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Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Trump Buddy Ruddy Walks Back His Criticism of Priebus
Topic: Newsmax

Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy appeared on the Feb. 12 edition of CNN's "Reliable Sources" mostly to shill for his buddy Donald Trump and to tamp down suggestions that the president doesn't know what he's doing. Cathy Burke's Newsmax article on her boss' appearance sums his words up in its lead paragraph: "President Donald Trump's first weeks in office are showing him to be 'a stable, sensible world leader,' who trusts the American people will judge him on the 'results' of both his foreign and domestic policies."

The big news, however ,was Ruddy throwing Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, under the bus, apparently based on a conversation he had with Trump a couple days earlier:

I think there's a lot of weakness coming out of the chief of staff. I think Reince Priebus -- good guy, well intentioned, but he clearly doesn't know how the federal agencies work. He doesn't have a really good system -- hedoesn't know how the communications flow.

Ruddy later told the Washington Post:

It’s my view that Reince is the problem. I think on paper Reince looked good as the chief of staff — and Donald trusted him — but it’s pretty clear the guy is in way over his head. He’s not knowledgeable of how federal agencies work, how the communications operations work. He botched this whole immigration rollout. This should’ve been a win for Donald, not two or three weeks of negative publicity.

That apparently didn't go over well. Ruddy's walkback began quickly, with a tweet declaring: "Reince just briefed me on new WH plans. Impressive! CNN today my personal view. Told him I have 'open mind' based on his results." At Newsmax, Ruddy's walkback is bizarrely framed as a scoop in an unbylined article:

Senior White House sources have told Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy that President Trump has full confidence in Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and the job he is doing.

"I’m hearing from a number of senior people today that President Trump very much likes the job Reince Priebus is doing and has no intention of replacing him," Ruddy told Newsmax.

Ruddy's comments come after a CNN appearance Sunday on Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources" when he defended the Trump administration from media attacks, but chided Priebus for White House messaging fumbles during the opening days of the administration.

Ruddy made clear to CNN and other press outlets his views were his own and were not based on any conversation with the president.

The Post's Chris Cillizza questions this: "Those quotes — on the record no less! — come 48 hours after Ruddy had drinks with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. It's sort of hard to imagine Ruddy didn't (a) run Priebus down even more in private and (b) let Trump know he was going to tell people about it."

Cillizza goes on to note that Trump's treatment of his senior staff -- an atmosphere in which his chief of staff is thrown under the bus by a Trump friend on TV -- is highly unusual.

Then again, the elevation of his friend to the presidency has made Ruddy something of a power broker. Another Post article touts the "newfound access" conservative outlets are getting in the Trump White House,  with the chief example being Newsmax Washington bureau chief John Gizzi: "press secretary Sean Spicer has picked him out several times from among the jostling mob of journalists seeking to question the administration." The Post didn't note that Gizzi's boss is a friend of the president, which might also account for that newfound access.

Ruddy seems to be playing his cards in a way to ride Trump's coattails to becoming a more mainstream media player. It's clear, however, that Ruddy has no interest in being critical of his friend -- yet.


Posted by Terry K. at 4:09 PM EST
WND's Loudon Skipped Right-Wing Indoctrination Class, Can't Name A 'Christian' Country
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily columnist Gina Loudon is so devoted to being a Donald Trump disciple, it seems, that she's losing touch with right-wing orthodoxy.

In her Jan. 29 column, Loudon makes this odd attack on critics of Trump's immigration order:

They claim this act is anti-Muslim, because it “bans immigration from Muslim countries.” What is a “Muslim” country? Can you define that? I doubt it. Name a “Christian” country. You get the point.

Loudon seems to have forgotten the conservatively correct answer to the question "Name a 'Christian' country" is the United States, full stop. Doesn't Loudon know that it's an article of faith among conservative Christians that America was founded as a Christian nation? Or that right-wingers spent the past eight years attacking President Obama for his apparently heretical suggestion that because the idea of America transcends religion it is no longer just a Christian nation -- which was then repeatedly misquoted and taken out of context to attack him?

