Cashill and Mirecki, Part 2 Topic: WorldNetDaily
Well, we were somewhat wrong. Jack Cashill remains on the case of Paul Mirecki, the University of Kansas professor attacked for intemperate remarks about religion by people with their own history of intemperate remarks. Of course, Cashill wouldn't be still on the case if he couldn't continue to attack Mirecki. Cashill is now accusing Mirecki of making up the story of being beaten by attackers.
Cashill has no actual evidence of this, of course; he merely blows up circumstantial evidence into something that looks substantial.
'Noted Author and Media Watchdog' Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 7 WorldNetDaily article attacking a decision by the Armed Forces Network to carry the first hour of Al Franken's radio show described the attacker, Alan Skorski, as a "noted author and media watchdog."
In fact, Skorski is barely the former and definitely not the latter. His claim to authorial fame is his WND-published smear attack on Franken, "Pants on Fire." As Media Matters (and ConWebWatch) noted, Skorski is a former wholesale candy and snack distributor and a failed candidate for Congress who withdrew from the race after fellow Republican candidate and former NewsMax columnist Dan Frisa challenged signatures on the petitions to place Skorski on the ballot.
Additionally, that description is a promotion from previous WND descriptions of Skorski; a Nov. 11 article, for example, described him as a "veteran political consultant."
Note to Skorski and WND: One smear book does not a "media watchdog" make.
And no, WND does not mention anywhere in this article that it published Skorski's book.
WND Misrepresents ElBaradei Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 5 WorldNetDaily article played up comments by International Atomic Energy Agency chairman Mohamed ElBaradei that Iran is only a few months away from creating a nuclear weapon without placing them in their full context, omitting key facts.
As Media Matters points out -- and WND doesn't -- ElBaradei's "a few months away" clock starts ticking only after Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz is operational; the IAEA has previously reported that it would take at least two years for the plant to be operational. Other intelligence estimates, meanwhile, peg Iran as being as much as a decade away from producing nuclear weapons.
The WND article also quotes author Jerome Corsi on the issue without disclosing within the article that WND published Corsi's book on Iran. (It does note the connection in a "special offer" at the end of the article.)
Kincaid's Clinton Obsession Topic: Accuracy in Media
When he's not obsessing over Rachel Maddow's lesbianism, Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid apparently obsesses over Bill Clinton's sex life. In the "Cliff's Notes" section of the Dec. 6 AIM Report, Kincaid is upset that a CBS Evening News segment on Clinton's healthier eating habits didn't change the subject to sex:
On November 18, the CBS Evening News ran a segment on "Eating With Bill Clinton," giving the disgraced former president an opportunity to appear on national TV as a good role model. Nothing, of course, was said about his sexual addiction or serial womanizing.
[...]
Like a school girl with a crush, correspondent Mika Brzezinski went on and on about Clinton's "personal journey" from eating bad food to eating right. If Clinton can persuade kids to eat right, that's great. But let's face it: his sexual appetite has been as serious a problem as what he eats. And it's in the sexual arena that he could really perform a public service. He should step forward and campaign against sexual diseases. Please send Ms. Brzezinski a postcard about this.
Will anyone send Kincaid a postcard about his dubious claims and conflict of interest regarding his AIM work on the Newsweek Koran story?
Cashill Strikes Again Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill -- he of the bogus seven-part defense of murderer James Kopp -- was WorldNetDaily's point man on one recent mini-scandal, a planned University of Kansas course debunking intelligent design.
In a Dec. 1 article, Cashill noted that the instructor of the proposed class, Paul Mirecki, wrote of fundamentalists that the class "will be a nice slap in their big fat face" because it would be categorized under "mythology" instead of "science." Cashill also took offense to comments disdainful of Catholics -- among them: "I don't think most Catholics really know what they are supposed to believe, they just go home and use condoms and some of them beat their wives and husbands" -- calling his comments "abuse." In a Dec. 2 follow-up article noting that the school had canceled the course after the uproar over Mirecki's remarks, Cashill cited the comments again as proof that Mirecki "valued the world's Roman Catholics even less" than fundamentalists.
Funny, we don't remember Cashill being similarly offended by similar, if not more offensive, comments made by his WND colleague Jerome Corsi:
-- "[B]oy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press."
-- "So this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the laywers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that's probably about it."
