Topic: NewsBusters
One recent NewsBusters sports blogger hid behind a "pen name," while the current one has no media presence outside the blog so that may be a fake-name writer too. Not that the content differs all that much. Read more >>
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
NEW ARTICLE -- NewsBusted: The Sports Blogger Files
Topic: NewsBusters One recent NewsBusters sports blogger hid behind a "pen name," while the current one has no media presence outside the blog so that may be a fake-name writer too. Not that the content differs all that much. Read more >>
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:26 PM EDT
WND Freaks Out Over Canadian Coin Marking Decriminalization of Homosexuality
Topic: WorldNetDaily As a reiminder that it still hates gay people, WorldNetDaily had a "homosexual agenda" freakout over a Canadian coin commemorating the 50th anniversary of homosexuality being decriminalized in the country:
Needless to say, WND didn't find anything to copy-and-paste into its article that expressed support for the coin -- apparently because it spent so much time hunting down the most hateful, gay-bashing take it could find. By contrast, WND had no problem with some right-wing Israelis issued a coin likening President Trump to the biblical leader Cyrus.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:57 AM EDT
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Naked Athlete-Hating NewsBusters Blogger Dances on ESPN Magazine's Grave
Topic: Media Research Center The past two years, mysterious NewsBusters sports blogger Jay Maxson had a meltdown over ESPN magazine's annual "Body Issue," featuring photos of naked athletes (with the naughty bits tastefully covered). So it's no surprise that when ESPN announced it would stop publishing the print edition of the magazine later this year -- but not before only final "Body Issue," Maxson was eager to dance on its grave with a special meltdown directed at, yes, those nekkid athletes:
By contrast, Maxson was never bothered by fleshiness of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue. Perhaps fearing the loss of something to write about with the ESPN magazine's imminent demise, Maxson redirected his ire at SI's swimsult models:
Maxson was put out that SI's models include a plus-size woman -- purportedly evidence that SI is "trying to divert readers' attention from the fact that the magazine is leaving sports to the wind, wallowing in PC and starving for relevance -- and an out lesbian.But Maxson was really freaked out by one particular model:
Actually, Raisman is saying that "being a survivor is nothing to be ashamed of, and going through a hard time does not define you," and that "women do not have to be modest to be respected. We are free to draw confidence and happiness in our own way, and it is never for someone else to choose for us or to even judge us for that matter." Clearly, Maxson is more than happy to judge and demand that Raisman live her life the way Maxson deems appropriate.
Posted by Terry K.
at 8:02 PM EDT
Updated: Sunday, June 2, 2019 3:22 PM EDT
Dishonest WND Portrays Women Who Threatened To Blow Up Church As 'NBC Producer'
Topic: WorldNetDaily The article trying to blame a journalist's sexual orientation for his suicide is not the only recent example of WorldNetDaily misleading about people involved in journalism. An April 24 WND article by Joe Kovacs carries the headline "Mom who threatened to blow up church was NBC producer." But Kovacs walks back that headline over the first three paragraphs of his article:
So Conkey wasn't an "NBC producer" after all -- she was some undetermined point an intern working in digital production for the NBC affiliate station in San Diego. Kovacs does make it clear further in the article that the woman was apparently having mental health issues -- which means her media work had nothing to do with the incident and that WND's hook of portraying her as a journalist who hated religion enough to threaten to blow up a church is doubly dishonest. No wonder WND is losing readers (and money).
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:49 PM EDT
CNS Misreports Warren's Tax Form Actions
Topic: CNSNews.com Craig Bannister writes in an April 29 CNSNews.com blog post:
In fact, Intuit's action does not mean it had "abandoned the practice Warren was condemning." As ProPublica also reported, the main TurboTax website -- where most people expect to go to use its tax software -- does not allow people to use the free version of the program and pushes uses into its paid tax-filing software. Intuit hiding the free version of TurboTax from Google is only one issue that was raised. Even the ProPublica article Bannister stated that Warren cited also states that Intuit "uses deceptive design and misleading advertising to trick lower-income Americans into paying to file their taxes, even though they are eligible to do it for free." Bannister then goes on to describe a bill Warren introduced that proves she's trying to do more than Intuit fixed, contrary to what he insinuated earlier in his article. Among other things, it would permit the IRS to offer a "free, online tax preparation and filing service," which is currently prohibited from doing because Intuit and H&R Block have heavily lobbied the government to keep it from happening. This is part of a recent pattern by CNS to attack and belittle Democratic politicians and presidential candidates.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:10 AM EDT
Monday, May 20, 2019
Trump-Fluffer Kessler Goes Into Full Apologist Mode
Topic: Newsmax Ronald Kessler is a Trumpophile from way back, and while he was a full-time writer for Newsmax, he promoted Trump's presidential ambitions as early as 2011. Kessler is still a Trump apologist, as he demonstrates in an April 23 column complaining that the FBI opened an investigation into Trump because he said in an interview that the "this Russia thing" was why he fired FBI Director James Comey. Commence apologist mode:
But as the Mueller report made clear, "the Russia thing" did clearly play a role in Trump firing Comey. Trump was angry that Comey would not publicly say that Trump was personally not under investigation, and Comey's alleged behavior during the FBI investigation, as stated in Ron Rosenstein's letter providing justification for the firing, was never the main factor. Kessler, like a good apologist, was still mad that Comey's firing did commence an FBI investigation into Trump, ranting that "Not since Hoover opened FBI investigations into anyone who criticized the government and blackmailed presidents and members of Congress has the FBI so outrageously abused its authority." (Photo: Ron Kessler and his wife, Pamela, with Trump, from Kessler's 1999 book "The Season," about the Palm Beach social scene.)
