MRC Writer Castigates Dem Obstruction of Nominees, Forgets That GOP Controls Congress Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Nicholas Fondacaro complained in a Sept. 18 post:
With President Trump set to address the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, NBC Nightly News spent a portion of Monday night’s broadcast slamming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and spreading rumors of his removal. Their gripe was over the fact that key positions inside his department had yet to be filled. The network’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell whined about it while neglecting to mention the unprecedented obstruction by Senate Democrats with confirmations.
[...]
What Mitchell failed to mention was the unprecedented obstruction by Senate Democrats with their confirmations. As proof of this: Two of the ambassadorships she whined about, Afghanistan and India both had nominees but they’re still waiting for the process to proceed. And as reported by The Washington Post, only 22 of the State Department nominees had been confirmed with another 39 awaiting confirmation. Many of those are ambassadorships.
And it’s not just Trump’s State Department feeling the pain. The Post also noted that out of Trump’s 345 total nominations, less than half (140) have been confirmed. That leaves another 196 nominees held-up by Senate Democrats, while 9 nominations had failed.
The nominees were also facing the longest confirmation process of any recent administration at 56 days for each one, the maximum time allowed.
But at no point does Fondacaro prove that any State Department nominee is being obstructed by Democrats.
Fondacaro also neglects the relevant fact that Republicans are majority party in Congress, so there's only so much obstructing Democrats can do. CNN has noted that "Democrats say the White House's failure to submit the full documentation for nominees -- along with necessary background checks and ethics paperwork -- is what's really holding up the nominations," adding that "it's still ultimately Republicans who control the calendar and committee process in the Senate."
But Fondacaro is too busy trying to score a partisan political point to actually do research on the issue he's writing about.
WND Thinks It's 'Bonkers' For SPLC To Demand Right-Wing Media Get Its Facts Right Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh writes in a Sept. 11 WorldNetDaily article, under the headline "Left's 'attack dog' goes bonkers on Fox News":
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has unleashed damaging and unsubstantiated claims about conservative organizations as a standard business practice for years, and in fact has been named in at least two lawsuits recently over its alleged defamation of conservatives, now has delivered a letter to Fox News, claiming its reporting defamed the far-left organization.
The SPLC routinely attacks conservatives, such as its labeling the staunchly American values-based Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Counsel, and the family promoting Family Research Council as “hate” groups because of their religious beliefs.
SPLC, which has been linked to domestic terrorism and attempted mass murder, claims now that Fox News’ reporting on its activities was “inaccurate, defamatory, and irresponsible.”
The letter from SPLC spokesman James Knoepp to Fox complained that a report on “The Five” incorrectly stated that the organization, with assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, “provided just $61,000 in ‘legal assistance.'”
SPLC claimed that was its “internal legal services” and that it actually “spent more than $1.8 million on out-of-pocket case costs for litigation brought on behalf of its clients.”
The organization said it worked on a case advocating for better treatment for prisoners and on behalf of vicitims of bail bond companies in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, among others.
“The show also implied there was something nefarious about the fact that the SPLC uses investment vehicles incorporated outside of the United States, going so far as to claim it constituted a money laundering operation,” SPLC said. “As Fox News surely knows, it is common for universities, foundations and other nonprofit organizations to have a portion of their endowments invested in off-shore funds.”
So, according to Unruh and WND, it's "bonkers" for the SPLC to expect a news organization to not tell falsehoods about it. That's to be expected given WND's irresponsible penchant for spreadingfakenews. WND's mocking also makes editor Joseph Farah's petulant demand that an obscure blogger correct things that are undeniably true even more hypocritical. Unlike Farah, the SPLC has documented facts to back up its claims.
The point of Unruh's article, though, is to argue that the SPLC deserves to be lied about because it purportedly was wrong to label anti-gay groups as "hate groups." As usual, Unruh never disproves the claim.
From there, Unruh's article descends into the usual anti-SPLC boilerplate. He also touted how "conservative leaders sent an open letter to members of the media calling on them to stop using data from the 'discredited Southern Poverty Law Center'" without mentioning that one of the signatories was his boss, Farah. That's an undisclosed conflict of interest, making Unruh's article even more of an instrument of revenge and even less an act of journalism.
