MRC's Graham Can't Stop Tilting At Fact-Checking Windmills Topic: Media Research Center
Tim Graham's incessant whining that fact-checkers expose the torrent of falsehoods from President Trump only end up demonstrating his own bias and denial of reality. He demonstrates that again in a Nov. 2 post about a CNN article on "Facebook fact-checkers and how Trump voters just don't trust them," which he claims "just means they're noticing that 'facts' have a liberal bias, according to the slippery rules of the 'independent fact checkers.'"
Graham then feigned offense that the article quoted a fact-checker stating that "there is more misinformation posted from right-wing sources than by the left":
The "math" from PolitiFact has been extremely slanted against Trump over September and October. Trump's True-to-False ratio was a staggering 52 to 1. They weren't even trying to locate anything Trump said that was True. There was one "Mostly True," on October 1.
By contrast, Biden's True-to-False ratio was 9 to 16 (or 17 to 16, if you're generous with the "Half True" ratings.) Notice Biden only has 33 ratings, while Trump has 56.
[...]
The "Pants on Fire" ratio in these last two months was 10 to 1 Trump.
As always, Graham fails to make any logical case to support his attack: He doesn't prove that Biden lies as much as Trump, nor does he document that any fact-check of Trump used any of those "biased" facts he claims exists. That means he, once again, demanding false balance from fact-checkers.
Graham concluded by whining that the CNN article featured "one of eight CNN veterans doing "fact checks" for Lead Stories. We found they tilted four to one against the conservative side." As we pointed out when it first attacked Lead Stories, the MRC similarly offered no proof that Lead Stories was pursuing an anti-conservative agenda or that its purported imbalance of fact-checks didn't reflect reality or weren't accurate in and of themselves.
WND's Election Conspiracy-Mongering, Part 2 Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've documented the election conspiracy-mongering from WorldNetDaily columnist in the days immediately following the presidential election. Because President Trump hasn't stopped forwarding increasingly specious claims of election fraud, WND's columnists haven't either. Let's see what they ranted about, shall we?
Anyone who factually believes Joe Biden won this election is a moron, a fool or both. Common sense dictates no other options. Not even Democrats and/or people in the Biden campaign believe he actually won. The Biden camp enjoined with the Democrats and media are cheering that for the moment it appears the cheating has worked.
The socialist ideologues and anarchists are beside themselves with glee, but what happens if the truth prevails, i.e., there was massive voter fraud and corrupt counting practices on a level that's beyond quantifying based upon the scale of the cheating? How will the cheaters feel if they're exposed and justice finally prevails? What if at long last those responsible for the political fraud that stripped honest Americans of their right to participate in non-rigged elections end up in handcuffs, ankle chains and federal prison jumpsuits, in prison vans going into federal courts?
[...]
This said and being true, the one thing I know that both groups fail to calculate in their formulas is that God is on His throne, and if God wants Donald J. Trump to have four more years as president, there's nothing anyone can do to prevent it.
This brings me to the matter of Democrat-controlled states "legalizing" universal ballot mail-outs, and post-Election Day acceptance of ballots. I am firmly convinced that the main purpose of this change was to increase the number of "unclaimed" ballots available to be "harvested" by the Democratic voter fraud machines in the swing states.
Obviously, this is a "conspiracy theory" in the truest sense of the word, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. I (along with millions of my fellow constitutionalists) am in fact alleging conspiracy.
[...]
Without SCOTUS intervention for Trump, Harris, Biden and Pelosi would continue in the same direction set by Obama and Clinton as fast as possible – and no one in the GOP but Trump has the backbone to stop them.
Any hope of Trump retaining the Oval Office rests on irrefutable proof of voting fraud. Keeping in mind we live in an era where first impression news stories have proven inaccurate, some Trump confidants are saying evidence of massive voter fraud is being assembled, arrests of several players in the voting scam will follow and the proof will be damning. Allegedly, this evidence involves fraudulent use of ballots identified as part of a sting operation. The Trump administration supposedly had all legal ballots secretly imprinted with invisible watermarks in unbreakable code. A scan so far of 14 million ballots in five states reflect an 80% failure rate – all Biden votes.
The 16th century English playwright William Shakespeare coined the phrase, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," connoting massive political corruption in that kingdom. Who would have thought more than four centuries later the stench of corruption would plague America as well?
The reality is this is such an incredible amount of fraud it would be impossible to list it all in one column. Third World level election fraud? Yes. It's a repeat of the Kenyan presidential elections in 2007 and 2017. In 2007, the anti-corruption candidate Raila Odinga was winning on election night. In the middle of the night, the power went out around the country. A few hours later, incumbent Mwai Kibaki had taken the lead. A U.S. exit poll found that Odinga had really won by 6%. In 2017, Odinga ran again. Due to hacking of the voting machines, incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta was announced the winner. Odinga appealed to the Supreme Court, which ordered a new election due to the hacking. But without enough guarantees to stop the election fraud, Odinga gave up and dropped out of the race.
There is so much fraud here – concentrated in the swing states. Voting machine irregularities that coincidentally tipped the vote to Biden. Dead people voting. Almost as many people over 90 registered to vote this year than that age group did in all of 2008-2019 combined. A Pennsylvania mailman who said he was ordered to collect late ballots, and four postal workers who said they were told to change the date on ballots. Election workers counting ballots without verifying signatures. Videos of election officials filling out ballots. More people voting than registered voters in some areas. Wide discrepancies between Trump and down ticket votes; former Justice Department prosecutor Sidney Powell said about swing states, "We've identified 450,000 ballots that miraculously ONLY have a vote for Joe Biden." Biden underperformed in big cities in blue states compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet he had record turnout in big cities in swing states.
President Trump should reject the liberal clamor to concede an election that was evidently stolen by hundreds of thousands of fake ballots in seven battleground states. Ballots from voters who never requested them, along with ballots not completely filled out and personally returned with signatures that were both witnessed and verified, have turned this election into an unverifiable farce.
