More Fake News: WND Misleads About Obama's Executive Orders Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh rants in a Dec. 20 WorldNetDaily article:
Barack Obama, who once threatened, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” to impose executive orders, is telling his soon-to-be successor Donald Trump that he really shouldn’t be using executive orders that much.
In fact, in an interview with NPR, he went on and on about it.
[...]
Fox News described Obama, who repeatedly has turned to the executive pen to impose major changes across America, such as a rule requiring that building owners allow men to use women’s restrooms when they say they are women, and more, as “pen-happy.”
What Unruh curiously fails to do: tell readers exactly how many executive orders Obama has issued and how that stacks up with previous presidents, despite ambiguously stating far down in his article that "statistics reveal that Obama has not issued significantly more executive orders that other recent presidents."
Turns out that's false. As of December 20, Obama has issued 266 executive orders. By contrast, George W. Bush issued 291 executive orders. If Obama's numbers stay steady, Obama will have issued the fewest executive orders of any president who served two full terms since the 19th century and slowest pace of executive order issuance since William McKinley.
The only concrete number Unruh bothers to serve up is an irrelevant claim that "Over the years, Republican presidents have issued 7,122 executive orders, and Democrat presidents 8,337." But that number is skewed by the fact that one president, Franklin Roosevelt, issued 3,721 executive orders durng his presidency, which spanned a little thing called World War II.
(If we wanted to play the same game WND is by selectively counting votes for Hillary Clinton to paper over the fact she got more votes than Donald Trump did, we could point out that if you don't count FDR, Democratic presidents issued only 4,616 executive orders, far less than Republicans.)
In other words, the entire premise of Unruh's article lacks a foothold in reality. But what else do you expect from a top fake-news provider?
Why, Yes, CNS, We Are Sick Of (Your) Censored News Topic: CNSNews.com
As part of the Media Research Center's year-end fundraising campaign, its "news" division, CNSNews.com, has been displaying a pop-up message asking readers, "Sick of censored news?"
Now that you mention it, CNS, we are -- but our problem is that CNS is the news outlet that has been doing the censoring. Let's review some of the examples we've caught over the years, shall we?
CNS censored the fact that a poll it touted feating results friendly to anti-abortion activists was condicted by an anti-abortion group and a right-wing polling firm run by Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.
CNS censored a statement by President Obama on persecuted Christmas because it contracted its partian agenda of attacking Obama for purportedly not caring enough about Christians.
CNS attacked Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer's criticism of Senate Republicans obstructing President Obama's final Supreme Court pick but censored the fact that Schumer's suggestion of a similar obstruction to a potential Bush pick, but censored the fact that Schumer was speaking hypothetically and that Repubicans attacked Schumer's suggestion just as Shumer criticized Republicans' obstruction.
CNS touted a Republican congressman's denouncing of the purported findings in the Center for Medical Progress' misleadingly edited attack videos on Planned Parenthood, but censored the fact that the congressman knew about the videos weeks before he spoke out about them.
CNS censored the Josh Duggar sex scandal when it first broke, later covering the scandal involving the right-wing-friendly family only when the story became too big to ignore.
CNS censored flaws in a study attacking immigrants to the U.S, then censored arguably racist statements by one of the study's co-authors.
CNS touted the Benghazi movie "13 Hours," but censored the fact that the film tanked at the box office.
Too bad CNS isn't so sick of censored news that it can be moved to do anything about its own.
No, WND, Obama Never Called Erdogan His 'Best Friend' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Leo Hohmann writes in a Dec. 17 WorldNetDaily article -- headlined "Obama mum after 'best friend' tosses U.S. pastor in prison" -- that "An American pastor in Turkey has been imprisoned on trumped-up charges and is, according to Christian human-rights advocates, in 'grave danger' of becoming a casualty of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s brutal crackdown on religious minorities and dissidents in the wake of a failed coup five months ago." Hohmann adds: "Although President Obama has repeatedly named Turkish President Erdogan as one of his 'best friends' among international leaders, he has yet to make a single public statement demanding [pastor Andrew] Brunson’s release."