Posted by Terry K.
at 6:29 PM EDT
MRC Falsely Puts A Swear Word In A Commentator's Mouth
Topic: Media Research Center The Media Research Center's Brad Wilmouth was in full rage mode, and it seemed justified at first (by right-wing standards, anyway). Under the screaming headline "Heilemann Slams 'Big Fat Steaming Plate of Hannity,' 'Pig in ****'," Wilmouth huffed in a May 3 post:
Just one problem: Heilemann never said the swear word that Wilmouth portrays him as saying. As Wilmouth later writes in his piece, Heilemann actually said: "There's a phrase, people talk about a 'pig in,' you know. That's Sean right now -- he's happy as a pig in, you know." So Wilmouth is lying. There's a difference between implying a swear word and speaking around it -- which Heilemann did -- and actually saying the word, which Heilemann did not but Wilmouth portrays him as doing. Wilmouth's sloppiness goes even further. His first paragraph misquotes Heilemann by claiming he referred to a "steaming, hot pile of Hannity," when Heilemann actually said "a big, fat, steaming plate of Hannity." Doesn't anybody edit anything at the MRC these days? (Ask Tom Blumer.) As of this writing, the MRC has not acknowledge Wilmouth's falsehood or issued a correction. Its failure to do so hurts whatever credibility it has.
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:04 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, May 20, 2019 3:09 PM EDT
WND Seems Pleased A Gay Journalist Killed Himself
Topic: WorldNetDaily WorldNetDaily devoted a May 7 article to this:
Never heard of him? Neither have we. WND's article is little more than a rewrite of a piece on the man published by something called Information Liberation, which has been described as an extreme-right operation known for publishing false and misleading information -- which tells you how decimated the news side of WND is these days in his current financial crisis. (WND calls Information Liberation an "independent news and commentary site.") WND, though, weirdly focuses on Howes' sex life, calling him a "gay white journalist" in the headline and inexplicably making the article's lead image a tweet from Howes' wedding -- even though his sexuality is irrelvant to anything in the story. WND seems to want you to think that Howes killed himself because he was gay -- and maybe that he deserved to die. There's really no other logical explanation we can think of that would cause WND to play up his sexual orientation. Of course, WND hates journalists as much as it hates people who are gay, so it can be credibly argued that it's pleased by this development.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:35 AM EDT
Updated: Monday, May 20, 2019 12:55 AM EDT
Sunday, May 19, 2019
MRC Does Damage Control For Ben Shapiro's Temper Tantrum
Topic: Media Research Center First the Media Research Center rushed to Ben Shapiro's defense over alleged mislabeling of his conservative views (despite its own long history of sloppy labeling of liberal views). Now, in a May 10 post, the MRC's Scott Whitlock is doing cleanup work on a disastrous TV appearance by Shapiro. Whitlock glowingly writes:
What Whitlock didn't tell you: Shapiro's attack on the BBC was followed by a massive temper tantrum in which Shapiro complained that Neil "simply going through and finding lone things that sound bad out of context and then hitting people with them is a way for you to make a quick buck on BBC off the fact that I’m popular and no one has ever heard of you" -- then stormed out of the interview.To which Neil deliciously responded, "Thank you for your time and for showing that anger is not part of American political discourse." Whitlock also cut off his blockquote of Shapiro to eliminate his attack on Neil: "Why don't you just say you're on the left?" Well, that's because he's not. Whitlock noted deep in the post that "Neil is an editor of the British Spectator and not a man of the left, as Shapiro initially thought." Whitlock then linked to a post-interview tweet as stating that Shapiro had "since admitted this", but didn't call Shapiro out for failing to sufficiently prepare for the interview by figuring out beforehand that Neil likes to play devil's advocate; instead, he tried to give Shapiro cover by claiming that "it’s easy to see why one would have been confused," oblivously adding that "The classifying of the pro-life position as 'extreme,' 'hard' and 'taking us back to the dark ages' is hardly objective. It’s typical of the sneering BBC view of anything culturally conservative." Whitlock provided no evidence to support his claim that the BBC has a "sneering view" of cultural conservatism. Shapiro totally botched that interview, but the MRC wants to use alternative facts to make you think differently.