Ah, but Loudon has her own smears to peddle. She maliciously labels critics of Trump's order -- which been fighting a losing battle in court -- as "pro-terrorist radicals," as if anything Trump proposes is the only possible solution and that being concerned about basic human rights makes one "pro-terrrorist."

She then baselessly says of anti-Trump protesters: "Many in the ranks are paid by George Soros," later sneering about "paid Soros “protesters” (a.k.a. lackeys/sheeple) on the streets outside starving for their five seconds of fame." Loudon offers no evidence that any protester, let alone "many" of them, are being paid directly by Soros.

It's quite hilarious to hear a woman who tried to capitalize on the publicity surrounding her teenage daughter's affair with a 57-year-old man whine about others "starving for their five seconds of fame."


Posted by Terry K. at 11:49 AM EST
Fake News: MRC Wonders Why Media Isn't Reporting a Discredited Story
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Julia A. Seymour was in full climate-denier froth in a Feb. 7 post:

A federal agency discredited a common argument of climate skeptics in 2015, but now a whistleblower has accused the agency of misleading the public and playing politics. Not that anyone watching the network news would know it.

For several years, climate skeptics argued there had been a “pause” or hiatus in global warming beginning in 1998. Then, in June 2015, a paper from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration erased it. Many news outlets reported that NOAA study and accepted its claims, but on Feb. 5 or 6, the network evening news shows said nothing about the new whistleblower’s evidence against it.

Data scientist Dr. John Bates blew the whistle on NOAA claiming the paper that erased the pause was based on misleading and “unverified” data and never analyzed in accordance with NOAA’s full process, The Daily Mail reported. That prompted many to draw comparisons to the Climategate scandal of 2009.

Just one problem: the Daily Mail story is bogus, which seems like a pretty good reason for actual news sources to ignore it.

Media Matters points out that NOAA's data debunking a "pause" in global warming has been independently verified by other non-NOAA data collection methods. Further, the whistleblower was reportedly not involved in any aspect of the report being attacked as manipulated, and the Daily Mail reporter has a lengthy record of misleading claims on climate science.

Ironically, a few days after Seymour's post was written, Wikipedia declared the Daily Mail to be too unreliable to be used as a reference on the website.

Doubly ironically, Seymour is right that the Daily Mail story is like Climategate -- both have been debunked.

In summary, Seymour is promoting fake news -- which her employer has done in the past.


Posted by Terry K. at 1:24 AM EST
Monday, February 13, 2017
Black WND Columnist Peddles Racist Argument Against Other Blacks
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Remember how we documented that WorldNetDaily columnist Jesse Lee Peterson uses his black conservative privilege to say things that would be considered racist if a white person said them? Well, he's done it again. From Peterson's Feb. 5 WND column:

Without black people in this country, I think there would hardly be any riots, and the murder rate might drop by half or more.

Imagine, say, a KKK member saying this -- he would be immediately denounced by a broad spectrum of people (though maybe not by Peterson). but because Peterson is a black conservative, he can say such things with impunity.

This comes on top of Peterson a few months back endorsing the anti-black views of race-baiters and white nationalists like Jared Taylor and Colin Flaherty.

Having blacks trash other blacks in the way a white racist would is one key way WND has plausible deniability in claiming it doesn't cater to white nationalists (despite having given a prominent platform to Flaherty).


Posted by Terry K. at 3:28 PM EST
CNS' Jones Suddenly Discovers Original Reporting ... In Order To Attack Warren
Topic: CNSNews.com

So CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones is capable of doing more than stenography after all -- when it comes to attacking a Democrat, anyway.

After Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the Senate floor for reading a letter by the late Coretta Scott King critical of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, Jones fought back in a Feb. 8 article headlined "Warren Falsely Claims That Republicans 'Silenced Mrs. King's Voice on the Senate Floor'." Jones howled that "A liberal advocacy group is already fund-raising off Tuesday's Elizabeth Warren kerfuffle" and insisted that "In fact, Warren read King's very long letter in its entirety, and she had moved on to other complaints when she was finally interrupted by [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and asked to take her seat," further complaining that Warren "read from long-ago letters."

