WND's Geller Upset Anti-Muslim Activist Was Quoted Accurately Topic: WorldNetDaily
Pamela Geller writes in her Feb. 14 WorldNetDaily column:
Islamic supremacists and their quisling apologists in the leftist media immediately tried to twist the meaning of remarks by one of our speakers, James Lafferty. They accused Lafferty, founder and chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force, of applauding the destruction of mosques. Lafferty set the record straight in a statement he sent me: “I do not condone or encourage any criminal act or vandalism against any mosque. I am a firm believer in the rule of law and the protections our Constitution provides for the free exercise of religion – and that means all religions.”
Geller curiously omits what Lafferty actually said, as Right Wing Watch notes:
Last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force spoke at Pamela Geller’s panel opposing the construction of mosques and the supposed threat of sharia law in the U.S. and bragged that while attending a hate crimes summit convened by the Department of Justice he watched “pictures of some mosque somewhere, and it was usually in the South I’m proud to say where a guy would drive a pickup truck right into the mosque.”
In other words, there was no twisting of Lafferty's words -- he was quoted accurately, and that's something Geller apparently can't deal with.
MRC: Contraception Poll 'Slanted' Because It Wasn't Slanted to the Right Topic: NewsBusters
In a Feb. 15 NewsBusters post, the Media Research Center's Matthew Balan claims that a CBS/New York Times poll finding that 61% of Catholics approve President Obama's contraception policy is "slanted." Why?
The left-leaning outlets' poll question, however, completely glossed over the religious liberty component to the controversy over the policy, asking only, "What about for religiously-affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university? Do you support or oppose a recent federal requirement that their health insurance plans cover the full cost of birth control for their female employees?"
Reframing the contraception issue as a religious liberty issue is a right-wing talking point that the MRC has aggressively embraced.
In other words, Balan's real complaint is not that the poll was slanted, but that it didn't slant to the right.
Newsmax Columnist Fawns Over Gingrich's PAC Funder Topic: Newsmax
Since there's a little lull right now between presidential primaries, Newsmax has been a little light on Gingrich-fluffing. Doug Wead has apparently decided to try and rectify that with his Feb. 15 column, which is devoted to serving up a ridiculous amount of praise to the billionaire who's funding Gingrich's super PAC, Sheldon Adelson:
Adelson's support of Gingrich is as American as a hot dog and as Italian as his luxurious Venetian hotel and resort. It is American to support the candidate you believe in and it is Italian to put your money where your heart is.
The billionaire's large donations to Newt Gingrich bring to mind the strategies of Nicolo Machiavelli, the 15th century Italian political genius.
At first glance Adelson's moves seem risky, after all, Mitt Romney is the official front-runner. But the casino mogul obviously knows the odds are in his favor.
Machiavelli taught that in a transition, when there are multiple rivals to the throne, one should quickly commit to one of the claimants. Actually, any one of them will do. And commit fully. If your candidate becomes king he will bring you to his bosom.
Wead's enthusiasm for Adelson is a bit surprising given his devotion to Ron Paul, which he even admits here:
As a committed supporter of Ron Paul, I admit that we have had some big donors to our Super PACs as well. I have read about them in the press.
But Ron Paul is running to diminish power not to take it, which attracts a different type of donor altogether.
My guess is that this whole Super PAC business will be shut down next time and there will be no more Sheldon Adelsons. He is seizing the moment as it appears and whatever happens he is a winner.
How else could someone become an overnight player in this trillion-dollar world power game?
And how else could someone do so with such a small investment? Can you really be at the right hand of the president of the United States for a few million? Others will spend a lifetime and commit tens of millions and not even be granted the title Mr. Ambassador, let alone "First Friend."
This sort of Kessler-esque fawning will have to do at Newsmax for now.
MRC's Graham Edits Out O'Reilly Being Unaware of MRC's Existence Topic: Media Research Center
In a Feb. 14 NewsBusters post, Tim Graham approvingly cites how, on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," Bernard Goldberg describes the Media Research Center as doing "God's work when it comes to exposing liberal media bias."This came during a segment attacking Media Matters (disclosure: my employer).
Before Goldberg said that, however, host Bill O'Reilly said this: "But now it seems like you have a Media Matters, and I don't know if there's a corresponding organization on the right. I don't believe there is. All right, who are basically spinning stuff out to the Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times."
O'Reilly doesn't know that the MRC exists? That's brutal.