[...]
Trump should not concede to the calculated corruption by those who pulled every trick imaginable to stuff the ballot box and change the outcome of the in-person voting. The hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots that supposedly went 80-100% for Biden were no better than fake news.
The Biden-Harris campaign, with consummate arrogance, is trying to begin the so-called transition before this election has even been determined. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters today, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."
We all knew the aftermath of the 2020 general election was going to be chaotic. Democrats designed it that way. New ways to vote, Election Day extended out for months in some places, counting of late ballots and patchworks of different enforcement of voting rules has turned the straightforward process of casting a ballot into a chaotic storm of confusion ripe for fraud. So much so that businesses boarded up their storefronts in preparation for post-election rioting that never materialized. At least not yet.
[...]
As the 2020 election results are litigated, look for Democrats to create chaos in the legal process. Lincoln Project this week tweeted the names, addresses and pictures of individual attorneys on President Trump's legal team for liberals to harass or terrorize. Another Twitter user claims to have a client list of the law firms representing the Trump campaign and openly discussed ideas for mass harassment to force them to pressure the firms to quit work on the case. Democrats also may demand one or more Supreme Court justices recuse themselves from election cases, claiming a conflict of interest, bias or some other reason to manipulate the court into a perceived Democratic advantage. Democrats are also likely to file their own lawsuits in one or more states if a recount, audit or court ruling results in President Trump winning that state. More created chaos.
Lying is the language Big Media and Big Tech have been speaking almost exclusively since Trump became president: deliberate falsehoods, misrepresentations, distractions, diversions, suppression of dissent, amplification of false witnesses, accusations that truth-tellers are guilty of exactly the crimes they themselves are committing and multi-faceted, multi-dimensional coordination of this campaign within a vast network of co-conspirators. We are literally witnessing corruption of biblical proportions.
[...]
BUT there is true "justice that arrives like a thunderbolt" on its way in the American culture war. And it's about to strike!
Just this morning, former CIA intelligence analyst and strong Trump supporter Larry C. Johnson published a highly persuasive article suggesting that Attorney General Bill Barr is about to bring the hammer down on the crooks behind the election fraud. Conservatives have grown increasingly frustrated with Barr over the past months for what they perceive as a reluctance to take action on the obvious "alleged" criminal conduct of the anti-Trump conspirators. I agree, it would have been helpful politically for indictments to have come down on numerous individuals involved in the now-exposed conspiracy to defraud the FISA court and to sabotage the Trump administration – but that may be the exact reason why they haven't happened … yet.
If Trump's challenges prove successful, if he flips some combination of the contested states so as to win the election, the master manipulators behind the scenes will have convinced millions of Americans that the legal challenges were abuse of process, that such a result will be illegitimate, that the presidency has been stolen. Trump's first term will look like a honeymoon compared with what he will/would be facing after two, three, four weeks of Biden voters celebrating what they were told was Biden's victory, what they have been told for months would be Biden's victory.
Propaganda.
And that brings us to other, more ominous aspects of the media manipulation. It's implausible that anyone high up in the Democratic Party or the major media planned last summer's riots in reaction to the death of George Floyd; antifa's ongoing violence in Portland and other cities; or the "occupation" of Seattle. But the Democratic mayors of these cities didn't stop them either. The threat inherent in the confluence of these events is clear: Accept the results of the election as we have announced them – or face the wrath of the mobs we have whipped into a fervor
Joe Biden "was able to steal" the election. This leftist praise came Wednesday from Chiara de Blasio, the 25-year-old radical daughter of ultra-leftist Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Biden's attempted theft of the United States government has not relied on clever or artful scheming. It has been a criminally crude gangster snatch-and-grab strong-arm robbery enabled by corrupt election officials and partisan news media willing to cover up wrongdoing by their Democratic ideological comrades.
The left-leaning media declare that Republicans have "no evidence" that large-scale cheating enabled Biden to win key states. The media never mention that certified Republican voting and vote-count watchers were illegally blocked by Democrats in key states from witnessing close-up the counting of many hundreds of thousands of votes.
[...]
Republican state legislatures should conduct fair and thorough audits of computerized voting systems, including source code, and by-hand audits of every vote. Do not surrender our democratic republic forever to criminals.
MRC's Double Standard On Plantation References Topic: Media Research Center
Finishing off the week before Election Day, NBC on Friday evening stoked racial fears and invoked violence against African Americans from the distant past as theNBC Nightly News likened Republican leaders to plantation owners who stopped blacks from voting in the 1870s.
In a piece featuring veteran civil rights activist Reverend James Lawson, after reporter Cynthia McFadden recalled complaints about voting rules enacted by Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, Reverend Lawson reacted:"It's absolute suppression, regression. It follows the plantation owners of the 1870s who used bullets and guns to stop the voting. He's using the technique of voting to stop the voting."
-- Brad Wilmouth, Oct. 31 Media Research Center item
Black conservative Candace Owens has a brand-new book out titled Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation. That is published by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon and Schuster. Does anyone think CBS will lavish attention on this book as they did for Woodward, a Simon and Schuster author?
Listen, black-ish writers, it wasn’t the color of Obama’s skin that conservatives didn’t like. It was his politics. And trying to claim otherwise is an insult to every black conservative (you know, the ones you love to demonize for refusing to be part of the Democrat plantation, even if they're an intelligent and renowned pediatric brain surgeon), including new black conservatives in the “Walk Away” and “Blexit” movements who recognize how much Trump has done for their communities, and how little the left has ever done for them.
But it must be said here that there is an obvious reason why [Meghan] McCain is a target at The Times. Her self description as a “hyper, hyper conservative” is a serious no-no in the world of the Leftist State Media. The all too obvious truth is that in the world of identity politics, the Left views women — and blacks, Latinos and in today’s world, gays — as property of the liberal plantation. To stray — much less to leave the plantation entirely — and the masters and mistresses of left-wing ideology will come after you for certain.
