NEW ARTICLE: WND's Chief Islamophobe
Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily reporter Leo Hohmann has been peddling hatred of Muslims with misleading and biased reporting, at one point effectively asking: Why should police investigate a crime when we can simply make assumptions if the perp is Muslim? Read more >>

CNS' Managing Editor Still Hates Gays, Loves Franklin Graham
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman is perhaps known for two things: keeping CNS as biased as possible and an obsessive love for the hateful words of Franklin Graham. It's been a while since we checked in on his biased work, so we thought we'd take a look at his output over the last three months of 2016.

To nobody's surprise, Chapman's Franklin Graham obsession is still alive and well, with 15 of the 102 articles he wrote during that time dedicated to regurgitating Graham's words (and an additional post quoting Graham's father, Billy Graham).

The bigger surprise, though, is Chapman's embrace of virulently anti-LGBT rhetoric, with 13 posts quoting right-wing ministers and activists attacking gays and transgenders (two of which quoted Franklin Graham). A sampling:

• World Congress of Families in Kenya: Africans 'Should Be Horrified' at LGBT Actions in USA -- 'It's Insane' (as we documented, the World Congress of Families is notoriously anti-gay)
• Transgender Soldiers: 'Disgusted' by Obama's 'Immoral Garbage'
• Rep. Gohmert: Homosexual Marriage Was Legal Once Before, 'In The Days of Noah' Before the Flood
• Pastor Rick Scarborough: Gay Marriage 'Opened the Floodgates' of Immorality, And Perhaps God's Final Judgment
• Ex-Gay Leader: Gay Sex Is 'Suicidal Sex,' And It's Taught to Your Kids in School
• FRC's Perkins: Trump's Sec. of State Must Ferret Out LGBT and Abortion Activists in State Dep't

Chapman's veering to the far-right fringe is perhaps best illustrated by two posts that uncritically quote the Zionist Organization of America, a far-right group that tolerates no criticism of Israel or its supporters and may be best known for promoting boycotts against its perdceived enemies that seem to have the unintended consequence of hurting Israel.

In a Nov. 23 post, Chapman highlighted how the ZOA demanded an apology fromHoward Dean for calling right-wingerand Trump adviser Steve Bannon "anti-Semitic." Chapman didn't mention ZOA's ideological bent (though he and the rest of his CNS employees are quick to identify the ideological leanings of liberal groups), nor did he mention that Bannon's ex-wife reportedly quoted Bannon during their divorce hearing as saying that Bannon didn't want his children "going to school with Jews." Bannon has denied this, but it's pertinent enough to this particular discussion that Chapman sould have mentioned it.

A Dec. 29 post by Chapman uncritically quoting ZOA ludicrously asserting that President Obama and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power "have anti-Semitic hatred for Israel and the Jewish people" for failing to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution criticizing Israeli settlements in disputed areas of Jerusalem.

Trump's victory means we can expect CNS, under Chapman's leadership, to pull further to the right -- and since Chapman cares nothing about journalistic balance, it will pretend even more that non-right-wing opinions don't matter.

WND Columnist Digs Up Old Fake Child-Sex Scandal That Predates Pizzagate
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bradlee Dean doesn't mention Pizzagate in his Dec. 22 WorldNetDaily column, but he may as well have.

It starts off as his usual homophobic rant, irresponsibly and maliciously equating homosexuality and pedophilia while huffing that "National Geographic took the time to dare the justice of God by boasting of the confusion (Daniel 9:7) that is being laid onto the backs of America’s children through the exploitation of a 9-year-old boy on their front cover."

After more ranting about pedophile rings, Dean writes this Pizzagate-esque blather:

The widespread acts of pedophiles committed against our children by both corrupt clergy and corrupt politicians are rampant and unthinkable (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Matthew 18:7-9; Romans 1:24; Jude 1:7).