Hillary Derangement Syndrome, MRC Media Coverage Edition Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center remains in the throes of Hillary Derangement Syndrome. There's no better illustration of that than its predictable freakout any time someone suggests that media was unfair to her during the 2016 presidential election.
An Aug. 30 column by the MRC's Tim Graham and Brent Bozell lashes out at a Harvard University study pointing out that media coverage of Clinton "was focused on scandals, while [Donald] Trump's coverage focused on his core issues." They ranted: "No one could plausibly argue that the media was nicer to Trump than they were to Hillary Clinton, or that they treated his policy proposals with more respect. They dubbed Trump's comments on immigration and Islam as horribly scandalous, while they dismissed Clinton's scandals like the private email server as a 'stupid issue' (as John Dickerson of CBS said)."
But Graham and Bozell were really incensed that the Harvard study's examination of media was much broader than the MRC's usual exceedingly (and strategically) narrow narrow definition of a half-hour of evening news on three channels:
When most people hear the term "the press," they think of the traditional press, the so-called objective media outlets. But this Harvard study defined the press as including a bunch of "hyperpartisan" sites, from Breitbart on the right to the Daily Kos on the left. It evaluated social media, studying the most shared stories of the campaign. That might be interesting, but it's not a study of press coverage as most people understand it.
Just because the study's definition of media doesn't conform to the one the MRC constructed for maximum ideological explitation doesn't mean it's invalild. In fact, it's much more accurate. Let's not pretend that a significant number of Americans don't get a significant amount of their political news from "hyperpartisan" operations.
Bozell and Graham then returned to rant mode to attack the study's methodology:
But here's where we scream "Buyer beware" on these studies of campaign bias. Did the Harvard researchers actually read the contents of each story? No. They offered "content analysis using automated tools."
They had Media Cloud software scan sentences ... because their sample was literally millions of stories. This is as nebulous as counting the number of Google mentions of a topic to say whether it was overcovered or undercovered. At least another Harvard outfit, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, issues studies "conducted by trained full-time employees who visually evaluate the content."
As if this is somehow less rigorous than the MRC's so-called "methodology" of assigning entirely subjective "negative" or "positive" values to news coverage that deliberately fails to consider the factual accuracy of said coverage.It doesn't matter if the contents were read if that reader is so biased (remember, the ability to push a right-wing agenda is a prerequisite for employment at the MRC) that no reasonable person would consider his or her judgments to be objective.
Graham and Bozell concluded by huffing: "Clinton can't blame the liberal media for her defeat."
When Clinton embarked on a media to promote her campaign memoir, "What Happened," in which she blamed her loss in part on the media, the MRC went into freakout mode again, this time in a Sept. 15 post by Rich Noyes with the shouty headline "FACT: The News Media Did NOT Tip the Election to Trump." but all Noyes does is serve up it previous narrowly tailored studies that focus only on that half-hour of evening news on three channels.
For the first time, though -- perhaps annoyed by us pointing out just how strategically narrowly tailored its focus is -- Noyes offers a justification for focusing only on that tiny sliver of time: reviewing only CBS, ABC and NBC is "the best proxy for a manageable examination of all campaign news from important national sources."
Well, no. Cable news channels are not important sources of news? Political websites aren't?
The MRC has a multimillion-dollar budget, funded in no small part by Mercer money, and can easily afford to do more comprehensive research. But that would involve having to examine Fox News, whose bias the MRC simply refuses to acknowledge because it's the same bias the MRC wants all media to have.
Noyes' "facts" are preconceived, and the MRC sculpts its so-called evidence to reinforce those preconceived notions -- hence the focus only on network evening news shows to the exclusion of everything else.
Nevertheless, Noyes offers up his own final-paragraph huffing: "Hillary Clinton was not the media darling that Barack Obama was in 2008, but no reasonable person could suggest that political reporters created a landscape more favorable to Donald Trump than to her. And it’s just silly of her to say the news media, which detests Trump, was one of the causes of her defeat." And Noyes detests Clinton enough to insist this is true.