[Joe] Scarborough adopts the patronizing view that people will vote their skin color instead of their interests; that voters of color will docilely remain on the Democrat plantation.
CNS Writer Touts Trump's Record Total, Doesn't Want To Talk About The Guy Who Got More Topic: CNSNews.com
In CNSNews.com's election coverage, there may be no bigger pro-Trump suck-up than Craig Bannister. Case in point: He wrote not one but two articles touting Trump's vote count despite the increasingly apparent fact that he lost re-election. He gushed in a Nov. 5 article:
President Donald Trump, often portrayed by liberal media as a racist, has reportedly attracted the highest share of minority voters of any Republican presidential candidate since 1960, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon.
Citing data obtained from Edison Research, The Daily Mail reports that Trump’s minority support at the ballot box increased among Blacks, Latinos, and nonwhites as a whole:
[...]
Even former Obama Administration official and current CNN Commentator Van Jones admitted Wednesday Trump that Trump’s outreach to minorities was surprisingly effective in this election cycle.
According to a chart posted on Twitter by Republican Strategist Adrian Gray, Nixon received 32% of the nonwhite vote in his 1960 loss to Kennedy.
The next day, Bannister gushed even harder under the headline "Trump’s Popular Vote Tops Obama’s Record-Setting Performance in 2008":
President Donald Trump has now garnered a higher popular vote total than President Barack Obama did when he set the record in 2008.
In 2008, Obama won 69,498,516 votes, according the Federal Election Commission.
As of Thursday morning, Trump had already exceeded that number, racking up 69,538,777 votes, Newsweek reported Friday, noting that Democrat Joe Biden appears to have won even more votes than Trump:
One hgas to go to the second paragraph of the Newsweek excerpt that followed -- the fifth paragraph of the article -- for mention of the highly relevant fact that Joe Biden had received nearly 4 million more votes than Trump.
From there, Bannister regurgitated claims of voter fraud:
In the battleground state of Florida, Maricopa County voters have filed a lawsuit alleging their ballots were rejected because of an issue with the Sharpie pens they were provided.
Constitutional scholar and nationally-syndicated radio host Mark Levin is arguing that in Pennsylvania, another battleground state, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, violated Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution by illegally changing the state’s election laws.
Meanwhile, Trump and his legal team are claiming that the president is a victim of voter fraud– and that they are prepared to take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Regarding the first claim, Maricopa County is in Arizona, not Florida, and the Sharpie claim is false. The Levin claim is taken from a CNS article about a Levin radio rant in which he is apparently arguing for Republican legislators in Pennsylvania to ignore the election results and vote to assign the state's Electoral College votes to Trump.
MRC Writer Still Hypocritically Dismissing Those He Hates As Having Mental Disorders Topic: Media Research Center
When last we checked in with Curtis Houck, managing editor of the Media Research Center's NewsBusters, he was hypocritically lashing out at media figures for purportedly for treating mental health "something to joke about in context of President Trump" even though labeling people in the media it doesn't like as "crazy" or "unhinged" is NewsBusters' stock in trade. It seems Houck is so proud of his hypocrisy that he's parading it in his headlines.
A Nov. 2 post by Houck carries the headline "All Aboard the Crazy Train!" In it, he complains that "CNN and MSNBC guest and psychologist Dr. Bandy Lee tweeted that President Donald Trump was worse than Adolf Hitler in not one facet, but a whole slew of ways." HOuck didn't explain why making such a comparison makes one "crazy," given that we don't recall him or any other MRC employee speaking out against their fellow right-wingers making Obama-Hitler comparisons.
But Houck wasn't done. Two days later he wrote a post headlined "CRAZY TOWN"; his complaint was that "presidential historian and LBJ aide Doris Kearns Goodwin went as far as comparing Joe Biden to Abraham Lincoln being reelected in 1864," adding that this "took the cake in the crazy department." Again, he didn't explain his reasoning; apparently, he thinks his insults don't need to be justified.
That's pretty much the state of the MRC these days -- insults instead of reason, declarations instead of "media research."
WND's Election Conspiracy-Mongering, Part 1 Topic: WorldNetDaily
The conspiracy theory obsessives at WorldNetDaily simply couldn't resist glomming onto President Trump's baseless accusations of election fraud. But since it does no original "news" reporting to speak of due to its ongoing financial crisis, WND's columnists have taken up that conspiracy-mongering mantle. Let's look at how they're doing, shall we? Here's what they ranted about in the days immediately after the election:
The 2020 presidential campaign was always going to come down to fraud.
Besides the Biden campaign's telegraphing its plans by hiding the candidate from the public and the media for extended periods in the middle of a presidential campaign, much of their strategy was out in the open. Democrats pushed a full-court press in every state possible to open as many avenues for fraud as possible to give the greatest possible chance of overcoming Trump's incredible voter enthusiasm and actual voter turnout. Democrats have been on the offensive across America all year to: 1) Create as many new ways to vote as possible; 2) Extend early voting as long as possible before Election Day; 3) Continue counting votes after Election Day; 4) Create as much chaos as possible; and 5) Prepare an army of attorneys to file lawsuits casting GOP efforts to ensure election integrity as "voter suppression" or otherwise run interference to allow as many of their myriad voting and vote-counting schemes as possible to produce the maximum impact for Biden and Democrats.
To make a football analogy, it would be like extending the sidelines as wide as possible and giving the offense several more footballs. Eventually, it becomes impossible for any defense to keep the other team out of the end zone.
While the short-term goal was to change every conceivable rule to set the conditions for fraud, the intermediate goal was to create as much confusion as possible in as many key states as possible on Election Day. This supported the ultimate goal of giving ammunition to Democratic election officials, lawyers and major media to pound the table and angrily portray Democrats as victims and the process as illegitimate long enough to count enough ballots in enough targeted states to put Biden over the top.
