Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters blogger Tom Blumer is as clueless as ever about how the media works -- which he topped by justifying the racism of Trump supporters. Read more >>
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
NEW ARTICLE: NewsBusted: The Blumer File, Part 2
Topic: NewsBusters NewsBusters blogger Tom Blumer is as clueless as ever about how the media works -- which he topped by justifying the racism of Trump supporters. Read more >>
Posted by Terry K.
at 2:03 PM EST
Down the Credibility Spiral: Corsi Moves from WND to Infowars
Topic: WorldNetDaily Jerome Corsi made the announcement on Twitter: He has left WorldNetDaily to join Alex Jones' Inforwars operation, where he hopes to be its White House correspondent, if he can get the credentials. (Apparently, despite what claimed were "12 very good years" at WND, they weren't good enough for Corsi to give Joseph Farah and Co. proper notice of his leaving; he said in a later tweet that "I resigned from WND on Monday & began working w INFOWARS today TUES Jan. 31.") This new job seems like a perfect fit for Corsi: Having destroyed his crediblity through his biased and inaccurate work for WND, Infowars -- the even less credible and even more conspiracy -obsessed than WND -- is probably only other place that will have him and keep up the charade that he's a real reporter. WND hired Corsi following the publication of his 2004 hit job on John Kerry, "Unfit for Command" -- before which he was known only for vulgar posts on right-wing message boards -- a book that was unreliable but served its purpose by undermining Kerry's presidential bid. We've summarized Corsi's WND career here, which includes the following:
Corsi's atrocious journalistic record is one key reason WND was forced to beg for money from readers last year in order to stay afloat -- such is the level of Corsi's (and WND's) credibility. And now, Corsi has found a new job at an outlet with even less credibility than WND. Well played, Jerry.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:21 AM EST
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
CNS' March for Live Coverage Was As Positive As Its Women's March Coverage Was Negative
Topic: CNSNews.com As we expected, CNSNews.com did not follow the mandate of its boss, Brent Bozell and give the March for Life the same amount and type of coverage it gave the Women's March. Contrary to CNS' sparse and overwhelming negative coverage of the Women's March, CNS' treatment of the March for Life was voluminous and unfailiingly positive, with a lot of pro-Trump bias worked in as well as the political opinion of an entertainer (well, a football player) that CNS says we're not supposed to listen to:
Such one-sided coverage violates (again) CNS' mission statement to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story." Of course, CNS has always been exempt from the media mandates of its boss -- and, as a result, is far more biased than any of the media outlets Bozell and Co. denounce for their purported "liberal bias."
Posted by Terry K.
at 4:43 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, February 1, 2017 3:45 PM EST
It's Opposite Day In Joseph Farah's Column
Topic: WorldNetDaily Joseph Farah rants in his Jan. 25 WorldNetDaily column:
You know what's funny? If you replace Farah's references to Russia with references to Barack Obama's birth certificate, he'd be talking about himself for the last eight years -- after all, that remains "maniacal conspiracy theorizing" with "absolutely no credible, independent evidence" to support it. Farah's huffing that "so-called progressives cannot accept the outcome of the presidential election" is particularly precious because, again, he's talking about himself. He never accepted the outcome of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections; remember, he wrote in a 2014 column: "Obama has never been my president. I have steadfastly refused to acknowledge him as such. He is undeserving of the honorific. To this day, I am unconvinced he is even eligible for office." In rejecting conspiracy theories and the idea of pretending the president isn't really the president, Farah is not only rejecting the tactics he spent the past eight years promoting, he's ascribing them to his political enemies. That shows what an utterly craven hypocrite Farah is. Finally, Farah doesn't cite any of that "overwhelming, conclusive, proof-positive evidence of widespread voting by people who are ineligible to vote" he claims exists. Perhaps because WND can't cite any.
Posted by Terry K.
