What LGBT Stuff Is The MRC Freaking Out About Now? Topic: Media Research Center
The anti-LGBT freakouts at the Media Research Center keep on piling up.
Annie Piper complained that the Thanksgiving episode of "This Is Us" "was a heartwarming Thanksgiving episode - that is, until one head-turning scene." That would be when, according to Piper, a 10-year-old character apparently came out as gay, though all that actually happened was that an adult said to the girl that she's growing up and could talk to her about her "first boyfriend," to which the girl responds, "or girlfriend."
Nevertheless, Piper went into freakout mode: "It isn’t enough for TV shows to push the LGBTQ agenda on adults, now they’re pushing it on kids who really shouldn’t be trusting their inhibitions and feelings at such a young age."
Gabriel Hays got all huffy over Angela Ponce, the transgender contestant from Spain at the Miss Universe Pageant: "Regardless of how anyone feels about Ponce’s gender-bending campaign, betting on her is probably a smart move, considering the showbiz industry is doubling down on an LGBTQ agenda by the hour. Ponce herself has claimed that such a whirlwind victory would be of utmost importance “to promote gender diversity and equality.”
When Ponce failed to place, Karen Townsend was around to complain not only that she "was awarded her very own segment during the show" but that it wasn't fully in English, as apparently all meaningful TV is supposed to be: "Plus size supermodel Ashley Graham narrated a segment about Ponce’s time in the spotlight and subtitles were used as Ponce only spoke in Spanish. It’s all about diversity and acceptance, y’all."
Townsend then lectured: "Contrary to what Miss Spain claims, a person’s body at birth does indeed determine the sex of a child. It’s all pretty basic science. You might even say that this science is settled. There are only two sexes of human beings. An operation that mutilates body parts doesn’t change that."
But the MRC still wasn't done whining about Ponce: Brad Wilmouth intentionally misgenders her in complaining that one show "took the time to celebrate the first time that a transgender contestant has gotten to participate in the Miss Universe pagent even though he ended up losing."
Wilmouth later complained that "On NBC Nightly News on Christmas night, the show devoted a full report to the story of a lesbian couple in Illinois whose gay pride flag was stolen from outside their home." That's pretty much all there is to that, though Wilmouth does go on to whine that this story was covered while "ignoring the story of a Muslim who is also black committing a hate crime."
The mysterious Jay Maxson was outraged that a writer criticized Chick-fil-a's sponsorship of the Peach Bowl because it supports, in Maxson's words, "organizations devoted to God’s design for sexual intimacy through the context of marriage." Maxon then huffed that the writer thinks "Chick-fil-A's sponsorship of the Peach Bowl and events like the Pittsburgh Marathon represent a sports world that puts money over the well-being of a demographic whose suicide rate and rate of self-harm should be alarming to everyone. As if Chick-fil-A is responsible for the individual decisions made by people who choose not to follow biblical values."
First, when you watch the video, it’s immediately clear that the customer is a man who identifies as a woman. He is “sir” by birth, even if he now identifies as female.
Listen to his voice and look at his face.
He can take hormones and grow breasts. He can surgically alter other parts of his body.
That still does not make him “ma’am.”
This is not to deny that some men have very feminine characteristics, by nature, and that some women have very masculine characteristics, again, by nature.
It is just to say that this transgender woman is not a biological female. This “sir” is not “ma’am.”
[...]
Of course, there are women who carry guns and women who start fights and women who say, “Let’s take this outside!”
But when you watch the video from the game store and when you watch the Ben Shapiro video, once thing is abundantly clear. These are males, not females, as their chromosomes and cells will attest.
As we come to the end of 2018, it’s good to remind ourselves of these realities.
As much as we have compassion on those who genuinely struggle with their gender identity. As much as we do not minimize their pain. As much as we want them to find wholeness. We do not collaborate with social madness.
Surgery that alters one’s appearance doesn’t change a person’s sex – it changes their appearance. Putting on a wig and a dress doesn’t change one’s sexual identity any more than putting on a baseball uniform makes someone a baseball player.