Election night Tuesday, at about midnight on the East Coast, Trump led in all the battleground states by decent margins. The betting odds were more than 75% for Trump to win. Then, for some unexplainable reason, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Nevada all seemingly stopped counting votes simultaneously, in unison. They took a "pause" at around 1 a.m. None of those states reported any additional votes for the next three hours. So, what did they do for those three hours?
Let me point out a couple of things:
1. All of those five states have Democratic governors.
2. Suddenly, during the three-hour shutdown, in the dead of night when most people were sleeping, all those states found enough votes for Biden to catch Trump. Five for five. At midnight in Michigan, Trump was ahead by 400,000 votes, with 80% of the votes already counted. When the next 10% of votes were counted, from Wayne County (Detroit), Biden suddenly caught Trump, with 90% of the votes in. Biden made up that the deficit with 10% of the total vote. That means that nearly 100% of the vote from Wayne County went to Biden. That also means that practically all registered voters voted in Wayne County. Does anyone believe any of that is possible? Similar things happened in Madison, Wisconsin, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Las Vegas, Nevada, and could be happening in Philadelphia by Friday. So why did all those Democratic cities take a "pause" in reporting their votes?
3. Not one pundit questioned why a shutdown in counting votes happened in all those states simultaneously. Not one. Not even Fox. Not one questioned how so many of the newly counted votes in those battleground states went to Biden. Only NewsMax pointed out the coincidence of it happening in those five states with Democratic governors with Trump ahead before the "pauses."
[...]
So did those battleground states run by Democrats use ballot harvesting or any other types of election fraud? How did the vote tallies change so dramatically after the counts were "paused" in the dead of night? In all five Democrat-controlled battleground states? If the media, Democrats and deep state could be in such collusion against Trump for four years, then how hard is it to question collusion in ballot counting last night by those Democratic governors?
In my view, a better question is not whether voter fraud played a part in the balloting, but how much voter fraud played a part in the balloting. Why? Two reasons. The first is because the character of those on the left lends itself to disreputable undertakings. We know that at this point, the Democratic leadership in Washington is largely comprised of socialists and functional Marxists, for whom an "ends justify the means" modality is standard operating procedure.
The second is that the deportment of elected Democrats, the Washington establishment and their surrogates since Trump took office made it quite plain that there was no lie too big to tell, no accusation too scurrilous to level and no conspiracy theory too outlandish to float in their efforts to oust the president. These combined with the increase in mail-in balloting, reports of registered voters receiving pre-filled ballots in the mail and similar shenanigans lend credence to the contention that voter fraud was probably rampant in this election.
Is it possible to have a free and fair national election in this country anymore? I'd call what we're seeing a "circus," but it's much more serious: states not being called for President Trump despite his overwhelming lead with 90-plus percent of the votes counted; states being called rapidly for Joe Biden with millions of votes not yet counted; the inexplicable "problems" that somehow only took place in battleground states (water main breaks, insufficient numbers of ballots, insufficient numbers of poll workers, broken voting machines); the unprecedented suspension of counting votes in all those same battleground states; the hundreds of thousands of "mailed-in" ballots that magically appeared in those states during the night, after the suspension of regular counting, all of which were cast for Joe Biden – at least in Michigan. (Not a single vote for Trump or Jo Jorgensen or Kanye West? Not a single write-in candidate? Not one? Out of 138,000 mailed-in ballots? This is statistically impossible and thus utterly lacking credibility.) The fact that all of these ballots that arrived after counting was suspended managed not to strengthen Trump's lead in a single state but to eliminate his lead in every single one is implausible, and the circumstances are suspect.
It's abundantly clear that this is fraudulent. Politics ain't beanbag, as the saying goes, and everyone wants to win. But far more important than the win or the loss is maintaining the public's belief in the integrity of the process, and their faith that their voices are heard and their votes matter. A stolen election is a shallow victory and a temporary one. When cheating becomes the norm (and if it's permitted, it will), then only those politicians who cheat will run. The electorate will cease to care or participate. The United States will collapse under the weight of its own corruption.
That sounds like the description of a banana republic. Is that where we are headed?
Nov. 3 was the Trump D-Day when an overwhelming surge of Trump voters, as impressive as the Allied invasion flotilla that stormed Normandy, flooded from the stunning MAGA rallies into the polls. Just as the Allies did on D-Day, the Deplorables broke the Atlantic Wall. The Red Tsunami crashed through the Blue Breakwater and established dominance in most of their strategic targets before bogging down on the bluffs above the beach. Just like the Germans, the Purple Uniparty had a second line of defense, assets unseen from the beach but just as well entrenched: hundreds of thousands of illegally harvested ballots, secured in caches awaiting deployment in the dead of the night – the cheating hours.
But just as elation began to turn to alarm at Normandy and Omaha, the Allies took Cherbourg – and in our parallel Rudy Giuliani announced in a Philly press conference he has filed lawsuits to stop the election fraud.
You, me and millions upon millions of other Americans voted, based upon what we saw and heard. The election returns came in strongly for Trump, even in battleground states. He was coasting to victory. This is exactly what anyone who had watched the build up to the election would have expected. Massive enthusiasm becomes massive voter turnout. When people want something, they do something to get it!
But a Trump victory was not in the big media, big tech globalist plan. Their own polls had convinced them that Biden was a shoe-in, just like the polls for Hillary four years earlier. Suddenly, they were confronted with a massive loss and had to mobilize their hardcore Democratic election officials to manufacture massive numbers of votes for Joe Biden, while the rest of us slept. The ballot counting facilities were "shut down" and the GOP observers sent home until the counting effort "resumed" the next day.
Big media's goal now is to convince you that what you saw during the election run up wasn't real, and to replace that memory with what they want you to believe: a Biden victory.
Big tech's job is to shut down anyone communicating the truth about the massive amount of election fraud we are seeing before our very eyes. "It's all a lie! It never happened!"