Posted by Terry K.
at 11:18 PM EDT
Updated: Sunday, May 19, 2019 11:21 PM EDT
CNS' Jeffrey Misleads To Portray Gov't Workers As Overpaid
Topic: CNSNews.com CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey thinks he's onto something in his May 8 column:
In trying to bash federal workers as needlessly overpaid, Jeffrey deliberately ignores critical nuance. A 2017 Congressional Budget Office report reveals facts that Jeffrey considers inconvenient: Those "upper class" earnings for federal workers are actually on the lower end of the scale. The CBO reports that compensation for federal jobs requiring a high school education or less is notably higher than private-sector jobs requiring a similar education level. But as the job requires increasing levels of education, the federal-private differential slowly disappears until federal jobs requiring a doctorate or other professional degree are actually paid less than in the private sector. Further, one could argue that the private sector has many more jobs requiring only a high-school education level than does government, which tend to be low-paying and may be skewing the numbers Jeffrey cites by dragging down the overall private pay level.Indeed, one study found that 54 percent of state and local government employees have a college degree, compared with 35 percent in the private sector. (Another study found that nearly 52 percent of federal workers have a college degree.) Jeffrey then gets into even more misleading territory:
While Jeffrey does concede taht the crop farmworkers are "part of the most poorly paid class of workers listed in PINC-07," but he never admits that the federal government doesn't employ farmers or cropworkers, which no doubt accounts for the huge salary differential he's decrying.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:23 PM EDT
Saturday, May 18, 2019
MRC Sneers At Obamas' Netflix Deal
Topic: Media Research Center The Media Research Center's hatred of non-conservative media and its hatred of everything Obama found a nexus when Barack and Michelle signed a content development deal with Netflix. There's actually some lead-up to this, in the form of a December 2016 post by Calista Ring trashing a made-for-Netflix film about the young Barack Obama, where she claims "most of the film focuses on Obama’s obsession with race," then sneering, "Now, it’s 35 years later, a black man named Barack Hussein Obama has been elected President of the United States twice, and still everything is about slavery for him." When the Obamas first signed the deal a year ago, the sneering headline on Randy Hall's NewsBusters post read, "$$$ for 'Empathy': Obamas Sign Deal with Netflix to Produce Their Kind of Movies and TV." Hall also had trouble acknowledging that Obama was president, huffing that they were "the former Democratic occupants of the White House." Hall also complained that Netflix's chief content officer is a former Obama campaign donor and that the company "named scandal-plagued former national security advisor Susan Rice to its board of directors." In November, Tim Graham complained that the first project the Obamas optioned was the book "The Fifth Risk" from "liberal author" Michael Lewis, a book "obviously addressing the Trump administration, since it 'details the chaos at the federal departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy in the transition from the Obama to Trump administrations.'" Graham doesn'tdispute any of the evidence Lewis presents in his book, only complains that it was written at all. It's not until the final paragraph that Lewis also wrote "The Blind Side," which suggests that he likely can't be pigeonholed as a "liberal author." The winner for MRC-style sneering at the Obamas, though, is Gabriel Hays, who devoted a May 1 post to unprofessional condesension toward the Obamas:
Hays concluded with one final sneer: "While we certainly can never get enough of that special Obama flavor, that amount of content should at least be enough to tide us over until Michelle gets into office. If you didn’t have Netflix before, this should convince you to grab a subscription. (As if.)" The MRC is morphing from "media researchers" into insult comics.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:15 AM EDT
WND Highlights Question Of Whether Trump Would Leave Office, Forgets It Fretted Over Whether Obama Would Leave
Topic: WorldNetDaily WorldNetDaily complains in a May 6 article:
Of course, one person on TV is not "the national media." And WND seems to have forgotten that it raised the very same question about President Obama. In a March 2015 column, WND editor Joseph Farah ranted that Obama "respects neither the law nor the American tradition of peaceful changes of power" and, thus, might refuse to leave the White House when his term ends. Farah added: "Again, do I think Obama will leave office in January 2017? Yes I do. But, with a track record like this – and, actually much worse – should we simply take it for granted?" In a follow-up column a few days later, Farah argued that the Obamas were "are living it up on your dime" through federally paid vacations --which ignores the fact that President Bush had taken three times as much vacation time as Obama did -- and that he would be loath to give that up:
Meanwhile, a July 2015 article by Cheryl Chumley claimed that Obama's assertion that he could likely win a third term in office "tapped into previous pundit discussions and constituent fears he might not want to leave the White House when his time was up – and in that case, who would actually stop him from staying?" But Chumley also quoted Obama saying that he couldn't run again because "the law is the law, and no one person is above the law, not even the president." Going even further back, a 2014 column by Kathy Shaidle highlighted how Rush Limbaugh "has expressed his fear that President Obama may not step down when his term ends in 2017" because of something related to Obamacare. And in an August 2016 column, Farah speculated that Obama would not leave office if Donald Trump won the presidency because he had criticized Trump:
Somehow we doubt thagt WND will apply this very same test to Trump, who has criticized most of the Democratic presidential candidates and will certainly be much more hostile to the eventual nominee that Obama ever was to Trump.