“Conspiracy of Silence” is a documentary that exposed a network of religious leaders and Washington politicians who flew children to Washington, D.C., for orgies. Many children suffered the indignity of wearing nothing but their underwear and a number displayed on a piece of cardboard hanging from their necks when being auctioned off to foreigners in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Toronto, Canada.

At the last minute, before airing, unknown congressmen threatened the TV Cable industry with restrictive legislation if this documentary was aired.

Almost immediately, unknown persons, who ordered all copies destroyed, purchased the rights to the documentary. A copy of this videotape was furnished anonymously to former Nebraska state senator and attorney John De Camp, who made it available to retired FBI Agent Ted L. Gunderson.

On May 3, 1994, the video embedded below was scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel. Influential members of Congress applied pressure to the cable industry to stop the airing of the program and destroy all copies.

It was already listed nationwide in the April 30th-May 6th edition of “TV Guide” and newspaper supplements.

The Discovery Channel and Yorkshire Television were reimbursed for the one-quarter to one-half million dollars in production costs.

The so-called scandal Dean is talking about came up as a side issue in the collapse of a credit union in Omaha, Nebraska. As the Wikipedia article on these allegations summarizes, the child trafficking allegations were found by local and federal grand juries to be a hoax possibly perpertrated by a vindictive employee fired by Boys Town, the refuge for troubled youths based in the area.

The story has perpetuated itself in part because, as an article at Medium explains, the mother of a 12-year-old boy who disappeared in a time frame convenient to the sex trafficking story believes it to be so and has surrounded herself with people who try to keep the story alive.

We could find no independent or reliable evidence to support Dean's claim that the "Conspiracy of Silence" about the alleged scandal was ever scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel or that its producers were ever reimbursed production costs, but since Dean embeds a YouTube video of the film in his column, the claim is a tad moot.

The scandal Dean writes about was Pizzagate before Pizzagate -- and just as discredited.

Russia and Putin Have A New ConWeb Friend in AIM's Kincaid
Topic: Accuracy in Media

WorldNetDaily isn't the only ConWeb outlet that's been coming to Russia's defense over alleged U.S. election hacking. Vladimir Putin has another ConWeb friend in Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid.

In October, the usually staunchly anti-communist Kincaid actually cheered Russia's intervention in the election -- as long as it shared his own goal of electing Donald Trump and stopping Hillary Clinton. But as accusations of Russian meddling continued to mount, Kincaid's defense of Russia got more aggressive.

On Dec. 12, Kincaid asserted that the CIA confirming Russian meddling in the election meant that it -- the CIA, that is -- was "out to get" Trump. He huffed: "Clearly, having an “intelligence” connection doesn’t mean you are intelligent or have good judgment. Making “America First” is not a requirement for serving in the CIA and other intelligence agencies. You can have numerous skeletons in your closet and even be a transgender." Kincaid further complained:

After he takes office, Trump should immediately clean house in the CIA and other intelligence agencies. But it may be the case that the charges being directed against him at the present time are designed to prevent just that. If Trump cleans house, he will be accused in the press of trying to purge intelligence officials with evidence of a Russian plot to elect Trump!

[...]

We know that the media picked sides in the presidential contest. Now we are seeing more evidence of how the CIA picked sides, to the point of engaging in what is an obvious effort to bring down the Trump presidency even before it begins.

The next day, Kincaid continued his blame-the-messenger strategy:

Common sense tells you that Moscow was perfectly content to let Hillary win, and probably thought she would win. After all, Hillary sold out America to Moscow’s interests with a Russian reset that failed and opened the door to more Russian aggression. Her State Department also sold American uranium assets to Moscow. She was the perfect Russian dupe.

This whole discussion in the media about the Russians backing Trump is fake news.

The obvious conclusion is that Brennan is on a mission to overturn the election through propaganda and disinformation. This is not only the last gasp of sore losers but represents corruption of the intelligence process.