[...]
If you allow big media to reprogram your memory of what you actually saw and heard into the faux-reality they have created to control you, then you have surrendered your mind to Satan's lies (because lies are all he has). If you remember what you saw, heard and felt during the campaign, you push back against big media's lies, you deny Satan his prize, and you demonstrate that each of us still bears the mark of the Creator God upon us, that we are not automatons and that we refuse to be ruled by the global satanists, who are running the war and using big media and big tech to dehumanize us. The facts support our account of events; only the media lies support their account.
Do not be fooled by the gyrations of Fox News or other "mainstream" so-called conservative media, which are, as usual, holding out false hope that the legal system will right the wrongs that occurred Nov. 3, 2020, with regard to the corrupt voting system – a system that is about to "elect" the brain-dead Joe Biden and the evil witch Kamala Harris as president and vice president of the United States. True to form, these media outlets – Fox is really no longer conservative, as can be seen from its calculated, reckless early call of Arizona for Biden – continue to lure viewers to tune in to boost ratings, advertising dollars and thus jingle the change for their owners by not admitting the reality that the corrupt political and legal system will succeed at greasing the presidency for Biden.
[...]
In short, do not count on the courts to bail out President Trump and Vice President Pence for the benefit of we conservatives, people of faith and others who believe in the conception and creation of our Founding Fathers on July 4, 1776. It ain't going to happen – period!
CNS Adheres To Pro-Trump Narratives After The Election Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com went into Election Day with its usual pro-Trump bias on top of the pro-Trump polls it was promoting: for example, one article by Melanie Arter hyped how "Stony Brook University political science professor Helmut Norpoth, whose election model correctly predicted the winner over the past 100 elections and correctly predicted President Donald Trump’s win in 2016, has predicted that Trump has a 91 percent chance of winning," and another Arter piece featured right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh arguing that "he thinks the majority of early voters and absentee voters are Trump supporters who are fed up with the way that President Donald Trump has been treated."
But -- in an apparently instance of hedging its bets -- CNS also set up a narrative in case Trump didn't win by publishing a Nov. 2 op-ed by the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky insisting that not only is election fraud a threat, denial of election fraud is too.
CNS' first post-election coverage came from Patrick Goodenough, who gushed that "President Trump’s chances were looking stronger than opinion polls had suggested." Since it was so close, it was time to aggressively push the narrative that the election was being stolen from Trump:
This was joined by a Nov. 5 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman in which John McLaughlin, CEO and Partner of the consulting firm McLaughlin & Associates, said that many of the presidential polling firms deliberately boosted their poll numbers to suggest that Democrat Joe Biden was ahead of Republican Donald Trump in many states, all in order to suppress the vote of Trump supporters." McLaughlin presented no evidence -- and Chapman apparently didn't ask for any -- that would prove his assertion, which dovetails nicely with a similar conspiracy theory forwarded by Chapman's boss, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell.
Curiously, Chapman waited until the very end of his 22-paragraph article to make a highly relevant disclosure: "McLaughlin & Associates is one of several firms doing polling for President Trump and the Trump-Pence campaign." Shouldn't that have been disclosed much earlier so that McLaughlin's bias could be taken into account? Chapman clearly didn't believe so.
(McLaughlin is also whom the MRC hired to manufacture a poll finding that the media stole the election for Biden, and the MRC has yet to tell its readers it hired Trump's pollster.)
Still, the news turned worse for Trump -- that is, it became more clear that Biden was winning. It grudgingly published a couplearticles noting how Nancy Pelosi was proclaiming Biden the winner; in the second, Susan Jones parenthetically huffed, "As she spoke, even media outlets had not yet called the election for Biden."
It’s not just TV news that’s heavily skewed their election news this year – a major Internet news site has bombarded its readers with anti-Trump and pro-Biden headlines every morning for the past four months.
A Media Research Center analysis of The Daily Yahoo email newsletter, compiled by Yahoo News and delivered to the inboxes of approximately 225 million active monthly users of Yahoo Mail every day, found that from July 1 through October 31, those users were inundated with a startling 134 headlines negative toward President Trump. In sharp contrast, only six headlines were positive toward the President – a greater than 20-to-1 disparity. Meanwhile, Joe Biden received nearly twice as many positive headlines (29) vs. negative ones (16).
The Daily Yahoo is an aggregator newsletter that draws headlines from various media outlets, including Yahoo News, ABC News, Business Insider, The Independent, and Huff Post, among many others.
[...]
Out of 732 headlines featured in the newsletter over the four-month time period (six per day), 331 of them were related to politics or the 2020 presidential race. Out of that total, 99 were deemed neutral, meaning the headlines were either nonpartisan or were critical of both Trump and Biden. That left 232 headlines that were clearly favorable or unfavorable to one side of the political spectrum or the other.
Within that total, there were headlines that were positive or negative to one political party or the other, rather than to the Trump or Biden campaigns specifically. From July 1 through October 31, there were 31 anti-Republican headlines vs. zero positive headlines for the GOP. On the other hand, Democrats were given 15 positive headlines and only one negative.
If only a fraction of Yahoo Mail’s users in the U.S. read those headlines on a regular basis, that’s millions of voters who could have been influenced by an online news source with a clear partisan agenda against Trump and for Biden.
This being the MRC, it's a flawed and subjective metric, since "positive" and "negative" are typically in the eye of the beholder. Drennen also apparently refused to read the articles to find out whether the "positive" and "negative" headlines were justified by the content. And, of course, there's no posting of the entire list so people not as biased as Drennen could judge for themselves.
In other words, Drennen is expressing an opinion that can be disputed, not declaring a fact -- never mind that he and the MRC want you to believe otherwise. This fits into its anti-media narrative, after all.
