Topic: CNSNews.com
When former CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr -- who moved on to Breitbart -- died in mid-August, her former employer's first attempt at a tribute was to repost a 2010 article by her in which she "discovered that the National Portrait Gallery was hosting a Christmas-season exhibit that featured an ant-covered Jesus."
We remember that story well. As we documented at the time, it was a completely manufactured controversy from a reporter known for manufacturing controversies. By using right-wing buzzwords like "homoerotic" and "ant-covered Jesus," Starr was able -- with a little help from the outrage machine of CNS' parewnt, the Media Research Center -- to turn it into a culture-war issue. She also spammed Republican congressmen with emails hyping the story to draw responses from them demanding that the exhibite be censored and shut down. The controversy provided a platform for right-wingers like her boss, MRC chief Brent Bozell, to spew homophobia and engage in rants that stereotyped LGBT people, while omitting the fact that the person who manufactured the controversy was on his payroll.
Starr got a more formal obituary in an Aug. 15 article by Craig Bannister:
Veteran Investigative Reporter Penny Starr, who spent a decade with CNSNews.com exposing news that drove the national debate, died over the weekend, following a bout with cancer.
On Monday, Breitbart.com was the first to report of her death. She joined Breitbart in December of 2017, following ten years with the Media Research Center’s (MRC) CNSNews.com news division. When she joined CNSNews.com, she had more than 25 years of experience in print journalism.
Bannister rehashed the bogus art exhibit story, as well as some of her other alleged greatest hits, with added comments like these:
“Penny was a hard-working journalist and unabashed conservative. She wanted to make an impact with her reporting and the movement needs more like her,” former MRC colleague and current Fox News Digital freelance Opinion Editor Dan Gainor said Monday.
Translation: Starr was a highly biased reporter -- as we've also documented. In addition to manufacturing culture-war controversies, Starr used her "reporter" perch to push anti-abortion activism and narratives, such as attacking Planned Parenthood. She also used her so-called reporting to issue biased attacks on President Obama and LGBT people, among other things designed to advance right-wing narratives.In 2015, Starr whitewashed the homophobia and anti-abortion extremism of the sons of notorious anti-abortoin extremist Flip Benham to create a victim narrative for them after they lost a TV deal when their extremism was made public. She also served as a reliable shill for the oil industry.
Starr's use to the conservative movement was as a propagandist -- and, as such, she could never be considered a true "investigative reporter" since she only "investigated" things that advanced her ideology.She cared about reporting only certain truths, not anything that reflected badly on her fellow right-wingers.