at 2:51 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, November 15, 2023 4:01 PM EST
No, MRC, WaPo Didn't Concede That Liberal Media Bias Has 'Documentary Backing'
Topic: Media Research Center The Media Research Center's Scott Whitlock declared in a Jan. 27 post that "In an online column about the mainstream media, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple on Friday conceded that claims of liberal media bias have 'documentary backing.'" No, he didn't. In his Jan. 27 column, Wemple was actually talking about liberal identification among journalists, not bias:
Liberal identification by journalists does not necessarily equal liberal media bias, no matter how much the MRC is paid to claim otherwise. Liberal journalists working for a mainstream publication are arguably more likely than a conservative journalist working for a conservative media outlet to be fair and balanced (see: the MRC's Trump-fluffing "news" division CNSNews.com), and you will never see the conservatives who demand that mainstream outlets skew right allow liberals to write at conservative outlets (CNS has no liberal columnists). Wemple quotes the MRC's Tim Graham claiming that young conservative journalists want to work at mainstream outlets but aren't getting interviewed: "They’re there for the interviewing and not just the 20-somethings." But Graham provides no evidence that "mainstream" outlets are refusing to interview conservatives based on identification alone; it's more likely that conservative journalists have shown no interest in being fair and balanced. That's uniroinically followed by Graham throwing shade at conservative writers who actually did get jobs at the Post:
It's that kind of ideologically driven logic that makes Graham a terrible media critic.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:22 AM EST
Monday, January 30, 2017
Pat Boone Tells One More Anti-Obama Lie
Topic: WorldNetDaily Pat Boone threw away what little credibility he had from his half-century-old stint as a pop star by becoming a rabid Obama-hater and birther. He got in one more shot on Obama's way out of the presidency. Boone's Jan. 18 WorldNetDaily column was ostensibly devoted to responding to Rep. John Lewis' claim that he didn't see Donald Trump "as a legitimate president." Boone misquoted Lewis, claiming he said Trump was "an illegitimate president"; while the overall meaning is the same, it's not accurate, and it shows Boone cares nothing about accuracy in his political screeds. Speaking of which, Boone then descends into full anti-Obama froth:
As we've documented, the State Department under Obama gave $350,000 in grants to a group to encourage peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine. After that grant ended, the group used the infrastructure set up for that campaign to run an anti-Netanyahu drive during the 2015 Israeli presidential election. A Senate investigation found that no grant money was used for the election, and theh group was not prohibited by the grant from later using that infrastructure for the anti-Netanyahu campaign. And while former Obama campaign workers who later formed a political consulting firm worked with the anti-Netanyahu campaign, there's no evidence that Obama "sent" them there, as Boone claims. Also, Boone provides no evidence Obama was "betraying the promise" to uphold the Constitution. Perhaps the most shocking thing about Boone's column, though: He doesn't go birther, despite the golden opportunity to do so amid his challenging Obama's legitimacy.
Posted by Terry K.
at 5:32 PM EST
How Biased Has CNS' Syrian Refugee Reporting Been? We Count The Ways
Topic: CNSNews.com CNSNews.com reporter Patrick Goodenough has long distorted the story of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S., obsessing over the number of Muslims admitted compared with the number of Christians while burying or ignoring entirely the relevant fact that -- as he occasionally admits -- the number he reports, which comes from the State Department and is based on data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-based number, isn't accurate because Christian refugees tend to go through churches or Christian charities instead of the U.N. He has even falsely suggested that the U.S. His biased reporting has led CNS to maliciously suggest the Obama administration was blocking Christian refugees from entering the country. Goodenough even has trouble clearly stating that many Muslim refugees (particulary Sunni) are fleeing persecution in Syria just like Christians are. Now that President Trump has order a ban on all immigration from Syria and other Muslim-dominated countries, it's worth a review of just how biased Goodenough's reporting on the issue has been in the past several months with his refugee counts. We'll divide it up into categories based on what key info was reported or omitted and include the biased headline on each article. No mention of inaccurate numbers, no mention of Muslim persecution:
Mentions Muslim persecution, no mention of inaccurate numbers:
Mentions inaccurate numbers and Muslim persecution:
Obviously, every single article Goodenough wrote on the subject should have been in the final category, in which both the inaccurate numbers and Muslim persecution are mentioned, yet only two of the 24 articles are. What every single article does do, however -- as the headlines clearly demonstrate -- is promote the unsubstantiated idea that the Obama administration was deliberately blocking Christian Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. Surely even Goodenough knows that's not true. Goodenough is capable of doing good reporting, he has not done so here. To the contrary: He has served as a dupe to CNS' anti-Obama agenda.
