How CNS Media Bias Works, Congressional Hearing Edition
Topic: CNSNews.com

As we've noted, one way CNSNews.com displays its right-wing bias is by ignoring questions at congressional hearings posed by Democrats while heaping coverage upon those made by Republican members of Congress. There is an exception, though: CNS will report questioning by Democrats when it can be used to advance its political agenda and/or to make them look ridiculous.

Susan Jones takes this approach in a March 7 article, in which she complains about questioning of Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan:

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) expressed more concern about the welfare of illegal alien children in U.S. custody than she did about the welfare of those same children on the perilous journey north, when they are subject to all kinds of injury and sexual abuse.

Harris was particularly concerned about allegations of sexual abuse in U.S. detention facilities; and about the removal of toys from children in Customs and Border Protection custody.

Jones then dismissed Harris' concern over "reports that immigrant children may have been sexually abused while in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement," suggesting that McAleenan shouldn't have been questioned about it because that "falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services," which operates the Office of Refugee Resettlement. She went on to huff: "Even though HHS/ORR personnel are separate from CBP, Sen. Harris made it look like McAleenan bears some responsibility for turning children over to alleged American abusers."

Jones concluded her article by circling back to her opening paragraph and touting the softball questions by Republican Rep. Joni Ernst, who merely "asked McAleenan what he's seeing at the border" and gave him time to pontificate about the alleged sexual abuse happening on the way to the border.

Jones, by the way, did not admit that the U.S. has no jurisdiction over any alleged criminal acts that happened to refugees before they arrived at the border, thus making it superfluous for Harris to demand accountability from any U.S. official over it.

 

CNS Keeps Cheering Increased Numbers Of Christian Refugees, Fewer Muslims
Topic: CNSNews.com

We've previously noted how CNSNews.com, particularly reporter Patrick Goodenough, fretted over large numbers of Muslim refugees being admitted to the U.S. under President Obama, compared with Christian refugees, only to be much happier when those numbers flipped under President Trump. That happiness continues in a March 4 article by Goodenough:

Five months into the fiscal year, the Trump administration has admitted a total of 9,305 refugees into the United States, an admission rate well below the average needed to meet the 30,000 ceiling for FY 2019 which it set last fall.

According to State Department Refugee Processing Center data, monthly admissions since the start of the current fiscal year were 1,834 in October, 2,150 in November, 1,722 in December, 1,455 in January and 2,144 in February – in each case below the 2,500 monthly average that would add up to the 30,000 ceiling.

[...]

Of the 9,305 refugees resettled in the first five months of FY 2019, 7,684 (82.5 percent) self-identified as Christians, and 1,306 (14 percent) as Muslims. One year earlier, 62.9 percent of the new arrivals over that five-month period were Christians, and 15.7 percent were Muslims.

By contrast, during the equivalent periods in FY 2016 and FY 2017, the proportions were more balanced: Muslims comprised 42.9 and 47.3 percent respectively, and Christians comprised 46.3 and 43.4 percent respectively.

Even though the religious breakdown of the refugees wasn't address until the fifth paragraph, CNS made it the headline claim.

Goodenough can be a good reporter when he wants to be, and he does admit that the number of refugees admitted so far aren't on track to be even close to the Trump's administration's lowered ceiling of 30,000. But he's still huffing about larger numbers of Muslims than Christians from Syria getting refugee status under Obama, even though "Christians, Yazidis, and other non-Muslims were deliberately targeted by ISIS jihadists in what the Obama administration determined in 2016 amounted to a policy of genocide." But as we've also noted, Goodenough still can't quite admit that Muslims were being persecuted during the Syrian civil war as well; while "74 percent of the Syrian population was Sunni Muslim" at the start of the civil war, as Goodenough states, the Assad regime that rules Syria is Alawite and has targeted Sunni civilians.

Instead, Goodenough is content to suggest sinister motives in Obama's admitting more Muslim refugees. That's not honest reporting.

