MRC Lets Mark Levin Rant That Facebook 'Censored' His Falsehoods
Topic: Media Research Center
Right-wing radio host Mark Levin was mad that Facebook put a block on the falsehoods he published on his page there. And his buddies at the Media Research Center was eager to give Levin a platform to vent that anger. Alexander Hall did tthe stenography job in a Nov. 2 post:

Popular conservative talk radio host Mark Levin was targeted by Facebook on the evening before the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“Facebook has now placed severe restrictions on my Facebook page on the eve before the election based on an extremely dishonest Politifact review of my link to an accurate story,” Levin tweeted November 2. He added: “I will not be intimidated or threatened by Facebook. You can also find my posts on Twitter and Parler.” 

Attached to the tweet was a screenshot of the notification from Facebook explaining: “Your Page has reduced distribution and other restrictions because of repeated sharing of false news. People will also be able to see if a Page has a history of sharing false news.”

Politifact had fact-checked Levin’s post of a tweet from Richard Grenell, where Levin called Biden a “fraud” for not wearing a mask on a plane. Fact-checkers such as Politifact claimed the photo Levin shared was in fact from November 2019.

Notice Hall's framing there. In his telling, the Grenell post that Levin reposted wasn't objectively, indisputably false; it's just that fact-checkers "claimed" it was false. Despite that framing, Hall offers no evidence to contradict anything the fact-checkers found.

Hall let the whining continue:

Levin tweeted about another fact-check he had received earlier on November 2 as well:

“And I listened to the audio myself. Biden said America is dead but FB dinged this as partly false on my site when I linked to it from another site due to leftwing Politifact’s opinion as a third party reviewer. Well, this is all fascistic crap.”

The Hot Air article “Biden Stumbles Through Another Campaign Speech: ‘America Is Dead Because Of COVID-19’” included a link to a clip of Democratic nominee Joe Biden speaking about COVID-19 at a rally, proclaiming: “America is dead because of COVID-19.”

But that Hot Air article now begins with an editor's note correcting the record: "The original version of this article stated that Joe Biden had said 'America’s Dead' during a campaign speech. In reality, Biden said 'Americans dead' in reference to the number of deaths caused by COVID-19. The incorrect references have been removed." And, yes, fact-checkers concur.

In other words, Levin was lying about what Biden said.

Despite the fact that Levin is 0-for-2 here and Facebook was entirely justified to limit the exposure given to his false claims, Hall still had to push the MRC's dubious victimization narrative. So he huffed that "Big Tech has been doing everything it can to protect Biden as the 2020 election approaches" -- while not explaining how shutting down Levin's falsehoods equated to "protecting Biden" -- and spent the rest of his post rehashing how social media limited the spread of the still-unproven New York Post story about Hunter Biden's "alleged scandalous dealings" with Ukraine.

Then again, the narrative is more important than the truth as far as the MRC is concerned -- perhaps even more so when it comes to its buddy Levin.

WND Bad Takes, 'Trumpslide' Division
Topic: WorldNetDaily

A pundit who correctly predicted how each state would vote in the 2016 presidential election, with the exception of one district in Maine, believes Donald Trump will collect even more Electoral College votes in November than he did four years ago.

"A #Trumpslide if you will," Kevin McCullough writes at Townhall.

Rush Limbaugh pointed out McCullough, who hosts a nationally syndicated radio show, has correctly predicted election maps since 2006.

McCullough forecasts 333 electoral votes for Trump and 208 for Joe Biden.

[...]

McCullough said nothing the Democrats have tried against Trump has worked, "Russia Hoax, Impeachment Farce, Lockdown Lies, Evaporative Economic Policies, Debate Blowups, and Covid Contraction."

"They've even floated the 25th Amendment, which I only thought really bitter and nasty Never Trumpers would ever embrace."

Trump will, he writes, "absolutely crush the election that day."

"Now the 'smart people' will tell you that's not possible, and that he lags Joe Biden in the polls by margins too big to overcome. If you only look at the selective polls listed in the Real Clear Politics average one might come to that conclusion (Just like they did in 2016). … To be exceedingly clear – I find no evidence of a Biden win outside of the media polls."

-- Oct. 12 WorldNetDaily article

A polling company that correctly predicted Britain's Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 has published its final 2020 survey, which indicates President Trump will get another four years.

The Democracy Institute poll for the Sunday Express finds Trump will win the vote nationally by 48% to 47% over Joe Biden. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 2.87 million more votes nationally than Trump.

In the tally that counts, the Electoral College, Trump is on course to win by 326 to 212 votes, 22 more than in 2016.

