WND's Farah Still in Denial About Publishing Fake News Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's indisputable that WorldNetDaily publishes fake news -- we've found a few recent examples ourselves -- but WND editor Joseph Farah (who creates nosmallamount of fake news on his own) will never admit it, and it continues to be in denial about it. Yet he's also very sensitive to the charge.
In his Feb. 10 column, Farah lashed out at a website called "FakeNewsChecker.com" that listed WND has a purveyor of it. "You won’t find out on the website who’s behind it. It’s been around since Nov. 17. And, irony of ironies, it makes stuff up. In other words, it’s a 'fake fake news checker.'"
Farah took great exception to the website's claim that WND "received donations from the Donald Trump superPac Great America PAC," huffing that it was completely false, though "It’s possible that such a PAC has advertised on WND – many have."
Farah actually has a point here. FakeNewsChecker is a strangely organized site, its claim that WND "received donations" from Great America PAC is not quite true -- though Farah should know, since he's also WND's CEO, that the PAC rented out WND's mailing list twice by our count -- and the fact that we could not figure out who's behind it is a red flag.
That said, note the cheap rhetorical trick Farah is pulling -- citing a shoddy criticism of WND as representative of all criticism of WND. Farah would never say the same thing about ConWebWatch, which is not only on record as to who we are, we can also cite chapter and verse of the fake news WND has published and can come up with specific examples of "anti scientific fact," in the words of FakeNewsChecker, that WND has run, as well as examples of exactly how it is "conspiratorial" and "inciteful."
Indeed, all you need to know aobut WND's editorial agenda is that it considers promoting the conspiracy theory that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered to be a "milestone" on its "path to greatness." No, really -- it's in the promo for this Feb. 15 "today in WND history" article (as well as in the headline for the article itself):
But Farah will never call out ConWebWatch because we respond and can back up what we say, as he found out in 2008.
Instead, Farah does some manhood-measuring and dishonestly defends his website:
How do I plead? Well, I would like to point out that I may be the one and only founder of an online news agency that spent more than 20 years in what we euphemistically call “the mainstream media,” running daily newspapers in major markets. WND was also the very first independent online news agency founded 20 years ago. That adds up to more than 40 years of experience directing large news agencies. I should also point out that I taught journalism at UCLA and have received countless awards for my work in the so-called “mainstream” news media long before founding WND. I served as an expert witness on journalistic standards and practices in some of the largest media lawsuits in history.
And the team of WND’s journalism professionals – editors and reporters – have collectively hundreds of years of experience doing similar things in the news media.
[...]
Notice WND reports openly and honestly, listing publicly who’s who, sourcing its reports, attributing its claims and operating under the highest standards of traditional American journalism, while very often its worst detractors hide in the shadows like cowards while slinging the most reprehensible unfounded and unsupportable charges.
At the end of the day, I’ll leave it to you to determine for yourself who has more integrity and credibility.
In fact, we've noted that more and more WND articles lately have no bylines at all, which counters Farah's claim that it's "listing publicly who’s who." And the claim that WND is "sourcing its reports, attributing its claims" glosses over the fact that it won't report when those attributed sources are wrong when doing so would undermine WND's right-wing agenda; otherwise, its readers would have known years ago that WND's birther conspiracy was discredited.
We've amply demonstrated that WND lacks integrity and credibility. It's a demonstration of Farah's own lack of integrity and credibility that he can't admit we're right -- or even have a civil conversation with us about it.
CNS Spinning for Trump on Flynn Scandal Topic: CNSNews.com
As you'd expect from the "news" operation that defended Donald Trump -- and, thus, Russia and Vladimir Putin -- over allegations of Russian meddling in the presidential election, CNSNews.com is largely following Trump marching orders in the aftermath of Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn over his conversations with Russian officials about sanctions issued by President Obama before he officially joined the Trump administration.
CNS -- unusual for an operation that pays the Associated Press no small amount of money for use of its content but barely promotes it -- actually ran an AP story or two about Flynn's departure on its front page. But most of its original content the day after Flynn left was, as usual, mostly written by chief stenographer Susan Jones and dedicated to spinning for Trump and even saying nice things about Flynn, like these:
CNS's so-called reporting quickly coalesced around the Trump-approved talking point that the real problem wasn't Flynn by that the offense that got him fired was leaked to the media, which feeds nicely into the tired old talking point that the media is out to get Trump:
The least biased article CNS ran was one in which Jones admitted that Republican members of Congress would also like Flynn brought before the House Intelligence Committee.