CNS Hops Aboard the Divine-Donald Train
Topic: CNSNews.com

Yet another example of the creeping WorldNetDaily-ization of CNSNews.com -- on top of its recent embrace of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories -- is its similar embrace of the idea that God ordained Donald Trump to be president. That has been a WND staple over the past couple years, most recently with editor Joseph Farah pushing the idea by declaring, "If God had wanted Trump elected, there is no doubt in my mind that it would be so."

CNS first dipped a toe in the divine-Donald pool a few months back by highlighting how a gathering of Christians in the White House turned into an "improptu worship session." In an anonymously written Jan. 31 article, CNS touted how "White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on the Christian Broadcasting Network on Wednesday that God wanted Donald Trump to become president." Later that day, CNS devoted an article to huffing that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar responded to Sanders' statement by tweeting, "God has a strange sense of humor!"

Then, a March 4 article by Craig Bannister gushed over the CPAC speech by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell:

God answered our prayers, our millions of prayers, and gave us grace and a miracle happened on November 8, 2016. We were given a second chance and time granted to get our country back on track with our conservative values and getting people saved in Jesus’ name.

“As I stand before you today, I see the greatest president in history. Of course he is, he was chosen by God.

[...]

I see myself in divine appointments, and one was especially important. Donald Trump invited me to meet him at Trump Tower in New York City. I walked into his office with high hopes on August 15 2016.

“I walked out of that office after meeting with him and I knew God had chosen him for such a time as this.

As with the WND writers who have pushed this idea, nobody at CNS appears to be entertaining the possibility that even if one accepts the idea that Trump's election was ordained by God, he was sent as a warning and not as a deliverance.

CNS Serves As Candace Owens' Stenographer, Censors Her Controversies
Topic: CNSNews.com

During the right-wing CPAC convention earlier this month, CNS went into stenography mode on several speakers -- for instance, devoting three entire articles to Vice President Mike Pence's speech alone. And Melanie Arter was locked into total stenography for a lengthy March 5 article:

Candace Owens, director of communications at Turning Point USA and founder of the Blexit movement encouraging blacks to exit the Democratic Party, said Friday that she doesn’t want a Green New Deal, she wants a Black New Deal.

“I say I don’t want a Green new Deal. I want a black new deal. And the good news, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that that actually can be free. It doesn’t cost $93 trillion,” Owens said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Nowhere in her lengthy article did Arter mention a little controversy from just a month earlier in which Owens responded to a question about pushing nationalism in the U.S. when it didn't end so well in Nazi Germany by responding: "If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine. The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German." After getting backlash for her failure to understand Nazi Germany, Owens blamed "leftist journalists" for unearthing the remarks and conceded that, yes, Hitler was bad.

Arter went on to uncritically repeat a dubious talking point from Owens:

She said she questioned how the left loved Donald Trump before he announced his candidacy for president and then hated him 24 hours later.

“I questioned at the time, is it really possible that a man that was loved by the media, Donald J. Trump – they loved him – loved by black America – every hip hop song that I listened to growing up, they wanted to be like Trump. Beyonce and Jay Z were sipping poolside at Mar-a-Lago. He was the dream. Obama said that the American dream was to be like Trump,” Owens said.

“Was it really possible that within 24 hours of declaring his candidacy for the White House, he became a racist, bigoted, homophobic, sexist rapist at one point, right? Was that really possible, and I said of course, no that’s it’s possible. There’s absolutely no way that’s possible,” she said.

As we've noted, there was plenty of evidence of Trump behaving in a racist manner long before he was president.

Arter also uncritically repeated Owen's claim that she "questioned how the Democratic Party, which 'instituted slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial terrorism in the KKK,' had the black vote,"which ignores that the answer is not that difficult to find -- driven in large part by Democratic support for civil rights laws in the 1960s and Republican opposition to same -- had Owens and Arter bothered to look.