Note that "best friends" is in quote marks, as if Obama directly said the words. But we could find no evidence that he has.
The closest we found was a January 2012 Foreign Policy article headlined "Obama names his world leader best buddies!" which cites a Time interview with Obama in which it is claimed Obama named "his international BFFs." But in the interview itself, Obama talks of "the friendships and the bonds of trust that I’ve been able to forge with a whole range of leaders is precisely, or is a big part of, what has allowed us to execute effective diplomacy," and lists Erdogan among those leaders.
Also note that this was in 2012, well before a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey that resulted in a harsh crackdown by Erdogan on perceived opponents. The U.S. has so far refused to hand over Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based religious leader whom Erdogan blames for inspiring the coup. And the Obama administration has lifted arms prohibitions that reportedly would allow the U.S. to arm Kurdish rebels in Syria, which Erdogan opposes.
So Hohmann is repeating a falsehood that, even if it was true at the time it was suggested, is apparently no longer operative. It makes one wonder about the accuracy of his upcoming WND-published anti-Muslim book.
Hohmann is not the first WND writer to let his hatred of Obama get ahead of the facts, and he probably won't be the last.
MRC's Jeffrey Lord Pretends Limbaugh Isn't Hurting Talk Radio Topic: Media Research Center
Jeffrey Lord's Dec. 24 Media Research Center column is dedicated to fluffing Rush Limbaugh and his alleged infulence. He quotes extensively from a press release announcing that Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Neworks, had extended a "multi-million dollar deal" contract to continue appearing on several stations owned by Cumulus Media:
It goes on with tributes to Rush, well deserved I should add. Realizing this is only a portion of the stations that air Rush’s show (he is on over 600 stations), this moment of Rush’s resigning is exactly a good moment to reflect on the fact that only a few years ago his critics and the critics of talk radio in general were cheering - because, they insisted, talk radio was dying.
Actually, it has been dying, and Limbaugh is a prime factor in that -- not that Lord will tell about it, of course.
Indeed, Lord is very careful to ignore and write around the key event that made people question talk radio's future: Limbaugh's three-day tirade of misogyny against Sandra Fluke. As Politico reported earlier this year, the huge backlash to Limbaugh's hate like advertiser boycotts -- so harsh the MRC started a desperate "I Stand With Rush" campaign to try and save him -- resulted in a 38 percent loss in revenue to the talk radio industry.
When Limbaugh re-upped with Premiere in August 2016 -- succeeding an eight-year contract that paid him $50 million a year plus a $100 million signing bonus -- Premiere never disclosed how much it will be paying him, which tells you that it's much less than he was getting paid.
Limbaugh's ratings plunged so deeply that stations inmajormarkets dropped him, forcing Premiere's parent company, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), to put his show on typically less powerful and desirable stations owned by iHeartMedia itself in order to claim it still had clearance in those major cities.
The fact that these other major-market stations carrying Limbaugh are owned by Cumulus -- which is to say, not stations owned by iHeartMedia, therefore depriving the company of revenue it could otherwise be keeping within the company -- also tells us that Limbaugh is making nowhere near what he had been udner his new contract.
One of those Cumulus stations, WLS-AM in Chicago, illustrates this new reality. There were reports in 2015 that WLS was considering dropping Limbaugh's show because the station couldn't sell ads for it. Chicago media writer Robert Feder made it clear that WLS keeping Limbaugh's show was a corporate mandate, not a local decision. And as of September -- and despite Cumulus' and Premiere's spin that Limbaugh's ratings are up -- WLS-AM doesn't register among the top 20 highest-rated Chicago radio stations in either total listeners or the key 25-54 demographic.
Nevertheless, Lord still insisted that "the critics of these talk hosts and talk radio in general gotten it wrong repeatedly." It's easy to pretend that others have gotten things wrong when you ignore inconvenient facts.
