MRC's Double Standard on Softball Interviews Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to complain that President-elect Biden gets asked "softball" questions in media interviews:
Kyle Drennen complained on Nov. 10: "During his first press conference as President-Elect on Tuesday, Joe Biden made sure to only take a few questions from reporters he knew would toss him softballs. Almost all of the questions were designed to tee up the Democrat to slam President Trump for not having conceded the race, despite votes still being counted in multiple states."
Curtis Houck whined on Nov. 16, linking back to Drennen's post: "Just as they did on November 10 in his first post-election press conference, liberal journalists played the role of lap dogs for Joe Biden, giving him free reign to attack President Trump and nudge him to the left on the coronavirus pandemic and the economy."
Joseph Vazquez declared on Nov. 19: "The Hill opinion columnist Joe Concha nuked the “marshmallow media” for consistently lobbing “T-ball” questions at former Vice President Joe Biden in the relatively few press conferences he’s held since clinching the Democratic nomination."
Houck followed up the same day: "If anyone was hoping the third time would be the charm for consistently constructive or tough questions at a post-election Joe Biden press conference, Thursday illustrated that such a hope was a fool’s errand. Over the course of the 15-minute availability, the Biden team had the former vice president receive questions from only four reporters with three of them offering softballs."
Needless to say, that concern about softball interviews of politicians doesn't apply when the politician being interviewed is a Republican -- or Donald Trump. When Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo interviewed Trump and was so utterly softball that she offered no pushback to his false claims of election fraud, the MRC wasn't happy when that was pointed out.
Joseph Norris took the whataboutism route in a Dec. 1 article:
On Sunday, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo interviewed President Trump for most of her Sunday Morning Futures program about his challenges to the election results in multiple states. This caused an eruption of outrage hours later on CNN’s Reliable Sources, that Bartiromo would give the president softball questioning on such a controversial issue.
The president’s lawyers haven’t been winning in court, and as always, CNN attempted to discredit the competition to maximum effect. CNN host Brian Stelter said Bartiromo was "not a journalist at all." He summarized: "Fundamentally, that is what this is about, destroying trust in the election system. It’s about delegitimizing Biden's presidency."
Wow. No irony, at all. Given the leftist media’s four-year war on the President, and CNN’s own history with the Russia coverage, it is not Fox News that is destroying trust in our election system. CNN's been doing that for years.
[...]
It is laughable that Stelter and his guests are accusing Fox News of being partisan hacks and spreading misinformation given their recent history. Stelter hypocritically lamented Bartiromo’s “fall”: “it's sad that a journalist like Bartiromo, who had a storied career, is now not a journalist at all. She is now on there just teeing up the President to lie to the viewers.”
Carpenter piled on: “ This is propaganda. If the RNC, if the Trump campaign produced a commercial, Brian, it would be more constrained by the truth to go on the airwaves than what transpired that hour.” This coming from the network that literally ran chunks of a Michelle Obama "closing argument" for Biden and called it a "news" show.
When Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Bartiromo's obsequiousness, Curtis Houck didn't take it well:
Late Monday on ABC, viewers saw the latest instance of a liberal double standard as, if the comment below had been leveled against a female journalist, politician, or spouse would have fetched wall-to-wall condemnations. During his eponymous show’s monologue, host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that the “always-sycophantic” FBN and FNC host Maria Bartiromo had been “auditioning for the position of” President Donald Trump’s fourth wife.
[...]
Ah, yes. Let’s boil down a woman who’s been a business anchor, correspondent, and host for over 25 years (and currently the host of the most-watched business news program), and the daughter of working-class parents to a housewife.
Imagine if a Fox News comedian said this about, say, Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris or a journalist like Dana Bash or Norah O’Donnell. The silence would be deafening.
Houck seems to have forgotten that he (as NewsBusters managing editor) and his employer sought to justify smearing Harris as a "hoe" because she once was romantically involved with a prominent politician.
More than two-thirds of the nation says it is fair for President Donald Trump to ask for a recount in key states, according to a new Newsmax/McLaughlin & Associates poll released Thursday.
Sixty-seven percent of likely voters backed Trump's recounts where the vote margins in his race with Joe Biden were 1% or closer, which applies to states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
Despite the close contests, 65% of Americans say the election will ultimately be decided honestly. But fully a third of all voters, 35%, said that there was significant fraud.