Cashill is also quiet about the background of the person who helped expose Mirecki's remarks, John Altevogt; Cashill describes him as merely a "conservative activist." As David Neiwert at Orcinus notes, Altevogt has engaged in his own share of inflammatory rhetoric; he refers to those who disagree with him as "nazis" and has derisively referred to Hillary Clinton as "Hitlary."
Orcinus also notes the postscript to this case: Mirecki required hospital treatment after reportedly being beaten by two men who referenced the controversy as they attacked him.
Will Cashill weigh in on this development? Don't count on it; we haven't heard a peep from him regarding James Kopp after his seven-part WND defense of Kopp as an innocent man was exposed as a fraud when, a couple months later, Kopp pleaded guilty to killing abortion doctor Barnett Slepian.
The Wall Topic: Newsmax
NewsMax gets it wrong once again in a Dec. 6 article on 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick noting that there is still a lack of information sharing between law enforcement and intelligence. "Gorelick made no mention of the fact that it was she herself who constructed the wall of separation - in a 1995 Justice Department directive that emphasized protecting the civil rights of terrorist suspects," NewsMax wrote.
As ConWebWatch has repeatedly detailed, Gorelick did not construct that "wall"; it was started in the late 1970s. And it was reaffirmed by the Bush administration in 2001 prior to 9/11. Somehow, NewsMax never reports that.
Going Out of Their Way Topic: CNSNews.com
In a Dec. 6 letter to the editor to CNSNews.com, a representative of the clothing company Mecca USA objected to a Nov. 21 CNS article by Marc Morano quoting "some U.S. military veterans" attacking the hip-hop clothing line for being sold on U.S. military bases because of its name. In an editor's note following the letter, CNS declared that "We respect her opinion, even if she did misspell Marc’s last name," then added: "CNSNews.com pursues news articles of interest to our audience and does not go out of its way to produce 'favorable' or 'unfavorable' stories about anyone or anything. We ask tough questions and cover issues that go unreported or under-reported by the establishment media."
Paul Begala might beg to differ with that assessment. But Morano sure seemed to be going out of his way to paint an unfavorable picture of Mecca USA. The article descends into a treatise of hip-hop culture and slang (odd since CNS is, near as we can tell, mostly a group of white Republican males working out of an office in trendy Old Town Alexandria), describing what he calls the "heavy Islamic influence dating back to at least the 1960s," playing up links between obscure rappers and radical Islam and sinisterly noting that "Cybercast News Service discovered that the hip-hop slang term for Brooklyn is Medina, the other holy city of Islam."
Critical Ex-Presidents Topic: CNSNews.com
A Dec. 5 CNSNews.com column by Alan Caruba bashes former presidents Clinton and Carter because they "refuse to get off the world stage, and ... do not restrain themselves from criticizing the current president." Caruba adds: "I have lived long enough to see a dozen presidents in office and I cannot recall any but these two behaving in this fashion."
Caruba, the head of something called the National Anxiety Center, must have been in the throes of a panic attack or something during the 1990s, because he missed out on the first President Bush's regular criticism of Clinton.
More at NewsBusters Topic: Media Research Center
Aside from the missing John Armor post -- which has been removed from the front page -- a couple other things of note at NewsBusters:
-- A Dec. 4 post by Noel Sheppard on the panel on "The Chris Matthews Show" calls it a "panel of left-leaning guests" despite the fact that it includes Andrew Sullivan.
-- A Dec. 3 post by Mark Finkelstein on a discussion on "Fox News Watch" noted "tiny" Neal Gabler's tweaking of Fox News for its so-called "war on Christmas" hype. Gabler said, "let's talk about the elephant in the room: Fox News. O'Reilly, Hannity and Gibson are demagogues and they know that they can rouse the masses around Christmas time." Finkelstein didn't take too kindly to that:
The "masses"? Gabler stopped just short of calling Fox's audience dumb and malleable, but his elitist implication was inescapable.
At first, we thought that Finkelstein thought Gabler was painting Fox News as elitists, which contradicts the conservative line on journalism, which holds that only liberals are "elitists." But we think it may be the more logical, conservatively correct approach, that Finkelstein thinks Gabler is an elitist for claiming that Fox News viewers are easily led and unable to think for themselves. This from a guy who likes to reference Gabler's height as a reason to disagree with him.
