog-fighting ring that also killed the dogs who didn't perform well.
It's odd that Morris would tout Vick's relationship with God without mentioning the defining event of his life, for which he has yet to fully apologize or take repsonsibility.
CNS' Reaction to Hillary's Historic Nomination: Benghazi! Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com reacted to the historic news of Hillary Clinton being the first female major-party presidential nominee in its usual fashion: with partisan sniping instead of the fair and balanced journalism a real news operation is supposed to engage in.
The news of Democratic National Convention delegates affirming the nomination was mostly ignored by CNS, which ran only an Associated Press article and devoted no original coverage to it.
The day after the convention, though, CNS issued its mostly politically driven -- and, thus, journalistically suspect -- reaction: a story by Rachel Hoover describing how "In their 'Additional Views' supplement to the House Select Committee on Benghazi report, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) conclude that 'the administration misled the public about the Benghazi attack,' which occurred on Sept. 11, 2012."
If you'll recall, the House Benghazi report came out a month ago. A month ago. In other words, there is no news value to Hoover's article -- it's a month-old story that CNS could have easily done at the time but apparently chose not to in order to play a political game.
Additionally, the fact that Jordan's and Pompeo's views are relegated to a supplement and not included in the report proper tells us that they were rejected by the Republican majority and should carry less weight. Indeed, the Jordan-Pompeo supplement appears to rely heavily on opinion, not fact, for its conclusions, such as its assertion that the Obama White House "misled the American people for political gain" immediately after the attack.
But Hoover also violates the dicate of her boss, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell, who says that "The first rule of journalism is that if you don’t have two independent sources, you don’t have a news story." Hoover quotes only the Jordan-Pompeo supplement -- which is anything but "independent" -- and nobody else.
CNS hasn't figured out that stenography is not journalism, and uncritically repeating partisan attacks isn't either, and not even Bozell's own guidance is making a difference.
CNS Buries News of Trump Inviting Russia To Hack Hillary's Emails Topic: CNSNews.com
You'd think a presidential candidate inviting a foreign power to hack the email accounts of Americans would be big news at CNSNews.com, which purports to care a lot about national security.
But that candidate is Republican Donald Trump, so it wasn't.
CNS' initial article on the press conference in which Trump said he wished for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's email, by Melanie Hunter, failed to even mention that he said it. Hunter began her article instead with Trump's statement that "he never met Russian President Vladimir Putin but as president, he would rather be 'friendly' with Russia so both countries 'can go and knock out ISIS together' along with other allies."
Hunter was in stenography mode, as most CNS reporters are when writing about Trump, and therefore she couldn't be bothered to note that Trump previously claimed he has spoken "directly and indirectly" with Putin.
Patrick Goodenough featured Trump's press conference in an article the next day -- but didn't mention the hacking invitation. Instead, he touted how "One day after Republican Donald Trump warned that China and Russia 'have never been closer,' China's military announced on Thursday it will hold joint exercises with Russian forces in the South China Sea."
Goodenough wrote an accompanying article that showed him in full spin mode, claiing that "The Russian government may soon release texts of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s private server during her time as secretary of state, a respected geopolitical affairs publication reported last month, citing Western intelligence sources." It wasn't until the 13th paragraph of his article that he noted Trump's invitation to Russia to hack Hillary's email, then immediately noted Trump ally Newt Gingrich's baseless assertion that Trump was making a "joke."
It wasn't until a full day later that CNS gave the hacking invitation a bit more prominence, in an article by Susan Jones -- but she, like Goodenough, spun Trump's words in a way to bury the whole treasonous aspect of it:
"It's just a total deflection, this whole thing with Russia," Donald Trump told a news conference on Wednesday.
"In fact, I saw her (Hillary Clinton's) campaign manager -- I don't know his title, Mook. I saw him on television and they asked him about Russia and the (DNC) hacking. By the way, they hacked -- they probably have her 33,000 e-mails. I hope they do. They probably have her 33,000 e-mails that she lost and deleted because you'd see some beauties there."
Trump repeated several times that it may not be Russia who hacked the DNC: "Nobody even knows this, it's probably China, or it could be somebody sitting in his bed. But it shows how weak we are, it shows how disrespected we are."
After telling the news conference that Russia -- or somebody -- probably already has Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, a reporter later returned to the subject, asking Trump why he doesn't tell Russian President Vladimir Puting to stop interfering with the U.S. presidential campaign.