If the purpose of the Russian hacking was to undermine confidence in the American democratic process, as some “experts” originally thought, Brennan’s CIA is doing a good job of that.

We suspect Kincaid would not have a problem with the CIA purportedly trying to overturn an election if Hillary Clinton had won.

In a Dec. 18 column, Kincaid went deeper into conspiracy mode:

Could it be that CIA Director John Brennan fears that Trump as president could order an investigation into what the CIA has been up to under President Obama? What could that be? Could the CIA have been interfering in foreign elections, and if so, could such efforts have provoked Russian retaliation?

[...]

The CIA will want to hide its hand, not because the evidence may implicate Russia in election interference, but because the evidence we do have demonstrates that the CIA is currently interfering in the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That’s the story that cannot be told, and the one which threatens our democracy. The Times and Post are vehicles for this insidious effort.

We do know that CIA Director Brennan is a far-left extremist—just like Obama himself—who once voted for a Communist Party candidate, and whose sympathies for radical Islam are well-known. Questions persist about whether Brennan, an alumnus of Catholic Fordham University, converted to Islam and why he took his oath of office on a copy of the U.S. Constitution and not the Bible.

As we've noted, there's no evidence whatsoever that Brennan has converted to Islam, and those who are peddling the claim, like John Guandolo, have no credibility.

On Dec. 22, Kincaid defended Trump's national security adviser-designate Michael T. Flynn for allegedly meeting with "a leader of the Austrian Freedom Party": "It would be a dereliction of duty for Flynn not to meet with such a figure and try to understand the nature of the political upheaval in Europe." Kincaid makes sure not to mention that the Austrian Freedom Party is a far-right party founded by former Nazis.

Kincaid then rants: "Liberal Democrats have been so busy accusing Donald J. Trump of being a Russian agent that they have missed the real Russian agent on the international scene—Germany’s Angela Merkel. Her pro-Muslim immigration policies have not only destabilized Europe and increased terrorism but have also facilitated the rise of the right-wing political parties our media have expressed alarm about."

Kincaid continued to attack Merkel by defending Russia:

More than two years ago we asked, “Is the German Chancellor an Agent of Russia?” Among other things, she had made Germany more dependent on Russian oil and gas by terminating Germany’s nuclear energy program. The refugee crisis adds to the suspicions about her real agenda.

Commentators who don’t want to face up to the evidence against Merkel instead claim that Putin is trying to undermine her.

[...]

Trump, for his part, would like to stop the refugee flow and stabilize the Middle East. He seems to think he can work with Russia. But Merkel and the Russians have other ideas. Trump’s military advisers such as Lt. Gen. Flynn have to understand the correlation of forces they are facing. That’s why Flynn’s meeting with the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party is necessary and important.

In his Dec. 26 column, Kincaid whined that the Obama administration hasn't released sufficient proof of Russian hacking, declaring its evidence so far "very weak and vague in key respects." (We figure that, just like the birthers, no amount of evidence would be sufficient for Kincaid.) He pushed another conspiracy theory, that "the Obama administration decided to blame the Russians only after Trump won the election, perhaps for the purpose of complicating the foreign relations priorities of the President-elect."

But as others have noted, Obama did bring up Russian hacking before the election, but if Obama had been more forceful on the issue before the election, he would have been accused of interfering with the election -- something Kincaid would undoubtedly have been at the front lines on.

To sum up: Kincaid will always bash Obama and defend Trump -- even if he has to praise a foreign dictator to do it. That's how messed up Kincaid's loyalties are.

WND Keeps Coming to Russia's Defense Over Election Hacking
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Did financially struggling WorldNetDaily get bought by the Russians while we weren't looking? Because WND has sure been heavily covering for Russia over allegation of meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

Garth Kant's Dec. 30 WND article on President Obama expelling several Russian officials from the U.S. over the hacking insists that Obama "has presented no evidence that it happened." He also tries to muddy the issue by claiming that "Not only has the administration produced no evidence Russia ever tampered with the actual vote, no one in the intelligence community ever even claimed that happened" -- ignoring the fact that nobody is claiming Russians tampered with "the actual vote."

