ConWebBlog: The Weblog of ConWebWatch

your New Media watchdog

ConWebWatch: home | archive/search | about | primer | shop

Monday, February 24, 2014
At NewsBusters, Discriminating Against Gays Is 'Religious Freedom'
Topic: NewsBusters

The boys at NewsBusters sure have a funny definition of freedom -- it involves denying others freedom. They'll support the proposed Arizona bill that would allow businesses to discriminate against gay people.

Ken Shepherd rants in a Feb. 21 post that it's inaccurate to portray the law as Jim Crow-style discrimination because Jim Crow was forced and this is merely voluntary:

The Daily Beast is at it again, portraying attempts by state legislators to protect religious freedom in the workplace as enshring "discrimination" at best and mimicking "Jim Crow" at worst.

[...]

 And lastly, comparisons to Jim Crow are needlessly inflammatory and insulting to real victims of Jim Crow repression and violence. What's more, Jim Crow laws FORCED businesses -- and in some cases religious institutions -- to discriminate against patrons -- or, in the case of churches, worshiper -- whether or not the business owner wanted to discriminate or not.

In the Jim Crow South, a free market remedy to discrimination was impossible thanks to government requiring all business owners of all races to discriminate and/or segregate in some manner. By contrast, laws being considered in Kansas and Arizona would leave plenty of room for competitors to open their doors wides to all comers and pick up the business both of gay persons and straight individuals who would rather not patronize a business which refuses to work with gays and lesbians.

Again, there's a reasonable debate to be had about whether such a free-market remedy is "enough" to address the real or perceived injustice of the matter, but the fact remains that Jim Crow FORCED discrimination whereas laws being considered in statehouses in 2014 are about allowing business owners to make business decisions which obviously threaten their bottom line while adhering to their religious scruples.

You gotta love how Shepherd frames anti-gay discrimination as a "free-market remedy."

In a Feb. 23 post, Jeffrey Meyer criticized network newscasts for allegedly framing their stories on the proposed law "against the religious freedom argument," adding, "ABC and NBC seem perfectly content arguing on behalf of the bill’s opponents and jumped on the left’s “outrage” and “controversial” nature of the bill rather than adequately include the religious freedom side of the debate."

In a Feb. 24 post, Paul Bremmer also called the bill a "religious freedom bill" and got huffy because somebody on MSNBC called it discrimination when a real conservative "would have argued for the need to protect freedom of conscience for business owners with certain religious beliefs, even if, perhaps, questioning whether this law was the best mechanism for doing so."

Bremmer then took umbrage at MSNBC cutting away from that discussion to a Q&A with Michael Sam, a prospective NFL player who recently came out as gay: "It was another sign of an obsession with homosexuality from a network that doesn’t usually cover sports, much less the NFL combine."

 


Posted by Terry K. at 10:04 PM EST
WND's Flaherty Falsely Attacks Google's Motive For Not Supporting His Race-Baiting
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Colin Flaherty gets his facts wrong at the very beginning of his Feb. 19 WorldNetDaily column:

Google doesn’t like stories about black mob violence. So it recently decided to stop sending its ads to accompany the WND stories about this largely secretive topic.

Actually, Google has determined what Flaherty refused to admit: His obssesion with "black mobs" has a lot more to do with race than it does with concern about crime, and it doesn't want to be involved in such a race-baiting endeavor.

Then, as if to prove how race-obsessed he is, Flaherty offers "a few suggestions to help Google in its quest for racial cleansing":

First, Google should block the results for anyone who enters the term “black mob violence” into its ubiquitous search engine.

There are lots of other phrases to block too: I use them in Google News Alerts to get a heads up on new episodes of racial mayhem.

Here’s a partial list of the phrases I follow like bread crumbs: Unruly teens, rambunctious teenagers, roving bands of youth, random attack, assault with no pattern, violence for no reason, large groups of people fighting, mob violence, bash mob, flash mob, black beach week, black expo, caught on camera, critical race theory, looting, Memorial Day assault, fireworks fight, teen violence, white privilege, and many, many more.