Posted by Terry K.
at 2:02 PM EST
WND Again Forgets Its Editor Didn't Accept Obama As President
Topic: WorldNetDaily The juxtaposition was too perfect not to screen-shot. A Jan. 23 WorldNetDaily column by dubious historian David Barton cited "4 reasons 'Trump is not my president' claim is foolish." He claimed that those making it were deficient in education on "American history, government, Constitution and truth," and that such a claim "establishes personal opinion as the ultimate measure of right and wrong – that truth is whatever I believe or declare it to be. ... There is no alternate reality. None." Barton didn't mention the people who spent eight years claiming that Barack Obama was not their president -- one of whom published Barton's column. WND editor Joseph Farah made his feelings on the subject very clear in a June 2014 column: "Obama has never been my president. I have steadfastly refused to acknowledge him as such. He is undeserving of the honorific. To this day, I am unconvinced he is even eligible for office." In other words, one could say that Farah was the original #NotMyPresident guy, predating all of the Trump naysayers. This is not the first time WND has hypocritically complained about people not accepting their elected president.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:43 AM EST
Sunday, January 29, 2017
MRC's Bozell Can't Deal With Media Mentions of Catholic Scandals
Topic: Media Research Center Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell has a long history of downplaying and deflecting from the history of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. He does it again in his Jan. 20 column with Tim Graham, in which he complains about what he considers insufficient coverage of a female teacher who had an affair with a 13-year-old student:
Bozell and Graham ignore the key difference in these cases. The above case he cites -- as well as the Mary Kay Letourneau case -- are isolated, independent cases and are not representative of a larger pattern. By contrast, the Catholic abuse cases were marked by systematic cover-ups in which diocesean officials tended to move offenders from one parish to another, covered up the abuse and didn't admit the abuse to parishoners until decades after the fact. In November 2015, Graham railed against the film "Spotlight," which is based on how systematic cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic diocese of Boston was uncovered by reporters, whining abaout "contrary facts" the film omitted. By contrast to Bozell and Graham's sensitivity about the mere mention of Catholic sex abuse scandals, the MRC has a weird fixation on Chappaquiddick even though that was more than half a century ago.
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:01 PM EST
CNS -- Which Cares Deeply What (Right-Wing) Entertainers Think -- Now Says We Shouldn't
Topic: CNSNews.com Back in December, CNSNews.com's Mark Judge published a blog post touting how conservative-leaning celebrity Joe Piscopo said that "no one cares what entertainers think" because "This is the time of the people." But as we've noted before, CNS is utterly hypocritical about this. CNS cares intensely about what entertainers think -- at least as long as they're thinking conservative things Plus, there's irony of CNS having cared enough about whan an entertainer thought to quote him telling us not to care what entertainers think. Here are some of the entertainers' thoughts CNS cared enough about to devote articles to in the month or so since that Piscopo post (some of which, ironically, were written by Judge):
That's a lot of caring about the thoughts of people who -- according to the website that published them -- we're not supposed to care about. (And, yes, CNS called on a former pro football player to opine on Obamacare.) And that's not even counting the fact that CNS publishes a regular column of political thoughts by entertainer Charlie Daniels.
Posted by Terry K.
at 4:09 PM EST
Updated: Sunday, January 29, 2017 4:18 PM EST
Saturday, January 28, 2017
MRC Writer Hates 'Pure Genius' For Not Hating LGBT People, Like He Does
Topic: Media Research Center Media Research Center contributing writer Justin Ashford really, really hates that there are LGBT characters on the CBS show "Pure Genius." Oh, he liked the show at first -- when it conformed to the MRC's right-wing dogma. The premiere episode centered on a woman with cancer who refused treatment because she was pregnant. Ashford gushed over the "self-sacrificing love [the character] showed for her unborn daughter" and how that "shows just how powerful pro-lifers really are." But Ashford soon changed his tune. In December, he complained that the show "followed the liberal Hollywood PC script by adding a transgender character" to one episode. He ranted: "The most alarming thing about this is [the transgender character] claimed to identify as a woman at age six – clearly trying to push the envelope of gender identification at such a young age. A six-year old is still learning to read and write. How the heck does one know their “identity” then? And yet this is what liberals are pushing on kids." Ashford ranted further, "The Human Rights Campaign reports that only 18 states consider transgender a protected class in the workplace, but it’s their goal to run roughshod over religious freedom and commonsense to make it all 50. " He doesn't explain how protecting the rights of transgenders interferes with "religious freedom." He concludes: "Such a shame as this show started with an actual conservative approach. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out Hollywood has their own agenda, and they want to ensure we all comply. No thanks." On Jan. 2, Ashford whined that the latest episode included "a gay ex-prostitute, a lesbian outing and a transgender actor/actress portraying a Christian!" He huffed: "What’s next for Pure Genius? Possibly cancellation. We can only hope the liberal Hollywood LGBT agenda dies with it." Ashford had another anti-gay freakout over the show on Jan. 12:
That's Ashford and the MRC for you: Anyone who doesn't agree with them, or look like them, is "abnormal" and must be held to scorn and ridicule.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:09 AM EST
WND Author Says Trump's Not Hitler -- But She Loved Likening Obama to Hitler
Topic: WorldNetDaily Paul Bremmer writes in a Jan. 25 WorldNetDaily article:
What Bremmer fails to tell his readers: None of those things applied to President Obama either, yet Dittman was not shy about likening Obama to Hitler. As we documented, WND publicized Dittman's book "Trapped in Hitler's Hell," which it published in 2014, by touting how she thought Obama reminded her of Hitler, claiming that "Liberals’ blind idolization of Obama mirrored Germany’s hypnotic fascination with Hitler" as did "Obama’s empty rhetoric that energized his followers." Now that's a better description of Trump and his followers than Obama -- witness WND managing editor David Kupelian's blind loyalty to him -- yet she curiously doesn't see the resemblence. Perhaps Dittman is motivated by something else her Hitler-comparison flip-flop. But since Bremmer is in marketing and not in news, he can't be counted on to tell us.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:28 AM EST
Friday, January 27, 2017
MRC Takes Madonna Out of Context to Smear Women's March
Topic: Media Research Center The Media Research Center has always been hypocritical in demanding that the media follow standards that it refuses to enforce on its own operations. One prime example of that is the use of context: The MRC loves to criticizing others for omitting it but it regularly fails to provide conext when not doing so suits its right-wing agenda. One key part of the MRC's agenda these days is denigrating last weekend's Women's March on Washington for daring to be critical of President Trump. One way ity's doing that is taking one particular remark Madonna made at the march out of context. You know the one. Nicholas Fondacaro set the stage in a Jan. 22 post:
Tellingly, Fondacaro waited until the seventh paragraph to include the full context of that "blowing up the White House" 'comment:
But Fondacaro immediately followed that by taking Madonna out of context again: "Trump’s inauguration has really taken the radical leftist off their hinges and exposed their violent nature. Between descriptions of Trump as the secessionist South from ABC’s Matthew Dowd, to comparisons to Nazis’ and gas chambers, and now the blowing-up of the White House they have really escalated things very quickly in just two days." Unsurprisingly, that would be the last time thte MRC would put Madonna's words in their proper, accurate context:
It's much easier for the MRC to lie to its readers and portray Madonna as a mad bomber and wannabe presidential assassin than to tell the truth. (Photo: Associated Press via New York Daily News)
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:23 PM EST
AIM Defends The Truth of 'Alternative Facts'
Topic: Accuracy in Media Accuracy in Media has totally bought into the reality-warping powers of Donald Trump and his administration. So much so, in fact, that AIM's Roger Aronoff devotes a Jan. 25 column to defending the honor of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts":
Aronoff then tries to spin the whole inauguration-attendance thing:
The problem with Aronoff citing CNN's gigapixel panorama is that it was taken from the front of the crowd and from a low angle that doesn't fully show the crowd -- not from the back and from high up, the angle that enraged Trump. Which means it's Aronoff who's being dupicitous. Aronoff also tries out a few "alternative facts" of his own:
But Aronoff conveniently ignores one other contextual "alternate fact" as we've documented when CNSNews.com obsesses over the labor participation rate, many of the people who aren't working are retired people or students who have no interest in finding a job; the rate is further skewed by the retirement of baby boomers. Even the conservative American Enterprise Institute agrees that the labor force participation rate is meaningless as a barometer of unemployment. Aronoff laughably concludes: "None of this is meant to justify Trump or his appointees saying things that they can’t back up with some credible evidence or sources. Being the president is different than being a candidate or even President-elect. They have to be more careful. But the media’s disposition towards Trump is proving far more adversarial than towards previous administrations." If Aronoff wasn't trying to justify the falsehoods spun by Trump and his crew, he wouldn't have written this column.
Posted by Terry K.
at 2:04 PM EST
WND Mocks Looks of Women At The Women's March
Topic: WorldNetDaily It wouldn't be WorldNetDaily if it wasn't taking nasty shots at the participants of last weekend's Women's March. First up is columnist Bert Prelutsky, who sneered that the participants were "post-menstrual harpies" who should just "write a memoir reminding people that there was in fact a time when a great many famous men had sex with them":
WND editor Joseph Farah, meanwhile, devoted his Jan. 25 column to ranting about the trash left behind by Women's March participants, contrasting with the (evidence-free) claim that "The mall was clean before, during and after" Donald Trump's inauguration. He didn't mention, of course, that the inaugration had a much smaller crowd than the Women's March. He then growled: "Whom would you prefer as your neighbor? A self-policing Trump supporter or one of these hags?" That's WND for you -- a place where any woman who dares to disagree with its right-wing agenda is a "hag."
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:53 AM EST
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