Jerome Corsi goes the change-the-subject route in a Dec. 30 article:

President Obama’s punishment of Russia for allegedly hacking the emails of Democratic Party operatives to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election ignores at least two important facts.

For one, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose hacktivist organization released the thousands of emails that shed damaging light on Hillary Clinton and her allies, denied the Russians were the source.

In addition, the Obama administration has developed a reputation for manipulating intelligence for political purposes.

Corsi offers no reason why Assange should be trusted by anyone. He also doesn't mention that back in 2010 friends of WND like G. Gordon Liddy wanted Assange dead.

Leo Hohmann tried to dismiss Russian meddling as 1) unknowable and 2) normal business between countries in a Dec. 31 article:

Whether Russia truly did try to influence U.S. presidential elections in November, as President Obama, Hillary Clinton and several high-profile Republicans claim, may never be known.

But, if it did happen, it wouldn’t be the first time the government of one country tried to influence the elections of another, and rarely do these interventions result in sanctions of the type Obama has imposed on Russia.

In fact, Obama himself has been accused of such meddling on at least two occasions involving elections in Israel in 2015 and the U.K’s Brexit vote in June.

On the flip side, Obama’s severe reaction to claims of Russian “hacking” are in stark contrast from his treatment of China, whom he accused last year of being the culprit in a massive hack of a U.S. government database containing personal information on 4 million current and former federal workers. No sanctions there, only a brief verbal reprimand for China.

There is concern that some of the information that was tapped could be used to aid the espionage operations of China, “which quickly emerged as the likely source of the hack,” reported CBS News on June 5, 2015.

But first, let’s look at the Obama administration’s interventions in the internal politics of Israel and Britain.

The "intervention" into Israel Hohmann cites wasn't one at all -- just the old misleading story about the State Department funding funding a technological infrastructure for a Israeli group's campaign to support peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine that was later used in a campaign to unseat right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- which Hohmann dramatically and laughably declared to be "Obama’s assault on the integrity of the Israeli elections." As we pointed out, no laws were violated, the organization did not violate any conditions of its deal with State, and no State Department money went toward funding the anti-Netanyahu campaign.

The other "intervention" example Hohmann cites is an Obama speech in London opposing the Brexit campaign. No, really -- Hohmann thinks a speech is the same thing as Russian hacking of campaign emails.

MRC Defends False Fox News Attack on Food Stamps
Topic: Media Research Center

The headline of Nicholas Fondacaro's Dec. 29 Media Research Center post complains, "MSNBC Analyst Smears Conservatives as Racist for Caring About Food Stamp Fraud." He complains further:

MSNBC’s Ari Melber was up in arms Wednesday night, as he filled in on The Rachel Maddow Show, at Fox News for daring to report that food stamp fraud was up to roughly $70 million in 2016. But the outrage at Fox gave way to outrage at the white working class for falling for the racist “dog whistle” of caring about said fraud. “Why is this all coming up again now,” he inquired to his radical leftist guest Joan Walsh from The Nation.

“Well, why now is because we have Fox News, which is awaiting a President Donald Trump by rerunning their greatest hits,” she declared, “I mean, Fox has done this before. They did it under Obama. They chased this idea of food stamp fraud.” Walsh completely wrote off the facts and pretending like the fraud was not happening, while smearing everyone who brought it up as racist:

[...]

Ironically, the whole discussion was started when Melber claimed that Fox News had lied about the $70 million in food stamp fraud. Melber claimed that MSNBC called the Agriculture Department and were told they didn’t know the origin of the number. He cited the radical leftist website Mother Jones as a “fact checker” who found “There's zero evidence that fraud is at an all-time high.”

But according to a Washington Post piece criticizing the Fox News report, the number is not an issue but arguing it requires the end of the program is. 