NEW ARTICLE: CNS Brings Its Bias To The Debates Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com covered the presidential debates the way you'd expect it to: a pro-Trump, anti-Biden slant with extra damage control after Trump failed to explicitly disavow white supremacists. Read more >>
Columnist Joel Hirschhorn's imaginary grand jury indictment of Anthony Fauci was the most bizarre attack on the government infectious disease expert published by WorldNetDaily. But there have been other recent ones as well.
An Oct.. 12 column by Elizabeth Lee Vliet -- a doctor affiliated with the fringe-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons -- once again shilled for hydroxychloroquine, asserting: "The failed Fauci model –telling patients to go home, self-quarantine, do nothing and go to the ER if they get sicker – exacerbated by the FDA's statements discouraging HCQ use, has caused the U.S. COVID death rate to be in the world's top 10."
This was followed by an Oct. 16 rant by Brent Smith:
How does Dr. Anthony Fauci still have a job? He's part of the Inside-the-Beltway Deep State and has attempted to undermine the president since he was elevated to the position of Doctor COVID Know-it-All. And here is just another example.
Many of us have seen clips of what Trump said at a recent rally – that he loves and appreciates the support he's gotten so much that he wanted to go into the crowd and kiss everyone.
He added that he could do this because he is now immune from getting the coronavirus.
For this, CNN pounced all over him and invited the nation's top "expert" on everything coronavirus, Dr. Fauci, to join Jake Tapper in the Trump bashing.
Still basking in the glow of his 15 minutes of fame, Fauci, I'm sure, gladly accepted.
Tapper asked Fauci whether Trump was right to say he was immune. Yet even before Fauci answered, the chyron across the bottom of the screen said, "Trump Falsely Claims He's immune, Defends White House Event."
Fauci answered, in his usual condescending way: "The problem with the word immune, it means different things to different individuals."
No, Dr. Fauci, it doesn't – not this time. Not if you listened to what the president said immediately following his declaration. Trump was actually quite clear, but evidently Tapper wasn't interested in providing any context, and Fauci had no interest in asking for any.
Smith waited until after asserting that "Trump was actually quite clear" to actually directly quote what he said, declaring that "Trump went on to do what a leader should – instill confidence, not fear, and trust in the American people." And he wasn't done with his Fauci-bashing:
Jake Tapper knows he has an ally in Dr. Fauci. And Fauci continues to have no appreciation for the man, President Trump, who, in effect, made him a household name.
I marvel at the fact that Fauci still holds the position he does and why Trump hasn't fired him. For a man who build a television career on firing people, it's a mystery to me that Fauci, this bureaucrat, has been spared the ax.
Since then, of course, it was Trump who has been fired, not Fauci.
MRC Lets Mark Levin Rant That Facebook 'Censored' His Falsehoods Topic: Media Research Center Right-wing radio host Mark Levin was mad that Facebook put a block on the falsehoods he published on his page there. And his buddies at the Media Research Center was eager to give Levin a platform to vent that anger. Alexander Hall did tthe stenography job in a Nov. 2 post:
Popular conservative talk radio host Mark Levin was targeted by Facebook on the evening before the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“Facebook has now placed severe restrictions on my Facebook page on the eve before the election based on an extremely dishonest Politifact review of my link to an accurate story,” Levin tweeted November 2. He added: “I will not be intimidated or threatened by Facebook. You can also find my posts on Twitter and Parler.”
Attached to the tweet was a screenshot of the notification from Facebook explaining: “Your Page has reduced distribution and other restrictions because of repeated sharing of false news. People will also be able to see if a Page has a history of sharing false news.”
Politifact had fact-checked Levin’s post of a tweet from Richard Grenell, where Levin called Biden a “fraud” for not wearing a mask on a plane. Fact-checkers such as Politifact claimed the photo Levin shared was in fact from November 2019.
Notice Hall's framing there. In his telling, the Grenell post that Levin reposted wasn't objectively, indisputably false; it's just that fact-checkers "claimed" it was false. Despite that framing, Hall offers no evidence to contradict anything the fact-checkers found.
Hall let the whining continue:
Levin tweeted about another fact-check he had received earlier on November 2 as well:
“And I listened to the audio myself. Biden said America is dead but FB dinged this as partly false on my site when I linked to it from another site due to leftwing Politifact’s opinion as a third party reviewer. Well, this is all fascistic crap.”
The Hot Air article “Biden Stumbles Through Another Campaign Speech: ‘America Is Dead Because Of COVID-19’” included a link to a clip of Democratic nominee Joe Biden speaking about COVID-19 at a rally, proclaiming: “America is dead because of COVID-19.”
But that Hot Air article now begins with an editor's note correcting the record: "The original version of this article stated that Joe Biden had said 'America’s Dead' during a campaign speech. In reality, Biden said 'Americans dead' in reference to the number of deaths caused by COVID-19. The incorrect references have been removed." And, yes, fact-checkersconcur.
In other words, Levin was lying about what Biden said.
Despite the fact that Levin is 0-for-2 here and Facebook was entirely justified to limit the exposure given to his false claims, Hall still had to push the MRC's dubious victimization narrative. So he huffed that "Big Tech has been doing everything it can to protect Biden as the 2020 election approaches" -- while not explaining how shutting down Levin's falsehoods equated to "protecting Biden" -- and spent the rest of his post rehashing how social media limited the spread of the still-unproven New York Post story about Hunter Biden's "alleged scandalous dealings" with Ukraine.
Then again, the narrative is more important than the truth as far as the MRC is concerned -- perhaps even more so when it comes to its buddy Levin.
WND Bad Takes, 'Trumpslide' Division Topic: WorldNetDaily
A pundit who correctly predicted how each state would vote in the 2016 presidential election, with the exception of one district in Maine, believes Donald Trump will collect even more Electoral College votes in November than he did four years ago.
"A #Trumpslide if you will," Kevin McCullough writes at Townhall.
Rush Limbaugh pointed out McCullough, who hosts a nationally syndicated radio show, has correctly predicted election maps since 2006.