And as for Arter definitively describing Owens as "founder of the Blexit movement," that's not exactly true either. The actual founder claims that Owens co-opted her movement and has threatened to sue Owens over it.

CNS Dips A Toe In The Anti-Vaxxer Pool
Topic: CNSNews.com

We've documented how CNSNews.com has been drifting toward WorldNetDaily territory, in both editorial bias and embrace of conspiracy theories. CNS is now trying on another WND conspiracy theory: anti-vaccine activism.

CNS published a March 6 column by right-winger Michelle Malkin in which she ranted about how "Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley have locked their sights on the next targets of a frightening free speech-squelching purge: independent citizens who dare to raise questions online about the safety and efficacy of vaccines," blaming "pharmaceutical big business" for being behind "politicians and government bureaucrats [who] are now hell-bent on deplatforming any and all dissenters who challenge mandatory vaccine regimens."

Malkin, though, doesn't quite have the conviction of her beliefs, conceding: "I'm vaccinated. My children are up to date. There's no dispute that vaccines have saved untold lives" -- which sort of undercuts the whole point of ranting against vaccines. She also admits there's "junk science on the 'anti-vaccine' side," but also complains that the film "Vaxxed" -- made by the defrocked doctor who pushed the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism -- was pulled from some streaming outlets.

Malkin then tries to play gotcha:

As for efficacy, consider this new data: A recent whooping cough outbreak at the private Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles last week resulted in 30 students contracting the illness, all of whom were vaccinated. Of 18 unvaccinated students, none caught the disease. Will pointing this out on my Facebook and Twitter accounts bring down the Silicon Valley ban hammer?

Malkin is pretending not to know that it's common knowledge that the whooping cough vaccine, part of the Tdap vaccine series, loses efficacy over time and requires a booster shot at age 11 or 12. The fact that none of the unvaccinated students didn't get whooping cough can likely be chalked up to coincidence rather than any magical non-vaccination power.

The next day, managing editor Michael W. Chapman gave Republican Rep. Rand Paul a platform to rant against mandating vaccinations without presenting an opposing view. But Chapman also let Paul undercut his own argument: "I'm not here to say don't vaccinate your kids. ... I vaccinated myself. I vaccinated my kids."

Chapman also let Paul huff that ""Despite the government admitting to and paying $4 billion for vaccine injuries, no informed consent is used or required when you vaccinate your child. This may be the only medical procedure in today's medical world where an informed consent is not required." Chapman didn't report the actual numbers of people involved: According to the federal government, that $4 billion involves just 6,430 cases judged to meet standards for compensation, out of the millions upon millions of people who have been vaccinated during that time. The government adds:

According to the CDC, from 2006 to 2017 over 3.4 billion doses of covered vaccines were distributed in the U.S. For petitions filed in this time period, 6,197 petitions were adjudicated by the Court, and of those 4,250 were compensated. This means for every 1 million doses of vaccine that were distributed, 1 individual was compensated.

Sounds like vaccines are quite safe. But Chapman couldn't be bothered to tell the full story.

CNS Unemployment Coverage Distortion Watch
Topic: CNSNews.com

When President Obama was in office, CNSNews.com's editorial mission was to spin employment numbers by focusing on irrelevant metrics like labor force participation rate while downplaying how millions of jobs were created, with the goal of making Obama look as bad as possible. Under President Trump, it's the opposite: CNS gushes over Trump no matter how dubious the employment news.

So it is with February's employment numbers. Only 20,000 jobs were created, which is a dismal number. Susan Jones' main story did acknowledge that in her opening paragraph, then spins it away:

The economy added a meager 20,000 jobs in February, well below the 180,000 that analysts were expecting, and among the lowest job-creation numbers of the Trump administration.

But the number of employed Americans grew by 255,000 in February to a record 156,949,000, the 18th record-breaker of the Trump era.

The unemployment rate dropped to 3.8 percent from last month's 4.0 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday.

And the labor force participation rate stayed at last month's 63.2 percent, also a Trump-era high.