The next day, Jones was still whining, in an article complaining that "a white liberal from the Northeast dragged the name of Sen. Jeff Sessions though the mud, violating Senate rules in the process." But then it was back to Trump stenography mode as she touted how "a black conservative from the South stood on the Senate floor to reflect on 'what occurred last night'" -- Republican Sen. Tim Scott. She further touted how "Sen. Scott spent the rest of his speech explaining the discrimination he faces, not necessarily for being black, but for being conservative. He even read aloud some of the hateful messages that have come into his office because of his support for Sen. Sessions."

Jones quickly followed that up with an article focusing solely on how scott "read some of the tweets he's received, blasting him for supporting Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general" and described those who wrote them as "liberal" without providing any evidence that they actually were. The headline of Jones' article: "Sen. Tim Scott Illustrates How Liberals Show Tolerance."

So Jones could be moved to fact-check a Democrat but not a Republican. That's life at CNS.


Posted by Terry K. at 11:26 AM EST
WND Overstates Anti-Immigration Activist's Experience
Topic: WorldNetDaily

In a Feb. 4 WorldNetDaily article, Radio America's Greg Corombos touts his interview subject, Jessica Vaughan of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, as an "immigration policy expert," though all she's doing is reflexively defending President Trump's immigration from certain countries by insisting it's not really a ban.

Corombos also writes: "Vaughan, a former visa officer, said the Obama administration failed to do even basic screening much of the time, including waiving required interviews with those seeking to go to the U.S. But she said the problems didn’t end there." Corombos is suggesting that  Vaughan's work as a "former visa officer" has direct relevance to Obama's alleged policies; it's further suggested in the headline of his article, "Ex-visa officer: Obama failed to do basic screening of migrants."

In fact, Vaughan's CIS bio says she "has been with the Center since 1992," meaning any direct experience she had in working with visas as a former State Department employee was 25 years ago.

In other words, she never worked in the Obama administration and can't provide any direct experience as to what its visa policies were.

Indeed, Natasha Hall, an former immigration officer with the Department of Homeland Security, explains that "The process for any citizen of a Middle Eastern or majority-Muslim country to get into the United States is tortuous and has become more so over the past 15 years, with additional screenings, interviews and other background checks."

That's a misleading bit of reporting on the part of Corombos. But misleading reporting is whats WND is all about.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:25 AM EST
Sunday, February 12, 2017
MRC Predictably Hates Boy Scouts' Decision to Admit Transgenders
Topic: Media Research Center

As professional LGBT-haters, the news that the Boy Scouts will accept transgender scouts did not go down well at the Media Research Center.

Sarah Stites whined: "Since 2013, the Boy Scouts of America have quickly caved to the progressive agenda, admitting both homosexual guides and scouts. As of today, transgender boys can now join troops." She huffed that "the networks did spin the news positively," adding: "Because scouts are required to acknowledge their duty to God, the BSA still prohibits avowed atheists and agnostics from membership. Eradicating this stipulation will likely surface as the next item on the progressive agenda."

Stites' complaining about the "progressive agenda" is rich, as if she and the MRC don't have an agenda of their own to promote.

Tim Graham -- known for his anti-transgender freakouts -- and Brent Bozell were even more whiny in their Feb. 3 column, asserting that the Boy Scouts of America "used to be derided as a 'traditional, values-based' organization" before it "folded on homosexual Scouts and then on homosexual scoutmasters." Now, they huff, " This cowardly shell of an organization should just scrap the references to God, and every God-respecting church should jettison their Boy Scout units to the nearest secular gathering place."

They rant about "libertine leftists" -- a favorite term of Graham's; remember, Graham actually writes this syndicated column and Bozell simply slaps his name on after the fact, something he was content to hide from the public until the truth came out --  and "homosexual celebrity lobbyists" who liked the changes and grumble that since "relativism is king" now, "Perhaps the next "reform" might be an 11-year-old Boy Scout declaring that he identifies as an Eagle Scout, negating the need for any stinking merit badges or review boards."