Actually, according to an update of that Washington Post article, the number is, in fact, an issue. The Post's Erik Wemple reports that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program, was seeking a correction from Fox News because the $70 million number seems to have been plucked out of nowhere.

And as Wemple also points out -- but Fondacaro doesn't admit because it destroys his attack on Mother Jones  as a "radical leftist website" who can't be trusted -- food stamp fraud is not at a record. The latest numbers available show fraud is around 1 percent of the program, down from 4 percent in the 1990s.

The USDA got its correction: Fox News has admitted the $70 million number is incorrect and that "nationally food stamp trafficking is on the decline." Will Fondacaro do the same by admitting by defending Fox News, he's defending a false claim?

WND's Loudon Credits Trump for Saving Christmas
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily columnist Gina Loudon has been more than a Donald Trump fangirl -- she has seen him in near-messianic terms, once declaring that "Donald Trump is the candidate we have been waiting for all these years since Ronald Reagan."

Trump's election victory has sent Loudon into new heights of idol worship, even as she spends part of her Dec. 25 column denying that she does such a thing. Witness Loudon discrediting her own defense of herself:

I detest sycophants. I don’t even like fans. I don’t worship people. I love my children and my husband, but I don’t idolize any of them. I have never been star-struck meeting a Hollywood A-lister or even Charles Krauthammer or Phil Robertson!

I am ethnically Jewish, so traditions are sacred to me. I serve a living Savior, Jesus Christ, and I celebrate His birthday every day, and especially at Christmas time. I don’t care if it’s the “right day.” I got over legalism a long time ago, too.

All of that is why I hesitate to say what I want to say in this column: Thank you for restoring Christmas, President-elect Donald Trump.

[...]

I was shocked by his humility in person, and his thoughtful answer to my questions. But more than that, I was shocked that he stayed much longer than any other candidate to mingle with press and people. He didn’t limit his rope line to the elite media, like the rest did. He stayed until the last blogger got his question in, and until the last small-town radio reporter had his mic touched unknowingly by the breath of a future president.

It was in that moment that I had what was tantamount to a vision, as best I can describe it. I realized that any of the other primary candidates, no matter how much I liked them, would need to sell their souls to accrue the money it would take for the establishment elite to “let” them have it. As the wife of a former senator from Missouri, I knew the deviousness of the establishment all too well. Trump’s independent wealth could, well, Trump that.

Then I thought of the guttural honesty Trump seemed unable to avoid. How refreshing I found him to be, even when he made me bristle. Honesty was something I thought was lost on American politics forevermore. But he was saying what many were thinking, and even though his political neophytism was glaring, he seemed to be learning at breakneck pace. As a university teacher and a homeschool mom of five, I recognize a “teachable spirit,” and I saw it in Mr. Trump.

Loudon concludes by suggesting that Trump really is the Messiah:

This Christmas, there are a few Trump Tower shopping bags under our tree, and a special spring in our step as we celebrate a God so infinitely capable of moving His hand if we will only humble ourselves, and pray, and seek His face (II Chronicles 7:14).

That is our plan this Christmas. It has never felt so good to say Merry Christmas, because I believe now that the overreaching government won’t take it from us and replace it with something agnostic or satanic.

Thank you, Mr. Trump, and the Trump family and staff, and to all of you who sacrificed to elect this president to restore our hope this year. Thank you to my family and friends, who fought and waited and waited and fought. And thank you most of all to the One and Only True God, who uses the weak to confound the wise, and the flawed to reprove those who believe they are blameless.

“For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence” (1 Corinthians 26-29).

“For unto us is born this day, in the City of David, a Savior who is Christ the LORD!” (Isaiah 9:6). Amen.

Merry Christmas, in every way!

This is the level of Trump-fluffing we have to look forward to from WND and its writers over the next four years.