So: Lots of bias, with the occasional window-dressing of actual journalism to perpetuate the illusion of being an actual news operation. That's pretty much how CNS is run under Terry Jeffrey and Michael W. Chapman.
UPDATE: CNS has added a couple more articles: One by Jones on Republicans calling for an investigation of how intelligence was handled (but not of Flynn's behavior), and another quoting Sean Hannity complaining that the media is trying to "make anything into the next Watergate" in an effort to impeach Trump.
WND Promotes Fake News-ish List of 72 Alleged Terrrorists Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymous WorldNetDaily reporter was in high dudgeon in a Feb. 11 article:
As WND reported more than a week ago, the federal judge from Seattle who issued a halt to President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring entry to the U.S. by travelers from seven nations because of concerns over potential terror threats erred badly when he said there had been no arrest of foreign nationals from those countries since 9/11.
A new report shows that at least 72 such individuals have indeed been convicted of terrorism-related offenses.
[...]
Meanwhile, the new report, compiled by a Senate committee in 2016 reveals that at least 72 individuals from the seven countries covered in President Trump’s vetting executive order have been convicted in terror cases since the 9/11 attacks.
Well, that's not quite true. The Washington Post looked into this and found that numerous people on this list were not directly linked to terrorist acts and the list is padded with cases as old as 40-plus years:
But it’s important to note that being convicted of material support is not always evidence that the person was planning a terrorist attack or terrorism-related activities.
Some cases involved individuals who were convicted of charges unrelated to terrorism activities, but who prosecutors charged were related to terrorist groups abroad. For example, three Rochester businessmen (Mohamed al-Huraibi, Yehia Ali Ahmed Alomari and Saleh Mohamed Taher Saeed) were convicted of money-laundering charges in 2009. Federal prosecutors charged that the men sent $200,000 overseas knowing the money could benefit Hezbollah.
But according to the Associated Press, “authorities stressed that the men had no links to any terrorist groups and have not been charged with any terrorism crimes.” A federal prosecutor said at the time: “This is simply a money laundering case. There are no charges claiming that they were giving money or aiding any terrorist organizations.”
[...]
Some of the people on this list had entered the United States decades before they were charged with any of the crimes — as early as 1972. This list included people who were naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, refugees, people whose citizenship statuses were unknown, and a Canadian citizen and a Dutch citizen born in Iraq.
Moreover, the list also includes about two dozen cases that are related to charges of fraudulent visas, passport forgery or making false statements. In some cases, the people were specifically found not to have any known ties to terrorism operations.
The Post stated that "this is pretty thin gruel on which to make sweeping claims about the alleged threat posed to the United States by these seven countries, especially because the allegations often did not concern alleged terrorist acts in the United States," adding that the list is a "questionable" tactic to justify Trump's immigration order because "some people on this list entered the United States — many of them naturalized — decades before they were charged with any of the crimes."
Our anonymous WND writer concedes some of this -- but not until later in his article, and during an attempt to spin criticism of the list:
Some opponents of the travel suspension have tried to claim that the Senate report was flawed because it included individuals who were not necessarily terrorists because they were convicted of crimes such as identity fraud and false statements. About a dozen individuals in the group from the seven terror-associated countries are in this category. Some are individuals who were arrested and convicted in the months following 9/11 for involvement in a fraudulent hazardous materials and commercial driver’s license scheme that was extremely worrisome to law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies, although a direct link to the 9/11 plot was never claimed.
The anonymous writer went on to quote Muslim-hating WND reporter and author Leo Hohmann as having "pointed out that it’s not only terrorism that has been a problem with regard to the resettlement of Third World refugees. The number of sexual assaults is also mounting."
So this has everything to do with fearmongering and nothing to do with facts.