The Democracy Institute said that in the final days of the campaign, the revelations from Hunter Biden's laptop and other sources of alleged influence peddling by Joe Biden and his family had an impact. The controversy over Twitter's censorship of the story only enhanced its profile.

The final survey has Trump with a lead of 2 to 4 points in the key swing states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Unlike most other polls, which predict a Biden victory, the Democracy Institute poll identifies likely voters instead of just registered voters and tries to identify the "shy" Trump vote.

The latest poll found 79% of Trump supporters would not admit their vote to friends and family compared to 21% of Biden supporters.

-- Art Moore, Nov. 2 WND article

CNS Kept Pushing Pro-Trump Poll Findings Before Election
Topic: CNSNews.com

We documented how CNSNews.com was interested in reporting on pre-election polls only if they showed President Trump winning. It kept that pattern up all the way to Election Day.

Indeed, the day after we published our original report, an Oct. 19 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman gushed over another poll by the very Trump-leaning Trafalgar Group having "place[d] Trump slightly ahead of Joe Biden in Michigan and Florida, and gives Biden a slight lead in Pennsylvania." As before, Chapman added that Trafalgar was "the only group to foresee a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of the few groups to forecast a Trump win in Pennsylvania in 2016." Two days later, Chapman pushed more Trafalgar polling that "currently places Trump ahead of Joe Biden in Arizona and in Florida."

On Oct. 28, Chapman was Trafalgar's PR person again: "The Trafalagar [sic] Group polling firm, the only pollster to accurately foresee a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of the few groups to forecast a Trump win in Pennsylvania in 2016, currently places Trump ahead of Joe Biden North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania." And on Election Day, Chapman wrote as if he was drawing a check from Trafalgar:

The Trafalgar Group polling firm, which was the only group to accurately predict a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of only a few firms that predicted a Trump 2016 win in Pennsylvania, gives Trump a slight lead today -- Election Day -- over Democrat Joe Biden in Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. 

Trafalgar's chief pollster Robert Cahaly, who accurately predicted Donald Trump's 2016 win and his electoral vote total (306), believes that Trump will win the 2020 race with an electoral total in the "high 270s."

Of course, as it turned out, Trump appears to have lost at least four of those states, suggesting there was something wrong with their model, which weights its polling to account for the "social desiriability bias" of purportedly shy Trump voters. Chapman hasn't written a thing about Trafalgar since the election.

For all of this love toward a shiny new polling firm, CNS didn't completely forget its first love, the Trump-skewing Rasumussen. On Oct. 22, Craig Bannister touted how "Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll released Thursday shows that the percentage of U.S. likely voters approving of President Donald Trump’s job performance has risen above fifty percent for the first day this month," adding that "Black voters registered 37% approval."

On Oct. 27, Bannister served up another piece of Rasmussen's biased polling:

A majority of voters believe it’s likely that, while vice president, Joe Biden knew about and may have benefitted from his son Hunter’s controversial foreign business dealings, a new Rasmussen poll shows.

In a national survey of U.S. likely voters, conducted October 22 and 25, 2020, Rasmussen asked the following question:

“How likely is it that Joe Biden was consulted about and perhaps profited from his son Hunter's overseas business deals including at least one involving a company in mainland China?”

More than half (54%) of voters polled say it’s at least “somewhat likely” Biden knew and may have profited, with 44% calling it “very likely.”

Chapman even tried to frame a finding from normally reputable pollster Gallup as somehow pro-Trump:

As Election Day approaches on Tuesday, Nov. 3, it is interesting to note that, according to Gallup, at this time in their first terms Americans' job approval ratings of President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump were very close -- Obama, 50% and Trump, 46%.

[...]

For Trump, his job approval rating on day 1,376 in office is 46%. (Poll conducted Oct. 16-27, 2020)

For comparison, Obama, at 1,377 days in office, had a job approval of 50%. (Poll conducted Oct. 22-28, 2012.) 

Gallup also reported that Obama's first-term average job approval rating was 48%.  (Similar data for Trump have not been posted yet by Gallup.)

If job approval ratings are an indicator of election performance, it's clear that Gallup was much more correct than Rasmussen. Chapman and Bannister won't admit that, of course.

UPDATE: Chapman got in one more pre-election poll to fit his template, using a Nov. 2 article to tout how "a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows that Trump has pulled into the lead with a strong 48% support compared to Biden's 41% support."

After Trashing Inaccurate Election Polls, MRC Touts Dubious Finding Based On ... Trump's Pollster
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center spent the days immediately after the presidential election gloating that the polls showing a Biden blowout were wrong. Jeffrey Lord proclaimed that "the media and the polls blew it. Big time," and Tim Graham devoted an entire column to ranting that pollsters "are damaging the legitimacy of our democracy, not helping it. When they’re this off base, they lead to both sides of the divide feeling the system is rigged. What's obviously rigged are these polls, easily categorized as an alternative reality. It’s hard not to see intentional rigging, not some kind of accidental bias."