Hillary's book tour brought Graham and Bozell back out to rehash its column from a month earlier, insisting that the Harvard study it bashed last time around was "embarrassingly terrible" because it "included blogs and tweets and was judged by a computer, not actual humans." they went on to cite the MRC's own study, avoiding the fact that its exceedingly narrow focus on "the network evening news broadcasts" is even more embarassingly terrible.
Graham and Bozell let out another end-of-column whine: "All this demonstrates that the media display no self-respect when it's suggested they were all Trump lackeys without a conscience for the country. Where's the fight? Where's the rebuttal? Where's the disgust with such a shameless falsehood? The chin stroking just underlines that they were in Clinton's pantsuit pocket then and they remain there today."
Of course, Graham, Bozell and the rest of the MRC are Trump lackeys fully in his pocket, and they lack any self-respect in insisting their bogus studies have any value beyond advancing a right-wing anti-media agenda.
Mark Tapson dutifully does the work right-wing publisher Regnery was hoping to see in devoting a Sept. 13 Newsmax column (also published at the right-leaning website Acculturated) to Regnery's hollow attack on the New YOrk Times bestseller list:
A Times spokesman insisted that the “political views of authors have no bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”
Ludicrous? The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”
Confidential context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the sales figures themselves. The once highly-regarded “newspaper of record” is notoriously leftist and D’Souza is a lightning rod for Progressive animosity, so the idea that there might be some manipulation of the list is not only not ludicrous, it’s likely.
In response, Marji Ross, president of D’Souza’s conservative publisher Regnery, said in a letter to colleagues, “Increasingly, it appears that The Times has gathered book sale data in a manner which prioritizes liberal themed books over conservative books and authors.”
As we've pointed out, the underlying issue ignored by Tapson, as well as by most of the ConWeb, is bulk sales -- Regnery depends on bulk sales to conservative book clubs (it owns one or two of them) and political organizations to juice sales, and the Times apparently doesn't count them.
Tapson goes on to rant about how the right must wage a "culture insurgency" against the left. He doesn't realize that a good start to doing that would be not to reflexively regurgitate right-wing talking points.
Stenography: CNS Does 4 Articles on Trump's U.N. Speech Topic: CNSNews.com
How eager is CNSNews.com to serve as President Trump's stenographer? It assigned at least three writer to do four -- count 'em, four -- articles on Trump's speech to the United Nations.
First up was Susan Jones, who touted how "President Trump lumped Iran with North Korea, saying both countries are led by 'reckless' regimes," complete with lengthy, copy-and-pasted speech excerpt. She was followed a few minutes later by Mlanie Arter cheering how "President Donald Trump said that if North Korea forces the United States to defend itself or its allies, the U.S. will 'totally destroy' it."
Then, an anonymous CNS writer, in an article credited only to "CNSNews.com Staff," gushed over how Trump "highlighted the fact that although there are 193 nations in the U.N., the U.S. pays 22 percent of the organizations budget." The next day, another anonymously written article featured how Trump made a shout-out to "the almighty God who made us all."
On top of that, prior to Trump's speech, Arter did another fawning article, touting how "In his first appearance at the United Nations, President Donald Trump said bureaucracy and mismanagement are reasons why the world body has not reached its full potential."
There's no journalistic reason to send at least three writers to pen four articles on a Trump speech that could be easily summed up in one. CNS simply cherry-picked the portions of the speech it thought helped further its right-wing agenda, then put them in separate articles to pad out its story count and give the illusion that CNS is a legitmate and prolific "news" organization.
Fake News: WND Baselessly Blames 'Leftists' For Nasty Comments About Bolling's Son Topic: WorldNetDaily
Chelsea Schilling writes in a Sept. 11 WorldNetDaily article:
In the wake of the death of Eric Chase Bolling Jr., the son of former Fox News star Eric Bolling, leftists are celebrating the tragedy on Twitter, saying it’s “karma” and “justice” for the TV host who lost his job after allegations of sexual harassment.
[...]
When news of Bolling Jr.’s death surfaced, leftists took to Twitter to celebrate the tragic loss, calling it “karma” and “justice” for the alleged actions reported by the Huffington Post.