Therein is the damnable lie of transgenderism. A person can undergo surgery, butchering his or her body to falsely shape it into that which it was not created, but that doesn’t change what they were born. It only changes the way they look. Trying to walk, talk and adopt behavioral characteristics of the sex you were not born is an effort in futility. It makes one a pretender; it doesn’t change sex.
We need not do anything to remain as we were born, but to alter our appearance into something else requires surgery, massive amounts of drugs, prosthetics and psychological counseling. It requires learning how to pretend to be what one was not born, from speech to walking and sitting.
A man wearing women’s clothing or a woman wearing men’s clothing cannot dictate that you or I reference them as what they clearly are not. A woman wearing men’s clothing and making every effort to conceal her breasts is still a woman. A man altering his voice, wearing makeup and women’s clothing is still a man. There can be no law that threatens you or me with legal action because we refuse to engage in others’ psychosis.
Ergo, threatening me or anyone else with bullying tactics intended to advance this false narrative is worthy of condemnation in the strongest possible terms.
Transgender activists are pushing what amounts to nothing less than an assault against you, myself and everyone else who refuses to embrace the lie that a person either by surgery or irrational thought can change the sex he or she was born. They are attempting to use judicial terrorism to force us into recognizing their deviancy as normal.
CNS Managing Editor Omits Crucial Info In Contraceptive Article Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman does his best to ramp up the dread in a Jan. 2 blog post:
Grace Marwick, a former law student and now insurance claims handler, revealed that she developed a blood clot on her lung as a result of taking the contraceptive pill and, if the doctors had not uncovered the problem when they did, it could have caused her to suffer a stroke or killed her, reported the New York Post and several British papers on Jan. 1.
Marwick was a law school student in Ipswich, Suffolk, about 80 miles north of London in 2015. In May of that year, the doctor's office at the school prescribed her the pill Gederel 30/150 as a form of contraception.
Chapman obviously seized upon this item to indict all contraception as harmful. Just one problem: Marwick's story doesn't actually fit Chapman's narrative.One hint of that is Marwick's message about her experience, which Chapman waits until the final paragrapf of his host to note: "I just want to warn other women and encourage them to be careful and to go straight to the doctor’s if they have any unusual symptoms at all."
But the key piece of evidence is something Chapman ignores completely. Both the New York Post and Daily Mail articles to which Chapman links make this important note: Marwick is now taking a different contraceptive pill, which she says "seems to be fine."
In other words, Marwick's incident was an unfortunate side effect of a specific pill -- indeed, packaging for Gederel 30/150 lists a slightly elevated risk of a blood clot as a possible side effect.
Chapman's attempt to implicitly smear all oral contraceptives as dangerous by withholding crucial information from his readers shows that he cares more about advancing a right-wing agenda than telling the truth.
WND Touts 'Neo-Nazi Lawyer's' Frivolous Lawsuit Against SPLC Topic: WorldNetDaily
The headline on the anonymously written Jan. 3 WorldNetDaily article sure sounds ominous: "SPLC sued for targeting, destroying lawyer's career." The lead paragraph goes even further: "The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which recently paid out millions of dollars to a target of its 'anti-hate' campaigns, has been sued by a lawyer who claims SPLC paid for stolen documents in an attempt to get him fired and destroy his future work prospects."
After that big beginning, things get strategically vague. There's a lot of ranting about "stolen documents" regarding the lawyer in question, Glen K. Allen. It's not until the eighth paragraph that WND gets somewhat close to identifying the issue at hand:
PJMedia reported Allen previously had purchased books published by the National Alliance and made donations to the group, but “he firmly disavowed the National Alliance.”
The report said he defended the group’s legal rights because “consistently with our American traditions of free expression, freedom of association, and the rule of law, is entitled to legal representation, like other unpopular groups, and should be encouraged to seek it.”
But he denied he is racist and pointed out he’s done considerable work for individuals and groups involving all races.
[...]
SPLC also accused him of being a “neo-Nazi lawyer” and insinuating that the lawyer’s work for the city of Baltimore was racist.