Of course, O'Reilly may be playing dumb. The MRC spins stuff out to Fox News all the time -- remember, Brent Bozell appears every week on Sean Hannity's show, where there is no guest to counter his spin. And when former Fox anchor Brit Hume accepted the MRC's William F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence, he expressed his gratitude for "the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report. I don't know what we would have done without them. It was a daily, sort of a buffet of material to work from, and we - we -- we certainly made tremendous use of it."
Why, it's as if the MRC is writing the scripts for Fox.
Nevertheless, Graham also decided to play dumb by pretending that the MRC is nice and honorable compared to those meanies at Media Matters: "Because liberal outlets dominate the media, there is no way that the MRC could demand the shutdown of a single network like the left-wing pressure groups do."
This is coming from the same guy whose boss called President Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead." (The MRC has yet to ackowledge that Bozell did that.) And the same guy who "declared war on the liberal media." So, yeah, that argument won't fly.
Noel Sheppard: "Sober People Don't Need Birth Control" (It's A Joke!) Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard writes in a Feb. 16 tweet: "If contraceptives R 2 B covered by health insurance shouldn't alcohol since sober people don't need birth control?"
This is immediately followed by tweetsinsisting that he was joking:
"It's called a joke, dude. Go rent a sense of humor."
"You're into comic books and you can't tell a joke when you see one? Now THAT's entertainment!"
Sheppard has yet to explain where exactly the humor is in his "joke," espeically on a day when prominent right-wing financier Foster Friess was apparently not joking when he insisted that a little aspirin between your knees was an effective contraceptive.
WND's Kinsolving Has Earned the Contempt He Receives Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's Les Kinsolving has another whining fit about White House press secretary Jay Carney being mean to him by not taking another of his stupid questions:
White House press secretary Jay Carney was described as “rude” when he dismissed without consideration a couple of questions from Les Kinsolving, WND’s correspondent at the White House, during the daily news briefing today.
Kinsolving had prepared to ask a question or two about the court ruling in New York that lets school officials discriminate against churches by renting facilities to any other group.
Kinsolving, however, didn’t even get the question out, as Carney, apparently referencing a previous question from Kinsolving about a formal Senate vote, warned him to “keep it clean.”
[...]
Kinsolving told WND that he’s never experienced such treatment from a press secretary in the White House. As the reporter who is the second-most senior on the White House beat, Kinsolving has worked with some 16 or 17 different press secretaries since the 1970s when he began attending the White House briefings.
“I’ve never before seen behavior by a White House press secretary like this,” he said. “I’ve never before been denied the opportunity to ask questions by any of the other press secretaries I’ve covered.”
The headline on this article is "See White House Contempt for WND Correspondent." But there's no mention of the contempt WND and Kinsolving has for the Obama White House.
WND is so amoral that it publishes liesandsmears about Obama and his administration with impunity and violates journalistic ethics on a regularbasis. Kinsolving, meanwhile, is a right-winghack, and a raging homophobe to boot, who whines every time his biased shenanigans are pushed back against.
If there is "contempt" against Kinsolving and WND, it is because they have behaved in a contemptuous manner. They have not earned the right to be taken seriously as journalists.
MRC Frets Over Comic Book Character Having An Abortion Topic: Media Research Center
In 2010, the Media Research Center railed against a characterization of Superman it didn't like. Now, the MRC has found another comic-book plot it disapproves of.
In a Feb. 13 MRC Culture & Media Institute post, Paul Wilson asserts that the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" comic book is "promoting abortion" because the title character decides to have one. Wilson reads the fictional character's mind: "In other words, for Buffy, abortion is a convenient way of cleaning up a mess, created by a lack of self-control."
Wilson then states: "But by publishing a comic where a woman gets an abortion, the creator of the comic has effectively taken the side of abortion." That's a pure Depiction-Equals-Approval Fallacy.
Wilson goes on to rant about how "Buffy’s abortion decision is merely the latest in a recent spate of pro-abortion propaganda in the entertainment industry":
Grey’s Anatomy, which is produced by a Shonda Rhimes, board member of the Los Angeles Planned Parenthood, inserted a pro-abortion message into a September 2011 episode, by positively depicting one of the doctors killing her baby. Private Practice, also produced by Rhimes, was even more overt in supporting abortion in a May 2011 episode, featuring a “pro-life” doctor who admitted to an abortion doctor who had just performed a partial-birth abortion that “you helped that woman.” Friday Night Lights also featured a pro-abortion message in a July 2010 episode, with the moral counselor of the show counseling a young woman to "think about her life, think about what's important to her and what she wants."