Needless to say, CNS didn't put that bad job-creation number in the headline, though it would have unquestionably done so if the president was a Democrat. Instead, the headline blared: "156,949,000: Number of Employed Americans Sets 18th Record of Trump Era."

CNS also served up its full complement of sidebars: Terry Jeffrey touting higher manufacturing jobs (though only a mere 4,000 were created) and lower government jobs (though tere was no drop at the federal level), and Craig Bannister highlighting lower Hispanic unemployment (since Hispanics are more politically exploitable for conservatives than blacks).

CNS Tries to Link Defrocked Cardinal To Democrats, Censors His Link To GOP
Topic: CNSNews.com

Religion is politics at CNSNews.com -- and it proved that yet again by trying to tie a Catholic cardinal defrocked over sexual abuse of children to Democratic politicians.

An anonymously written Feb. 25 article worked hard to do just that:

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked by the Catholic Church on Jan. 11 for abusing minors and the Sacrament of Confession, presided over the Aug. 29, 2009 burial service for Sen. Ted Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.

The burial, which took place at sunset, was televised and preserved on video by CSPAN. McCarrick, at the time, was the retired archbishop of Washington, D.C.

The video shows Vice President Joe Biden chatting amiably with McCarrick before the burial.

The anonymous writer also made sure to rehash an old Kennedy scandal: "On the night of July 18, 1969, after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island along with 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne (who had been a staffer on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign), Kennedy drove off a bridge into a channel of water. Kopechne drowned."

(But we thought the MRC hated when the media brought up unfortunate stories about dead people's pasts.)

The next day, CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey tried to hang McCarrick around the neck of another Democratic politician:

On Jan. 6, 2009, the day that Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) was re-elected to serve as speaker of the House for the 111th Congress, then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick said the opening prayer for the House of Representatives and Pelosi said he had honored the House by doing so.

She then called all the children in the chamber that day to join her at the podium as she took the oath of office and said: “I want to thank the children for joining me at the podium so that, as we called the House to order earlier today, it will be clear that the House will be called to order for all of America’s children."

At the opening of that day’s session, McCarrick, who was then the archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., was introduced at the podium at the front of the chamber to say the traditional prayer. This was the first meeting of the 111th Congress, which had been elected in November 2008, with majorities in both chambers going to the Democrats. In that same election, Barack Obama was elected president.

But CNS doesn't want to tell you that McCarrick was very much a bipartisan cardinal. The Washington Post reported that McCarrick curried favor on both sides of the political aisle -- reading at a memorial service for Ronald Reagan and earning praise from President George W. Bush -- and that he "basked in the glow of being a crossover figure who presented himself as the righteous person whom politicians sought when they faced their own theological questions of right and wrong." The Post also points out -- where CNS failed to -- that nobody knew about McCarrick's proclivities.

But then, nobody reads CNS for fairness and balance in reporting.

CNS' Highly Biased Coverage of Cohen Testimony
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com's coverage of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's testimony before Congress was like a lot of  its political coverage: highly biased.

CNS kicked things off with an article by Susan Jones touting Trump tweets trashing Cohen. It's not until the ninth paragraph that Jones gets around to noting that Cohen said in his written testimony that "Trump is a racist, a conman, and a cheat." That was joined by an anonymously written preview article taken from Cohen's advance written testimony that focused on he "says that he has lied but he is not a liar" -- and completely omitted Cohen's scathing criticism of Trump in that very same testimony. (A separate anonymous article addressed that; no reason was provided as to why they could not appear in the same article.) And it wasn't until Cohen's testimony before Congress actually started -- a full four hours after her first article posted -- that Jones got around to more fully summarizing Cohen's criticism of Trump in his written testimony, and it's framed as it usually is by Jones declaring that Cohen offered no "direct evidence" of collusion. (Jones wrout another article the next day highlighting Trump's tweeting that Cohen lied about everything except the "no collusion" part.)