At no point in the article doees WND explain what the National Alliance is, or exactly why Allen is denying he's racist or the whole "neo-Nazi lawyer" thing (the rest of the article is mostly a rehash of right-wing attacks on the SPLC). As the SPLC details, the National Alliance is an aggressively neo-Nazi group whose founder wrote a book called "The Turner Diaries," which inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City.
The lengthy PJ Media article does a somewhat better job than WND of tying all this together (albeit remaining one-sided and unbalanced). In short: An accountant for the National Alliance gave the group's records to the SPLC, which included the fact that Allen was a dues-paying member of the National Alliance for years, donated at least an additional $500 to the group and purchased a Holocaust denial DVD and entry to a Holocaust denial conference held by the group, and that at one point he was identified as the group's lawyer. Allen contends that the membership information is stolen property and his association with the group should have remained confidential, and that the revelation of the link has effectively ended his career as a lawyer. Allen also insists that his association with the National Alliance was a "mistake" and denies he's a racist, though PJ Media never presses him on his Holocaust denial beliefs; instead, it whitewashed (as it were) his record by touting how Allen has done work for black youths and tried to volunteer "for a pro bono project to help Holocaust victims obtain compensation."
But PJ Media got strategically vague as well. Of Allen's association with the American Eagle Party, it wrote that the SPLC "also slammed the American Eagle Party as racist, which the lawsuit denounces as a 'fraudulent characterization.'" In fact, the SPLC describes the American Eagle Party as "an offshoot of the racist American Freedom Party" that embraced conspiracy theories but was also "promoted heavily on Stormfront."
So. basically, Allen is not denying his neo-Nazi leanings -- despite his protestations that he's not a racist and that his "present outlook... is a mixture of Ron Paul Libertarianism, First Amendment advocacy and civil debate," his apparently still current American Eagle Party ties appear to belie that -- but, rather, he's mad that they were made public and he can't get a job as a lawyer as a result. Of course, if you're a neo-Nazi and a lawyer, "neo-Nazi lawyer" is not an inaccurate descriptor.
In most cases, the truth is an absolute defense. Allen doesn't seem to understand that, and WND cares only about using Allen's lawsuit to launch a dubious attack on tthe SPLC.
MRC Roots Through Reporter's Instagram Account To Attack Him As 'Socialist' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham was in fine whining mood in a Dec. 23 post, ranting that a Washington Post profile on Adam McKay, director of the new movie about Dick Cheney, "Vice," was somehow another example of the paper publishing "the most embarrassing laudatory dreck supporting its favorite socialist elites," because McKay considers himself a democratic socialist.
But it wasn't enough for Graham to attack a newspaper or a person it featured. He then went needlessly personal attacked the article's author, Jeff Weiss. Graham declared that "Weiss is such a socialist he posted a happy picture of himself posed with statues of his heroes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the Marx-Engels forum in Berlin, created under the East German communist regime."
Graham apparently spent no small amount of time rooting through Weiss' personal Instragram accounty until he found the photo. Graham provided no other evidence that Weiss is a "socialist" -- indeed, Weiss' Instragram feed shows him to be a music obsessive rather than a political ideologue -- and seems to have discounted the possibility that Weiss was merely a tourist who posed ironically with the statues.
This is how terrible a media critic Graham is -- he has to smear a journalist based on a single Instagram photo in order to own the Washington Post.
CNSNews.com has closely following President Trump's rhetoric in playing down the effects of the government shutdown. Now, managing editor Michael W. Chapman is directly attacking the furloughed workers themselves.
Chapman's Jan. 4 blog post first complains that the furloughed workers have jobs to return to, unlike regular folks who get fired or laid off (emphasis in original):
The partial government shutdown, now in its 14th day, affects an estimated 800,000 federal workers, nearly all of whom will receive their back-pay when the shutdown ends. In the private sector, however, more than 1.5 million Americans are laid off or fired every month and most of them do not get to return to their jobs.
Simply, nearly twice as many private sector workers lose their jobs every month compared to the federal workers who are temporarily inconvenienced for a few weeks during the shutdown.
Of course, virtually none of those who were fired or laid off were being used as pawns in a political argument, but Chapman isn't going to mention that inconvenient fact.