Posted by Terry K. at 8:22 PM EST
Did WND's Farah Really Engage In Violent Proests In the '60s?
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has an odd habit of making grandiose claims about his supposed left-wing past -- marking with Martin Luther King and following the orders of Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda, for example.

He's at it again. In the Jan. 24 column in which he sneered that the participants in the Women's march were "hags," Farah said this about himself:

I was once on the other side – a participant in many leftist, anti-American, pro-communist demonstrations. I remember what they were like. I didn’t care back then. I had a completely different worldview. But I still remember how contemptuously we left behind the garbage. It was deliberate. We had no thought for the people who had to clean it up. We had no thought for the people who lived there. We smashed plate glass windows, turned over the cars of innocent victims and spit on those with whom we disagreed – figuratively and literally.

Farah took this further in in a Jan. 28 WND article promoting his new book "The Restitution of All Things": "I was an unregenerate, crazy young person. ... My background is with the far, far left, even in high school, arrested in all sorts of demonstrations. I used to help start riots and building takeovers at Colombia [sic] University as a teenager."

That's odd, since Farah apparently graduated from William Paterson University, not Columbia. And the biggest and most notorious protests at Columbia were in 1968, when Farah would have been just 13 -- around the same age he was when he claimed to have marched with Martin Luther King. 

As with his puported MLK marches, we highly doubt that Farah was sufficiently politically aware at age 13 to be skipping junior high and schlepping from his New Jersey home into Manhattan for the sole purpose of protesting and rioting and taking over college buildings with college students several years his senior. (The fact that he misspelled "Columbia" adds even more doubt.) And Farah's lengthy record of lying proves that we cannot take his words at face value.

So we're adding the increasingly omnipresent "liar" graphic to this post. As he has always been, Farah is free to provide us with proof of his violent left-wing activism, we will freely apologize and remove the graphic.


Posted by Terry K. at 2:19 PM EST
Saturday, February 11, 2017
MRC's Waters Still Whining That NY Times Reports Accurately
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's resident New York Times-hater, Clay Waters, loves to complain that the Times reports accurately on things he doesn't want reported. He does so again in a Jan. 30 post:

The front of Sunday’s New York Times featured David Barstow, known for blessing the paper’s readers with dubious Pulitzer bait every couple of years, tackling the story of authoritarian President Trump’s falsehoods , backed up by liberal good-government types, liberal plagiarist authors, and liberal “fact-checkers”: “‘Up Is Down’: Unreality Show Echoes a History of False Claims.”

[...]

The Times managed to endure eight years of the Clintons (plus Hillary Clinton's email lies) and Obamas, telling fibs about Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky...then Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Obamacare...but only now does the paper decide that we have a lying politician in the White House?

At no point does Waters defend the accuracy of any claim the Times identified as false; all he does is complain that "liberals" identified themand deflect the issue by bringing up irrelevant claims of alleged falsehoods by Democratic presidents when he knows they don't compare with the routine and pervasive lying Trump has done throughout the campaign and into his presidency.

Waters also huffs that "It’s no secret that Politifact, a liberal media creation, presses a left thumb upon the scales of “truth” to make Democrats come out cleaner than Republicans," linking as alleged evidence to a NewsBusters post touting right-wing columnist Mollie Hemingway engaging in pedantic hair-splitting over Planned Parenthood and mammograms.

Waters apparently doesn't realize that fact-checking is not a zero-sum game, or that "liberals" identifying Trump's falsehoods doesn't make them any less false. He's simply playing into his employer's war on facts to give Trump a pass on his lies.


Posted by Terry K. at 10:24 AM EST
WND's Farah Sucks Up to Breitbart Again, Takes Financially Safe Stance on Ad Boycott
Topic: WorldNetDaily

After the election, Joseph Farah and worldNetDaily started sucking up to and latching onto Breitbart News, since its website was on the ascendacy through its close assocation to Donald Trump and WND's, well, wasn't. One of the things Farah did was to declare that any company that refused to run ads on Breitbart can forget about advertising with WND; Farah conveniently offered no proof that such companies had ever placed ads at WND, meaning that they probably haven't and WND is giving up no revenue from taking such a stand.