But at no point does Schilling prove that any of the comments she cites were made by "leftists." Making nasty comments on Twitter is not the exclusive domain of "leftists," even if the target of the nastiness is a right-wing TV host recently fired following allegations of sexual harrassment.
Since Schilling is making a claim she fails to support, that makes this yetanotherexample of fake news at WND.
MRC, CNS Have A Sally Quinn Freakout Topic: Media Research Center
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman is horrified in a Sept. 13 blog post that "In her new book, Finding Magic: A Spiritual Memoir, Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn, the widow of former Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (d.2014), admits that she believes in and has practiced the occult since childhood, and even placed hexes on people. He concluded by huffing: "The liberal media and Washington insiders, incidentally, mocked Nancy Reagan for consulting an astrologer. Why were they so silent, for decades, about Sally Quinn and her occultism?"
Perhaps because Quinn married to a journalist and was not the first lady of the United States, perhaps? That distinction appears to have escaped Chapman, who's much more comfortable promoting so-called Christians expressing their hatred for the LGBT community.
Chapman isn't the only Media Research Center employee huffing and puffing about Quinn. Tom Blumer is in full dudgeon at NewsBusters, somehow equating the lack of public knowledge about Quinn's occultic tendencies to a political scandal akin to Watergate (and cites co-worker Chapman along the way):
The reception given to Sally Quinn's new book, Finding Magic, has been strangely quiet.
Perhaps that's because the book shamelessly reveals that since 1973, if not earlier, Quinn, who was the nation's capital's de facto social gatekeeper for several decades, deceived the world about the true nature of her "religious" outlook, and did so with the help of the rest of the Washington press corps — that is, if one considers belief in the occult, practicing voodoo, and supposedly communicating with ghosts (sound familiar?) the foundations of a "religion."
[...]
The bolded sentence in the final excerpted paragraph is very telling. It reveals that Quinn's occultism was an open Beltway secret for over four decades which no reporter in the media echo chamber had the courage to share with the public this crowd of alleged journalists piously claims to serve.
[...]
Quinn, like so many other reporters who were or still are at thePost, was a fan of citing unnamed "sources." Ronald Reagan himselfinsisted that "no policy or decision in my mind has ever been influenced by astrology."
As to what's really "frightening and shocking," I'd place a closeted practitioner of occultism who believes in murderous hexes pretending to be offended by astrology to score cheap political points against the First Lady of a wildly successful two-term presidential administration several "frightening and shocking" notches above a protective First Lady who allegedly consulted the stars and had "a role" in Ronald Reagan's "scheduling."
[...]
Otherwise, media coverage of Quinn's new book has been very light.
It's understandable, given how this book effectively shames members of the Washington press corps irrevocably for the history books for a disgraceful four-plus decade coverup.
If Blumer could demonstrate when Quinn's personal life was relevant to anything she had done in public, he might have a point. Since he can't, he's just engaged in a meaningless right-wing rant.
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:24 PM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 9:25 PM EDT
WND Publishes Another Dubious Attack on Islamic Charity Topic: WorldNetDaily
In 2005, WorldNetDaily was forced to retract an article falsely attacking the relief organization Islamic Relief of supporting terrorism, as well as raising money to aid nonexistent children, presumably under threat of a lawsuit from the group.
Rack up a win for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and a network of other U.S. Islamist organizations controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Not only has the Brotherhood thus far managed to avoid the Trump White House designating it a terrorist organization, but its U.S. affiliates still hold enormous sway over the Republican-dominated Congress.
The latest evidence of that fact played out on Capitol Hill last Thursday, in a stunning turn of events that received no coverage from the national media and elicited nary a peep out of the conservative media.
Islamic Relief Worldwide, or IRW, a United Kingdom-based humanitarian relief agency with a U.S. chapter, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. federal grants in recent years, including $370,000 for the fiscal years 2015 and 2016. Quite naturally, IRW wants to keep the spigot of federal dollars flowing, despite the charity’s links to the terrorist group Hamas.
U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., introduced an amendment to the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Act that would have banned all federal funding of IRW and its affiliates.
When they got wind of DeSantis’ amendment, CAIR and other Islamist groups blitzed members of Congress with a last-minute lobbying effort to vote against the amendment. House leaders capitulated, withdrawing the amendment last Thursday before it was even brought up for a vote.