CNS curiously cited no questioning of Cohen by Democratic representatives -- that would have been too fair and balanced -- but it did a full three stories on Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, among the CNS and the Media Rrsearch Center's favorite congressmen, haranguing Cohen:

• Melanie Arter transcribed Jordan's rant against Cohen, calling him a "fraudster, cheat, convicted felon, and in two months a federal inmate."
• Craig Bannister highlighted Jordan's complaint that "CNN obtained Cohen's statement and exhibits before the committee did."
• Dimitri Simes gushed over how Jordan "pressed the former lawyer to President Donald Trump over his filing of five fraudulent tax returns and his failure to pay $1.4 million in taxes."

Jones also featured Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx badgering Cohen about whether he intends to "profit from his crimes through movie and book deals."

None of these articles addressed any of the claims Cohen made about Trump. Again, that would have been too fair and balanced.

The one bit of non-Cohen-related fireworks at the hearing -- Republican Rep. Mark Meadows trotting out a black Trump administration official to somehow counter Cohen's claim that Trump is racist, and Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib's calling out Meadows on the tokenism of that gesture -- got subdued coverage that managed to be about Tlaib and not Meadows.

Arter touted Meadow's stunt, and his insistence that "Lynne Patton, who served as vice president of the Eric Trump Foundation," somehow countered Cohen's point that there are no black executives in the Trump Organization (which is the name of Trump's business operations). An article the next day by Patrick Goodenough attacked Tlaib for having "'liked' a tweet that essentially described Meadows as an example of 'white privilege and white fragility.'" Goodenough did eventually offer an unusually even-handed recount of the dispute. Later that day, Bannister huffed that new CNS target Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez honored Tlaib's "bravery" in criticizing Meadows "for daring to allow an African-American colleague testify that President Donald Trump is not a racist."

(Actually, the woman, Lynne Patton, did not testify; she simply stood next to Meadows.)

Bannister then gave Patton her own article, citing a Fox News appearance (of course) in which she went on a self-aggrandizing, Trump-fluffing rant that Tlaib was taking "the word of a self-confessed perjurer and criminally convicted white man over a black female who is highly educated, rose up through the ranks of one of the most competitive companies in real estate, spoke before 25 million people at the Republican National Convention, and now works in one of the most historic administrations in history."

Bannister didn't mention that Patton is so dedicated to emulating Trump that she's trying to get a spot on a reality TV show.

CNS' Donohue Still Gay-Bashing Over Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal
Topic: CNSNews.com

When right-wing, anti-gay Catholic Bill Donohue declares he's going to assess "gay priests' role" in the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal -- as he does in his Feb. 21 CNSNews.com column -- you can be assured that it will not be a fair and balanced assessment. Indeed, he asserts at the very start that "every effort to downplay the role of gays is being made."

Donohue does, surprisingly, offer the illusion that he's not being as anti-gay as he usually is, though said in an unusually passive voice for him:

Let it be said emphatically that it is morally wrong to blame all gay priests or to bully someone who is gay, be he a priest or a plumber. It is also wrong to call on all gay priests to resign: such a sweeping recommendation is patently unfair to those gay priests who have never violated anyone.

However, it is not helpful to the cause of eradicating the problem of sexual abuse in the priesthood to dismiss a conversation about the obvious. We can begin by talking honestly about who the victims are.

Then, for the first time that we've seen, Donohue acknowledges that the researchers in the John Jay report commissioned by Catholic bishopshave pointed out that at least some of the abuse committed by priests were crimes of opportunity not necessarily driven by sexual orientation -- then goes on to blame gays anyway:

The John Jay researchers try to protect homosexuals by saying that not all the men who had sex with adolescent males consider themselves to be homosexuals. But self-identification is not dispositive. If the gay priests thought they were giraffes, would the scholars conclude that the problem is bestiality?

It was the John Jay researchers who first floated the "opportunity" thesis that Cardinal Cupich picked up on. This idea is flawed. Predator priests hit on boys not because they were denied access to girls, but because they preferred males. More important, there is something patently unfair, as well as inaccurate, about this line of thinking.