WND Spins Election Results To Bury Trump's Vote Loss Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember after the 2000 election, when the ConWeb (for example, then-Newsmax columnist Neal Boortz) found different ways of viewing the election -- voting by county, voting by square miles, etc. -- to obscure the inconvenient fact that Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush did? (And which quickly devolved into fake-news territory that Newsmax also treated as fact?)
Well, it's happening again, this time at WorldNetDaily, with a similar goal: to obscure the inconvenient fact that Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump.
A Dec. 17 WND item copies-and-pastes an article from the right-wing Investor's Business Daily saying that Donald Trump won if you ignore the most populous state in the country:
As we noted in this space earlier, while Clinton's overall margin looks large and impressive, it is due to Clinton's huge margin of victory in one state — California — where she got a whopping 4.3 million more votes than Trump.
California is the only state, in fact, where Clinton's margin of victory was bigger than President Obama's in 2012 — 61.5% vs. Obama's 60%.
But California is the exception that proves the true genius of the Electoral College — which was designed to prevent regional candidates from dominating national elections.
WND followed up with a Dec. 25 article by Bob Unruh dragging out the ol' county vote, asserting that "Trump won 30 out of 50 states, and 2,623 counties, to Clinton’s 20 states or 489 counties."
Unruh went on to declare that "The 2016 results really reveal that America has become two different nations: far left metropolitan and urban areas and much more conservative regions of small cities, towns and rural areas." He added a map of the county-by-county vote -- putting Trump's counties in blue, per the petulant dictate of WND editor Joseph Farah -- because "The impact is never so strong as in a visual image."
Unstated by Unruh: Counties don't vote for president, people do.
MRC's Graham Hypocritically Attacks Media Citing 'Anonymous Government Sources' Topic: Media Research Center
The other day, we noted that the Media Reearch Center's Tim Graham huffed that "Donald Trump correctly felt NBC reporter Katy Tur was hostile to him on the campaign trail." While we looked at how the MRC appears to have helped Trump target Tur -- which resulted in threats to Tur's safety -- there's more to the story.
What launched Graham's complaint was Tur pointing out how the intelligence community agrees that Russian hackers meddled in the U.S. presidential election with the apparent goal of getting Trump elected. That set off Graham, going once again into self-righteous media-bashing mode:
This is how the liberal media try to inflate their own authority and credibility. They use anonymous government sources and then insist that when you attack their ginned-up hit jobs, you’re undermining the government. What would it look like if the anonymous sources were publicly named, and the public could judge their political or career motives? The “intelligence community” could be Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, as many suspect, a Democrat appointee spinning for the Democrats right before the Electoral College votes. That’s why the anonymity can be a very secretive and dishonest tactic.
Funny, we don't recall Graham or anyone else at the MRC demanding that Fox News reveal the anonymous government sources behind its pre-election claim that Hillary Clinton's indictment was imminent -- heck, rather than denouncing this "very secretive and dishonest tactic," the MRC was demanding that the media report the story. And when Fox's Bret Baier had to walk back his claim -- thus, making it fake news a few days before the election -- Graham and the MRC could not be bothered to issue a prominent correction, let alone apologize to its readers for promoting a fake story.
Graham can't have possibly forgotten that just two months ago his employer was promoting fake news based on the "nonymous government sources" he now derides. He has simply tried to flush it down the memory hole and is hoping MRC readers don't realize he's a massive hypocrite.
WND Admits Man Who Pushed Woman Down Stairs Wasn't Muslim Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember earlier this month when WorldNetDaily's Joe Kovacs effectively asserted that the perpetrator in a German incident in which a woman was pushed down a flight of stairs was a Muslim "migrant" -- then had to walk it back (to the point that Kovacs' byline disappeared from the article) in the face of the utter lack of evidence to support that claim without issuing a correction?