But by far, the most reliable indicator of racial violence comes from Google News Alerts about any story containing the phrase “large fight.”

Better block it.

There’s a lot of racial violence out there. So Google has a lot of work to do. I don’t like its chances.

There are too many videos, too many witnesses, too many victims, too many stories, too many people tired of being prisoner to this untruth to allow the epidemic of black mob violence to stay a secret any more.

Whether Google likes it. Or not.

Never mind that Flaherty has never proven an "epidemic of black mob violence" beyond his cherry-picked anecdotes taken out of context of the entirety of crime in the U.S. And never mind that Flaherty, not Google, is the one who's very concerned about "racial cleansing."

Flaherty is not the only WND writer to opine on the Google-WND battle, despite the fact that it has been solved by WND capitulating to Google and, in essence, admitting the race-baiting nature of Flaherty's reporting. A Feb. 21column by Willie Shields takes the same approach of falsely portraying Google's objections to Flaherty's race-baiting:

The smartest people in the world work at Google.

So if Google had a problem with the way WND and Colin Flaherty write about black mob violence, it should have taken one of its brainiacs about half a second to show they are wrong.

But they can’t. Because WND and Flaherty are not.

Instead Google is trying to inhibit these stories from being published by banning Google ads from them.

Nothing is keeping WND from publishing Flaherty's race-baiting -- Google has chosen not to be a part of it, and as we've noted, there are plenty of other ad delivery services that don't have a problem with race-baiting.

Shields is described as "a writer and radio talk show host in Wilmington, Del." Unmentioned by WND: Shields has been a guest on Flaherty's radio show, and Flaherty has cited Shields in a column at the right-wing American Thinker. So he's hardly an impartial observer.


Posted by Terry K. at 7:04 PM EST
MRC Still Half-Assedly Giving Graham Credit For Bozell's Columns
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center still can't get proper credit for Tim Graham right.

Since Graham was revealed as the ghostwriter of the syndicated columns of his boss, Brent Bozell, the MRC has been struggling to get its act together to properly credit Graham for his work. It still can't.

Bozell's Feb. 21 column gets a Graham credit at NewsBusters but not at CNSNews.com. At the main MRC website, Bozell's Feb. 18 column gets a Graham credit, but the slot it occupies on the website is still designated ror "Brent Bozell Columns," and earlier columns have not gotten a Graham credit.

It's not that difficult, guys. Why are you continuing to screw Graham out of his proper due?


Posted by Terry K. at 5:04 PM EST
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Supersize WorldNetDaily Edition
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Barack Obama is killing off freedom and liberty by signing one executive order after another without congressional approval. He routinely bypasses Congress and takes matters into his own collectivist hands, targeting our constitutional rights like a sniper targets its victim. Liberty and freedom is in Obama’s cross-hairs, and with the end of his second term approaching, he’s taking as much of our lawful privileges with him as possible, notwithstanding tightening his noose around our necks even more through unconstitutional actions and stifling regulations.

Last I checked, America is a free society and the rule of law aptly applies.

-- Selena Owens, Feb. 11 WorldNetDaily column

Because simply recovering from surgery that involved my hand, wrist and thumb, didn’t strike me as being all that challenging, I decided to add a case of the flu. And because even that didn’t seem to be daunting enough, I decided to throw caution to the wind and watch Obama’s State of the Union Address. Predictably, that just about did me in.

-- Burt Prelutsky, Feb. 11 WND column

Much has been made of the supposed technology savvy of our Imperious Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, the man who famously refused to give up his beloved BlackBerry – effectively introducing an additional security liability to the office of president of the United States and necessitating the creation of a specially secured phone for His Majesty. At the time, Obama’s devotion to technology was cause for his media sycophants to laud his modernity. “Look, how adorable,” the pundits reported. “He’s so much less old-fashioned than the unhip white men who came before him.”

[...]