It suggests that many priests are inclined to have sex with minors—and will choose the sex which offers them the greatest opportunity. There is no evidence to support this unjust indictment. Also, girl altar servers date back to 1983, after Canon law was changed. They became even more common in 1994 when Pope John Paul II ruled that girls can be altar servers.

If the "opportunity" thesis had any truth to it, we should have seen, over the past few decades, a spike in altar girls being sexually abused by priests, but this has not happened. Indeed, 80 percent of the victims are still male and postpubescent.

Donohue offers no evidence to substantiate his argument.

Donohue then rants about the "homosexual subculture in the Church," which ultimately tells us that, despite his semi-conciliatory wording earlier in his column, blaming gays for everything remains Job 1 for Donohue.

NEW ARTICLE: Financial Non-Accountability at CNS
Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey loved to attack President Obama and Democrats for rising federal deficits. Now that President Trump and Republicans are in charge, though, Jeffrey's much less interested in assigning blame. Read more >>

CNS Managing Editor Refuses to Fact-Check Trump
Topic: CNSNews.com

It seems that CNSNews.com's lonstanding refusal to fact-check the Trump administration comes straight from the top. Managing editor Michael W. Chapman uncritically writes in a Feb. 15 article:

During his Rose Garden talk today about declaring a national emergency to deal with the crisis at the southern border, President Donald Trump discussed the scourge of drug dealers and quoted Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping who had told him that China uses the death penalty against narcotics dealers and that ends the problem. 

Trump prefaced these remarks by noting that China had agreed to put the deadly drug fentanyl (synthetic opioid) on its list of illegal products. 

In his speech, Trump said, "Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called 'how about a fine?' And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? ‘No, no, no.’"

"I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem?" asked Trump.

"‘No, we don't have a drug problem,'" he quoted Xi as saying.  "I said why? ‘Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs, end of problem.’"

That's simply not true. China does, in fact, have a drug problem in both manufacture and use. Indeed, an actual news outlet found that the number of drug users in China is on the increase, and that the death penalty for dealers has not served as much of a deterrent, if it is at all (never mind the fact that punishing drug crimes with execution violates international law).

Asa a result of Chapman's refusal to fact-check Trump, CNS has published more misinformation. Apparently, he's proud to do so.

How Is CNS' Managing Editor Hating Gays Now?
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com's notoriously gay-hating managing editor, Michael W. Chapman, knows how to keep up his gay-hating game.

In a Feb. 12 post, Chapman whines that a Disney Channel show is shoving gayness down people's throats:

In a recent episode of Disney's popular Andi Mack show, which targets elementary and middle school kids, the homosexual character "Cyrus Goodman" finally comes out of the closet and states on-screen, "I'm gay." His friend "Jonah Beck" then replies, "Yeah? Okay, cool."

This is the first time that a Disney character has said the words, "I'm gay," according to the Washington Blade. The Disney program is designed, in part, to teach young children that homosexuality is normal and must be accepted.

On Feb. 18, Chapman complained that "Disney Paris will officially host for the first time a "Magical Pride" parade that caters to homosexuals," further huffing that Disney "was once a pro-family company" but now is "introducing more homosexual content into its movies and programs."

On Feb. 28, Chapman found a new corporate target for his anti-gay animus, grousing that "Multinational retail giant Walmart is now promoting homosexuality with a Facebook ad that follows two gay men -- 'Pat' and 'Andy' -- on a blind date shopping at a Walmart store. The video ad is entitled 'Love is in the Aisle: A Dating Show at Walmart.'" Chapman then called on his fellow gay-haters at the right-wing American Family Association to complain that the commercial "normalizes homosexual relationships," which are a "dangerous lifestyle," and that "There is no doubt in our mind that Sam Walton is turning over in his grave." Chapman also touted tht AFA's petition to demand that Walmart remove the ad.

