Topic: CNSNews.com
When the Media Research Center abruptly shut down CNSNews.com in April, it declared that CNS was being merged into its MRCTV hot-take website "to form a new conservative media platform, designed to deliver news and commentary on all of the top issues of the day." Well, that hasn't happened. MRCTV is still all about right-wing hot takes,; witness Brittany Hughes whining that buring a pride flag is onsidered a hate crime. CNS, however, is nothing but a blog -- to which the CNSNews.com domain now redirects -- featuring the biased rantings of Craig Bannister, the only CNS staffer apparently still with the MRC.
Interestingly, Bannister is pulling the same biased reporting tricks that a fully staffed CNS did -- apparently as a condition of funding it has received. A May 5 post fulfilled Susan Jones' old job of repoprting on the April's employment stats -- an unusually positive report without Jones' usual bias -- carries the tagline "The business and economic reporting of CNSNews.com is funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold." That article was joined, however, by another claiming that "The number of jobs created in each month of 2023 has been revised down in subsequent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, making the current month’s growth look better in comparison.." A June 2 Bannister post on May's unemployment numbers was back to the usual biased shenanigans, under the headline "Unemployment Rate Rose in May as Number of Employed Fell for First Time in 6 Months." Apparently, the Wold money mandates talking down positive economic news when a Democrat is president.
Bannister repeated one of CNS' biased reporting tricks -- cherry-picking statistics to make Democrats look bad -- in a May 4 post headlined "CEO Survey Ranks Texas #1 State for Business, California #50 - 9 of 10 Worst Have Dem Governors." That article also carried the Wold-money tagline.
Bannister did more cherry-picking -- this time to make a certain former Repubican president look good -- in a May 10 post:
In April, consumer prices for all items increased a seasonally-adjusted 0.4% from March and were 4.9% higher than they were a year earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Wednesday.
While the all-items Consumer Price Index (CPI) increase of 4.9% for the 12 months ending in April was the smallest year-over-year rise since the period ending April 2021, inflation thus far during the Biden Administration is still more than three times higher than it was under his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Bannister made no mention of the fact there was was a global pandemic that messed with the economy, and he censored the fact that inflation in the U.S. is lower than in most other major countries.
Bannister also continued his anti-ESG obsession:
- Biden Using ESG to Force People with Good Credit to Subsidize Those with Bad Credit – in the Name of ‘Equity’
- ‘ESG is DOA in Florida’: DeSantis Does for Fla. What Biden Blocked Congress from Doing for Everyone
- Most Americans Don’t Know What ESG Is and Have No Opinion About It – But, Would Rather Invest Purely for Profit
- ESG Advocacy Group Subpoenaed to Appear Before House Judiciary Cmte. Regarding Potential ‘Collusion,’ Antitrust Violations
The CNS blog is also continuing to be a whore to its parent, just as the "news" operation was. Bannister touted his boss in a June 12 post:
“Another Joe Biden middle finger to America,” Media Research Center (MRC) Founder and President Brent Bozell reacted Monday, retweeting a post by Pres. Biden declaring America an LGBTQ nation - and displaying a “Pride” flag - at the White House.
“Today, the People's House – your house – sends a clear message to the country and to the world. America is a nation of pride,” Biden tweeted, along with the flag photo looking out from the White House at the crowd at Saturday’s Pride celebration on the South Lawn.
As we documented, the MRC killed CNS just two months before its 25th anniversary terminating several longtime employees from an operation that used up 13 percent of thte MRC's budget -- and notoby cared (aside from us), not even the MRC, which refused to publicly acknowledge its shutdown despite being so close to a significant anniversary. It's also notable that deprecating an entire"news" operation to a one-person blog didn't significantly change the tone of what came out under the CNS nameplate. If nobody cared about CNS as a "news" operation, why does the MRC apprently believe people will care now that it's been reduced to an opinion blog on a different website that's dedicated to right-wing hot takes?