As a result, Hamas terrorists will continue to have access to federal tax dollars.
IRW is an Islamist charity that has funneled money to Hamas and has ties to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, according to the highly respected Islamist Watch projectof Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum.
Hohmann doesn't say who considers the Middle East Forum "highly respected," but we suspect that respect is limited to Muslim-haters like Hohmann, given that Pipes is given to conspiracy theories like claiming that President Obama is a Muslim. Hohmann goes on to assert that "Islamic Relief Wordwide has a long history of promoting extremist ideology across both America and Europe," but he makes no effort to prove it.
At no point does Hohmann bother to contact anyone with Islamic Relief for a comment on attacks of his fellow Muslim-haters. If he had, he would have known that the group has long denied any links to terrorism and that it conducted an audit of itself that similarly demonstrated that. Hohmann also fails to mention that DeSantis' amendment was opposed by numerous relief groups around the world and in the U.S.
This is the kind of biased, one-sided story filled with dubious -- if not outright false -- allegations that tends to draw attention from libel lawyers. Hohmann and WND may want to brace themselves and start drafting that retraction, using that 2005 retraction as a model.
MRC Churns Out Another Bogus Study Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center appears to be on a roll with its biased so-called "studies." It served up another one on Sept. 13 courtesy of Mike Ciandella:
The twin disasters of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma showcased once again the media's reflex to use such tragedies to push for liberal climate change policies.
In their pursuit of this agenda, the broadcast networks' have heavily criticized the Trump administration's policies on the environment. From January 20 through August 31, MRC analysts tallied 75 stories discussing the President and climate change, totaling 73 minutes, 43 seconds of network airtime.
The commentary in these stories was as one-sided as the rest of Trump's coverage has been, with 88 percent of evaluative statements criticizing the President, vs. a mere 12 percent that praised him.
Once again, Ciandella ignores the vast majority of of the media universe to portray a half-hour of time on three channels as representative of the entire "media." Also note that Ciandella is trying to politiclze science by declaring that anything that supports the scientific consensus on climate change to be "liberal."
And we have another dubious "methodology":
Methodology: Our measure of spin was designed to isolate the networks’ own slant, not the back-and-forth of partisan politics. Thus, our analysts ignored soundbites which merely showcased the traditional party line (Republicans supporting Trump, Democrats criticizing him), and instead tallied evaluative statements which imparted a clear positive or negative tone to the story, such as statements from experts presented as non-partisan, voters, or opinionated statements from the networks’ own reporters.
Using these criteria, MRC analysts tallied 121 evaluative statements about the Trump administration’s approach to the environment from January 20 to August 31, 2017, of which 106 (88%) were negative vs. a mere 15 (12%) which were positive.
Again, "negative" and "positive" are subjective values, not objective ones that can be subject to scientific definition and rigor, and Ciandella is either ignoring neutral statements or forcing them into "negative" or "positive" camps.
Ciandella's bias is obvious in the examples he cites (again, the MRC refused to release full documentation of the study results), in which he portrays the reporting of facts as negative:
The most consistent factor in all of this coverage was the criticism. NBC Nightly News correspondent Matt Bradley’s July 30 quip that “President Donald Trump shifts American climate commitments into reverse” was typical of the media attitude towards the president’s environmental policies.
On June 2, Nightly News correspondent Kristen Welker promoted an anti-Trump protest over this decision, hyping “the backlash is only heating up.”
The same night, CBS Evening News’s anchor Anthony Mason spoke of the “world of opposition to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.” Correspondent Chip Reid echoed by referencing “worldwide condemnation.”
NBC Nightly News, anchor Savannah Guthrie on June 1 criticized the move to withdraw from the climate treaty: “detractors say it is a stunning abandonment of the U.S.’s leadership in the world, and a grave threat to the planet itself.”