Chapman then attacks the furloughed workers -- who, again, are not being allowed to work and earn a paycheck through no fault of their own -- as lazy people who are "essentially on vacation" (with a bonus potshot at Sen. Chuck Schumer for defending federal workers):
To put it in perspective, over the last 12 months, more than 18,000,000 Americans lost their jobs; in the shutdown, 800,000 federal workers either worked without pay temporarily or they stayed home, and they will get paid when the shutdown ends.
Yet the liberals, big government hangers-on, and the leftist media complain because a National Forest worker is essentially on vacation. They rarely ever complain about private sector layoffs. They claim that it's part of the nature of capitalism. But when government employees have to stay home, the sky is falling, according to liberals.
Sen. Schumer (D-N.Y.) saidtoday that "food safety inspectors ... are working without pay ... American farmers can't get loans from the USDA" and "our National Parks are suffering."
Welcome to tightening your belt, Sen. Schumer, regular Americans do it every single day.
(Schumer, incidentally, has worked in government on the taxpayers' dime since he was 25 years old -- 43 years now.)
To drive home the whole "vacation" thing, Chapman includes a stock photo of a beach, despite offering no evidence that any furloughed government worker is vacationing at a beach this very moment.
Chapman sure is judgmental about how others make their money for a guy sponging off wingnut welfare -- that is, other people's money.
WND Cranks Up The Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracies Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've noted WorldNetDaily's recent return to pushing anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories following a brief attempt at falsely blaming Muslims for hating vaccines. The conspiracy continues in an anonymously written Dec. 30 article that rehashes the old trope about vaccines causing autism:
A video in which two parents tearfully tell the story of their tragedy – triplets all becoming autistic within hours of getting a vaccination at the age of nine months – is getting a second life.
And it’s at least partly due to the continuing controversy over the alleged link between vaccinations of infants and autism – an issue put in the news just days ago by a newly elected congressman.
It was Tennessee U.S. Rep.-elect Mark Green who explained at a town-hall event that he thinks vaccines may cause autism.
That would be contrary to what the federal Centers for Disease Control have claimed.
Green, a medical doctor, questioned data from the CDC and other institutions that purport to disprove the vaccine link.
“Let me say this about autism,” Green said. “I have committed to people in my community, up in Montgomery County, to stand on the CDC’s desk and get the real data on vaccines. Because there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines.
“As a physician, I can make that argument and I can look at it academically and make the argument against the CDC, if they really want to engage me on it,” Green said.
Jane Orient, M.D., former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, says the real problems are a lack of adequate research and the medical industry’s apparent effort to conceal any link between vaccines and autism.
“We just really don’t know [the causes] and we’re not doing the research” that is needed, she told WND.
The video of the triplets allegedly becoming autistic is hosted on a video platform called Brighteon; it has an Infowars channel, which tells you all you need to know about the kind of content that exists there. WND couldn't be bothered to find any independent verification of the claims -- then again, we could find none ourselves.
Meanwhile, supposed medical doctor Orient, as befits her longtime association with the anti-vaxxer AAPS, is being irresponsible and borderline fraudulent by claiming no research is being done on the alleged link. Plenty of research has been done to disprove the link, and the one piece of research claiming such a link has been refuted and retracted.
Rather than offering any actual scientific proof, WND lets Orient rant about "thousands of case studies" and "the medical industry's shot agenda." Giving space to such factually deficient rants without the same space devoted to debunking it belies WND's claim to be "credible" (as does much of WND's existence, but that's beside the point).
MRC Mocks Coverage of 'World's Most Racist Haircut' Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Reserach Center's Bill D'Agostino devoted a Dec. 27 post to bashing "liberal media outlets" for reporting on a incident in which a (black) New Jersey high school wrestler getting a ringside haircut of his dreadlocks on orders of a (white) referee. He sneers that this was "the world's most racist haircut," then tries to pretend there's no issue here:
There’s just one problem: such occurrences are fairly commonplace in high school wrestling.
Wrestling is a heavily regulated sport, and participants are subject to very specific standards of decorum and dress. Before matches, the athletes are checked for skin lesions and have their hair and nails inspected to ensure that they are the proper length – that is, very short.