Farah was at it again in his Feb. 5 column, braving taking another stand that costs him nothing:

The federal government of Canada has pulled advertising from Breitbart.com.

In response, I’m going to do what I did when Kellogg chose to blacklist what many might consider WND’s competition in the independent online news community: Tell Canada to dump WND, too.

Our neighbor to the north might as well follow my advice as I have instructed my advertising department to block ads from the Canadian government as long as this anti-Breitbart hysteria continues.

[...]

This is not the first time I have stood with Breitbart against the assault on diversity of opinion and worldviews that conflict with certain advertisers. In December, when the cereal company Kellogg announced it was pulling ads from our friends at Breitbart, I announced we would neither solicit nor accept its advertising unless the company dropped its Breitbart boycott.

That’s our position on the Canadian government as well.

Again, Farah offers no evidence that the Canadian government has ever placed ads at WND, which means he is once again giving up nothing by taking this stand. He did, however, complain that "it appears that an “inquiry” from a Canadian newspaper – the Toronto Globe and Mail – prompted the ban" by the Canadian government on advertising at Breitbart, and "This same despicable media outlet suggested in its story celebrating the Breitbart ad ban that the blacklist should be expanded to include WND and other highly trafficked independent voices." He added: "While I am gratified that the marketing firm running ad campaigns for Canada chose WND to be one of 398 media outlets worldwide, I regretfully have to turn down the unsolicited offer – at least until the government stops discriminating against other independent media outlets like Breitbart."

But according to the "despicable" Globe and Mail article Farah is citing, WND was simply on a "list of 398 sites approved for online federal advertising" compiled by the government's media-buying agency, and it's unclear whether any Canadian government advertising ever appeared at WND. Farah didn't mention that the Globe and Mail flagged two other right-wing sites on the government whitelist: Gateway Pundit and Newsmax.

The Globe and Mail also had this to say about WND:

And the list of approved sites for government ads still includes a number of other fringe outlets which have been criticized for fomenting hatred and conspiracy theories such as the racist “birther” movement championed by Trump.

[...]

WND.com (World Net Daily) was a leading voice of the birther movement, and its WND Books division published a book promoting the conspiracy. On Monday afternoon, the site’s lead story suggested the airport protests which erupted over the weekend in response to Trump’s ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries was “just the start of ‘chaos’ planned by Muslim Brotherhood.” The article was by Leo Hohmann, whose new book, published by WND Books, is titled Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad. On Tuesday, a leading WND writer decamped to InfoWars, another fringe site which traffics in conspiracy theories.

Farah shockingly didn't respond to this other than a tepid statement that "While we believe WND would never incite racial hatred, discrimination or the subversion of Canada’s democratic system of government, we don’t believe Breitbart does, either." (He presumably didn't want to concede that a Canadian news outlet scooped WND on the fact that its own reporter -- Jerome Corsi -- quit WND for Infowars.)


Posted by Terry K. at 1:00 AM EST
Friday, February 10, 2017
CNS Trump Stenography Watch, Gorsuch Edition
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com hedged its bets a bets at first on the idea of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. As chatter grew about him, it published an op-ed by Larry Pratt of the right-wing Gun Owners of American and birther-adjacent lawyer William J. Olson fearing he might not be sufficiently pro-gun enough.

But when the selection of Gorsuch was officially announced, CNS went into its usual fawning/stenography mode:

Chief CNS stenographer Susan Jones wrote a single article critical of Gorsuch, but framed opposition to him as crazy and unreasonable, as demostrated by the headline "Pelosi: Gorsuch ‘Against Employees’ Rights, Clean Air, Clean Water, Food Safety’—Even Autistic Children."

CNS' Barbara Hollingsworth also cranked out a one-sided article (the only kind she writes, it seems) headlined "Law Profs: Judge Gorsuch’s Record Puts Him Well Within Nation's Legal Mainstream." Not only does Hollingsworth not identify the ideology of any of those law professors -- though given that she writes for CNS, we can presume all of them are conservative and she would not have bothered to talk to anyone not pushing the Trump administration line on Gorsuch -- one of those offering praise, curiously, is John Yoo, infamous for his work in the Bush administration in providing legal justification for "enhanced interrogation," which many have called torture, so he might not be the best judge of what is in the "legal mainstream."