So it might be a little surprising to learn that an anonymously written Nov. 9 piece under the headline "FACT: Big Media and Big Tech Stole the 2020 Election" is actually based on ... a poll:

A new post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, shows 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6% of Biden’s total vote) say that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for the former Vice President.

Such a shift away from Biden would have meant President Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.

[...]

The net effect: 13.1% of these voters (4.6% of Biden’s overall vote) say they would not have voted for Biden if they had been properly informed. Applying this to the most closely-contested states, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would today all be in the Trump column, giving the President 289 electoral college votes and a second term. (This also assumes Alaska, where the current margins are not close, is also called for the President).

Obviously, the MRC is not going to mention that McLaughlin has long been a notoriously unreliable pollster -- receiving a C/D rating from FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps best known for a 2014 poll for then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that showed him up by 34 points two weeks before a Republican primary against opponent Dave Brat; Brat ended up defeating Cantor by 11 points.

But there's one other thing the MRC is not telling you: As we documented when the MRC used the company to advance another right-wing anti-media narrative, McLaughlin & Associates worked for Trump's re-election campaign. That's a blatant -- and undisclosed -- conflict of interest.

Despite bering on record denouncing the entire polling process as shoddy and biased, MRC put out a statement  from Brent Bozell proclaiming the results of its own poll as "indisputable fact":

“It is an indisputable fact that the media stole the election. The American electorate was intentionally kept in the dark. During the height of the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, the media and the big tech companies did everything in their power to cover it up. Twitter and Facebook limited sharing of the New York Post’s reports, and the liberal media omitted it from their coverage or dismissed it as Russian disinformation.

“Now we know the impact of that cover-up. 4.6% of Biden voters say they would not have voted for him had they been aware of evidence of this scandal. This story would have potentially changed the outcome of this election. The media and Silicon Valley were fully aware of this, so they actively tried to prevent it from reaching the American public. The American people deserved to know the truth; now it’s too late.”

It cannot be true that all polls are inaccurate except the ones bought and paid for by the MRC. But that's the fiction the MRC is going with.

UPDATE: The promotion of this story at the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, similarly censored the fact that McLaughlin was Trump's pollster and failed to explain why this poll should be trusted when it has attacked the entire polling industry and shoddy and inaccurate.

CNS Published Op-Ed By Admitted Criminal Before Election
Topic: CNSNews.com

How desperate was CNSNews.com to see President Trump get re-elected? It published an op-ed by an admitted criminal that it pulled from a far-right conspiracy site.

The Oct. 27  op-ed was by Michael Flynn, the onetime Trump national security adviser who admitted to lying to the FBI, though he has since been trying to retract that admission. CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, falsely claimed that Flynn was "exonerated" after the Trump Justice Department decided to stop pursuing the case. His rant is a pretty standard right-wing screed:

Never should our nation, our president, or any family or individual be so viciously targeted, maligned, smeared, and threatened as we have all felt for the past four years and counting. This unconscionable and seditious direct attack by ideologically driven elitists strikes at the will of the American people who ensure our very freedoms through their vote and daily selfless actions.

We cannot allow the opposing leftist agenda to continue enabling the fleecing of America, peddling connected-influence for cash, exploiting American innovation for an elitist self-serving purpose, wielding official power and influence as a means to ensure personal gain while exercising mass control, and selling out our American ideals for ideologies to pursue what the leftists would like as “common and normal.”

These all diminish the power and purpose inherent in “we the people” who constitute our republic.

I ask that you stand with me today in renouncing this betrayal of trust that has burdened our nation and breached the foundation of our American ideals.

Needless to say, CNS made sure not to mention Flynn's criminality.

At the end of his op-ed, an editor's note stated, "A version of this article originally appeared on The Western Journal." That's the website that seems to be running WorldNetDaily these days,and it's a descendant of the right-wing nonprofit journalistic group that WND founder Joseph Farah created back in the 1990s. It was so into pushing right-wing conspiracies that it got blacklisted by social media, and it has been trying to act somewhat more legit under a slightly altered name.

CNS sullied what little journalistic reputation it has by publishing this, and Trump lost anyway.

WND's Elizabeth Farah Still Invoking Christianity To Get Trump Re-Elected
Topic: WorldNetDaily

In her husband's stead, WorldNetDaily's Elizabeth Farah has been keeping up the website's far-right poliltics, including sycophantic love of President Trump and vicious hatred of Joe Biden.