To their credit, CBS stood alone in interviewing a conservative to hear the other side of the climate change debate. On April 22,CBS Evening News, correspondent Dean Reynolds noted that Joe Bast, CEO of The Heartland Institute, “looks with approval on Mr. Trump’s decision to roll back regulations limiting greenhouse gases, and to his appointments of fellow skeptics in the administration. Climate change, he [Bast] says, is a naturally occurring cyclical phenomenon caused mostly by the sun, not an approaching disaster accelerated by carbon dioxide emissions caused by humans.”
However, before stating this position, Reynolds noted that “most climate scientists, the United Nations, as well as NASA, dismiss these arguments as propaganda for fossil fuels.
So Ciandella is effectively proving Stephen Colbert correct once again: Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.
John McCain Derangement Syndrome Topic: WorldNetDaily
John McCain is losing it! Or, perhaps this is the real McCain finally coming out. During his 30 years in the Senate, McCain has fooled the public and pretended to be a conservative Republican. The fake news media have depicted him as a “maverick” who isn’t afraid to stand up to his own party. But McCain has always been a RINO, and he is not an honorable man. The election of President Trump is exposing his true nature and lack of character.
McCain, 81, is a Navy veteran who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War, and he has never gotten over Donald Trump mocking him as “not a war hero” during the 2016 campaign. He needs to get over his anger before he passes from this earth.
With the encouragement of President Trump, millions of Americans wished McCain well and prayed for his recovery after he was diagnosed with brain cancer in late July, only to be betrayed by him when he joined with liberal Republicans to defeat the GOP’s “skinny repeal” of Obamacare.
[...]
With his unrelenting attack against Trump, McCain is revealing himself, and he doesn’t even realize it.
We have a great president who is working hard to make “America Great Again,” and this cowardly RINO is fighting against him and against the good people in this country. Arizonans, I blame you, because you had a chance to get rid of this man, but you voted for him over and over again.
I recall when John McCain spoke in Southern California in 2008 during his presidential run against Obama. I thought he was a good guy. I voted for him because he presented himself as a conservative who loved his country and the military – I didn’t know he was a RINO!
-- Jesse Lee Peterson, Sept. 3 WorldNetDaily column
MRC Writer Is Still Defending Gay Conversion Therapy Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center writer Dawn Slusher has been extremelyconcerned that the TV show "Greenleaf" has a storyline about Kevin, a married man who is conflicted by his attraction to other men and attempts to deal with them by attending a church group involved with gay conversion therapy, fretting that the oft-discredited therapy will be discredited further and insisting that conversion therapy works.
Remarking in an Aug. 17 post on a scene in which Kevin confronts the leader of the conversion therapy program on how it's not working, Slusher rants (bolding is hers):
Suddenly, instead of Kevin voluntarily wanting to change because of his faith, he's now blaming the group leader for driving him crazy? And this was never about the group leader or anyone other than God, telling His followers what is right in His Word.
The question is, will the show use this storyline to show that Kevin truly wants to continue fighting his urges and is only angry because he failed, and that maybe he will try again once he calms down?
Or will they make Kevin to be the hero against those horrible conversion therapy groups that try so hard to help Christians make their own choices based on their faith rather than their flesh? (So awful of these groups to help such people despite the many success stories, right? God forbid people seek to live as they feel called to by their faith and voluntarily seek out the support of such groups to suppress urges they’d rather not have.)
Seeing that this is liberal Hollywood, and the Oprah Network at that, my money is on the former. Especially since Charity finds a letter Kevin left behind before leaving the house to confront the group and she seems extremely concerned. My guess is that the show will paint Kevin as suicidal in a future episode. Not because of his inner struggle between his faith and his desires, though, but because of Fortitude Families and intolerant Christians.
All the blame must lie with those who are trying to help Christians live out their faith. Because, of course.
Note to Slusher: Just because someone voluntarily seeks out something that's been proven to be psychologically harmful doesn't mean they should be encouraged to do it.
And, as before, Slusher's evidence that gay conversion therapy is a "success" are a pro-conversion therapy group that cites the virulently anti-gay group NARTH for backup, as well as Walt Heyer, a current fave of anti-gay activists who admits he was misdiagnosed as transgender.