CNS Devotes 3 Articles to Trump Aide, Censors His Lies Topic: CNSNews.com
When it came time to document Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller's Sunday-morning talk-show marathon, CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones knew it was time to get into stenography mode. So she cranked out three articles' worth of stenography:
The first touted how Miller "said President Trump's authority to suspend the entry of aliens into this country is 'beyond question,' both in law and according to the Constitution" and complained that "a district judge, a district judge in Seattle, cannot make immigration law for the United States."
The second promoted Miller saying that ""The crackdown on illegal immigrants is merely the keeping of my campaign promise."
The third featured a back-and-forth between Miller and "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace and waited until the ninth pagaraph to note Miller's assertion that "the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned."
Curiously, Jones made no mention of Miller's appearance on that other Sunday show, ABC's "This Week." Why? It's where Miller told a bunch of demonstrable lies -- most prominently, his utterly unsubstaniated and discredited assertion that "thousands of illegal voters were bused from Massachusetts to New Hampshire" to vote -- and Jones isn't being paid to call out a member of the Trump administration as a liar.
Jones can only be bothered to trot out something approaching acutal journalism when it can be used to serve her (and the Media Research Center's) right-wing agenda. That makes her a propagandist, not a reporter.
Trump Buddy Ruddy Walks Back His Criticism of Priebus Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy appeared on the Feb. 12 edition of CNN's "Reliable Sources" mostly to shill for his buddy Donald Trump and to tamp down suggestions that the president doesn't know what he's doing. Cathy Burke's Newsmax article on her boss' appearance sums his words up in its lead paragraph: "President Donald Trump's first weeks in office are showing him to be 'a stable, sensible world leader,' who trusts the American people will judge him on the 'results' of both his foreign and domestic policies."
The big news, however ,was Ruddy throwing Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, under the bus, apparently based on a conversation he had with Trump a couple days earlier:
I think there's a lot of weakness coming out of the chief of staff. I think Reince Priebus -- good guy, well intentioned, but he clearly doesn't know how the federal agencies work. He doesn't have a really good system -- hedoesn't know how the communications flow.
It’s my view that Reince is the problem. I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff — and Donald trusted him — but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work. He botched this whole immigration rollout. This should’ve been a win for Donald, not two or three weeks of negative publicity.
That apparently didn't go over well. Ruddy's walkback began quickly, with a tweet declaring: "Reince just briefed me on new WH plans. Impressive! CNN today my personal view. Told him I have 'open mind' based on his results." At Newsmax, Ruddy's walkback is bizarrely framed as a scoop in an unbylined article:
Senior White House sources have told Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy that President Trump has full confidence in Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the job he is doing.
"I’m hearing from a number of senior people today that President Trump very much likes the job Reince Priebus is doing and has no intention of replacing him," Ruddy told Newsmax.
Ruddy's comments come after a CNN appearance Sunday on Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources" when he defended the Trump administration from media attacks, but chided Priebus for White House messaging fumbles during the opening days of the administration.
Ruddy made clear to CNN and other press outlets his views were his own and were not based on any conversation with the president.
The Post's Chris Cillizza questions this: "Those quotes — on the record no less! — come 48 hours after Ruddy had drinks with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. It's sort of hard to imagine Ruddy didn't (a) run Priebus down even more in private and (b) let Trump know he was going to tell people about it."
Cillizza goes on to note that Trump's treatment of his senior staff -- an atmosphere in which his chief of staff is thrown under the bus by a Trump friend on TV -- is highly unusual.
Then again, the elevation of his friend to the presidency has made Ruddy something of a power broker. Another Post article touts the "newfound access" conservative outlets are getting in the Trump White House, with the chief example being Newsmax Washington bureau chief John Gizzi: "press secretary Sean Spicer has picked him out several times from among the jostling mob of journalists seeking to question the administration." The Post didn't note that Gizzi's boss is a friend of the president, which might also account for that newfound access.
Ruddy seems to be playing his cards in a way to ride Trump's coattails to becoming a more mainstream media player. It's clear, however, that Ruddy has no interest in being critical of his friend -- yet.
WND's Loudon Skipped Right-Wing Indoctrination Class, Can't Name A 'Christian' Country Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily columnist GinaLoudon is so devoted to being a Donald Trump disciple, it seems, that she's losing touch with right-wing orthodoxy.