Such knee-jerk attacks -- and dismissal of any portrayal of abortion in the media that isn't negative as "pro-abortion" -- are exactly what "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon was trying to counter with his storyline. From a USA Today article:
Whedon points out that Friday Night Lights is one show that recently tackled abortion with the proper respect. And he concedes there's a little bit of a political jab in the Buffy story line. It's not that women should be on one side or the other, he says, but that people have to make this decision and talk about it.
"It offends me that people who purport to be discussing a decision that is as crucial and painful as any a young woman has to make won't even say something that they think is going to make some people angry."
[...]
"I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges," he says. "But because I don't, when I do it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life."
Wilson is apparently not interested in dealing with real life -- He's rather just mindlessly spout right-wing talking points.
In Argentina during the late 1940s, fascist ruler Juan Peron's wife Evita had a cunning way to win political support.
She would go on the radio and shower listeners with gifts, but not at her or the government's expense. Evita would announce that Pedro's Hardware Store had agreed to give free washing machines to the first 50 workers who asked for them.
The storeowner had made no such agreement, nor was even consulted. But when a mob of "shirtless" Peronistas arrived demanding the free goodies Evita promised, most owners were too frightened to call the first lady a liar or risk having their store ransacked, torched, or targeted for political retaliation by refusing.
Last Friday President Barack Obama offered the Roman Catholic Church what he called an "accommodation . . . not a compromise" on Obamacare's requirement that all employer health insurance must provide female workers with free birth control and abortion-inducing drugs.
[...]
President Obama, in what his spokespeople call "balancing" the (constitutional) right to practice one’s religion with the (non-constitutional) "right" of women to receive free anti-reproductive medication, offered a very Evita-like accommodation.
Tim Graham Anti-Gay Freakout Watch Topic: Media Research Center
It's been, what, a few days since Media Research Center director of media analysis Tim Graham's last anti-gay freakout? So we were due for another one.
This time, Graham's anti-gay ire du jour is directed at Google for inculding a same-sex couple in its Valentine's Day doodle, and at the Washington Post for reporting it. Oddly, Graham seemed to be more offended by the same-sex couple illustration than he was of the doodles of interspecies love. Still, he sneered: "Gay advocates would likely claim that the cartoon before the end is awfully 'heteronormative.' Perhaps they'll complain that they don't like to be compared to love between an astronaut and a space alien."
The Post drew further ire from Graham because "below a photo of Shirley and Arthur Siden on their 70th wedding anniversary, is a photo of a carving in a tree in Rock Creek park saying 'TED N DARYL,'" as well as "a photo of two black men embracing."
WND's Corsi Claims Investment Firm Fired Him Over Story He Wrote Topic: WorldNetDaily
Over the past few days, WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi has been taking a break from birther conspiracy theories and kissing up to Joe Arpaio to peddle a claim from a former employee of the bank HSBC that the company took part in "an international money-laundering scheme." Corsi thought so much of thisstory that he appeared on Alex Jones' video webcast to promote it.
Now, according to a Feb. 14 WND article, Corsi is claiming that Gilford Securities, "a Manhattan investment firm that serves institutional and retail clients" where Corsi worked as a "senior managing director," has fired him over the HSBC story. Corsi, of course, is quick to blame the victim, and he offers no actual evidence that his dismissal is retaliation for the HSBC story:
Corsi said Gilford notified him Monday that it would file a U-5 form with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, to deregister him from the firm due to “corporate reorganization.”
Gilford Securities declined comment to WND.
Corsi said the firm is responding to his series of reports on the charges of former HSBC manager John Cruz. The whistleblower has provided WND with 1,000 pages of customer account records he claims are evidence of an international money-laundering scheme by HSBC, which reportedly is under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee.
“I was completely blindsided by the reaction of the firm to the HSBC stories,” Corsi said. “I thought Gilford would be proud that a member of the firm had sufficient courage to do the right thing – make public and report suspected money laundering activity when first hearing about or learning about credible allegations, regardless what firm the allegations involved.”
Corsi noted that he never made any accusations about Gilford and was not investigating anything related to the firm.
“I pointed out to Gilford that firing me could create a chilling atmosphere where others in the firm might think twice before reporting suspicions of money laundering,” he said.
We have no idea about the veracity of the HSBC story. We do, however, know about the veracity of Corsi, and that alone is enough to raise red flags about it.