The constant social media reminders of the Obama’s superiority to you little people, Obama’s incessant hectoring in all media outlets whenever he wishes to harangue the American people into complying with his whims, the president’s blithe pronouncements online and in every media outlet that he will act without Congress and that he can do whatever he wants – these technologically pervasive cultural messages have a unified purpose. They exist to beat Americans into compliance with the notion that liberal opinion must never be questioned, and that to do so is to engage in marginal politics outside the “mainstream.” The never-ending onslaught of progressive brainwashing in almost all news and popular entertainment inoculates dictators like Glorious Leader Obama from the consequences for their tyranny.

That is why all major news outlets ignore Obama’s abuses of power. That is why they treat his many arrogant declarations as “jokes” or even “gaffes.” That is why the smoking gun in the IRS political-targeting scandal has not been front-page, prime-time news day after day since news of these impeachable offenses first came to light. Obama does whatever he wants – and nobody cares, because our televisions and our computers are forever telling us not to.

-- Phil Elmore, Feb. 12 WND column

So intertwined is the socialist progressivism and evolution atheism of Obama with the neo-Leninism and Machiavellianism of Alinsky that it is impossible to separate the two either in theory and practice or in public policy and law, so much so that when Obama looks into a mirror the only reflection he sees is that of the nihilist radical Saul Alinsky.

-- Ellis Washington, Feb. 14 WND column

The case for impeaching and removing President Obama grows stronger each week, as the president continues to violate the constitutional limits on his executive powers. His latest move in delaying the enforcement of yet another part of Obamacare should be article 20 in a bill of indictable offenses against the Constitution.

-- Tom Tancredo, Feb. 14 WND column

To this day, like-minded people keep sending me emails questioning Obama’s religion and his birthplace. Inasmuch as I have already declared that the only portion of the Constitution to which I object is its prohibition of the foreign-born to be president, I personally don’t really care about his background. Knowing he was a product of Chicago politics was more than enough for me. If the worst thing about Obama is that he’s an Arab, a Muslim or was born in Kenya, we’d all be a lot better off. Better an ex-Kenyan than an ex-community organizer. After all, nobody questions the religion or birthplace of Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Maxine Waters or Dick Durbin. The problem with them and with Obama is that they are devout left-wingers, which makes them all fascists at heart.

-- Burt Prelutsky, Feb. 18 WND column

I’ve also detailed the similarities between the respective political rises to power of Barack Obama and Mohamed Morsi. This becomes particularly chilling when one considers the damage that continues to be done in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood since Morsi was driven from office. Considering the laxity of our federal law enforcement with regard to Islamists within our borders, the insinuation of Muslim Brotherhood operatives into our government and the known presence of foreign jihadis in America, could it be that the president has clandestinely created jihadi cells across country in order to “have his back” in the event that a move is made to remove him?

-- Erik Rush, Feb. 19 WND column


Posted by Terry K. at 1:08 AM EST
Sunday, February 23, 2014
MRC Equivocates Away Ted Nugent's Attack on Obama
Topic: Media Research Center

As we learned with Rush Limbaugh, if the Media Research Center ever concedes that something a prominent conservative says is offensive, it will do so only invoking supposedly similar statements by liberals.

And so it goes with Ted Nugent's sliming of President Obama as a "subhuman mongrel." 

In a Feb. 18 NewsBusters post, Matt Hadro happily parroted Newt Gingrich's claim of "selective outrage" over Nugent, citing Bill Maher as an example. Yet Hadro is engaging in his own selective outrage since neither he nor any other MRC employee could be moved to mention Nugent's sliming of Obama before this.

Tim Graham made his equivocation clear in a Feb. 19 Newsbusters post: "NY Times Devotes Story to Texas Candidate Embracing Ted Nugent, Barely Noticed Obama Embracing Spike Lee." Graham has to go back to 2005 to find something offensive by Lee, despite the fact that this was seven years to before Obama "embraced" Lee. By contrast, Nugent's "subhuman mongrel" remark came a month before Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott invited Nugent to campaign with him.