McCullough forecasts 333 electoral votes for Trump and 208 for Joe Biden.
[...]
McCullough said nothing the Democrats have tried against Trump has worked, "Russia Hoax, Impeachment Farce, Lockdown Lies, Evaporative Economic Policies, Debate Blowups, and Covid Contraction."
"They've even floated the 25th Amendment, which I only thought really bitter and nasty Never Trumpers would ever embrace."
Trump will, he writes, "absolutely crush the election that day."
"Now the 'smart people' will tell you that's not possible, and that he lags Joe Biden in the polls by margins too big to overcome. If you only look at the selective polls listed in the Real Clear Politics average one might come to that conclusion (Just like they did in 2016). … To be exceedingly clear – I find no evidence of a Biden win outside of the media polls."
A polling company that correctly predicted Britain's Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 has published its final 2020 survey, which indicates President Trump will get another four years.
The Democracy Institute poll for the Sunday Express finds Trump will win the vote nationally by 48% to 47% over Joe Biden. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 2.87 million more votes nationally than Trump.
In the tally that counts, the Electoral College, Trump is on course to win by 326 to 212 votes, 22 more than in 2016.
The Democracy Institute said that in the final days of the campaign, the revelations from Hunter Biden's laptop and other sources of alleged influence peddling by Joe Biden and his family had an impact. The controversy over Twitter's censorship of the story only enhanced its profile.
The final survey has Trump with a lead of 2 to 4 points in the key swing states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Unlike most other polls, which predict a Biden victory, the Democracy Institute poll identifies likely voters instead of just registered voters and tries to identify the "shy" Trump vote.
The latest poll found 79% of Trump supporters would not admit their vote to friends and family compared to 21% of Biden supporters.
CNS Kept Pushing Pro-Trump Poll Findings Before Election Topic: CNSNews.com
We documented how CNSNews.com was interested in reporting on pre-election polls only if they showed President Trump winning. It kept that pattern up all the way to Election Day.
Indeed, the day after we published our original report, an Oct. 19 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman gushed over another poll by the very Trump-leaning Trafalgar Group having "place[d] Trump slightly ahead of Joe Biden in Michigan and Florida, and gives Biden a slight lead in Pennsylvania." As before, Chapman added that Trafalgar was "the only group to foresee a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of the few groups to forecast a Trump win in Pennsylvania in 2016." Two days later, Chapman pushed more Trafalgar polling that "currently places Trump ahead of Joe Biden in Arizona and in Florida."
On Oct. 28, Chapman was Trafalgar's PR person again: "The Trafalagar [sic] Group polling firm, the only pollster to accurately foresee a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of the few groups to forecast a Trump win in Pennsylvania in 2016, currently places Trump ahead of Joe Biden North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania." And on Election Day, Chapman wrote as if he was drawing a check from Trafalgar:
The Trafalgar Group polling firm, which was the only group to accurately predict a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of only a few firms that predicted a Trump 2016 win in Pennsylvania, gives Trump a slight lead today -- Election Day -- over Democrat Joe Biden in Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
Trafalgar's chief pollster Robert Cahaly, who accurately predicted Donald Trump's 2016 win and his electoral vote total (306), believes that Trump will win the 2020 race with an electoral total in the "high 270s."
Of course, as it turned out, Trump appears to have lost at least four of those states, suggesting there was something wrong with their model, which weights its polling to account for the "social desiriability bias" of purportedly shy Trump voters. Chapman hasn't written a thing about Trafalgar since the election.
For all of this love toward a shiny new polling firm, CNS didn't completely forget its first love, the Trump-skewing Rasumussen. On Oct. 22, Craig Bannister touted how "Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll released Thursday shows that the percentage of U.S. likely voters approving of President Donald Trump’s job performance has risen above fifty percent for the first day this month," adding that "Black voters registered 37% approval."
On Oct. 27, Bannister served up another piece of Rasmussen's biased polling:
A majority of voters believe it’s likely that, while vice president, Joe Biden knew about and may have benefitted from his son Hunter’s controversial foreign business dealings, a new Rasmussen poll shows.
In a national survey of U.S. likely voters, conducted October 22 and 25, 2020, Rasmussen asked the following question:
“How likely is it that Joe Biden was consulted about and perhaps profited from his son Hunter's overseas business deals including at least one involving a company in mainland China?”
More than half (54%) of voters polled say it’s at least “somewhat likely” Biden knew and may have profited, with 44% calling it “very likely.”
Chapman even tried to frame a finding from normally reputable pollster Gallup as somehow pro-Trump:
As Election Day approaches on Tuesday, Nov. 3, it is interesting to note that, according to Gallup, at this time in their first terms Americans' job approval ratings of President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump were very close -- Obama, 50% and Trump, 46%.
[...]
For Trump, his job approval rating on day 1,376 in office is 46%. (Poll conducted Oct. 16-27, 2020)
For comparison, Obama, at 1,377 days in office, had a job approval of 50%. (Poll conducted Oct. 22-28, 2012.)
Gallup also reported that Obama's first-term average job approval rating was 48%. (Similar data for Trump have not been posted yet by Gallup.)
If job approval ratings are an indicator of election performance, it's clear that Gallup was much more correct than Rasmussen. Chapman and Bannister won't admit that, of course.
UPDATE: Chapman got in one more pre-election poll to fit his template, using a Nov. 2 article to tout how "a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows that Trump has pulled into the lead with a strong 48% support compared to Biden's 41% support."
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:35 AM EST
Updated: Wednesday, November 11, 2020 10:05 PM EST
After Trashing Inaccurate Election Polls, MRC Touts Dubious Finding Based On ... Trump's Pollster Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center spent the days immediately after the presidential election gloating that the polls showing a Biden blowout were wrong. Jeffrey Lord proclaimed that "the media and the polls blew it. Big time," and Tim Graham devoted an entire column to ranting that pollsters "are damaging the legitimacy of our democracy, not helping it. When they’re this off base, they lead to both sides of the divide feeling the system is rigged. What's obviously rigged are these polls, easily categorized as an alternative reality. It’s hard not to see intentional rigging, not some kind of accidental bias."