In her Jan. 29 column, Loudon makes this odd attack on critics of Trump's immigration order:
They claim this act is anti-Muslim, because it “bans immigration from Muslim countries.” What is a “Muslim” country? Can you define that? I doubt it. Name a “Christian” country. You get the point.
Loudon seems to have forgotten the conservatively correct answer to the question "Name a 'Christian' country" is the United States, full stop. Doesn't Loudon know that it's an articleoffaith among conservative Christians that America was founded as a Christian nation? Or that right-wingers spent the past eight years attackingPresidentObama for his apparently heretical suggestion that because the idea of America transcends religion it is no longer just a Christian nation -- which was then repeatedly misquoted and taken out of context to attack him?
Ah, but Loudon has her own smears to peddle. She maliciously labels critics of Trump's order -- which been fighting a losing battle in court -- as "pro-terrorist radicals," as if anything Trump proposes is the only possible solution and that being concerned about basic human rights makes one "pro-terrrorist."
She then baselessly says of anti-Trump protesters: "Many in the ranks are paid by George Soros," later sneering about "paid Soros “protesters” (a.k.a. lackeys/sheeple) on the streets outside starving for their five seconds of fame." Loudon offers no evidence that any protester, let alone "many" of them, are being paid directly by Soros.
It's quite hilarious to hear a woman who tried to capitalize on the publicity surrounding her teenage daughter's affair with a 57-year-old man whine about others "starving for their five seconds of fame."
Fake News: MRC Wonders Why Media Isn't Reporting a Discredited Story Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Julia A. Seymour was in full climate-denier froth in a Feb. 7 post:
A federal agency discredited a common argument of climate skeptics in 2015, but now a whistleblower has accused the agency of misleading the public and playing politics. Not that anyone watching the network news would know it.
For several years, climate skeptics argued there had been a “pause” or hiatus in global warming beginning in 1998. Then, in June 2015, a paper from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration erased it. Many news outlets reported that NOAA study and accepted its claims, but on Feb. 5 or 6, the network evening news shows said nothing about the new whistleblower’s evidence against it.
Data scientist Dr. John Bates blew the whistle on NOAA claiming the paper that erased the pause was based on misleading and “unverified” data and never analyzed in accordance with NOAA’s full process, The Daily Mail reported. That prompted many to draw comparisons to the Climategate scandal of 2009.
Just one problem: the Daily Mail story is bogus, which seems like a pretty good reason for actual news sources to ignore it.
Media Matters points out that NOAA's data debunking a "pause" in global warming has been independently verified by other non-NOAA data collection methods. Further, the whistleblower was reportedly not involved in any aspect of the report being attacked as manipulated, and the Daily Mail reporter has a lengthy record of misleading claims on climate science.
Ironically, a few days after Seymour's post was written, Wikipedia declared the Daily Mail to be too unreliable to be used as a reference on the website.
Doubly ironically, Seymour is right that the Daily Mail story is like Climategate -- both have been debunked.
In summary, Seymour is promoting fake news -- which her employer has done in the past.
Black WND Columnist Peddles Racist Argument Against Other Blacks Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember how we documented that WorldNetDaily columnist Jesse Lee Peterson uses his black conservative privilege to say things that would be considered racist if a white person said them? Well, he's done it again. From Peterson's Feb. 5 WND column:
Without black people in this country, I think there would hardly be any riots, and the murder rate might drop by half or more.
Imagine, say, a KKK member saying this -- he would be immediately denounced by a broad spectrum of people (though maybe not by Peterson). but because Peterson is a black conservative, he can say such things with impunity.
This comes on top of Peterson a few months back endorsing the anti-black views of race-baiters and white nationalists like Jared Taylor and Colin Flaherty.
Having blacks trash other blacks in the way a white racist would is one key way WND has plausible deniability in claiming it doesn't cater to white nationalists (despite having given a prominentplatform to Flaherty).
CNS' Jones Suddenly Discovers Original Reporting ... In Order To Attack Warren Topic: CNSNews.com
So CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones is capable of doing more than stenography after all -- when it comes to attacking a Democrat, anyway.
After Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the Senate floor for reading a letter by the late Coretta Scott King critical of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, Jones fought back in a Feb. 8 article headlined "Warren Falsely Claims That Republicans 'Silenced Mrs. King's Voice on the Senate Floor'." Jones howled that "A liberal advocacy group is already fund-raising off Tuesday's Elizabeth Warren kerfuffle" and insisted that "In fact, Warren read King's very long letter in its entirety, and she had moved on to other complaints when she was finally interrupted by [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and asked to take her seat," further complaining that Warren "read from long-ago letters."
The next day, Jones was still whining, in an article complaining that "a white liberal from the Northeast dragged the name of Sen. Jeff Sessions though the mud, violating Senate rules in the process." But then it was back to Trump stenography mode as she touted how "a black conservative from the South stood on the Senate floor to reflect on 'what occurred last night'" -- Republican Sen. Tim Scott. She further touted how "Sen. Scott spent the rest of his speech explaining the discrimination he faces, not necessarily for being black, but for being conservative. He even read aloud some of the hateful messages that have come into his office because of his support for Sen. Sessions."
Jones quickly followed that up with an article focusing solely on how scott "read some of the tweets he's received, blasting him for supporting Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general" and described those who wrote them as "liberal" without providing any evidence that they actually were. The headline of Jones' article: "Sen. Tim Scott Illustrates How Liberals Show Tolerance."
So Jones could be moved to fact-check a Democrat but not a Republican. That's life at CNS.
In a Feb. 4 WorldNetDaily article, Radio America's Greg Corombos touts his interview subject, Jessica Vaughan of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, as an "immigration policy expert," though all she's doing is reflexively defending President Trump's immigration from certain countries by insisting it's not really a ban.
Corombos also writes: "Vaughan, a former visa officer, said the Obama administration failed to do even basic screening much of the time, including waiving required interviews with those seeking to go to the U.S. But she said the problems didn’t end there." Corombos is suggesting that Vaughan's work as a "former visa officer" has direct relevance to Obama's alleged policies; it's further suggested in the headline of his article, "Ex-visa officer: Obama failed to do basic screening of migrants."
In fact, Vaughan's CIS bio says she "has been with the Center since 1992," meaning any direct experience she had in working with visas as a former State Department employee was 25 years ago.
In other words, she never worked in the Obama administration and can't provide any direct experience as to what its visa policies were.
Indeed, Natasha Hall, an former immigration officer with the Department of Homeland Security, explains that "The process for any citizen of a Middle Eastern or majority-Muslim country to get into the United States is tortuous and has become more so over the past 15 years, with additional screenings, interviews and other background checks."
That's a misleading bit of reporting on the part of Corombos. But misleading reporting is whats WND is all about.
MRC Predictably Hates Boy Scouts' Decision to Admit Transgenders Topic: Media Research Center
As professionalLGBT-haters, the news that the Boy Scouts will accept transgender scouts did not go down well at the Media Research Center.
Sarah Stites whined: "Since 2013, the Boy Scouts of America have quickly caved to the progressive agenda, admitting both homosexual guides and scouts. As of today, transgender boys can now join troops." She huffed that "the networks did spin the news positively," adding: "Because scouts are required to acknowledge their duty to God, the BSA still prohibits avowed atheists and agnostics from membership. Eradicating this stipulation will likely surface as the next item on the progressive agenda."
Stites' complaining about the "progressive agenda" is rich, as if she and the MRC don't have an agenda of their own to promote.
Tim Graham -- known for his anti-transgender freakouts -- and Brent Bozell were even more whiny in their Feb. 3 column, asserting that the Boy Scouts of America "used to be derided as a 'traditional, values-based' organization" before it "folded on homosexual Scouts and then on homosexual scoutmasters." Now, they huff, " This cowardly shell of an organization should just scrap the references to God, and every God-respecting church should jettison their Boy Scout units to the nearest secular gathering place."
They rant about "libertine leftists" -- a favorite term of Graham's; remember, Graham actually writes this syndicated column and Bozell simply slaps his name on after the fact, something he was content to hide from the public until the truth came out -- and "homosexual celebrity lobbyists" who liked the changes and grumble that since "relativism is king" now, "Perhaps the next "reform" might be an 11-year-old Boy Scout declaring that he identifies as an Eagle Scout, negating the need for any stinking merit badges or review boards."