Well, Kovacs has written an update that put the definitive never-mind on his original reporting:
An arrest has been made in the high-profile case of a man who kicked a woman down a flight of subway stairs in Berlin, Germany – an attack that horrified the world when video of the incident went viral.
Svetoslav Stoykov, 27, of Varna, Bulgaria, was taken into custody at a bus station upon his return to Berlin from France, where authorities think he went to hide with relatives in coastal town of Nice.
[...]
According to the Guardian, Stoykov is a married father of three children, and has a criminal record for robbery, theft and hooliganism in his native Bulgaria. He was reportedly working in a restaurant and on a building site in Berlin.
In other words, not a Muslim.
Kovacs wrote in his final paragraph: "As WND reported, the release of the video initially sparked a firestorm on social media, as some were blaming the attack on a migrant as a result of Germany’s policy of welcoming migrants, many of whom are Muslim." Kovacs failed to tell his readers that among the people blaming Muslim "migrants" was himself.
Again, no correction for Kovacs' earlier, false reporting was issued.
CNS Reduces George Michael's Life To Arrest, 'Video Showing Two Cops Kissing' Topic: CNSNews.com
After singer George Michael's death, the Associated Press sent out an article with a feature-oriented angle under the headline "Pop superstar George Michael dies of heart failure at 53." It began by noting how Michael turned his embarassing 1998 arrest for lewd behavior in a public toilet into an artistic statement through the video for the song "Outside" and how its "memorable image of the two uniformed policemen kissing in the video -- both funny and outrageous at the time -- helped Michael come out as a proud gay man."
CNSNews.com ran that AP article as well, but as it has many times before, it decided the original article wasn't biased enough. CNS' new headline for the article: "After Arrest for Lewd Conduct in Public Toilet, George Michael Made Video Showing Two Cops Kissing."
No, really. CNS really did reduce the career of a man who sold 100 million albums and was a worldwide superstar to an arrest and a video for one of his less popular songs.
And CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, has the temerity to complain about the alleged bias of other media outlets?
An anonymously written Dec. 27 WND article claiming that "the Obama administration gave Iran secret exemptions, allowing the terror-sponsoring state to stockpile uranium in larger amounts than the limits imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal" is illustrated with a picture of President Obama apparently posing with Iran President Hassan Rouhani.
WND uses the image again in the front-page carousel tease for the article:
But as Right Wing Watch reports, Obama has never met Rouhani. The photo is a fake -- the image lifts a photo of Obama, who has never met Rouhani, meeting with former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The orange in India's flag behind them has been replaced by the green from Iran's flag.
Right Wing Watch adds that FactCheck.org has caught others using the image. Maybe if WND didn't dismiss all fact-checkers as liberal shills, it would have caught this before publishing it and embarassing itself -- and damaging its credibility -- even further.
UPDATE: WND has replaced the image with a stock photo of Obama. It didn't tell readers that the image was changed, let alone why.
MRC Complains Media Isn't Thanking Trump Enough for Stock Highs Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Sam Dorman complains in a Dec. 19 post:
As the Dow Jones Industrial Average neared the 20,000 mark for the first time in history, the index set 16 closing-day record highs since Donald Trump’s election.
Even some liberal media outlets have drawn a direct connection between the soaring stock market and Trump’s election, going so far as to label it a “Trump stock market rally.” But the broadcast networks often ignored any connection.
In just over a month’s time, ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows aired fewer stories combined than the number of records. The evening shows reported the market records in just 11 stories between Election Day and Dec. 13, despite huge investment gains. Forty-five percent of those stories ignored Trump in their market reports (5 of 11).
Meanwhile, the Dow industrial average has more than doubled under President Obama, and we don't recall anyone at the MRC crediting Obama for it even once.
WND Regurgitates Lurid Hit Job on Fact-Checker Snopes Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 24 WorldNetDaily article is largely a rehash of a Daily Mail hit job on the fact-checker website Snopes, making sure to play up claims that "One of Snopes’ leading fact-checkers is a former sex-and-fetish blogger who described her routine as smoking pot and posting to Snopes.com, and the company now is embroiled in a legal dispute between its former married founders that includes accusations the CEO used company money for prostitutes."