The NFHS (National Federation of State High School Associations) 2019 rules interpretation booklet says the following about “non-abrasive” braided hair: “If the hair in its natural state is longer than allowed by rule, then it must be contained in a legal hair cover. (4-2-1)”
For unknown reasons, the referee determined that the young wrestler's hair covering was not legal. Liberal reporters then concluded with alarming certainty that that determination was not only unjust, but also motivated by grotesque racial bias.
[...]
Yet for all the outrage it caused, the video of the incident itself is remarkably tame. A coach talks excitedly as the teenager has his hair trimmed by an athletic trainer, and another wrestler walks by to give his teammate an encouraging pre-match high five. Notably absent from the video is any hint of outrage or discomfort on the faces of those observing the scene.
Not only does D'Agostino provide evidence that ringside haircuts are "fairly commonplace," he also omits a couple of inconvenient facts in recounting his version of the story. Notably, the lawyer for the boy's family stated that the boy had wrestled the week before without any incident. Referees are also expected to report any possible rules violations before thte start of the meet, but the referee arrived late and missed the weigh-in period when such things would be addressed.
Instead, D'Agostino mockingly noted that one reporter "shrewdly observed that the teenager had been given no such trouble for his hair during matches earlier in the season. That's certainly a strike against the referee in question – unless, of course, the student’s hair had grown since then, as hair sometimes does."
D'Agostino did concede that "the same referee previously was accused of using a racial slur at a social gathering [in] 2016," so that's something.
Fake News: WND Pushes False Claim Obama Favored Muslim Candidate in Nigeria Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymously written Dec. 29 WorldNetDaily article states:
The former president of Nigeria, a Christian, is charging in his new book that President Obama was involved in “facilitating” the persecution of Christians by prodding voters there to adopt a Muslim-led government.
The Muslim, Muhammadu Buhari, was, in fact, elected, and he is being blamed for allowing “the persecution of Christians,” reports Breaking Israel News.
Goodluck Jonathan was Nigeria’s president from 2010-2015, and writes in his new book, “My Transition Hours,” that, “On March 23, 2015, President Obama himself took the unusual step of releasing a video message directly to Nigerians all but telling them how to vote … In that video, Obama urged Nigerians to open the ‘next chapter’ by their votes. Those who understood subliminal language deciphered that he was prodding the electorate to vote for the [Muslim-led] opposition to form a new government.”
Since WND can't be bothered to tell the other side of the story, its readers won't know that Jonathan's claim is false.
Obama's video did not advocate for one candidate over another; he asked "all leaders and candidates to make it clear to their supporters that violence has no place" in the election process, and he urged "all Nigerians from all religions, all ethnic groups and all regions to come together and keep Nigeria one."
Further, Russell Brooks, an officer at the U.S. Consulate in Nigeria, pointed out that Jonathan mischaracterized what the Obama administration for Nigeria, that the 2015 elections were, in fact, free and fair, and that the U.S. supports the democratic process, not a particular candidate.
WND, in its current decimated state, made the mistake of relying the right-wing Breaking Israel News for its claim, specifically a highly biased article by anti-Muslim Raymond Ibrahim ranting about a "genocide" of Christians in Nigeria and that Buhari is "facilitating jihad." While one Christian group declined to endorse Buhari for re-election later this year, another Christian group has endorsed him.
WND also uncritically repeated Ibrahim's claim that nomadic Fulani Muslims are killing Christian farmers in the country in the name of jihad; in fact, the Fulani themselvesinsist the conflict is about cattle, and one imam helped to save the lives of Christians in the conflict.
WND still hasn't learned that publishing bogus claims doesn't help fix its credibility issues.
It's pro-Trump rah-rah time again with December's employment numbers at CNSNews.com. Susan Jones gushed in her lead story:
Amid concerns about trade with China and rollercoaster stock markets, the final employment report of 2018 counts as good news.
The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday the economy added an impressivve 312,000 jobs in December, which was a month of strong retail sales; and the nation's unemployment rate increased two-tenths of a point to 3.9 percent, which is still an 18-year low.