Corsi has spent the past couple of years peddling his birther conspriacies, suppressing inconvenientfacts in the process. Most recently, he has been cranking out hagiographic stories about Joe Arpaio in the apparent hope that his "cold case posse" will return a pro-birther result. Both of these are egregious journalistic violations.
This raises another question: Why was Corsi so poorly compensated as a WND "senior staff writer" that he had to get a second job? Is Joseph Farah really that cheap?And it's not like that Gilford appeared all that happy to be employing him; much of his WND work while employed at Gilford required a disclaimer that "The views, opinions, positions or strategies expressed by the author are his alone and do not necessarily reflect Gilford Securities Incorporated's views, opinions, positions or strategies."
Given that Corsi seemed to be spending a lot of his time running aroundthe country peddling birther nonsense, when did he have time to do his job at Gilford?
Corsi and WND seem to have ignored, deliberately or otherwise, the possibility that Gilford got tired of having to associate itself with a nutjob like Corsi.
Both Corsi and WND have a track record that tells us we should not take this story at face value. Or anything that comes from them, really.
MRC Still Complaining That Reporting on CPAC Uses the Word 'Conservative' Topic: Media Research Center
Remember last weekend, when the MRC's Clay Waters was upset that the New York Times labeled a conservative gathering as a conservative and the conservatives who attended it conservative as well? He's still whining about it.
New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny reported Saturday from Mitt Romney’s speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C., “Romney’s Record as Governor Resumes Central Role in Nomination Fight,” and noted that Mitt Romney used the “conservative” label “at least 25 times during a 25-minute speech.” Funny Zeleny should mention that, considering a Friday Times report from CPAC contains 23 instances of the word “conservative” in a 28-paragraph story, making it as popular a word choice as the conjunction “and.”
Zeleny's Saturday dispatch was only slightly less label-happy, using the word 12 times, not counting quoted material or the name of the conference itself. (Is the name Conservative Political Action Conference not a sufficient giveaway?)
AIM's Irvine Pretends Cliff Kincaid Doesn't Work For Him Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media chairman Don Irvine uses a Feb. 12 blog post to promote Cliff Kincaid's campaign to return Glenn Beck to Fox News. Irvine describes Kincaid only as a "veteran journalist," adding, "In an interview at CPAC this weekend Kincaid told me of his concerns that Beck, who left Fox News last year and is now airing his own programming on the Internet on his subscriber based GBTV, was a victim of left-wing, George Soros-funded efforts to pressure Fox to part company with Beck."
Weirdly, Irvine fails to mention that Kincaid also works for AIM -- in fact, he's listed only behind Irvine on the AIM website's list of employees, where it's noted that he joined AIM in 1978.
Why would Irvine deny the obvious? We have no idea.
WND's Lamb Repeats Pipeline Jobs Myth Topic: WorldNetDaily
Henry Lamb writes in a Feb. 10 WorldNetDaily attack on President Obama:
His adoring press amplified Obama’s criticism of the Republican-controlled House for not approving his jobs bill, which included a healthy tax increase. “We can’t wait,” was his cry to the public. He failed to mention that the Republican House had passed more than 20 jobs bills that the Democrat-controlled Senate refused even to consider. He failed to mention that more than 20,000 jobs were left awaiting only his approval on the Keystone Pipeline project — studied for more than three years by the EPA.
The idea that the Keystone XL pipeline would create "more than 20,000 jobs" has been roundly discredited. Those inflated numbers came from the pipelines builder; in fact, pipeline construction would create, at most, 6,000 jobs, and it would create a mere 50 permanent jobs.
NEW ARTICLE: (Don't) Tell the Truth! Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's latest anti-"liberal media" campaign encourages truth-telling -- except when it comes to the scandals of conservative candidates like Newt Gingrich, in which case it wants the media to shut up. Read more >>
CNS Runs 8-Month-Old AP Story As New Topic: CNSNews.com
On Feb. 13, CNSNews.com published an Associated Press article stating that "French lawmakers on Tuesday rejected a bill presented by the opposition Socialist Party seeking to legalize same-sex marriage, despite growing public support for gay rights."
Just one problem: That article came out eight months ago.
Note the change CNS made to the headline, putting "marriage" in scare quotes. It's unlikely that AP sent out the story that way, since the ABC version of the article has no such scare quotes. It's just another example of CNS adding right-wing bias to AP stories.
Over the past few days, WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi has been taking a break from birther conspiracy theories and 