"I have nothing to do with Putin. I've never spoken to him. I don't know anything about him other than he will respect me. He doesn't respect our president.
"And if it is Russia -- which it's probably not, nobody knows who it is -- but if it is Russia, it's really bad for a different reason, because it shows how little respect they have for our country, when they would hack into a major party and get everything.
"But it would be interesting to see -- I will tell you this. Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next."
A short time later, Trump repeated that nobody knows if the Russians were the ones who hacked into the DNC: "You know (what) the sad thing is? That with the technology and the genius we have in this country, not in government unfortunately, but with the genius we have in government, we don't even know who took the Democratic National Committee e-mails. We don't even know who it is."
Trump also said it's not about the hackers anyway: "It was about the things that were said in those emails. They were terrible things, talking about Jewish, talking about race, talking about atheist, trying to pin labels on people -- what was said was a disgrace, and it was Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and believe me, as sure as you're sitting there, Hillary Clinton knew about it. She knew everything."
Not only did Jones failed to mention the bipartisan criticism of Trump's remarks, she referred to something she called the "Democrat National Convention."That's not a mistake -- right-wingers have maliciously switched "Democratic" for "Democrat" for years.
Jones' commitment to partisan posturing over something as basic as getting names correct tells us what a hack she is -- and the lack of journalistic seriousness of her employer.
UPDATE: A July 29 article by Goodenough on Joe Biden referring to Russian premier Vladimir Putin as a "dictator" waits until the very end to note Trump's hacking invitation to Russia, but then added, "Trump later characterized the comments as sarcasm."
This means that CNS has yet to make Trump's hacking invitation the primary focus of any article. And this is a "news" operation?
Dear CNS: Obama is Right, World Is Less Violent Than Ever Topic: CNSNews.com
On July 21, CNSNews.com published an unbylined article headlined "Obama: ‘The World Has Never Been Less Violent’." It's another bit of lazy stenography, cribbing from a speech in which Obama said that “we are living in the most peaceful” era in human history and that “the world has never been less violent.”
The powers that be at CNS are apparently going to trot that article out every time there's a terrorist attack or some other form of mass violence. CNS put it back on the front page earlier this week following terrorist attacks in Europe and adding "FLASHBACK" to the headline, though the "flashback" was to about one week ago.
But CNS won't tell its readers that Obama is pretty much correct. The World Economic Forum reports:
Last year may be remembered for barrel bombs, beheadings and the Bataclan massacre, but according to a Harvard psychologist, a remarkable long term downward trend in violence is continuing.
Wars are far less common and deadly than in the recent past, terrorism is rare, and the European refugee crisis is nothing new, said Steven Pinker, a bestselling science author.
“The news is a systematically misleading way to understand the world,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
In the past five years alone, conflicts have ended in Chad, Peru, Iran, India, Sri Lanka and Angola, and if peace talks currently underway in Colombia are a success, war will have vanished from the Western hemisphere, he said.
In his 2011 book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Pinker called the decline in violence “the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species”.
Compared to most of the postwar period, 2015 has been relatively peaceful, and dramatically so compared with earlier centuries. However, there has been a small uptick in violent deaths around the world over the past couple of years.
Pinker expanded on his view of the downward trend in world violence in an article at Slate:
The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.
[...]
Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.
There is a better way to understand the world. Commentators can brush up their history—not by rummaging through Bartlett’s for a quote from Clausewitz, but by recounting the events of the recent past that put the events of the present in an intelligible context. And they could consult the analyses of quantitative datasets on violence that are now just a few clicks away.
CNS would never do that -- it's so much easier to push its right-wing agenda with misleading information.
CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones has a nastyhabit of injecting editorial comment into her supposedly fair and balanced "news" articles -- you know, the exact same thing her employer, the Media Research Center, loves to accuse the "liberal media" of doing. She's so biased, apparently, that she cannot admit the near-universal bipartisan consensus that Michelle Obama gave a very good speech on the first night of the Democratic National Convention.
Jones had to find a way -- presumably under orders from editors Terry Jeffrey and Michael W. Chapman -- to denigrate the speech in her article on it, which seems to explain her very odd opening paragraph:
Children who need protection. Bullies and "hateful language from public figures." A White House built by slaves. Black SUVS and big men with guns. Little faces pressed up against the window. And at the end of First lady Michelle Obama's speech, an admission that "right now, this is the greatest country on earth."