This is another attempt to discredit those with whom Facebook is working to ferret out fake news on its website. WND is a major source of fake news, and needless to say, WND doesn't mention that Snopes has busted it for its falsehoods afewtimes. Further, at no point does WND prove Snopes got anything wrong in its fact-checks, despite its whining that it "has been criticized by conservatives for a left-leaning bias."
WND is also silent about the Daily Mail's motivations for its hit job, and its reputation is much different that WND's biased description of it. Richard Bartholomew points out that Snopes " enjoys a reputation for truthfulness and accuracy because it has earned it. Nowhere does Snopes demand that we simply trust the site’s judgement – instead, it provides judicious quotes from relevant sources, which anyone can then check for themselves."
As the Guardian notes, the Daily Mail "has come under Snopes’ microscope enough times to be called in July 'Britain’s highly unreliable Daily Mail' by a Snopes writer who just happens to be named in the Mail story." Rather than having a debate about Facebook's fact-checker policy, the Guardian adds, "the Mail has attempted to cast doubt on the notion of fact checking. In the battle between those who profit from playing fast and loose with the truth and those trying to fix the fake news problem, the Mail has made it clear in which camp it sits."
WND is lazily engaging in a second-hand hit job on not only a political enemy -- yes, to WND anyone who tells facts inconvenient to WND's right-wing agenda is an enemy, just like we are -- but a critic who knows all about WND's shoddy reporting record.
Did The MRC Prime Trump's Attack On NBC Reporter? Topic: Media Research Center
In a Dec. 16 post, the Media Reearch Center's Tim Graham huffed that "Donald Trump correctly felt NBC reporter Katy Tur was hostile to him on the campaign trail." Graham doesn't mention how the MRC played a big role in ginning up the idea of that purported hostility.
At a Nov. 2 rally, Donald Trump singled out Tur, complaining about the purportedly "dishonest" media before shouting at Tur: "There's something happening. They're not reporting it. Katy -- you're not reporting it, Katy. But there's something happening, Katy. There's something happening, Katy." Tur respondedafterwards by pointing out that while attacking reporters is part of Trump's "schtick" on the campaign trail, and his complaints about how the media covers the rallies is false, "it does make the crowd very angry and it does concern a lot of folks about the safety of journalists."
this wasn't the frist time: Tur wrote that after Trump targeted her in a December 2015 rally, the Secret Service hed to walk her to her car for her protection.
Did Trump get advice for choosing Tur as a target from the MRC? Let's look at the evidence.
In an Oct. 24 Media Research Center item, Nicholas Fondacaro complained that "The 'Big Three' networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) put their undying loyalty to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on full display Monday evening, as they completely blacked out two news stories with explosive consequences for the campaign," in contrast to the reporting of pro-Trump Fox News. He sneered: "NBC Nightly News led with Clinton fangirl Andrea Mitchell talking about how comfortable Clinton is with her lead, then pivoting to Katy Tur who mocked the GOP candidate." Curiously, Fondacaro provided no evidence whatsoever of the "mocking" he claimed Tur did.
That seemed to be a catalyst for Trump's Nov. 2 attack on Tur, but the MRC has long bashed her for not being a right-wing shill throughout the 2016 campaign:
In a September 2015 post, Ken Shepherd huffed that Tur "trashed Values Voters Summit attendees as the 'far right' of the GOP" (though Shepherd doesn't prove otherwise), but he cheered when she "was interrupted by an attendee who told her to quiet down."
In December 2015, Curtis Houck asserted that Tur "hyped that the crowd at the Trump rally on Monday 'was anything but merry and bright' as reporters like her were 'booed and cheered' by the 'riled up and angry' crowd."