The number of employed Americans has now set a 14th record under Trump:
When Trump became president in January 2017, 152,076,000 Americans were employed. Last month, that number grew to a record 156,945,000, a gain of 4,869,000 in two years.
By contrast, when writing about December 2016 employment numbers under President Obama, Jones obsessed over the labor force participation rate, waiting until the seventh paragraph to report that the number of employed Americans had reached a new high.
CNS editor in chief Terry jeffrey not only served up his usual sidebar about manufacturing jobs under Trump, he wrote a second one proclaiming that "The U.S. economy added 284,000 manufacturing jobs in 2018, according to the employment report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the largest increase in manufacturing jobs in the United States in 21 years."
We also got a sidebar from Craig Bannister touting how "The national seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. labor force hit itslowest level on record in December of 2018." CNS' Media Research Center quickly exploited that in an anonymously written MRC Latino piece complaining that Spanish-language networks weren't reporting this.
Additionally, CNS published a column by Mickey Levy gushing over the "exceptional" employment numbers and how "labor market performance surpassed expectations in 2018."
WND Columnist Hopes Shutdown Will Stall Democratic Investigations of Trump Topic: WorldNetDaily
Right-wing lawyer Andy Schlafly is indifferent to the lives of hundreds of thousands of federal workers whose lives have been disrupted by the government shutdown. Indeed, Schlafly uses his Jan. 1 column to cheer on the shutdown for a selfish, partisan reason: it might keep Democrats from investigating the Trump administration. No, really:
The shutdown disarms the Democrats of their most powerful weapon against Trump: investigations by the House of Representatives, soon to be controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With committee majorities starting in 2019, Democrats could serve subpoenas on anyone they choose, from Trump’s children to his biggest supporters.
Pelosi is lawyering-up with attorneys who want to impeach the president. Fourteen of the nation’s most aggressive and partisan lawyers are already working for Robert Mueller, but there is no shortage of liberal hacks anxious to take on the assignment of trying to bring down a conservative president.
The House Democrats plan to launch many investigations and hold numerous committee hearings against conservatives other than Trump. If someone turns on the lights, heats the buildings, pays the congressional staff and serves the subpoenas, that is.
The shutdown postpones some of these bad things from happening. Liberals are not interested in working for free in a cold building, and investigations go nowhere if subpoenas cannot be enforced.
As Trump enjoys a rock-solid base of support, he is probably asking himself why he would want to fund Pelosi and the House Democrats to harass him, his family and his supporters. The spectacle of Pelosi not having funds to accomplish her political mischief should be appealing to the president and all conservatives.
There has already been enough wasteful distraction caused by the funding of Robert Mueller and his search for non-existent crimes. The shutdown prevents a multiplication of that in the House.
Only for a partisan like Schlafly would holding the Trump administration accountable be a "bad thing."
Double Standard: MRC Whines Trump Being Called A 'Draft Dodger,' But Had No Problem Calling Clinton One Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Gabriel Hays complains in a Dec. 27 post:
Hateful and petty celebs claimed that Trump was “shamed into visiting the troops,” that somehow Trump’s appearance in Iraq displayed his “cowardice, lies, and stupidity;” and that either way, he’s still a “crook” and a “draft dodger.” And yet we are expected to believe that Hollywood embodies some sort of class?
Actor/Director Rob Reiner put out another predictable Twitter post about how Trump was just “shamed” into doing the visit. Reiner tweeted, “He lies about the bone spurs. Trashes war heroes and gold star parents. Refuses to honor the fallen because it’s raining. Is shamed into visiting the troops. Then lies to them about getting a raise & reveals location of Navy Seals. The Cowardice, Lies, Stupidity are epic.”
[...]
Cher also got in on the action with a barely intelligible tweet. It had to do with some “correlation” between Trump’s visit and the behavior “stock market” or something. Either way, Cher blasted Donald as a “psychotic liar, crook, draft dodger.” Well, the Trump hate was loud and clear.
So if you're "hateful and petty" for pointing out that Trump was a draft dodger -- Hays conveniently leaves out the important context of a news report the day before claiming that a doctor diagnosed Trump with bone spurs as a favor to the Trump family in order to keep him out of the draft during the Vietnam War -- what does that make Hays' employer, which has made hay (pun intended) out of sliming Bill Clinton as a "draft dodger"?