Huh? What does that even mean? Is Jones so desperate to avoid saying anything nice about Obama's speech that she emulated a word cloud to open her article on it?
Much of Jones' article did find her in stenography mode summarizing the speech, but she couldn't resist getting one more dig in, adding at the end: "On the campaign trail in 2008, Michelle Obama made waves when she said, 'For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.'"
This negative spin contrasts with Jones' effort to put a happy face on Ted Cruz's speech at the Republican National Convention, insisting that Cruz's "powerful speech" was "well-received until the very end, when it became clear he would not endorse Donald Trump."
MRC's Bozell Won't Lead By Example on Right-Wing News Standards Topic: CNSNews.com
Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell surprisingly went after the standards of the right-wing media, according to the Daily Caller:
Founder of the media watchdog group Media Research Center Brent Bozell criticized bloggers in their “underwear” who write unsubstantiated stories at 3:00 am and their effect on the rest of the media.
[...]
Commenting to the division in conservative media, “I warn my fellow conservatives about this. We are very critical of the old media for all the rules that they break. But the new media, it’s the wild, wild west. There are no rules. And in the name of journalism you’ve got websites that are projecting things that are terrible [for] journalism.”
“The first rule of journalism is that if you don’t have two independent sources, you don’t have a news story,” Bozell said. “And you look at some sites, especially bloggers, and they put forward things that occur to them at 3:00 in the morning in their underwear and then the next site picks it up because it’s interesting and if it’s not true, well they just point to the blogger.”
“You can have the guy in his underwear but if you have an independent source that confirms what he said, then you got a news story.”
“So be careful. We have to all be careful,” he said.
That's a good point, of course, and it would mean something if Bozell practices what he preaches. He doesn't.
Much of the original reporting at the "news" division of Bozell's MRC empire, CNSNews.com, is simplystenography and it often does not include the "two independent sources" Bozell says make a news story. CNS is run by a managing editor who's much more interested in copying-and-pasting the latest anti-gay and anti-Muslim rants from Franklin Graham than he is offering fair and balanced reporting. And it has opted to publish nothing about Donald Trump rather than report anything negative about him.
Instead of merely spouting off on journalistic standards, Bozell could lead by example by structuring and staffing CNS to be the model of the news organization it wants to see. But judging by CNS' nearly 20 years of bias, he has no intention of ever doing that.
P.S. Wasn't just a few weeks ago that Bozell's lieutenant-slash-ghost writer, Tim Graham, was insisting that right-wing media was just as good and original as the "liberal media"? Yes, he was.
Perhaps the Media Research Center isn't quite as solidly behind Donald Trump as we thought.
The MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, was in full spin mode on Ted Cruz's poorly received speech at the Republican National Convention, in which he pointedly refused to endorse nominee Donald Trump and was booed off the stage by RNC delegates. CNS' Susan Jones spun that Cruz's "powerful speech" was "well-received until the very end, when it became clear he would not endorse Donald Trump." Jones then went into full stenography mode, summarizing the speech and not mentioning the boos again until the 21st paragraph of her article.
Jones followed up with an article reciting Cruz's defense of his speech -- which curiously omitted any criticism of it by his fellow conservatives -- and uncritically quoted Cruz blaming the media for the controversy over it.
Meanwhile, at the side of the MRC that doesn't pretend to be a "news" organization, they were going after anyone who criticized Cruz's speech -- well, anyone who wasn't a prominent conservative or who regularly appears on Fox News (Charles Krauthammer, for example). Frequent MRC target Chris Matthews got bashed again, with Scott Whitlock insisting that his "unhinged" criticism was "more about his hatred for Cruz and less about righteous indignation in how the Republican treated Donald Trump."
Conservative political analyst Nicolle Wallace (on NBC) "melodramatically ranted" about Cruz, Kyle Drennen declared. And Nicholas Fondacaro even went after a Trump surrogate (on CNN) who "couldn’t seem to control his emotions as he let loose a stream of insults towards Cruz."
This is the same MRC, by the way, that has had no comment whatsoever about CNN's ethically questionable hiring of fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, even though such a thing should be in the MRC's bailiwick given that CNN is part of the hated "liberal media."