On March 11, Houck was upset that "Tur took to MSNBC to air a multitude of concerns about the growing number of violent incidents at Trump rallies to go along with Tuesday’s alleged bruising of Breitbart’s Michelle Fields by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski."
On March 30, Kristine Marsh complained that Tur "slammed" Mike Huckabee as a "hardline anti-abortion rights conservative," declaring that "anti-abortion" a "biased" term (even though it's a more accurate term since all "pro-life" activists are, in fact, opposed to abortion).
In May, Mark Finkelstein grumbled that Tur suggested that it's "veiled sexism" to suggest that Hillary Clinton lacked the stamina to be president, arguing that it wasn't sexist because Trump said the same thing about Jeb Bush.
Marsh cheered in July when Trump "shushed" Tur for "continuing to press her question after he briefly answered it then shifted the focus to Hillary Clinton," justifying Trump's rudeness by delcaring that "Trump is universally brusque to reporters regardless of gender."
Sam Dorman complained on Aug. 9 that when Tur reported on Trump's sketchy tax plan as revealed in a speech, she "framed it as an attempt to appease disgruntled republicans."
On Sept. 26 Kyle Drennen was angry that Tur pointed out that Trump was trying to "game this system" by pre-emptively bashing media debate coverage"; according to Drennen's interpretation, Tur "denounced Donald Trump’s campaign team for demanding fair treatment from the press ahead of the upcoming debate."
A Oct. 2 post by Nicholas Fondacaro complained that Tur "seemed outraged that being able to write off net-losses on taxes was legal."
The MRC -- as its agenda dictates -- had a definite interest in painting Tur as hostile to Republicans in general and Trump in particular, even though much of the criticism was because Tur accurately reported events in a way that didn't advance the agenda of Trump and Republicans. It wasn't necessarily "correct" -- it was a politically motivated campaign.
The MRC was determined to paint Tur as "hostile" to Trump simply because she was not a Trump sycohpant. And it appears they made Trump know that Tur was not a sycophant, which encouraged him to single her out with anger on the campaign trail.
WND Still Covering for Trump And The Russians Over Election Interference Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has been an unusually apologetic defender of the Russians who hacked Democratic emails for the apparent purpose of getting Donald Trump elected president -- even praising such foreign intervention in the election. The defense hasn't stopped.
Chuck Norris engages in som serious spin in his Dec. 18 WND column, asserting that while Russian intervention may be a bad thing, it didn't help Trump:
I’m not minimizing the severity of the charge of cyber espionage and attempts of election sabotage by a foreign power. I love the Russian people, but, if true, it is contemptible on several levels for the Kremlin to interfere in our free elections in any respect. Whether or not the digital footprints lead to Putin’s front door, our government must track down the culprits and take some retaliatory course of action.
But the truth is: Even if the hacks originated with Putin himself, they aided Trump’s election victory about as much the Grinch helped Whoville to love Christmas. Just because the Grinch finally got it right and cheered a little on one particular Christmas, neither he nor his actions forced or even influenced the Whos’ decision to celebrate the holiday. They did that on their own volition.
There’s not a single shred of evidence or intelligence discussion that voting devices were tampered with. There’s not a single shred of evidence that WikiLeaks’ DNC and Podesta’s revelations convinced even a posse who were not already steadfast in their political conviction and decision to turn their vote against Hillary and for Trump.
Are you kidding me? As if those WikiLeaks’ emails exposed any new or greater insight into the depth of Hillary’s career corruption or chronic congenital liar syndrome.
Jesse Lee Peterson used his Dec. 18 column to take a similar stance, but then melt down in yet another fit of Obama derangement:
Any interference or effort to create uncertainty in our elections should be investigated, but there is zero evidence that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was affected by Russia.
Vladimir Putin has been outplaying Obama at every turn. From the Crimea invasion to the Syria smackdown – Putin has been snubbing Obama and aggressively pursuing his interests.