Posted by Terry K. at 2:06 PM EST
WND's Muslim-Hating Reporter Now Just Telling Lies
Topic: WorldNetDaily

It seems that simply hating Muslims is no longer enough for WorldNetDaily reporter Leo Hohmann. He apparently feels he must start spreading lies about them.

Hohmann's Jan. 29 WND article starts off with a justification of President Trump's attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States -- and a falsehood:

Trump’s executive orders slapping a 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement and a 30-day ban on those entering on visas from seven terror-sponsoring countries has been met with protests Sunday at airports in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Minneapolis.

In Hamtramck, Michigan, the nation’s first city to elect a Muslim-majority city council, protesters descended on City Hall Sunday with signs that included “Ban Bannon” and “We are all Immigrants.”

There were no such protests when former President Obama restricted Christian refugees from entering the U.S. from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and other Muslim countries.

There were no such protests over Obama's "restriction of Christian refugees" from Muslim countries because Obama did no such thing. As we've pointed out whenever CNSNews.com reporter Patrick Goodenough obsessed over the purported lack of Christian refugees from Syria, the statistics showing unusually high numbers of Muslim refugees vs. Christian ones are skewed because, as Goodenough occasionally admits, those numbers come from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Christian refugees tend not to go through UNHCR operations. It also discounts the fact that Muslims who don't agree with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad are being persecuted as well.

Hohmann goes on to cite his fellow WND Muslim-hater, Philip Haney, claiming that there will be "lawsuits, ugly protests, and an all-out effort to create chaos in the streets of U.S. cities" when Trump more provocative acts such as moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Why? Hohmann answers his own question: "The reason is simple. This isn’t 1968 or even 1978, when Islam in America consisted primarily of a few thousand Nation of Islam and Black Panther activists."

Even the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies blew that malicious stereotype out of the water, stating that by 1965, "about 100,000 to 150,000 Muslims lived in the United States."

If Hohmann really believes every Muslim in America in the 1960s was either in the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam, there's no reason to take him seriously as the "expert" on Muslims in America WND is trying to potray him as.

From there, the descent into anti-Muslim paranoia by Hohmann and Haney came quickly:

More than 300 U.S. cities and towns have been stacked with Sharia-compliant Muslims through refugee resettlement and myriad other visa programs that have been expanding for four decades.

Meanwhile, groups that agitate for Muslim “civil rights,” which tend to manifest as special privileges not afforded to Christians, have been empowered. Thanks to the expanded immigration, the U.S. Muslim population has exploded to 3.3 million, the number of mosques has grown exponentially and the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR is now a force to be reckoned with despite its ties to extremist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, Haney said.

“There’s this concept of the observant Muslim base, it’s a global observant base, and that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood has done here in America since the 1960s is build up that observant Muslim base,” Haney said.

[...]

Haney said the three trigger points will affect three different areas: The Israel policy will affect the political arena, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist declaration will affect law enforcement, and the immigration issue will affect the fabric of American society, halting the process of Islamization and civilization jihad that has been steadily occurring for the last 35 years and which was placed into overdrive under Barack Obama.

“It’s not about Trump. It’s about America,” Haney said. “America has had the audacity to pick someone different from what the world wanted, which was someone who would not be submissive to the global Islamic movement. So America is now going to become the focus of this backlash.”

WND should stop obsessing about the "fake news" of others and deal with the fake news it pays people like Hohmann to create.


Posted by Terry K. at 12:39 AM EST
Thursday, February 9, 2017
CNS Trump Stenography Watch
Topic: CNSNews.com

We've established that CNSNews.com is little more than a stenographer for the Trump administration. It was Trump's obedient servant again this week for President Trump's claim that the media isn't covering reports of terrorist attacks.