Unlike Hadro and Graham (and unlike any MRC employee regarding Limbaugh's three-day tirade of misogyny against Sandra Fluke), Scott Whitlock does use a Feb. 20 MRC item to state that Nugent's remarks "both offensive and disrespectful." But like his colleagues , Whitlock equivocates anyway, using MSNBC host Chris Matthews' statement on Nugent that "you are known by the company you keep" to bring up old statements by other MSNBC hosts:

However, Matthews's "company" includes former colleague and frequent guest Martin Bashir. Bashir famously advocated for someone to defecate on Palin.

Ed Schultz trashed Laura Ingraham as a "slut." On February 18, the similarly tone deaf host complained about conservative vulgarities.

Matthews, Schultz and all the coarse hosts of MSNBC are hardly in a position to judge the company of conservatives. They are the very definition of not practicing what you preach.

And, of course, neither is Whitlock. His co-workers include Brent Bozell, who has committed all manner of offenses, not the least of which is calling Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead": and Matt Philbin, who enthusiastically joined in Limbaugh's sliming of Fluke by calling her a "horizontal laborer" and a  "Lincoln Tunnel Hitcher" and viciously insulted his critics.


Posted by Terry K. at 11:44 PM EST
WND's Garth Kant Finds Another Congressman To Slobber Over
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Steve Stockman, it appears, is not the only congressman for which WorldNetDaily's Garth Kant is willing to serve as a public-relations agent.

A Feb. 20 WND article by Kant is full of fawning over Sen. Mike Lee, starting with a headline calling Lee a "1-man think tank":

Lee is one of the Three Musketeers of the new conservative movement in Washington, along with Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rand Paul, R-Ky.

If Cruz and Paul are the faces of the new conservatives, particularly after each conducted memorable filibusters last year, Lee may be the behind-the-scenes architect who is particularly active away from the cameras, trying to spark a Reagan revolution for our times and a flowering of new creative energy in the GOP.

He might be called the GOP’s renaissance man because he so obviously relishes ideas on an impressive variety of issues, and is constantly working to come up with innovative and new conservative solutions for modern times.

That’s why he is promoting his own conservative reform agenda that he outlined in a major speech (posted on his website) as well as a conservative solution for poverty.

Needless to say, Kant doesn't challenge anything Lee says, nor does he even bother to talk to anyone else about him.

Kant better hurry and do another puff piece on Steve Stockman, lest he start to feel a little jealous of having to share Kant's adulation.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:42 PM EST
Saturday, February 22, 2014
CNS' Jeffrey Undermines His Argument Against Raising Minimum Wage
Topic: CNSNews.com

Terry Jeffrey writes in a Feb. 17 CNSNews.com article:

Sixty-four percent of Americans who earned the minimum wage or less in 2013 were 29 years old or younger, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 63 percent worked in restaurants, bars or retail.

People 30 years or older equaled only about 36 percent of those who earned the minimum wage or less in 2013--and only 0.8 percent of the people employed in the United States.

[...]

Of the 75,948,000 who were paid an hourly wage in 2013, 3,300,000 earned at or below the minimum wage.

That means only about 4.4 percent (3,300,000) of hourly wage earners (75,948,000) earned the minimum wage or less in 2013--or only about 2.3 percent (3,300,000) of all U.S. employees (143,929,000).

Jeffrey thus takes the latest line of attack peddled by other minimum-wage-raise opponents like Fox News -- so few people minimum wage, so there's no need to raise it.

But as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert points out, that argument shoots down the normal conservative opposition to raising the minimum wage: "Because if hardly anyone makes minimum wage, than why the movement-wide opposition to changing it? If so few people earn minimum wage, why demagogue the issue and stand in the way of an increase?"

Jeffrey just undermined his own argument. Oops.


Posted by Terry K. at 11:38 PM EST
WND Still Pushing Its Birther Hypocrisy
Topic: WorldNetDaily

An unbylined Feb. 20 WorldNetDaily article takes issue with a Democrat raising eligibility questions about Ted Cruz because, you know, Obama:

Remember all those questions about Barack Obama’s eligibility and the suggestions that if he’s not American, he’s not eligible to be president?

A Democrat member of Congress has acknowledged that the issue is legitimate.

Well, not really. What Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., said in an interview was that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, couldn’t be president because he’s Canadian.