What LGBT Stuff Is The MRC Freaking Out About Now?
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center just loves to freak out about gays and transgenders in the media, and it's continuing to do so.

A Dec. 19 post by Maggie McKneely complains:

Move over, transgenders. There’s a new kid in town.

Huffington Post reported that Billions will make “TV history” for featuring the first gender non-conforming star in a mainstream show. Showtime, Billions host network, has a history of pushing boundaries with its leading characters. Season seven of Shameless included a major character who was transgender, played by a transgender actor.

Billions new star is the next politically correct step for the network. Asia Kate Dillon, from Orange Is the New Black and Master of None, has been cast as Taylor, the new intern at the hedge fund run by billionaire Bobby “Axe” Axelrod. In addition to, and probably more importantly than, her prowess at navigating the financial world, Taylor identifies as gender non-conforming. 

[...]

From Law & Order, Chicago Med, Star, and others, the networks have been following the Hollywood agenda and making transgender characters an ordinary occurrence onscreen. If normalizing non-gender characters are the subsequent item on the to-do list, one can only wonder who (or what) will be next.

McKneely does not explain why transgenders and the gender non-conforming must be denounced in the media as abnormal.

The transgender child on the cover of National Geographic resulted in predictable outrage from Melissa Mullins:

Transgender, cisgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, agender, or whatever name you want to call it, this “fluidity” seems to be the trending topic covered in the media these days – and although it may appear an unlikely outlet for such a topic, National Geographic is the latest to jump on the bandwagon by featuring a nine year old transgender girl by the name of Avery Jackson on the cover of its upcoming issue. If you are unaware of the aforementioned names, no worries – the upcoming issue comes complete with a glossary of more than 20 terms redefining gender.

Mullins went on to huff that despite national Geographic being absorbed into Rupert Murdoch's empire, "the magazine can still be a progressive darling….even as its claims to respect 'science' go up in smoke in the pursuit of political correctness, declaring gender is a 'spectrum.'" Mullins doesn't explain how "science" doesn't show that gender is not a spectrum.

Poor Tim Graham, meanwhile, spent his Christmas day ranting about drag queens who perform "progressive subversive humor":

The Washington Post easily proves it's a secular liberal newspaper at Christmas time. On Friday, the Post promoted a "dragapella" quartet mocking Christmas (and the incoming administration) in two different sections of the paper, in the Style section and in the Weekend tabloid. In Style, theatre critic Celia Wren hailed the Kinsey Sicks and their show "Oy Vey in a Manger!" at the D.C. Jewish Community Center.

Yes, it seems Graham really had nothing better to do on Christmas than complain about this.

Sarah Stites was upset that a story about a transgender boy who's being prohibited from joining the Boy Scouts is getting media attention, whining, "The fact that Boy Scout membership is limited to males has not always been newsworthy. However, in the current media landscape, such a 'controversial' claim garnered three minutes of network airtime and copious online news coverage."

Stites further fretted that the Boy Scouts of America may "buckle from the pressure of media and activist groups." She's also worried that Scouts for Equality, which "was partially responsible for pushing BSA to lift its national bans on gay scouts and leaders in 2015," is weighing in on this issue and will "force" BSA to make a decision on the issue.

And Graham and Brent Bozell ranted about non-straight people in the media in their Dec. 31 "cultural winners and losers" column:

Winner: Transgender propaganda products. The Danish Girl, a fictionalized account of the first man to undergo a sex change operation, led to an Oscar for Alicia Vikander, who played the man’s supportive wife. The Amazon web show Transparent was showered with TV awards again. ABC’s Modern Family made “history” by featuring an eight-year-old girl (“transgender boy”) to raise our awareness of “gender fluidity.”

Leave it to LGBT-haters like Graham and Bozell to insist that portraying transgender people as actual humans and not freaks is "propaganda."

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 covered a House hearing on abortion by heavily quoting only anti-abortion statements and censored most statements from the other side.
• 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 in major markets 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.