Did WND's Farah Really Engage In Violent Proests In the '60s? Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has an odd habit of making grandiose claims about his supposed left-wing past -- marking with Martin Luther King and following the orders of Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda, for example.
He's at it again. In the Jan. 24 column in which he sneered that the participants in the Women's march were "hags," Farah said this about himself:
I was once on the other side – a participant in many leftist, anti-American, pro-communist demonstrations. I remember what they were like. I didn’t care back then. I had a completely different worldview. But I still remember how contemptuously we left behind the garbage. It was deliberate. We had no thought for the people who had to clean it up. We had no thought for the people who lived there. We smashed plate glass windows, turned over the cars of innocent victims and spit on those with whom we disagreed – figuratively and literally.
Farah took this further in in a Jan. 28 WND article promoting his new book "The Restitution of All Things": "I was an unregenerate, crazy young person. ... My background is with the far, far left, even in high school, arrested in all sorts of demonstrations. I used to help start riots and building takeovers at Colombia [sic] University as a teenager."
That's odd, since Farah apparently graduated from William Paterson University, not Columbia. And the biggest and most notorious protests at Columbia were in 1968, when Farah would have been just 13 -- around the same age he was when he claimed to have marched with Martin Luther King.
As with his puported MLK marches, we highly doubt that Farah was sufficiently politically aware at age 13 to be skipping junior high and schlepping from his New Jersey home into Manhattan for the sole purpose of protesting and rioting and taking over college buildings with college students several years his senior. (The fact that he misspelled "Columbia" adds even more doubt.) And Farah's lengthyrecord of lying proves that we cannot take his words at face value.
So we're adding the increasingly omnipresent "liar" graphic to this post. As he has always been, Farah is free to provide us with proof of his violent left-wing activism, we will freely apologize and remove the graphic.
MRC's Waters Still Whining That NY Times Reports Accurately Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's resident New York Times-hater, Clay Waters, loves to complain that the Times reports accurately on things he doesn't want reported. He does so again in a Jan. 30 post:
The front of Sunday’s New York Times featured David Barstow, known for blessing the paper’s readers with dubious Pulitzer bait every couple of years, tackling the story of authoritarian President Trump’s falsehoods , backed up by liberal good-government types, liberal plagiarist authors, and liberal “fact-checkers”: “‘Up Is Down’: Unreality Show Echoes a History of False Claims.”
[...]
The Times managed to endure eight years of the Clintons (plus Hillary Clinton's email lies) and Obamas, telling fibs about Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky...then Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Obamacare...but only now does the paper decide that we have a lying politician in the White House?
At no point does Waters defend the accuracy of any claim the Times identified as false; all he does is complain that "liberals" identified themand deflect the issue by bringing up irrelevant claims of alleged falsehoods by Democratic presidents when he knows they don't compare with the routine and pervasive lying Trump has done throughout the campaign and into his presidency.
Waters also huffs that "It’s no secret that Politifact, a liberal media creation, presses a left thumb upon the scales of “truth” to make Democrats come out cleaner than Republicans," linking as alleged evidence to a NewsBusters post touting right-wing columnist Mollie Hemingway engaging in pedantic hair-splitting over Planned Parenthood and mammograms.
Waters apparently doesn't realize that fact-checking is not a zero-sum game, or that "liberals" identifying Trump's falsehoods doesn't make them any less false. He's simply playing into his employer's war on facts to give Trump a pass on his lies.
WND's Farah Sucks Up to Breitbart Again, Takes Financially Safe Stance on Ad Boycott Topic: WorldNetDaily
After the election, Joseph Farah and worldNetDaily started sucking up to and latching onto Breitbart News, since its website was on the ascendacy through its close assocation to Donald Trump and WND's, well, wasn't. One of the things Farah did was to declare that any company that refused to run ads on Breitbart can forget about advertising with WND; Farah conveniently offered no proof that such companies had ever placed ads at WND, meaning that they probably haven't and WND is giving up no revenue from taking such a stand.
Farah was at it again in his Feb. 5 column, braving taking another stand that costs him nothing:
The federal government of Canada has pulled advertising from Breitbart.com.
In response, I’m going to do what I did when Kellogg chose to blacklist what many might consider WND’s competition in the independent online news community: Tell Canada to dump WND, too.