A new post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, shows 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6% of Biden’s total vote) say that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for the former Vice President.
Such a shift away from Biden would have meant President Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.
[...]
The net effect: 13.1% of these voters (4.6% of Biden’s overall vote) say they would not have voted for Biden if they had been properly informed. Applying this to the most closely-contested states, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would today all be in the Trump column, giving the President 289 electoral college votes and a second term. (This also assumes Alaska, where the current margins are not close, is also called for the President).
Obviously, the MRC is not going to mention that McLaughlin has long been a notoriously unreliable pollster -- receiving a C/D rating from FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps best known for a 2014 poll for then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that showed him up by 34 points two weeks before a Republican primary against opponent Dave Brat; Brat ended up defeating Cantor by 11 points.
But there's one other thing the MRC is not telling you: As we documented when the MRC used the company to advance another right-wing anti-media narrative, McLaughlin & Associates worked for Trump's re-election campaign. That's a blatant -- and undisclosed -- conflict of interest.
Despite bering on record denouncing the entire polling process as shoddy and biased, MRC put out a statement from Brent Bozell proclaiming the results of its own poll as "indisputable fact":
“It is an indisputable fact that the media stole the election. The American electorate was intentionally kept in the dark. During the height of the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, the media and the big tech companies did everything in their power to cover it up. Twitter and Facebook limited sharing of the New York Post’s reports, and the liberal media omitted it from their coverage or dismissed it as Russian disinformation.
“Now we know the impact of that cover-up. 4.6% of Biden voters say they would not have voted for him had they been aware of evidence of this scandal. This story would have potentially changed the outcome of this election. The media and Silicon Valley were fully aware of this, so they actively tried to prevent it from reaching the American public. The American people deserved to know the truth; now it’s too late.”
It cannot be true that all polls are inaccurate except the ones bought and paid for by the MRC. But that's the fiction the MRC is going with.
UPDATE: The promotion of this story at the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, similarly censored the fact that McLaughlin was Trump's pollster and failed to explain why this poll should be trusted when it has attacked the entire polling industry and shoddy and inaccurate.
CNS Published Op-Ed By Admitted Criminal Before Election Topic: CNSNews.com
How desperate was CNSNews.com to see President Trump get re-elected? It published an op-ed by an admitted criminal that it pulled from a far-right conspiracy site.
The Oct. 27 op-ed was by Michael Flynn, the onetime Trump national security adviser who admitted to lying to the FBI, though he has since been trying to retract that admission. CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, falsely claimed that Flynn was "exonerated" after the Trump Justice Department decided to stop pursuing the case. His rant is a pretty standard right-wing screed:
Never should our nation, our president, or any family or individual be so viciously targeted, maligned, smeared, and threatened as we have all felt for the past four years and counting. This unconscionable and seditious direct attack by ideologically driven elitists strikes at the will of the American people who ensure our very freedoms through their vote and daily selfless actions.
We cannot allow the opposing leftist agenda to continue enabling the fleecing of America, peddling connected-influence for cash, exploiting American innovation for an elitist self-serving purpose, wielding official power and influence as a means to ensure personal gain while exercising mass control, and selling out our American ideals for ideologies to pursue what the leftists would like as “common and normal.”
These all diminish the power and purpose inherent in “we the people” who constitute our republic.
I ask that you stand with me today in renouncing this betrayal of trust that has burdened our nation and breached the foundation of our American ideals.
Needless to say, CNS made sure not to mention Flynn's criminality.
At the end of his op-ed, an editor's note stated, "A version of this article originally appeared on The Western Journal." That's the website that seems to be running WorldNetDaily these days,and it's a descendant of the right-wing nonprofit journalistic group that WND founder Joseph Farah created back in the 1990s. It was so into pushing right-wing conspiracies that it got blacklisted by social media, and it has been trying to act somewhat more legit under a slightly altered name.
CNS sullied what little journalistic reputation it has by publishing this, and Trump lost anyway.
Tim Graham's incessant whining that fact-checkers expose the torrent of falsehoods from President Trump only end up demonstrating his own bias and denial of reality. He demonstrates that again in a Nov. 2 post about a CNN article on "Facebook fact-checkers and how Trump voters just don't trust them," which he claims "just means they're noticing that 'facts' have a liberal bias, according to the slippery rules of the 'independent fact checkers.'" 
We've documented
Finishing off the week before Election Day, NBC on Friday evening stoked racial fears and invoked violence against African Americans from the distant past as the
In CNSNews.com's election coverage, there may be no bigger pro-Trump suck-up than Craig Bannister. Case in point: He wrote not one but two articles touting Trump's vote count despite the increasingly apparent fact that he lost re-election. He gushed in a Nov. 5 
When last we checked in with Curtis Houck, managing editor of the Media Research Center's NewsBusters, he was 
CNSNews.com went into Election Day with its usual pro-Trump bias on top of the 
Add this to the pile of 
Columnist Joel Hirschhorn's 
Right-wing radio host Mark Levin was mad that Facebook put a block on the falsehoods he published on his page there. And his buddies at the Media Research Center was eager to give Levin a platform to vent that anger. Alexander Hall did tthe stenography job in a Nov. 2 
A pundit who correctly predicted how each state would vote in the 2016 presidential election, with the exception of one district in Maine, believes Donald Trump will collect even more Electoral College votes in November than he did four years ago.
We 
The Media Research Center spent the days immediately after the presidential election gloating that the polls showing a Biden blowout were wrong. Jeffrey Lord 
How desperate was CNSNews.com to see President Trump get re-elected? It published an op-ed by an admitted criminal that it pulled from a far-right conspiracy site.