WND's Farah Still Has Thin Skin, But Doesn't Disprove White-Nationalist Allegations Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah's thinskin shows up yet again in his Sept. 12 WorldNetDaily column, in which he rants that an obscure blog has committed a "blood libel" against him:
A blog called “Peacock Panache” posted a diatribe called“The Trump Administration: A Confederacy of Dunces,” by Sheila Kennedy. It sought to discredit executive branch officials through a tactic the left used to detest – “guilt by association.” When liberals and leftists were linked in the past to Communists and socialists, they doth protest such connections as “McCarthyite” smears.
But the left has fully embraced the tactic and raised it to an art form.
What caught my eye about this particular piece was the attempted smear of John Kenneth Bush, Trump’s nominee for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. One of his grave offenses was that his wife purportedly called slavery and abortion two of America’s greatest tragedies. I don’t know if the accusation is true or not, but … what’s wrong with that? Bush’s second offense, according to the post, was: “He consistently cited WorldNetDaily, an extremist publication known for peddling conspiracy theories and white nationalism, including the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.”
Meet the SPLC’s “white nationalist conspiracy spin cycle.”
Since I, as the founder of WND, openly detest white supremacy and all forms of racism, this lie struck a nerve. So, I dashed off a demand for retraction and public apology from Tim Peacock, the managing editor of Peacock Panache.
I explained that WND has never and would never promote “white nationalism” and that his blog’s claim is an outrageous and actionable lie – and clearly defamatory.
But, of course, the little Peacock knows better than me, my friends, my family members, my employees about my reputation and integrity as a Christian who believes all people are created in the image of God.
It’s a blood libel, but not beneath political activists who, without a shred of decency or humanity, don’t mind putting targets on the backs of people just because they have differences of opinion.
Farah is crying some massive crocodile tears here. He and his website spent the entire Obama administration putting targets on the backs of people just because they have differences of opinion.
But notice what else he does here: He attacks the sources of the allegations against him and WND without ever denying the allegations. The SPLC link details how WND gave a forum to race-baiting, black-mob-obsessed author Colin Flaherty, who gained popularlity in white-nationalist circles with his WND work.
The Media Matters link, meanwhile, documents how white-nationalist radio host James Edwards said he worked with WND to promote a highly dubious birther claim by Tim Adams while Edwards was broadcasting from a convention of the white-nationalist Council of Conservative Citizens (WND never explained what Adams was doing there in the first place).
Farah doesn't deny that Flaherty is a white nationalist -- though it had to cut him loose after his obsession jeopardized its Google ad revenue --nor does he deny that WND worked with a white nationalist radio host to get Adams place on his show at a white nationalist group's conference.
It doesn't matter how much Farah rants that the blog's allegations are an "actionable lie" and a "blood libel" and threatens to silence it, since Farah never disproves the claims. And it doesn't matter how much Farah insists that he's not a white supremacist, since his website undeniably tried to profit from it. If he really put his principles where his business is, WND would never have published anything by Flaherty or teamed with Adams.
It's even more laughable that Farah is making an appeal to his own "reputation and integrity as a Christian who believes all people are created in the image of God," when he's anunrepentantliar.
Farah finally rants: "At what point does SPLC bear moral, financial and legal responsibility for such acts of defamation and terrorism?" This from the editor of a "news" organization that's cited in the manifesto of mass murder Anders Breivik and whose editorial agenda parallels the white-supremacist obsessions of mass murder Dylann Roof, and has irresponsiblypushed anti-vaccine myths that likely caused people to die unnecessarily.
On Sept. 13, Chapman uncritically repeated a rant by anti-gay Rev. E.W. Jackson in which he asserted that the LGBT community "hates Christianity" and that gaywho "brag about their sin" are responsible for "all kinds of disorder and chaos and, yes, natural disasters and so forth."
Chapman then deliberately failed to get Chelsea Manning's name correct in a Sept. 14 article, referring to her as "Bradley 'Chelsea' Manning."Chapman did it again the next day, adding that Manning is "a former U.S. Army soldier who now identifies as a 'woman'."
Most media outlets identify transgender individuals to as they present themselves in public, but Chapman has decided he knows better than those biased, respectful journalists.
MRC Decrees: Don't Talk About Climate Change During A Hurricane Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center gets plenty of love from conservative writers like Joe Concha, and it makes sure to return that love.