Farah kicked off her Oct. 30 video by declaring that a Biden presidency will bring "wickedness, tyranny, destruction that is unimaginable, at least to me." She then went off on an article by pastor John Piper bashing Trump by pointing out that since he "models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction," and that Trump's support of anti-abortion policies aren't enough to warrant his support. (WND columnist Michael Brown also attacked Piper over this.)

In her lengthy response -- the video runs an hour and 40 minutes -- Farah  declared that Piper's comments "to not only be unconvincing, but -- I'm going to say it -- incoherent, dangerous, harmful and without proper and sufficient Biblical foundation," adding that "if Piper's influence wit Christians affected the outcome of this election negatively for donald Trump's re-election, I believe Piper would be guilty of doing great harm." She accused Piper of "erasing the distinction between greater and lesser sins, which is a form of Christian or Biblical relativism. ... I'm asking myself, how many dead babies outweigh a boastful comment on Twitter by our president?" The ranting continued:

Secondly, Piper's reasoning the manifold sinfulness of the entire Democratic Party leadership and its platform, and he doesn't even address Joe Biden's corruption and wickedness. Effectively, he turns a blind eye to their lying, their slander, covetousness, corruption, fraud, theft, oppression, prejudice, boastfulness, manipulativeness, conspiracy, sexual immorality as well, lawlessness, blasphemy against God, and you know -- I mean, that's a short list. So this party that has these extraordinary list of sins and Joe Biden its titular head -- so long ago, I believe, we saw that they turned very much to the dark side.

Farah listed a group of Democratic politicians and huffed: "All these men and women, to a greater or lesser degree, have been complicit in attempting a coup d'etat of our country. they've been bearing false witness, devising conspiracies, slandering, perverting justice, speaking lies and hypocrisy, oppressing and persecuting innocent people in their vicious desire to circumvent the law and will of the American people who put Mr. Trump in to office, all to achieve the overthrow of our government and to eject President Trump from his presidency under the color and fiction of law."

But isn't that same thing what Farah's WND did to Barack Obama throughout his presidency? Where's her sincere repentence for that? Nowhere that we've seen.

Farah laughed as she noted that Trump "tweets things that would fall under the Sermon on the Mount admonitions by our Savior, to say it lightly. Then she played dumb about Farah's amorality: "I don't really know about Donald Trump's supposed vulgarities and his boastulness and his so-called divisiveness."

Responding to Piper's contention that "It is naive to think that a man can be effectively pro-life and manifest consistently the character traits that lead to death — temporal and eternal," Farah huffed, "the most pro-life president since there was such a thing needed. Mr. Piper, give me the name of one president in our history that was more effectively pro-life than Donald Trump. ... After the appointment of three pro-life justices, I believe that Donald Trump's tweets have not led to more death than the life that will be -- that has been lost and the live will be saived if he continues in office, assuring good things in the courts."

Farah then conducted a Nov. 2 interview Farah did with the messianic rabbi who was at one time WND's would-be cash cow, Jonathan Cahn.

Cahn asserted that Trump's election meant that "God gave us a window ... an extension of time," asserting that "it's not about the personality, it's not about the tweets, it's about the issues," which for both Cahn and Farah boils down to abortion. Cahn's feed cut out during Cahn's rant that Trump is "turning back death" while Democrats have "pledged to strike down the Hyde Amendment." If Trump doesn't get re-election, Cahn asserted, it could bring "not only a fall of the nation but also judgment."

Farah once declared that it's "Christian moral relativism" for Christians not to support Trump, to which Cahn responded by depicting  Trump as a jerkass fireman who "might break a few things but he's going to save your house." Farah then went the Divine Donald route: "Going on your analogy, if I were literally going get my life saved from drowning, would I stop to say, are you a Sermon on the Mount kind of a guy, do you turn the other cheek? I want to make sure before I allow you save me and my children who are drowning next to me that you are right with God." She later proclaimed that Trump is "God's blessing on America."

Cahn also ranted against the proposed Eqality Act, misleadingly insisting that it means "government is officially not going to recognize gender, male and female. ... Once this goes through, forget about Christian bakers, forget about Christian florists, forget about Christian photographers, that's all gonna be wiped out. Also, there will be men, boys in girls' rooms and in girls' sports. ... And it may come down to telling ministries and churches -- ministries, you must hire those who are living blatantly against God for your ministry, which could mean the destruction of ministry."

Needless to say, neither of them think Trump might have been sent by God as a harbinger, not a blessing.