Our neighbor to the north might as well follow my advice as I have instructed my advertising department to block ads from the Canadian government as long as this anti-Breitbart hysteria continues.
[...]
This is not the first time I have stood with Breitbart against the assault on diversity of opinion and worldviews that conflict with certain advertisers. In December, when the cereal company Kellogg announced it was pulling ads from our friends at Breitbart, I announced we would neither solicit nor accept its advertising unless the company dropped its Breitbart boycott.
That’s our position on the Canadian government as well.
Again, Farah offers no evidence that the Canadian government has ever placed ads at WND, which means he is once again giving up nothing by taking this stand. He did, however, complain that "it appears that an “inquiry” from a Canadian newspaper – the Toronto Globe and Mail – prompted the ban" by the Canadian government on advertising at Breitbart, and "This same despicable media outlet suggested in its story celebrating the Breitbart ad ban that the blacklist should be expanded to include WND and other highly trafficked independent voices." He added: "While I am gratified that the marketing firm running ad campaigns for Canada chose WND to be one of 398 media outlets worldwide, I regretfully have to turn down the unsolicited offer – at least until the government stops discriminating against other independent media outlets like Breitbart."
But according to the "despicable" Globe and Mail article Farah is citing, WND was simply on a "list of 398 sites approved for online federal advertising" compiled by the government's media-buying agency, and it's unclear whether any Canadian government advertising ever appeared at WND. Farah didn't mention that the Globe and Mail flagged two other right-wing sites on the government whitelist: Gateway Pundit and Newsmax.
The Globe and Mail also had this to say about WND:
And the list of approved sites for government ads still includes a number of other fringe outlets which have been criticized for fomenting hatred and conspiracy theories such as the racist “birther” movement championed by Trump.
[...]
WND.com (World Net Daily) was a leading voice of the birther movement, and its WND Books division published a book promoting the conspiracy. On Monday afternoon, the site’s lead story suggested the airport protests which erupted over the weekend in response to Trump’s ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries was “just the start of ‘chaos’ planned by Muslim Brotherhood.” The article was by Leo Hohmann, whose new book, published by WND Books, is titled Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad. On Tuesday, a leading WND writer decamped to InfoWars, another fringe site which traffics in conspiracy theories.
Farah shockingly didn't respond to this other than a tepid statement that "While we believe WND would never incite racial hatred, discrimination or the subversion of Canada’s democratic system of government, we don’t believe Breitbart does, either." (He presumably didn't want to concede that a Canadian news outlet scooped WND on the fact that its own reporter -- Jerome Corsi -- quit WND for Infowars.)
CNSNews.com hedged its bets a bets at first on the idea of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. As chatter grew about him, it published an op-ed by Larry Pratt of the right-wing Gun Owners of American and birther-adjacent lawyer William J. Olson fearing he might not be sufficiently pro-gun enough.
But when the selection of Gorsuch was officially announced, CNS went into its usual fawning/stenography mode:
CNS' Barbara Hollingsworth also cranked out a one-sided article (the only kind she writes, it seems) headlined "Law Profs: Judge Gorsuch’s Record Puts Him Well Within Nation's Legal Mainstream." Not only does Hollingsworth not identify the ideology of any of those law professors -- though given that she writes for CNS, we can presume all of them are conservative and she would not have bothered to talk to anyone not pushing the Trump administration line on Gorsuch -- one of those offering praise, curiously, is John Yoo, infamous for his work in the Bush administration in providing legal justification for "enhanced interrogation," which many have called torture, so he might not be the best judge of what is in the "legal mainstream."
As you'd expect from the "news" operation that 
An anonymous WorldNetDaily reporter was in high dudgeon in a Feb. 11 
When it came time to document Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller's Sunday-morning talk-show marathon, CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones knew it was time to get into 
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy 
WorldNetDaily columnist 
The Media Research Center's Julia A. Seymour was in full climate-denier froth in a Feb. 7 
Remember how we 
So CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones is capable of doing more than 
In a Feb. 4 WorldNetDaily 
As 
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has an odd habit of 
The Media Research Center's resident New York Times-hater, 
After the election, Joseph Farah and worldNetDaily started 
CNSNews.com hedged its bets a bets at first on the idea of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. As chatter grew about him, it published an 