Obama says Russia tried to influence our election, yet his State Department reportedly spent several hundred thousand dollars in an attempt to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu. He worked to get rid of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, and backed the Muslim Brotherhood (which was ultimately kicked out of power). Obama undermined Moamar Gadhafi and allowed Libya to descend into civil war, which resulted in Gadhafi’s murder. Obama reportedly spied on German leader Angela Merkel and tried to have Syrian President Bashar al-Assad deposed – that one is blowing up in his face, with untold suffering and Assad still firmly in power.
Further, it’s the Democrats who notoriously register dead people to vote in elections, and who’ve opened the floodgates to let illegals come into the U.S. and vote.
[...]
Despite all his bluster, Obama has a fragile ego, and that ego – not the United States – is under serious threat right now. Obama is playing a dangerous game of chicken with the Russians, risking all of our lives in the process.
Peterson even goes birther, citing Joe Arpaio and Mike Zullo's bogus presser to assert that "The truth about this poser is coming out in many ways, and soon Obama won’t have the power of the presidency to block it."
And WND's favorite former Soviet Bloc spymaster, Ion Mihai Pacepa -- who we showed was trying to ignore Russian ties to Trump and his key supporters to justify his endorsement of Trump -- mysteriously popped out of the woodwork once againin a Dec. 20 article by Art Moore.
Moore writes that "Pacepa said that while he has no specific knowledge of the Kremlin’s current intelligence operations against the U.S., he can confirm that during the Cold War, influencing foreign elections was one of the main tasks of the Soviet bloc intelligence community." But that's buried in touting Pacepa's claim that it was Trump, not Hillary Clinton, who was the victim of a disinformation campaign and, Moore writes, "insisted that while the left is complaining that Americans are being duped by the Russians, the most influential dis-informers are the U.S. establishment media and its allied Democratic Party."
Pacepa again remained silent about the Trump team's Russian ties, and he's a loyal Trump man:
“Fortunately, the United States is still run by ‘we the people,’ and it still has free elections,” Pacepa said. “On Nov. 8, 2016, we the people overwhelmingly endorsed capitalist freedom.”
He said Trump’s “crushing victory may prove to be the Democratic Party’s Waterloo and the funeral for Marx’s socialism and American progressivism.”
MRC's Graham Bashes CNN's Stelter For Making Accurate Observations Topic: Media Research Center
One of the ways Media Research Center Tim Graham loves to slag the so-called "liberal media" is by asserting the prowess and alleged robustness of right-wing journalists -- minus any actual proof to back it up, of course.
Graham does this again in a Dec. 14 post attacking CNN media critic Brian Stelter for daring to criticize those who dismiss journalism:
Stelter maligned Trump voters and supporters of Trump’s media critiques as anti-journalism: “A big part of the country has opted out of journalism and opted in to an alternate reality.”
Liberals always think that you either swallow the liberal media consensus whole, or you've "opted out of journalism." Why don't they understand conservatives are journalists? Could they acknowledge conservatives were tougher journalists in the last eight years?
Again, if would be nice if Graham had cited any examples of conservatives being "tougher journalists" than non-conservative ones in the last eight years, but of course he doesn't.He certainly can't point to his fellow MRC co-workers at CNSNews.com as an example, since all they care about is slavish stenography of Donald Trump and his minions and snide attacks on liberals.
Further, his view of the media is unrealiastically binary -- in his eyes, any media that's not slavishly right-wing is "liberal." That view may bring in the big bucks from right-wing donors, but it's not how the media world works.
Graham also complains that "Stelter also predictably bashed Fox News in the usual Clintonista terms as a kind of super PAC instead of a news channel," but again, Graham offers no proof that it's not.
So it seems that Graham is once again criticizing others for making accurate observations about the right-wing media.
WND's Unruh Turns In Yet Another Biased One-Source Wonder Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily reporter Bob Unruh -- who loves stories about alleged persecution of Christians and right-wingers so much that he can'tbebothered to report the other side of the story lest it undermine the whatever biased story the right-wing legal group is trying to get out -- writes in a Dec. 17 article:
Police officers who are accused of shutting down a woman’s prayer in her own home, and joking about it, have defended their actions to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, saying it did not “burden” her constitutional rights.