Posted by Terry K.
at 2:19 AM EDT
Friday, May 17, 2019
MRC: Stop Saying 8chan Is On The Right!
Topic: Media Research Center The Media Research Center's Nicholas Fondacaro spent an April 28 post huffing that CNN's Brian Stelter was "politicizing" the shooting at a, Poway, Calif., synagogue by accurately noting that the shooter had been "radicalized on right-wing message boards" like 8chan. Fondacaro growled in response:
Except, you know, that 8chan is very much a part of the same side of the political ledger that Fondacaro is on. 8chan's /pol/ channel -- where the Poway shooter apparently announced his intent to commit a massacre -- is, in addition to being a home for neo-Nazi and white nationalist provocateurs, is a hotbed of anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT rantings. None of these things are associated with liberalism. Fondacaro then attempted another bit of deflection: "In another case of this, Stelter tried to link the car attack in Sunnyvale, California on Tuesday with this supposed rise in white extremism. The only problem? The suspect in that attack was black." Fondacaro didn't mention that the driver was attempting to run down Muslims and reportedly praised Jesus after the attack. Again, neither hating Muslims nor loving Jesus are liberal proclivities, as conservatives continually remind us. Fondacaro might want to do some, er, media research into what is where on the political spectrum before he addresses this subject again.
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:21 PM EDT
CNS Gushed Over Trump's NRA Speech -- But Censors NRA Drama
Topic: CNSNews.com CNSNews.com, like a good pro-Trump stenography operation, gushed over President Trump's speech at the National Rifle Association's annual meeting last month. So much so, in fact, that it generated three "news" articles from that speech -- two by Melanie Arter and one by Craig Bannister:
By contrast, CNS has published exactly nothing about the behind-the-scenes drama and power struggle that boiled over at the meeting -- accusations of financial misconduct by NRA officials, particularly in relation to millions of dollars paid to a public relations firm to run its TV operation, which resulted in the ouster of NRA president Oliver North. This silence is doubly perplexing, since Allen West -- a "senior fellow" for CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, and a CNS columnist -- is also an NRA board member. He didn't have much to say either. His April 30 column, the first after the meeting began this way:
He didn't, however, make those comments at CNS. And he hasn't make a peep about it at CNS since -- though he has since called for (at his own website) the removal of NRA executive VP and CEO Wayne LaPierre, who won the power struggle with North at the annual meeting and has since been accused of questionable spending. CNS has an in with West and could get all of his NRA musings if it wanted to -- yet it refuses to report what he has to say about an issue CNS' conservative audience would want to hear more about. Apparently, censoring bad news about its conservative friends trumps reporting the news at CNS.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:57 AM EDT
Thursday, May 16, 2019
MRC Mocks Fact-Checks on Satire -- Then Fact-Checks A Joke
Topic: Media Research Center The Media Research Center -- specifically, Tim Graham -- loves to mock fact-checkers like Snopes who point out that the right-leaning satire site Babylon Bee is fake news, even though Snopes explains that it does so because "satire often isn’t recognizable as such in social media posts" and that right-wing fake-news sites repost Babylon Bee articles without identifying them as satire. Still, Graham sneeringly interpreted that in a May 12 post as "Snopes complained people are NOT bright." If humor isn't supposed to be fact-checked, why did the MRC's NewsBusters -- of which Graham is the executive editor -- fact-check a joke? Christian Toto -- a movie reviewer moonlighting as a right-wing pundit -- huffed in a lengthy May 4 post:
Toto included a screenshot of a tweet from "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams purporting to make the case that Trump's "full comments" showed he did not praise white supremacists when he said there were "very fine people on both sides" because that comment was adjacent to a reference to people protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. But as the Washington Post's Aaron Blake pointed out, the statue-removal protest "was partly organized by a well-known white nationalist, Richard Spencer, and included both neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups" and, thus, "was clearly not one for your average supporter of Confederate monuments." Blake added:
But never mind actual facts -- Toto went on to spout the accepted right-wing narrative on the Mueller report:
Toto concluded by effectively making the same argument that Graham mocked when it came from Snopes:
Of course, Graham will keep on mocking Snopes for fact-checking satire -- and forget he let a writer fact-check a joke.
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:28 PM EDT
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