Grayson’s comment came in an interview with MSNBC when he was asked who he thinks would win the GOP nomination for president in Florida.

“Since Ted Cruz is a Canadian and our Constitution requires an American to win, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be Ted Cruz,” Grayson said.

Cruz has explained that he has held dual citizenship and is renouncing his Canadian citizenship.

The questions about Obama, however, linger as an ongoing, official law enforcement investigation has determined the “birth certificate” he released from the White House appears is a forgery.

[...]

WND Founder and longtime news executive Joseph Farah, whose news organization has covered the dispute about Obama’s eligibility, said in a column he was amazed that Democrats have raise the issue regarding Cruz.

“I pointed out … that the media are on a campaign to ensure Sen. Ted Cruz never gets a chance to run for president. Why? Because, they claim or infer, he’s ineligible under the constitutional requirement to be a ‘natural born citizen,’” Farah wrote.

“It’s amazing given the media’s ridicule of those of us who posed the question and did six years of investigative work to try to determine Barack Obama’s eligibility – a question that has still not been answered, by the way, or even debated rationally on the facts we now know.”

Farah said it’s “precisely why it was so important to pay attention to the precedent Obama set by refusing to release his birth certificate for two years and then releasing one that was labeled fraudulent by the only law enforcement investigators who have examined it, as well as dozens of document experts.”

He said the questions that remain include where Obama was born, whether or not his Hawaii birth certificate is accurate and shows he is a “natural born citizen.”

As we've pointed out, the only reason Farah claims there are "questions" about Obama is because WND has refused to report on the answers. Hawaii has vouched for the authenticity of both birth certificates Obama has released, and supposed anomalies in the PDF file of Obama's long-form certificate are easily reproduced with a Xerox scanner.

Farah goes on to rant that "America needs one standard of eligibility" -- but he won't apply to Cruz the standard he used against Obama.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:59 PM EST
Friday, February 21, 2014
CNS Joins Right-Wing Government Ammunition Conspiracy Theory
Topic: CNSNews.com

A right-wing staple over the past couple of years is fearmongering about the government buying ammunition. CNSNews.com apparently felt left out, because it decided to hop on the bandwagon with a Feb. 19 article by Ali Meyer:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is contracted to purchase 704,390,250 rounds of ammunition over the next four years, which is equal to a total of about 2,500 rounds per DHS agent per year, according to a January 2014 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled Ammunition Purchases Have Declined Since 2009.

Much of the article is devoted to explaining how the DHS says that really isn't that much ammo for training purposes. But Meyer leads with the sensational and out-of-context claim and doesn't bother to explain the whole right-wing conspiracy thing.

That makes this a lazy and uninformative article. But have we come to expect anything less from CNS?


Posted by Terry K. at 7:50 AM EST
WND's Farah Thinks His Website Isn't As Horrible As Gawker
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Gawker wrote about Joseph Farah and WorldNetDaily, and he's not happy about it. So unhappy, in fact, that Farah dedicated his entire Feb. 20 column to bashing Gawker.

The subject of Gawker's article was WND's current tiff with Google over blocking ads in articles taht reference "black mobs" (as we noted, WND has copped to 670 articles on the subject). Farah is shocked -- shocked! -- to find that there are less-than-friendly people on the Internet:

What’s my beef with Gawker?

It’s mean-spirited. It’s irresponsible. It’s childish and immature. I’ve never said any of that before, because there are lots of sites like Gawker that have no redeeming social value. I never think about them. I never visit them. But I did this week when one of their talentless bloggers went after WND – and me personally.

You can see it for yourself, but I would caution you the coarse, vulgar language and name-calling is pretty rough. Don’t blame me. I’m just the target. Visitor beware.

It’s never pleasant to be accused of something as ugly as racism. But I’ve gotten used to it since 2008, when Barack Obama’s cheerleaders began hurling that epithet at political opponents like it was wealth that needed to be redistributed.

But there is it again from the know-nothings at Gawker.

Do you know what else is sad about this kind of venomous, personal, ad hominem, groundless attack? It comes from a website that actually attracts a lot of viewers. What does that say about the intelligence and discernment of its mainly American audience?