MRC Tries To Dismiss Revealed Identity of 'Anonymous' Author
Topic: Media Research Center

When the New York Times published a 2018 op-ed by anonymous Trump administration senior official who claimed he was part of a group in the White House keeping President Trump from acting on his worst instincts, the Media Research Center hated it. Nicholas Fondacaro whined that the author "pompously painted them self as part of a secret, superhero-like team in the White House keeping the wildly unstable President from harming us all," Kyle Drennen cheered how Megyn Kelly "blasted the article for trying to 'subvert the President' and 'dripping with sanctimony,'" and Jeffrey Lord argued that the Times was "a Deep State co-conspirator against a sitting President of the United States" for publishing a "self-righteous idiot."

A few days before the election, the anonymous author revealed himself as Miles Taylor, then the deputy chief of staff (and later chief of staff) to then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Unsurprisingly, the MRC cranked out a bunch of posts on that too.

Fondcaro returned to whine some more, insisting that Taylor's original allegations against Trump were "unsubstantiated," that he was a "serial liar" since he denied he was Anonymous, and that his first interview after revealing himself "was filled with unsupported accusations of 'Nazi-like' policies and delusions of grandeur with comparisons to the authors of the Federalist Papers."

Rich Noyes insisted Taylor was a "nobody" and a "low-level flunkie." Kayla Sargent complained that Taylor later took a job at Google, "as if we needed any more proof of Google’s leftist leanings." Joseph Norris groused that "the timing of this announcement was suspicious. Instead of reprimanding him for having lied to CNN on-air about whether he was Anonymous, they've brought Taylor on to further bash Trump," adding that during an interview CNN "did not ask for evidence of the allegations, documents, conversations, or witnesses to bolster his claims about the President." Curtis Houck sneered that Taylor "became 2020's media equivalent of Al Capone’s vault."

Tim Graham quickly cranked out a column calling the Taylor reveal an attempt by the media to distract from Hunter Biden's alleged scandal, denigrated him as "someone barely old enough to be elected to the Senate," huffed that his anonymity was a "smelly veil" and complained that the book Taylor wrote wasn't given away: "Taylor’s publisher, Hachette, churned out a first print run of 500,000 copies. Such public-spirited anonymity was going to make some people a tidy profit."

But none of Taylor's MRC detractors offered any evidence that Taylor was wrong, which is really all you need to know -- and which is why Noyes returned to attack the Times for originally describing Taylor as a "senior administration official," huffing that it used "those magic words to confer a sense of knowledge and authority on its otherwise anonymous sources who may hold a position few would consider 'senior.'" He further complained that "A Nexis search of Times articles shows the phrase 'senior administration official' or 'senior White House official' was used 1,104 times from January 20, 2017 through October 29, 2020."

Noyes didn't tell you that his employer has a wildly inconsistent record on the use of anonymous sources.

CNS' Jeffrey Whines Biden's Victory Speech Interrupted A Football Game
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is a bit of a football fanatic -- so much so that, for some unexplained reason, today's CNS front page includes a link to a 2012 column by him gushing that the Princeton-Harvard game that year was "football as it was meant to be."

But that love -- on top of his apparent seething hatred for all things liberal -- led him to post what may already be the worst take on Joe Biden's defeat of President Trump. He actually felt the need to write an entire article to petulantly whining that Biden's victory speech interrupted a football game:

Former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris decided to give victory speeches in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday night, causing NBC to break away from its broadcast of the football game between No. 1 Clemson and No. 4 Notre Dame to cover the speeches.

The game was in the second quarter--and Biden could not even wait until halftime.

Did Biden believe it would increase his audience to interrupt the broadcast of a contest between the No. 1 and No. 4 college football teams in America?

Did Biden--a self-described devout Catholic--know that Notre Dame was playing Clemson?

Notre Dame and Clemson fans--and fans of college football wanting to watch the contest between two of the leading teams in the country--were forced to switch to a cable channel to continue watching the game as Harris and Biden interrupted it.

That's the caliber of "news" coverage we've sadly come to expect from CNS. Expect much more petulance as the Biden administration proceeds.

MRC Does An Ad For Biden Accuser's Book
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center never cared about Tara Reade and her sexual misconduct accusations against Joe Biden -- it hypocritically used her as a cudgel to bash Biden, though it smeared or outright censored women who made similar (or worse) accusations against Donald Trump. So it's unsurprising that the MRC basically did an ad for Reade's new book. Scott Whitlock gushed in an Oct. 31 post:

After Reade went public in March to assert that Biden forcibly penetrated her while a Senate staffer in 1993, the networks, as well as CNN and MSNBC, buried the story. Since protective journalists don’t want to tell the truth, Reade is telling her own story in a new book called Left Out: When the Truth Doesn’t Fit In.