CNS Backtracks on Calling Trump Out On The Economy, Deficit
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has not been shy about blaming Democrats in general and President Obama in particular for federal budget deficits. Republicans? Much more shy, though even he can't ignore reality, finally admitting that the federal debt has climbed under President Trump and a Republican Congress.

Jeffrey backtracked a bit in a Feb. 13 article in which he touted how The federal government collected a record $1,665,484,000,000 in individual income taxes in calendar year 2018," the first full year after Trump's tax cuts went into effect. But he waited until the fifth paragraph to admit that the deficit grew by $1.4 million (though it was mentioned in the headline) and the eighth paragraph to note that "Corporation income tax collections declined significantly from calendar year 2017 to calendar year 2018" by more than 32 percent, or $95 billion.

Jeffrey followed that up by lamenting in a Feb. 20 article that "The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the federal government will not only fail to balance its budget in any year over the next eleven years (fiscal 2019 through 2029), but that during those eleven years it will increase the federal debt held by the public by $13 trillion." Jeffrey did not mention Trump or the Republican Congress that helped to run up that projected deficit or set the baseline upon which the CBO's projection is based.

Jeffrey then served up a Feb. 28 lament that "The United States has gone a record 13 straight years without 3-percent growth in real Gross Domestic Product." This comes around six months after CNS was touting a big quarterly GDP increase under Trump (and despite the fact that CNS never touted even larger quarterly GDP increases under Obama). 

Jeffrey made no mention of Trump or Republicans in his article, though in 2017 he was quick to point out that "Obama remains the first president since the Great Depression not to see a single year with at least 3 percent growth in real GDP." Instead, Jeffrey includes a picture of congressional leaders at some social function.

In other words, Jeffrey is unable to say out loud that his hero Trump isn't doing any better on the economy than the hated Obama.That has to be a blow considering how much he and the rest of his CNS crew have puffed up Trump's economic record.

CNS Touts Anti-AOC Billboard, Doesn't Disclose It's Funded By Same Folks Who Fund CNS
Topic: CNSNews.com

Craig Bannister gleefully writes in a Feb. 20 CNSNews.com blog post:

On Wednesday, a billboard in New York’s Times Square criticizing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for having opposed Amazon’s plans, which Amazon has now cancelled, to open a headquarters in the city, began a one-week run.

The billboard highlights the cost to New York of Amazon’s decision not to open a headquarters there, Job Creators Network, the ad’s sponsor explains in its press release:

“Today, the Job Creators Network is putting up a billboard in Times Square calling out Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the role she played in the recent termination of Amazon’s HQ2 that was planned to be constructed in Queens. The pullout of Amazon—because of anti-business politicians, notably Ocasio-Cortez—is a major blow to the New York economy. The retreat will not only cost the area $12 billion in economic activity, but 25,000 new jobs that would have paid an average salary of $150,000.”

The billboard, located on 42nd Street near 8th Avenue, is headlined “AMAZON PULLOUT, Thanks For Nothing AOC” and ends with the hashtag, #SocialismTakesCapitalismCreates.

In a tweet, conservative commentator Laura Ingraham thanked Job Creators Network for the billboard and posted a picture of it.

But Bannister is curiously silent on a conflict of interest he should have disclosed.  As Ocasio-Cortez noted in a tweet responding to the billboard (and Mediaite further detailed), the Job Creators Network is funded by the Mercer family, which has their money all over right-wing politics.

And CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, is heavily funded by the Mercers as well -- as we documented, the Mercers are the single largest MRC donor, providing one-fourth of its annual budget, and a member of the family, Rebekah Mercer, sits on the MRC's board of directors.

An honest writer would have disclosed that. Bannister has not proven that he is one.

NEW ARTICLE: The Creeping WND-ization of CNS
Topic: CNSNews.com
The Media Research Center's "news" division has gone from echoing WorldNetDaily's editorial decisions (and columnists) to beating WND to the punch on conspiracy theories. Read more >>