Nobel Nominees Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah and other WND writers are looking askance at the Nobel Peace Prize nominations made on behalf of Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the founder of the Crips street gang who faces execution for a triple murder more than 20 years ago.
Farah, in a Dec. 5 column, wrote that Williams was "inexplicably nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize" for "writing two books about kids and gangs that no one read!" Doug Powers wrote in a Nov. 28 column: "Suffice to say the nomination didn't come from the families of the people Williams is convicted of murdering or those who have had the crap beat out of them by Crips." And a Nov. 28 column by Michael Ackley uses the nomination to satirically attack the meanlessness of the nomination by nominating a nobody named Howard Bashford: "Henceforth, we expect any media mention of Howard will refer to him as 'Nobel Peace Prize nominee Howard Bashford.'"
But nobody at WND was bothered enough by the relative meaninglessness of a Nobel nomination to stop referring to Dr. William Hammesfahr, a Florida doctor who claimed he could rehabilitate Terri Schiavo, as a "Nobel Prize nominee. That descriptor accompanies WND news articles from March 8 and May 15, as well as appearing in columns by Mychal Massie and Kevin McCullough. It was also in WND writer Diana Lynne's "whole Terri Schiavo story" until it was removed after ConWebWatch called her on it.
NewsHounds notes that Fox News' Sean Hannity has done the same thing.
Forgetting the Present Topic: Media Research Center
We were going to take this Dec. 4 NewsBusters post by John Armor (aka Free Republic's Congressman Billybob) to task for falsely claiming that Jamie Gorelick, as a Clinton-era deputy attorney general, created the "wall" that kept intelligence and law enforcement authorities from sharing information. As we've detailed, the wall was created long before Gorelick wrote the memo purportedly "creating" it, and John Ashcroft's Justice Department renewed it in 2001. But between our original reading and our returning to it to formulate a response, the post has disappeared, though the comments to it have not. Strange.
New Article: The LoBaido Story Topic: WorldNetDaily
His infamous WorldNetDaily screed isn't the only reason we named a Slantie Award after correspondent Anthony LoBaido. Read more.
Fake News Topic: Newsmax
As its way of rebutting claims that the U.S. government paid millions of dollars to Iraqi media and journalists to place positive stories stories in the press, a Dec. 3 NewsMax article recounts a litany of "faked news reports" by the "mainstream media."
But something's missing from that list -- NewsMax's own ventures into fake news:
-- It falsely claimed that the Clintons were selling their Chappaqua, N.Y., house.
-- It falsely claimed that U2 was holding a fund-raiser for Sen. Rick Santorum, then denied making that claim.
Schiavo Demagogery Topic: WorldNetDaily
Diana Lynne descends into demagoguery on the Terri Schiavo case in a Dec. 3 WorldNetDaily commentary. She essentially attacks anyone who disagrees with her view of the Schiavo case (you know, the one that omits Michael Schiavo's side of the story) as "largely uninformed and misinformed," adding that this is something "which WND's continuing coverage seeks to correct." She also claims that "Those who favored Terri's death seek silence."
Yet Lynne has her own code of silence. She has never addressed (beyond our call for balanced and factual coverage at the height of the story) her own biased coverage of the Schiavo story, which conveniently omits anything exculpatory about Michael Schaivo and anything criticial about Terri Schiavo's parents and their supporters. And the article once again includes promotional copy that describes Lynne's book on the Schiavo case as "comprehensive," which, given the above-listed biases, it most definitely is not.
The Watchdog Whimpers Topic: WorldNetDaily
Several days late to the party, WorldNetDaily -- the self-proclaimed "watchdog exposing government waste, fraud, corruption and abuse of power" -- has finally acknowledged the corruption scandal around disgraced Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
After months of promoting Cunningham's work on behalf of saving a cross on public land, a Dec. 2 article brings the first original WND coverage of the defense-contracting scandal that brought Cunningham's resignation as a congressman. The article focuses on other members of Congress who have had financial connections with the defense contractor at the center of the Cunningham scandal.
Needless to say, WND doesn't mention its own links to two of the congresscritters on the dirty-money list, Richard Pombo and Katherine Harris. WND published Harris' (ghostwritten) book, and WND editor Joseph Farah co-wrote a book with Pombo.
