Topic: CNSNews.com
As the midterm elections approached, CNSNews.com endeavored to be a Repuiblian Party mouthpiece by giving Republican politicians and partisans a platform to peddle partisan talking points unencumbered by such inconvenient things like balance or fact-checking. For example:
- Sen. Kennedy: 'Vote!...If Dead People Can Do It, So Can You!' (Susan Jones claimed Kennedy said this "in his inimitable folksy way")
- Sen. Kennedy: Blame ‘the Gene Pool’ of Biden’s Advisors for the Last ’20 Months of Misery’
- Rep. Waltz: If Republicans Take the House, 'We Will Have a Select Committee on China'
- Arizona Republican Kari Lake Touts Her 'Common-Sense Policies'
- Sen. Cruz: Hard-Core Partisans in FBI, DOJ ‘View Themselves as Jackbooted Thugs for the DNC’
- Sen. Rubio Outlines 3 Ways GOP 'Can Immediately Begin' to Move the Country 'in the Right Direction'
- Levin: ‘If You Want to Destroy America, Then You Vote Democrat’
- Rubio: The Democratic Party Is Controlled by Two Groups: ‘Laptop Liberals and Marxist Misfits’
- DeSantis: If Abrams Becomes Governor of Georgia, ‘People Wouldn’t Want to Deal with It’ and Flee to Florida
- Kellyanne Conway: ‘I’m a Republican in Part Because It’s a Party That Talks to Me from the Waist Up’
- McCarthy: Democrats Trying to Divide America to Distract from Disasters They Created
CNS even tried to clean up and spin away after Republican foibles, like in this Nov. 2 article by Jones:
President Biden and his fellow Democrats claim that Sen. Rick Scott -- and by extension, the entire Republican Party -- want to cut or end the Social Security and Medicare programs.
Biden said it on Tuesday while campaigning in Florida: "You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life. You earned it. Now these guys want to take it away. Who in the hell do they think they are? Excuse my language," the president said.
"I think the heat of South Florida's gotten to the guy, all right?" Sen. Scott told "Mornings With Maria" on Wednesday.
[...]
Biden on Tuesday pointed to the plan floated by Scott -- not by the Republican Party.
Scott has proposed the following: "All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again." And: "Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt."
Biden told his audience, correctly, that under Rick Scott's plan, "every five years, the Congress will have to vote to reauthorize Social Security — reauthorize it or else it goes away. Would have to vote to reauthorize Medicare, reauthorize veterans benefits, and I go down the list."
But Biden then translated "reauthorizing" as "cutting."
[...]
Asked if it was a mistake to float a plan that lends itself to misrepresentation by Democrats, Sen. Scott said Democrats "do the same thing" every election cycle:
"They say Republicans are going to cut Medicare and Social Security. They do it whether you put out a plan or not. I do believe that when you run for office you ought to tell people what you're going to do. I'm a business guy. I went and raised money when I was running businesses. Nobody gave me money and said I don't know how I'm going to spend it, just give me the money.
"If you want somebody's vote you should tell them exactly what you're going to do do... We ought to be very specific, how are we going to preserve Medicare; how are we going to preserve Social Security. We have to talk about it. Because what's happening right now, it's going away and nobody wants to talk about it."
As election day neared, CNS was eager to peddle Republican talking points on "election integrity" straight from the source (and, of course, without fact-checking or added commentary). A Nov. 7 article by Jones cheered how RNC chair Ronna McDaniel refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether Republicans would follow in Donald Trump's footsteps and scream "election fraud!" in every election Republicans lose:
Dana Bash, host of CNN's "State of the Union," asked Republican Party Chairwoman Rona McDaniel on Sunday for a "simple yes or no" answer -- "Should Republican candidates, Ron Johnson, all of them, accept the election results?"
McDaniel took the question and ran with it, concluding that Democrats talk a lot about "election deniers," but Democrats themselves are "crime deniers, inflation deniers and education deniers."
The exchange left Bash flustered, as McDaniel turned the "denier" label on Democrats. You can watch the entire exchange in the video below, complete with crosstalk, but here are the highlights.
In response to Bash's question, should Republicans accept the election results, McDaniel replied:
"Well, I would say the same to Stacey Abrams, right, or Hillary Clinton, who's already saying, in 2024, we are going to rig the election. That's not helpful.
"Listen, you should have a recount. You should have a canvass. And it'll go to the courts, and then everybody should accept the results. That's what it should be.
"But I'm also not going to say, if there's problems, that we shouldn't be able to address that. If there's real problems, everyone should be able to address that. And I think Ron Johnson and Stacey Abrams, in the end, once all their avenues are exhausted, right, they will -- they will accept the results."
Jones failed to point out that McDaniel refused to give a straight yes-or-no answer to a simple question.
Another article that day, by Melanie Arter, uncritically let McDaniel spin away reports of right-wing activists intimidating voters by keeping occasionally armed watch on drop boxes by declaring that "nobody should be intimidating or breaking the law. Nobody should, but poll watching is not intimidating. ...This isn't happening from the RNC." A Nov. 8 article by Craig Bannister, however, cheered McDaniel touting how Republicans have lawyered up to fight election results they don't like:
“We’re going to make sure it’s fair,” Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel reassured Americans Tuesday as they went out to vote in this year’s midterm elections.
“Everybody needs to be calm,” because Republicans are hard at work throughout the country to ensure voter integrity, McDaniel promised in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” conducted in a Pennsylvania diner:
"We have poll watchers everywhere. We have 100% coverage. And in Pennsylvania, we have poll workers. We have lawyers everywhere and we're going to make sure, if we see anything wrong, we're going to protect everybody's vote, and we're going to make sure it's fair.”
“But some of these states have wacky laws, and we're just going to have to deal with it and be patient. It may take some time," McDaniel cautioned.
Bannister also uncritically hyped that, in his words, "Democrats are to blame for delays in vote-counting and the erosion of trust in the integrity of the country’s elections."