For instance, a July 2015 NewsBusters post by Jack Coleman carried the headline "Maddow Cites Bill Clinton's 'Student Deferments' (Translation: Draft Dodging) as '92 Campaign Issue," in which he complained that "Clinton's student deferments were not an issue that nearly derailed his first presidential campaign -- it was his evasion of the draft." And on Dec. 13, the MRC published a column by R. Emmett Tyrell declaring Clinton to be "a proven draft dodger." And MRC chief Brent Bozell has previously ranted about "Clinton's draft-dodging past."
Hays never disputes the "draft dodger" charge against Trump, by the way -- he only complains that it was voiced. That seems to show he's just as hateful and petty as the celebs he's projecting upon.
Newsmax Touts Kudlow's Economic Predictions, Censors How His Old Ones Failed Topic: Newsmax
David Patten enthusiastically writes in a Jan. 4 Newsmax article:
Larry Kudlow, director of President Trump’s National Economic Council, told Newsmax in an exclusive interview Friday that the economy’s addition of a whopping 312,000 jobs last month means “we’re in a boom” and there is no recession on the horizon.
“There’s way too much pessimism out there, probably because of the stock market correction,” Kudlow told Newsmax. “But sometimes stocks depart from the economy.”
He added: “We’re hitting on all cylinders. The Trump plan is working: Low tax rates for large and small businesses and individuals, the biggest regulatory rollback in decades, and sponsorship of American energy dominance.
“This is working. It has led to great confidence, particularly among small business owners.”
Patten, however, doesn't detail Kudlow's record on predicting non-recessions -- or anything, really:
“Despite all the doom and gloom from the economic pessimistas, the resilient U.S. economy continues moving ahead,” Kudlow wrote on Dec. 7, 2007, in National Review, predicting that gloomy forecasters would “wind up with egg on their faces.” Kudlow, who previously derided as “bubbleheads” those who warned about a housing bubble, now wrote that “very positive” news in housing should “cushion” falling home sales and prices.
“There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen,” wrote Kudlow. “ . . . The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.”
[...]
When the economy didn’t rebound and housing continued its collapse, Kudlow pronounced, in a CNBC column on July 24, 2008, that he saw in the data “an awful lot of very good new news, which appear to be pointing to a bottom in the housing problem; in fact, maybe the tiniest beginnings of a recovery.” Stocks lost nearly half their value in the coming months.
Patten seems to have let his "exclusive interview" excitement overrule the idea of reporting the full story.
CNSNews.com reporter Melanie Arter is a loyal stenographer to the Trump White House, dutifully transcribing without bothering with extraneous things like fact-checking. She was at it again in a Dec. 18 article, in which she uncritically relayed White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claiming that "the FBI 'broke standard protocol in the way that they came in an ambushed' former national security adviser Michael Flynn despite Flynn telling a federal judge Tuesday he knew it was illegal to lie to the FBI."
Later in the article, Arter embraced Sander's rhetoric in referencing "the day that the FBI ambushed Flynn."
In fact, as actual news organizations have pointed out, Flynn's own lawyers have stated that Flyn was not entrapped or "ambushed" in the FBI interview.
Regarding Sanders' claim that the FBI "broke standard protocol" in interviewing Flynn they way it did by contacting him directly instead of going through hthe White House counsel' office, which happened "because James Comey told us that" -- Arter let that bogus claim stand without correction as well. As another actual news organization reported, Comey never said it was a break in protocol or even required to go through the White House first, and that if any failure to use proper channels occured, it was by the White House, not the FBI.
Arter also uncritically repeated Sanders' assertion that "the FBI broke standard protocol in the way that they came in and ambushed General Flynn, and in the way that they questioned him, and in the way that they encouraged him not to have White House Counsel's Office present" -- neither of which Comey ever claimed happened.
Uncritically repeating demonstrable falsehoods doesn't enhance CNS' credibility as a news organization.