Answer us this, Mr. Farah:

Is Gawker as childish and immature as WND treating a Hitler "Downfall" clip about Obamacare as a real "news' story?

Is Gawker as mean-spirited as WND repeatedly likening President Obama to Nazis and the Antichrist?

Is Gawker as irresponsible as WND publishing lies about a Tennessee car dealer, fighting the ensuing defamation lawsuit for seven years, then abruptly settling out of court before the case was to go to trial?

Is Gawker is vulgar as Farah himself saying of a Muslim scholar named Dalia Mogahed, "I call her toga head"?

Is Gawker as venomous, personal and ad hominem as Farah calling me a "talent-challenged slug" merely for daring to criticize him?

Is Gawker as groundless as WND's utterly discredited birther obsession, which has no point other than to make the birth certificate Obama's Vince Foster?

Farah goes on to lament:

I just sometimes long for the day when people who communicate for a living had some professional standards guiding them. I wonder if people like this Gawker guy would allow his children to read his posts – if he has children or knows any. I guess it would be even more disturbing if he would or does. What are their standards? Do they have any? Is it supposed to be funny? Name-calling, uniformed mockery and vulgarity might get a cheap laugh from the low-information crowd. But is that the point?

Yes, the man who runs a website that publishes lies -- and who admits that he publishes lies -- wonders if others have "professional standards." Well, one can argue that Farah does have standards: he'll publish anything that will keep the rubes glued to his website, regardless of its veracity. Not a high or admirable standard, of course, but it is a standard.

Of course, such thin-skinned tirades are par for the course from a man who's notoriously thin-skinned. And of course, such tirades are couched in self-aggrandizement about just how awesome he is, combined with a little misinformation:

I was one of the earliest pioneers of the Internet.

I founded WorldNetDaily.com, later shortened to the more manageable and memorable WND.com, in 1997.

Before that I had experimented with launching other sites – back in the days when the few people actually visiting the Internet were nearly all on dial-up connections. There were only 1 million computer users hooked up to the Internet worldwide back in those days.

How long ago was this? How much has the Internet landscape changed?

Back then, the largest, most heavily trafficked website in the world was MSNBC.com. Many observers thought this juggernaut corporate combo of Microsoft and NBC could never be approached by competitors.

Today, MSNBC.com ranks 2,295th worldwide and 530th in the U.S. – well behind WND.com.

But today's MSNBC.com is not the website of yesteryear. Farah seems to have overlooked the fact that in 2012 MSNBC.com changed its name to NBCNews.com, and the current MSNBC.com is not a general news site but one dedicated to supporting MSNBC programming.

Judging by the Alexa numbers Farah used for MSNBC.com, NBCNews.com is ranked 255th globally and 69th in the U.S. -- much bigger than WND. Farah can't even self-aggrandize honestly. 

One final note: Nowhere does Farah dispute the accuracy of the information in the Gawker article -- he's merely upset that the truth was told.


Posted by Terry K. at 2:03 AM EST
Thursday, February 20, 2014
NEW ARTICLE: Brent Bozell's Pattern of Deception and Disrespect
Topic: Media Research Center
The revelation that Bozell's columns have been ghostwritten for years by a subordinate is just the latest example of the Media Research Center chief's outrageous behavior. Read more >>

Posted by Terry K. at 4:13 PM EST
Aaron Klein Anonymous Source Watch
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Aaron Klein claims in a Feb. 17 WorldNetDaily article that "The Palestinian Authority received a pledge from the U.S. that by the end of 2014, the Obama administration will issue an official written declaration presenting general highlights of a future Palestinian state." His source: "a senior Palestinian negotiator."

There is no evidence Klein made any attempt to verify this claim, or that he talked to any U.S. official about it.

Klein just loves pushing his right-wing agenda through untraceable anonymous sources.


Posted by Terry K. at 2:53 PM EST
CNS' Starr Tries To Manufacture Outrage Over Public Radio Story She Doesn't Like
Topic: CNSNews.com

Yes, CNSNews.com's Penny Starr devoted an entire "news" article to someone else's news article:

On its “All Things Considered” news program Monday, National Public Radio (NPR) aired a story that included a reporter attending a “live porn shoot.”