For anyone who wants to know the depth of corruption and collusion between the liberal media and the Democrats, this book is a must read. Activist and actress Rose McGowan put it this way in the introduction to Reade’s book: “Fake news isn’t only what’s written, it’s what’s purposely omitted. When it comes to observing the cabal of liberal media titans working against Tara, the only word that comes to mind is sad.”

Whitlock is surely pleased that Reade is parroting the MRC's own rhetoric about "liberal media titans." He followed with lots of blockquoting from Reade's book and a declaration that "Reade ended with a message of hope, despite the trauma she suffered, despite the corruption of the mainstream media."

Needless to say, Whitlock is not going to tell you about Reade's history of manipulative and deceitful behavior, nor the dozens of Biden staffers who dispute Reade's accounting of events. Nor did he breathe the names of E. Jean Carroll and Amy Dorris, who are merely the latest Trump accusers.

Whitlock concuded his ad with the expected link-filled sales pitch: "The e-book version of Left Out is available now and can be ordered here and on Amazon here. The hardcover will be available January 1, 2021. (Also available for pre-order here.) If you want the truth that journalists have hidden, read this book."

Whitlock will never say the same about any Trump accuser. Hypocrite.

Fake News: WND Spreads Lie About Biden
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Remember how WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian keeps insisting that WND publishes the truth, despite all evidence to the contrary? Well, we caught WND lying again. An anonymously written Oct. 26 article claimed:

During a virtual event over the weekend, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden added to a long list of gaffes, misidentifying the current president.

"This is the most consequential election in a long long time, and the character of the country in my view is literally on the ballot. What kind of country are we going to be four more years of George, uh, George, uh …"

His wife, Jill Biden, sitting beside him, muttered "Trump" under her breath.

President Trump took notice.

"Joe Biden called me George yesterday. Couldn't remember my name," he wrote on Twitter. "Got some help from the anchor to get him through the interview. The Fake News Cartel is working overtime to cover it up!"

Biden apparently was thinking of George W. Bush, president from 2001-09, or George H.W. who was in office from 1989-93.

WND is lying. As actual news outlets reported, Biden was talking to interviewer George Lopez. And there's no evidence Jill Biden actually "muttered 'Trump' under her breath."

Kupelian once huffed, "the truth – what a concept!" He might want to try it sometime, particularly if he wants WND to survive.

MRC Frets Over Newspaper Endorsements
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center, it seems, can't agree on the importance of newspaper endorsements for presidential candidates -- even from post to post.

On Oct. 20, Scott Whitlock raged against the very first presidential endorsement made by the country's largest newspaper, USA Today, because it was for Joe Biden:

Given that USA Today has never, technically, endorsed a presidential candidate before, the paper touted this as historic and important. But, as the opening paragraph of the 1775 word pronouncement noted, just four years ago the paper demanded that Americans not vote for Trump. That, of course, is very close to endorsing Hillary Clinton.

[...]

[Editor-in-chief Nicole] Carroll went on to promote USA Today as ideologically diverse: “The 10-member Editorial Board includes conservatives, liberals and centrists.” Yet the decision was “unanimous.”  

So not one member, even among the "centrist" or "conservative" wing of the USA Today editorial board supported Trump? Yes, this all sounds very “non-partisan.” This is the same USA Todaythat has begun producing “fact checks” for the paper, including one in July that declared it “false” to say the Democrats started the Civil War and founded the KKK. (They absolutely did both. Here's my fact check of the fact check.) 

In fairness, credit to USA Today write an op-ed responding to the editorial.

The paper closed the editorial by insisting the endorsement was a one-time deal: “We may never endorse a presidential nominee again. In fact, we hope we'll never have to.” However, once you start endorsing Democrats, it can be hard to stop.

By contrast, Tim Graham spent an entire Oct. 26 post dismissing the importance of the New Hampshire Union Leader, a longtime conservartive newspaper, endorsing Biden. He started by attacking CNN's for getting something wrong regarding the endorsement, then admitting he was right after all:

CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza tried to hype a newspaper endorsement with this headline: "This influential newspaper just broke a 100-plus year streak of endorsing a Republican." But it was false.

The New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed the Libertarian ticket in 2016. Cillizza actually included this fact in his article, that the newspaper touted Gary Johnson and Bill Weld as "a bright light of hope and reason."

How can CNN bungle the facts so badly?

Graham then complained that Cillizza's statement that "It's hard to overstate the influence of the Union Leader in conservative circles" was "false" because it had endorsed Chris Christie in the 2016 Republican primary and not Trump. We would remind Graham that his boss, Brent Bozell, supported Ted Cruz in 2016 before he and the rest of the MRC did the big Trump flip. Does he think his boss lacks influence?