WND's Farah Freaks Out On A Fact-Checker Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has long had a thinskin when it comes to criticism of himself or WND. (That's why he pretends we don't exist.) Farah extends that thinskinned petulance to a person who's merely trying to fact-check him in his Dec. 21 column.
Farah rants: "Some new self-appointed media gatekeeper arises from the know-it-all fever swamp of snowflake self-righteousness to judge my life’s work unworthy." Here, he'stargeting his rage at Kendrick McDonald of NewsGuard, a new organization that aims to provide a clearinghouse on the reliability on news operations. Farah played his usual manhood-measuring card, whinign that McDonald's "career as a professional factchecker has spanned two years," adding that "Before he was born, I was running daily newspapers in major metro markets, teaching journalism at UCLA and winning awards for reporting and editing in urban areas in 'progressive' California."
Farah then reproduced the questions that McDonald asked him. It's cldear that McDonald is simply asking basic questions about WND, like whether it has a corrections policy (the answer to that is no, unless the person or organization who was wronged threatens to sue -- hello, Chobani).
McDonald also asked Farah questions about specific stories WND has covered. It appears McDonald has been reading ConWebWatch, for he asked about the conspiracy theories it has promoted about Barack Obama's birth certificate, Seth Rich and Steve Stockman. He also notes Erik Rush's unhinged column positing that right-wing MAGAbomber Cesar Sayoc was some kind of secret "leftist operative." McDonald also included something we haven't written about:
In your Nov. 12 column, “Where did all these voters come from?” you state as fact that Democrats voted illegally in the 2018 midterm elections, which is the cause of high voter turnout statistics. You cite as evidence a video from Project Veritas. However, the Travis County Deputy Clerk has stated that there has been no evidence of illegal voting at that polling station or any others in Travis County. No other authorities have reported any evidence of voter fraud in the 2018 midterm election.
Before the list, Farah said that "I’d like you to consider what you see daily at MSNBC, the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast – not to mention the wall-to-wall conspiracy theorizing at CNN." After it, he made it extremely clear that anyone who questions WND's shaky editorial choices is beneath him:
all the reasons I don’t believe Obama’s phony birth certificate; and
how many dead people the Clintons stumbled over.
Let’s just say “too many.”
As we have seenrecently, Farah is aggressively refusing to learn the lessons of the past year and failing to see his own flaws even as he lashes out against the same flaws in others.He has made it clear that he blames everyone else but himself for WND's current life on the edge of extinction, even though his embrace of the above cbogus onspiracy theories are a key reason why nobody believes WND.
Self-reflection is clearly not something Farah is interested in -- he's so hostile to the idea that anyone who tries to get him to do it is a "fool" and a "partisan hack." (Farah, by the way, offered no evidence that McDonald and NewsGuard are "partisan hacks" beyond their asking him questions.) He doesn't seem to understand that asking for conspiracy theories to be justified with solid evidence is not the line of reasoning from a "partisan hack" -- it's what journalists do.
Farah has apparently become so ossified in his conspiracy theories that he will brook no dissent from them. That means he has stopped being a journalist -- and, thus, there's even less of a reason to believe what WND reports.
The anti-LGBT freakouts at the Media Research Center keep on piling up.
First, when you watch the video, it’s immediately clear that the customer is a man who identifies as a woman. He is “sir” by birth, even if he now identifies as female.
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman does his best to ramp up the dread in a Jan. 2 
The headline on the anonymously written Jan. 3 WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham was in fine whining mood in a Dec. 23 
CNSNews.com has closely following President Trump's rhetoric in 
We've 
The Media Reserach Center's Bill D'Agostino devoted a Dec. 27 
An anonymously written Dec. 29 WorldNetDaily 
It's pro-Trump rah-rah time again with December's employment numbers at CNSNews.com. Susan Jones gushed in her 
Right-wing lawyer Andy Schlafly is indifferent to the lives of hundreds of thousands of federal workers whose lives have been disrupted by the government shutdown. Indeed, Schlafly uses his Jan. 1 
The Media Research Center's Gabriel Hays complains in a Dec. 27 
David Patten enthusiastically writes in a Jan. 4 Newsmax 
CNSNews.com reporter Melanie Arter is a 
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has long had a 