Remember that MRC chief Brent Bozell endorsed Cruz and denounced Trump during the primary process, and as recently as last month was still working behind the scenes to help plot Cruz's political future. One has to wonder if MRC's Cruz defense was ordered straight from the top as a passive-aggressive needling of Trump -- and whether Cruz's RNC speech itself was at least partly the work of Bozell and his secret Cruz cabal.
CNS Buries Story of Melania Trump's Plagiarism Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com did do some original reporting on the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the CNS front page.
The headline on Susan Jones' story reads "Melania Trump: 'Our Country Is Underperforming'" and it begins with sycophantic slobbering over the speech:
In her well-received speech to the Republican National Convention Monday night, Melania Trump promised that the presidential race "will be hard fought all the way to November. There will be good times and hard times and unexpected turns. It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama," she added with a smile.
It's not until the second paragraph that Jones got around to noting that "The drama exploded shortly after Mrs. Trump left the stage, as accusations of plagiarism swirled around two passages in her speech, copied almost word for word from a speech delivered to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 by Michelle Obama."
But after noting that "Those similarities, played side-by-side on televisions across America on Tuesday morning, are noted below," Jones returned to stenography mode, explaining how "the heart of Melania's speech centered on her husband's love of family and country -- and how he will deliver the change that he says the country needs."
That was apparently more important to Jones than the details of Melania's apparent plagiarism, complete with a quote from the Trump campaign that avoided addressing the issue at hand.
Later, an update was added to the top of Jones' article in italics that uncritically transcribed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's nonsensical denial plagiarism took place. But the plagiarism-avoiding headline remains.
Meanwhile, over at CNS parent the Media Research Center, they're trying to dismiss the story entirely by complaining that it's being covered, calling the coverage a "feeding frenzy" and grumbling that "In contrast, ABC, CBS, NBC and FNC during these hours collectively provided a mere 1 minute, 48 seconds of coverage to Pat Smith's emotional speech condemning Hillary Clinton's inept handling of Benghazi." It took seven MRC employees to register that complaint: authors Mike Ciandella and Rich Noyes and five others doing research.
Last Week's Trump Coverage At CNS: Finally, Actual Coverage Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com finally got around to acting like the "news" organization it claims to be by finally putting Donald Trump on its front page -- something it hasavoideddoingforweeks.
CNS did runseveralwirearticles on Trump on its front page, which surprisingly focused on the actual news of the week, which mainly involved Trump's vice presidential pick. CNS also ran its first original Trump-related "news" articles since June 29, and the subjects it chose were, well, a bit odd.
In a July 11 article -- closing the 13-day gap between original CNS Trump articles -- managing editor Michael W. Chapman huffed that possible Trump VP pick Michael Flynn "supports abortion and thinks homosexual marriage is fine." The next day, Chapman dutifully reported Flynn's flip-flop and his new declaration of being “a pro-life Democrat.”
Those were followed by a July 14 article by Patrick Goodenough on new British foreign secretary and former London mayor Boris Johnson, noting that Johnson is "no fan of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump" but has also said mean things about Hillary Clinton as well.
An Aug. 8 CNSNews.com blog post by managing editor Michael W. Chapman praises "rap artist and TV star Ice-T, who is liberal," for declaring that "right to bear arms is 'the last form of defense against tyranny,' and that the right is not about hunting animals but about protecting oneself from an oppressive government." Chapman rather benignly describes Ice-T's rap career this way: "Ice-T, born Tracy Lauren Marrow, started his rap music career in the 1980s and won the “Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group” in 1991."
The idea that Hillary Clinton's emails outed an Iranian nuclear scientist, thus leading to his execution by Iranian authorities, is a myth -- but don't tell CNSNews.com that.
As usual, the CNSNews.com 
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman really, really hates gays and transgenders. So much so, in fact, that he 
As 
Michael Morris writes in a July 27 CNSNews.com 
CNSNews.com reacted to the historic news of Hillary Clinton being the first female major-party presidential nominee in its usual fashion: with partisan sniping instead of the fair and balanced journalism a real news operation is supposed to engage in.
You'd think a presidential candidate inviting a foreign power to hack the email accounts of Americans would be big news at CNSNews.com, which purports to care a lot about national security.
Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell surprisingly went after the standards of the right-wing media, according to the 
Perhaps the Media Research Center isn't quite as solidly behind Donald Trump as we thought.
CNSNews.com did do some original reporting on the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the CNS front page.
CNSNews.com finally got around to acting like the "news" organization it claims to be by finally putting Donald Trump on its front page -- something it 