When the Union Leader editorial pointed out that Trump was "forcing a reexamination of what words like "Republican" and "conservative" even mean, Graham went all ranty:

It is absolutely a "reexamination" of what "conservative" means when a "conservative" newspaper complains about the national debt: "Since Trump took over, the national debt has exploded by more than 7 TRILLION dollars." So the answer to that problem is....Joe Biden? As if the Democrats in the House did NOT pass spending bills exploding the debt? As if Biden isn't proposing a massive spending increase? At least they acknowledged a blue wave would be a disaster and urged split-ticket voting. But one might call the editorial page there "formerly conservative."

PS: Brent Baker -- who vacations in New Hampshire -- pointed out the Union Leader still endorsed Republicans for the U.S. House and Senate -- which may also demonstrate their endorsements don't matter.

We would also remind Graham that Terry Jeffrey, editor in chief of the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, is such a Trump fanboy that he can't quite bring himself to criticize the person who's most responsible for running up that $7 trillion debt.

The MRC flipped back to caring about newspaper endorsements three days later, when Geoffey Dickens complained about all the newspapers endorsing Biden:

With just five days to go, polls show a tight race in many of the key battleground states. But one place where the race isn’t tight: newsrooms across America. The country’s newspapers have absolutely thumped Donald Trump in their official endorsements, favoring Joe Biden by a count of (88) to (7).

Out of a total of (95) newspapers that have offered an editorial on who their readers should vote for, 88 (93 percent) of them have endorsed Joe Biden. Only seven (The Las Vegas Review Journal, Santa Barbara News-Press, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Spokesman-Review, The New York Post, The Washington Times and Boston Herald) have advised voting for Trump.

Dickens avoided mentioning the relevant that all of those newspapers have an explicitly conservative agenda and/or conservative owners.

CNS Touts Pre-Election GDP Numbers To Help Trump
Topic: CNSNews.com

The Trump-fliuffers at CNSNews.com put in one last pre-election effort to boost his campaign, managing to get a whopping four articles out of a relatively good-looking GDP number.

"GDP Grew at Record 33.1% in 3rd Quarter," proclaimed the headline of Susan Jones' Oct. 29 article, complete with photo of a grinning, thumbs-up Trump to reinforce the message that he should be given credit. Jones reinforce it further in the copy:

The key indicator of an economic rebound comes at an opportune time for President Trump, just days before the presidential election.

“This record economic growth is absolute validation of President Trump’s policies which create jobs and opportunities for Americans in every corner of the country," Tim Murtaugh, Trump's campaign communications director, said in a statement released by the White House[.]

Jones followed that with a full five paragraphs of Murtaugh shilling for his boss.

That was followed by an anonymously written article that tried to dunk on Nancy Pelosi for criticizing the economy the day before the GDP number came out:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appearing on MSNBC on Wednesday, said that “now we’re in worse shape” in response to a question about the “markets falling.”

The next day, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its report for the 3^rd quarter of 2020, stating that real Gross Domestic Product grew at an annual rate of 33.1 percent during the quarter.

Craig Bannister checked in with a blog post about Trump-loving Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera complaining that Trump won't getcredit for the GDP growth because "Big Media is so toxic." Bannister also gave space to Rivera to spin away the growth in coronavirus cases in the U.S. because his critics "they should realize that the virus has surged in other countries, too – and they can’t blame Trump for that."

Finally, CNS sent an intern to Capitol Hill to ask Pelosi, "The economy grew at an annual rate of 33.1 percent in the third quarter. Does President Trump deserve any credit for that?" Pelosi responded with the argably more accurate point that the CARES Act, which pumped billions into the economy, deserved the credit for the GDP post. CNS loves to send interns to pester members of Congress.

Bozell's Conspiracy Theory: Polls Showing Biden With Big Lead Were Faked
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center' Brent Bozell is not taking the possiblity that Joe Biden may win the presidential election very well. He issued a statement concocting a conspiracy theory that polls about the election were "deliberately wildly wrong" in order to "suppress the vote" for Trump:

“While votes are still being counted and the outcome of the election is undetermined, there is one thing we can say with certainty: once again, the polls weren’t just wildly wrong, they were deliberately wildly wrong.

 This was no mistake. These were the same pollsters who predicted the same thing four years ago, day after day after day: there was no way Donald Trump could win. It was clear then that they were attempting to suppress the vote. The pollsters denied it, of course.