But that defense claim is gaining little ground with advocates for Mary Anne Sause, a Louisberg, Kansas, resident who has brought the charges against the officers.
WND reported in October when a lower court rejected Sause’s claim and the case moved up to the appeals court.
The case is being handled now by lawyers with First Liberty Institute after Mary Anne Sause, a retired Catholic nurse on disability, handled the initial claim on her own.
[...]
“When Sause came to the door, the officers asked why she didn’t answer the door the first time. Ms. Sause saw a pocket Constitution, given to her by her congressman, lying on a nearby table and showed it to the officers, who still had not explained the reason for their appearance. One officer laughed and said, ‘That’s just a piece of paper’ that ‘doesn’t work here.'”
Once inside, they “harassed” her, she said, at one point telling her to get ready to go to jail.
“When Sause asked why, he said, ‘I don’t know yet,'” First Liberty reported.
She was frightened and asked permission to pray, and one officer agreed. The other then came back into the room and ordered her to “stop praying,” the complaint explains.
They then “flipped through the codebook to see how they could charge her,” finally choosing “interference” and “disorderly conduct.”
At the end of their visit, they finally explained they were there because someone thought her radio was too loud.
As usual, Unruh once again fails to tell the other side of the story, sticking only with the propaganda supplied by the First Liberty Institute. The Christian Examiner reported after Sause's case was first dismissed that Sause has a history of making dubious claims:
This is not, however, the first time Sause has launched a claim the court deemed implausible.
In 2011, she filed assault charges against Mark Pederson, the manager of a Kansas City abortion clinic, for reportedly body slamming her during a scuffle outside of the clinic. Sause was reportedly protesting abortion at the time.
Pederson was found not guilty because numerous eyewitness accounts didn't support her version of the story.
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She also filed another pro se case (a case filed without a lawyer) over the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services' placement of her child in the state's foster care system. She claims the state's court case reflected "inaccuracies in her parenting history" and the child was taken "into custody" by the state in violation of federal law.
The court dismissed that case, as well.
The federal court that dismissed Sause's claim -- which Unruh could have quoted from to provide balance to his article, but didn't -- explained further that Sause offered no proof whatsoever to back up her allegations:
While Officer Stevans’s instruction to Plaintiff [Sause] to stop praying may have offended her, it does not constitute a burden on her ability to exercise her religion. Plaintiff fails to provide any allegations that would suggest Officer Stevans’s actions coerced her into conduct contrary to her religious beliefs, or that he otherwise prevented her from practicing her religion. Rather, he merely instructed her to stop praying while the officers were in the middle of talking to her about a noise complaint they had received. The Court thus finds that Plaintiff has not made a plausible claim that her First Amendment rights were violated.
In other words, it's more journalistic malpractice from a reporter who, to be blunt, is getting paid to be a unfair and highly biased reporter -- making his boss Joseph Farah's laughable insistence that "WND uses the same standards and practices I cherished during my 20 years in the 'mainstream media'" even more laughable.
Bob Unruh rants in a Dec. 20 WorldNetDaily article:
Leo Hohmann writes in a Dec. 17 WorldNetDaily 
Remember after the 2000 election, when the ConWeb (for example, then-Newsmax columnist 
The other day, we 
Remember earlier this month when WorldNetDaily's Joe Kovacs effectively asserted that the perpetrator in a German incident in which a woman was pushed down a flight of stairs was a Muslim "migrant" -- then had to 
After singer George Michael's death, the Associated Press sent out an 
The Media Research Center's Sam Dorman complains in a Dec. 19 
A Dec. 24 WorldNetDaily 
In a Dec. 16 
WorldNetDaily has been an 
One of the ways Media Research Center Tim Graham loves to slag the so-called "liberal media" is by 