Melanie Arter (nee Hunter) led the stenography brigade with her loyal transcription of how Trump said "'the very, very dishonest press' doesn’t want to report on the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists determined to strike the homeland." CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman followed up with an article copying-and-pasting the "list of 78 terrorist attacks" the Trump White House says were underreported.

CNS won't report, however, what a mess that list is (the typos that CNS faithfully reproduced, wuch as the repeated misspellings of "attack," are the least of it). Actual reporters at the Washington Post point out that many of the attacks listed did not result in fatalities, the list omits non-Western victims, it includes attacks such as the San Bernardino and Orlando nightclub attacks that indisputably not underreported, and appears to list one attack that was a workplace dispute and not terrorism.

Note to CNS: Serving as a stenographer doesn't fulfill your self-proclaimed mission statement to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."


Posted by Terry K. at 6:32 PM EST
More WND Fake News: Author Exaggerates Bio in WND-Published Book
Topic: WorldNetDaily

When we first wrote about WorldNetDaily's favorite Donald Trump fanfiction writer Ted Malloch, we noted his propensity for pumping up his resume. WND insisted on presenting him as Theodore Roosevelt Malloch in honor of his claimed lineage to the former president, but we could find no proof of it. And in a May WND column, Malloch described himself this way to sell himself as a VP pick for Trump:

THEODORE ROOSEVELT MALLOCH, Republican extraordinaire, Oxford professor, Ph.D., best-selling author, earliest Trump supporter (see: WND archive), international political economist of some renown, accomplished corporate strategist, served on dozens of boards, held ambassadorial position for President Reagan in the U.N., worked in the State Department and in the U.S. Senate. No skeletons, great namesake and very good-looking.

Turns out Malloch has gone way overboard in his self-aggrandizement -- to the point that it's not true at all.

Upon Trump's appointment of Malloch as U.S. ambassador to the European Union (which WND is absolutely giddy about), The Financial Times looked into Malloch's WND-published book "Davos, Aspen & Yale: My Life Behind the Elite Curtain as a Global Sherpa" and fond that several things Malloch writes about himself "are misleading or are contradicted by available evidence." Among them:

  • He claimed that a documentary he made "was nominated for an Emmy Award"; in fact, it was for a regional Emmy in the Lower Great Lakes.
  • He claimed that Margaret Thatcher described him as a "genius" and "global sherpa" in a 1992 speech; in fact, those words weren't said specifically about him.
  • He claimed he was "knighted in the Sovereign Order of St John by the Queen, Elizabeth II herself" and that "to my family and closest friends, I am therefore known as Sir Ted"; in fact, the honor is several ranks below knighthood and carries no right to a title like "Sir."
  • He claimed he was "made a laird by Lord Lyon of Scotland and given a personal coat of arms with a fancy Latin inscription"; in fact, the Lord Lyon does not have the power to make anyone a laird.
  • He claimed he completed his "entire doctoral program in an unprecedented less than three years"; in fact, he completed it in four years.

The Scotsman newspaper adds that Malloch wrote in his book that he was "president of the Ancient Scottish Universities Trust"; in fact, there is no such institution by that name.

Meanwhile, WND has published a new insta-book by Malloch, in which he takes his Trump-fluffing skills to new heights by writing about Trump's election win and puporting to explain how, "as the twenty-first century Theodore Roosevelt, Trump is a strong and authentic leader who will fix America, defend America, and make it great again."

We're guessing WND fact-checked that one about as well as his first one. Then again, WND did republish so-called historian David Barton's book on Thomas Jefferson that was considered so fact-deficient that its original publisher withdrew it from the marketplace, and the WND edition includes added falsehoods about the critics who forced the withdrawal of the book in the first place.


Posted by Terry K. at 3:00 PM EST
Updated: Thursday, February 9, 2017 5:45 PM EST
NEW ARTICLE: Russia's New ConWeb Comrades, Part 2
Topic: Accuracy in Media
CNSNews.com and Accuracy in Media joined WorldNetDaily in defending Donald Trump -- and, thus, Vladimir Putin -- over allegations that the Russians meddled in the U.S. presidential election. Read more >>

Posted by Terry K. at 12:35 AM EST

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