The “porn shoot” took place at the headquarters of Kink.com where the reporter interviewed “internet porn mogul” Peter Acworth.

The story, entitled “Hurting for Cash, Online Porn Tries New Tricks,” was produced by KQED public television and radio station in San Francisco, Calif.

The NPR story, posted on its All Tech Considered website pages, portrays the story as a business piece and Acworth as a victim.

"We're suffering what happened to the music industry a while back,” Acworth stated. “It's becoming much more easy to get content for free and people are less apt to want to pay for it.”

Describing how it's harder to make money on pornography hardly equates to portraying someone as a "victim."

Also: Why does Starr care what another news outlet reported? Why did she cherry-pick this story out of the hundreds and thousands of stories reported in the news each day? Because she thinks there's tax money involved, and she wants to destroy public radio:

KQED, which is affiliated with NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), did not respond to an inquiry from CNSNews.com asking if reporting on pornography helped the media outlet meet its mission and whether or not they believe the reporting is beneficial to taxpayers, who help fund public broadcasting.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – the congressionally created funding arm for public radio and television – was appropriated $445,000,000 for fiscal year 2014, according to its financial records.

Given that KQED was reporting on a local business and did not include any pornographic content in its news report, it's entirely likely that the story fits within the station's mission statement.

Starr is simply trying to impose her right-wing morality on others, like she did when she manufactured outrage over a National Portrait Gallery exhibit because she doesn't like gay stuff.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:51 PM EST
Steve Stockman's Media BFF, WND's Garth Kant, Strikes Again
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Steve Stockman's media BFF, Garth Kant, has struck again.

In another press release for the Texas Senate candidate, Kant's Feb. 18 WorldNetDaily article touts how a "stunning new poll" shows Stockman closing in on his Republican incumbent opponent, John Cornyn, which hints that Cornyn might not be able to garner the 50 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff.

But Kant fails to mention a few things about the poll: that it found 29 percent had not made up their mind, and that it didn't include the six other candidates who are also running in the Republican primary for Cornyn's seat.

Further, as Slate's Dave Weigel notes, the poll is an outlier: "Nobody else looking at the race sees Cornyn sinking like this." It's highly unlikely that Stockman could be doing as well as that poll claims to be given that, as Human Events points out, he's doing basically no campaigning.

Since Kant is in fanboy mode, the article is filled with quotes from Stockman and attacks on Cornyn, and no attempt is made to contact Cornyn's campaign for a response. Instead, we get slobbering statements about how "Stockman has become the darling of so many conservatives and the bogeyman to such liberal outfits as MSNBC."

Kant also mentions Stockman's libel lawsuit against a Cornyn-linked super PAC without mentioning that it has no merit, and repeats Stockman's boast that he "killed the amnesty bill" without telling readers that it's not true.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:09 PM EST
Updated: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 10:10 PM EST
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
MRC Manages to Botch Crediting Graham For Bozell's Column
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center may finally be giving belated credit to Tim Graham after he was revealed as Brent Bozell's column ghostwriter, but it lacks something on follow-through.

The version of Bozell's latest column at NewsBusters gets a newly created Bozell & Graham byline, but  older columns have not been moved to the new byline.

Meanwhile, the same column at MRC division CNSNews.com carries only Bozell's byline. The column has yet to be posted at the main MRC website, where Bozell remains identified as the sole column writer.

And, no, the MRC has yet to publicly address the ghostwriting controversy, though it would certainly speak up if a member of the hated "liberal media" did the same thing.


Posted by Terry K. at 4:27 PM EST

Newer | Latest | Older

Bookmark and Share

Get the WorldNetDaily Lies sticker!

Find more neat stuff at the ConWebWatch store!

Buy through this Amazon link and support ConWebWatch!

Support This Site

« February 2014 »
S M T W T F S
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28

Bloggers' Rights at EFF
Support Bloggers' Rights!

News Media Blog Network

Add to Google