In a Sept. 11 MRC post, Curtis Houck cheers on Concha's haranguing of MSNBC's Ali Velshi for committing the offense of talking about climate change during a hurricane:
On Sunday night, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi showcased his desire to not let a deadly crisis like Hurricane Irma go to waste, reaffirming his belief that it’s appropriate to discuss climate change as the cause of hurricanes like Irma while lives were at stake.
Velshi made this pathetic proclamation during a Twitter debate with The Hill’s Joe Concha, who had tweeted that the media had largely been doing their job when it came to the hurricane.
[...]
Concha calmly replied that there was a “[t]ime and a place for that conversation...[b]ut while people’s homes & business are being devastated isn’t that time.”
When Velshi hit back that “I think this is the perfect time to have that discussion,” Concha seemed exasperated:
[...]
Just as the left largely congregates to gun control after a shooting while people lay dead, many of those same folks can’t help but talk up global warming while lives are at risk from flooding, high winds, storm surge, and tornadoes. And this doesn’t even touch the fact that these storms have been causing catastrophic damage for centuries.
People can debate the issue like any other topic, but as Concha astutely argued, the day of landfall isn’t the time for that.
Note Houck's biased language designed to paint those who point out that climate change have a role in hurricanes as irrational if not completely crazy: Velshi is "pathetic" and "hit back" at Concha, while Concha responded "calmly" and "astutely."Houck also attacked Velshi as among "liberal journalists" who were confined to comfy, safe studios in New York City and Washington" during the hurricane. But Concha, we can presume, was nowhere near the hurricane either, but he doesn't get slammed as a liberal elite.
Yet for all of this manufactured indignation over the proper time to discuss climate change in relation to hurridcanes, neither Houck nor Concha identified a specific time when that conversation could take place. We suspect that for them, the real answer is never.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has now branded hundreds of counties, cities, schools and U.S. military bases as potential catalysts to “unleash more turmoil and bloodshed” – because of their names.
The SPLC website says it has compiled a list of 1,503 place names, monuments and symbols it wants its supporters to demand be eradicated:
[...]
“We will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination,” SPLC says.
But those quoted statements don't appear in the SPLC document to which Bannister links -- they are in a separate document.
And in neither of those documents does the SPLC assert that confederate monuments should be "eradicated," as Bannister claims. The document to which Bannister failed to link has a form letter stating that monuments should be moved to "an appropriate place," adding: "Confederate symbols belong in museums and on private property. In museums, we can learn their full history."
Bannister also asserted that the SPLC listed "The top 10 most hateful states, ranked by SPLC by number of offenses." IN fact, in neither document does the SPLC call these states "hateful."
Bannister is engaging in dishonesty that borders fakery. Ironic, since right-wingers love to attackk the SPLC for falsely labeling right-wing anti-gay groups as "hate groups."
The Media Research Center's Nicholas Fondacaro complained in a Sept. 18 post:
Bob Unruh writes in a Sept. 11 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center remains in the throes of Hillary Derangement Syndrome. There's no better illustration of that than its predictable freakout any time someone suggests that media was unfair to her during the 2016 presidential election.
Mark Tapson dutifully does the work right-wing publisher Regnery was hoping to see in devoting a Sept. 13 Newsmax 
How eager is CNSNews.com to serve as President Trump's stenographer? It assigned at least three writer to do four -- count 'em, four -- articles on Trump's speech to the United Nations.
Chelsea Schilling writes in a Sept. 11 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman is horrified in a Sept. 13 
In 2005, WorldNetDaily was 
The Media Research Center appears to be 
John McCain is losing it! Or, perhaps this is the real McCain finally coming out. During his 30 years in the Senate, McCain has fooled the public and pretended to be a conservative Republican. The fake news media have depicted him as a “maverick” who isn’t afraid to stand up to his own party. But McCain has always been a RINO, and he is not an honorable man. The election of President Trump is exposing his true nature and lack of character.
Media Research Center writer Dawn Slusher has been 
Joseph Farah's 
LGBT-hating CNSNews.com managing editor 
The Media Research Center gets 
CNSNews.com blogger Craig Bannister is a 