Here we go again four years later. Same pollsters, same prediction, day after day after day: Trump could not win. This time it’s indisputable. They did it on purpose. They knew exactly what they were doing. Just as with Clinton four years ago, they were firmly vested in Biden’s election.

There needs to be a federal investigation. This is clearly election tampering. At the very least, this is a violation of federal election laws.

So many of these pollsters worked for the national ‘news” media.’ It’s yet another reason why Americans should never believe these hucksters again.”

Needless to say, Bozell offers no evidence to back up his paranoid conspiracy theory.

Bozell also issued a video claming that the MRC is "going to show the supression that took place," as well as other conspiratorial claims to be made in an upcoming "explosive report" that will purport to prove that "the national news media stole the 2020 campaign."

The creeping WorldNetDaily-ization of the MRC continues apace.

CNS Does Damage Control For Trump Chief of Staff
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com worked until the very end to play damage control and cleanup on behalf of President Trump's re-election.

On Oct. 25, Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows got himself into a spot of bother when he admitted on CNN that "We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas." That didn't go over well -- a fact reinforced by CNS, which ignored the remark at first. It took nearly two full days after Meadows said it for CNS to acknowledge it, apparently requiring that long to come up with a way to spin it. That angle -- blaming Joe Biden for taking Meadows out of context -- debuted in an article by Susan Jones:

Giving a speech near his home in Delaware Monday, Vice President Joe Biden said, "Look, yesterday White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows went on television to admit to the country his administration wasn't even trying -- trying anymore to deal with the pandemic." He said, and I quote, 'We're not going to control the pandemic.'"

Yes, Meadows used those words. But clearly, Meadows did not mean the Trump administration is giving up.

Here's what Meadows actually told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, in context:

[...]

So clearly Meadows meant that the contagious virus is impossible to control, absent a job-killing lockdown, until therapies and vaccines are able to keep it at bay. Meadows did not mean the Trump administration doesn't care about controlling it.

Jones further complained that "Biden made that comment after reporters asked Mark Meadows about his 'we're not going to control the pandemic' remark on Monday morning," in which he did his own damage control.

This was joined by an article from Melanie Arter attacking MSNBC host for noting Meadows' remarks (and referencing Jones' attempt at damage control):

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Monday compared the Trump administration’s approach to the coronavirus to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying during his re-election campaign that we’re not going to win WWII.

On MSNBC’s “Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” O’Donnell was referring to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadow’s comments over the weekend, saying that we’re not “we’re not going to control the pandemic. We’re going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.”

As CNSNews.com reported, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden twisted Meadows’ words, claiming that Meadows “went on television to admit to the country his administration wasn't even trying -- trying anymore to deal with the pandemic."

That's basically all CNS had on this. It seems even they didn't think it was all that defensible.

AAPS' Dubious Doc Shills For Trump And HCQ, Attacks Fauci
Topic: Newsmax

Dubious doctor Jane Orient of the fringe-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons spent her Oct. 28 Newsmax column touting President Trump's "America First Healthcare Plan" -- despite the fact that it's not an actual replacement for the Affordable Care Act and Trump hasn't really tried to implement it beyond a few executive orders -- and fearmongering about what she claims Joe Biden will do to healthcare.

Orient also gushed over how Trump "mentioned hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) favorably" as a treatment for coronavirus -- not a surprise, since we last saw her touting a fake study purporting to defend the efficacy of the drug --But she didn't mention that Trump apparently did not take HCQ during his recent bout with the virus.

Also unsurprisingly, Orient attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci for committing the sin of insisting on rigorous medical standards:

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been very negative about early COVID-19 treatment as "unproved," and Biden has declared Trump as being "totally irresponsible" for taking HCQ for a time until last May.

At age 80, Dr. Fauci himself may not be in his position much longer, but he exemplifies the mindset of federal bureaucracies.

He was in charge early in the AIDS epidemic. In 1987, when patients were dying of pneumocystis pneumonia, activists pleaded with Dr. Fauci to issue guidance that suggested prophylactic treatment with Bactrim, a safe sulfa drug, based on studies done in transplant patients in 1977.

Dr. Fauci refused, insisting on the "gold standard" of randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Since the National Institutes of Health refused to fund trials, activists raised the money themselves. By the time the results were ready, two years later, 17,000 patients had died needlessly. Since efforts to develop an HIV/AIDS vaccine have so far failed, the standard of care is now pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP and PEP).

In a 2020 re-play with COVID-19, Dr. Fauci disregards the experience of thousands of physicians who treat patients worldwide, demanding RCTs.

In referencing Fauci and AIDS, Orient is parroting an attack from Harvey Risch, a Yale professor turned HCQ obsessive. But Risch's advocacy has been discredited.