"This seems to be a very disturbing and high number for the country that always prided itself to be the world's leading democracy," pollster John McLaughlin said. "The highest level of fraud concerns are among Trump voters at 70% and Republicans at 65%."
What Newsmax didn't tell you, just like the Media Research Center didn't: McLaughlin & Associates was the pollster for Trump's campaign, meaning it has a certain bias and conflict of interest in conducting polls that support narrative pushed by the Trump campaign.
Additionally, Trump has been giving Newsmax's TV operation lots of attention of late, meaning that it's entirely likely that Newsmax did this poll as a way to garner even more attention from Trump -- with, hopefully, the resulting eyeballs of right-wing viewers that will watch its channel.
In short: This just screams "stunt" and "lack of credibility." There's no real reason to trust this poll.
CNS Sends Interns To Pester Members of Congress With Anti-Trans Gotcha Question Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com has long been obsessed with hating transgendered people, particularly the idea that a boy who identifies as a girl might be allowed to use girls' locker rooms and restrooms -- and that President-elect Joe Biden supports transgender rights. For instance:
In an August column, editor in chief Terry Jeffrey mocked Republican John Kasich for saying his conscience led him to support Biden, sneering: "Under Biden's rule, a human being who God and nature made male will be allowed to play girls sports and use the female bathrooms and locker rooms. But Kasich's 'conscience' is driving him to support this candidate."
Another August article highlighted that Kamala Harris, Biden's running mate, "co-sponsored the Equality Act, a bill that would require schools to allow biological male athletes who identify as transgender to play on female sports teams and use female locker rooms and showers."
An unbylined Oct. 28 article (but apparently posted by Jeffrey, according to CNS' search engine) warned that "Biden is promising that on his first day as president he will order schools to let biological males, who consider themselves female, to have 'access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity.'"
On Nov. 9, Jeffrey declared that "Joe Biden also supports letting biological males who are 'transgender' claim to be females on government identity documents—and to play on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms," suggesting that Biden wasn't a true Catholic for supporting this.
In his Nov. 18 column, Jeffrey listed among the purportedly "evil" things Biden will dois "force public schools to treat biological males as females and biological females as males," adding that "Under Biden's plan, an 18-year-old boy who says he is a girl can play on the girls' field hockey team and use the girls' locker room."
Now, Jeffrey is forcing CNS' fall interns to act out his biased anti-trans agenda. As it likes to do, CNS regularly sends its interns to Capitol Hill to pester members of Congress with gotcha questionsdesigned to push its right-wing narratives. This is summed up in a Dec. 1 article:
When asked about Joe Biden’s intent to order public schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams of their choice, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said that he does not think Biden “has the power” to force such a unilateral change and that he would “like to hear from the schools.”
Graham also said he did not know if it was a good idea or not to allow transgender “women” (biological males) to play on real women’s sports teams and use their locker rooms.
At the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, CNS News asked Senator Graham, “Joe Biden said that on his first day of office he will mandate through Title 9 that all sports teams, locker rooms should be open to transgender students according to their gender identity. Do you think he has the power to unilaterally do this at all federally funded schools and do you agree with this?”
“No, I don’t think he has the power,” Graham said, “and I don’t know if that's a good idea or not, I’d like to hear from the schools.”
From there, the CNS gotcha-question conga line continued, with overly long headlines to push the narrative:
All of the articles -- yes, it pestered eight members of Congress with this question -- copy-and-paste Biden's policy; most of the articles added pictures of what it claims are transgender athletes with "woman" and "female" in scare quotes to describe them.
With transphobic Jeffrey at the helm, CNS will keep spreading anti-trans hatred and use it as a cudgel to bash Biden.
MRC Touts Blogger Pushing Falsehoods About Voter Fraud Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Joseph Vazquez thinks he got a big "EXCLUSIVE" scoop in a Nov. 23 post:
Big Data Poll Director Richard Baris slammed both Big Tech and the liberal media after being silenced by Twitter for speaking out about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Baris was blocked from his Twitter account earlier this month for sharing research pointing to the possibility of voter fraud. He said his wife Laura and his polling firm were also blocked from their respective accounts as well. Baris’s account has since been restored.
In a new interview with MRC Business, Baris warned about the interference of Big Tech and the liberal media into the 2020 election by hoodwinking the American people into believing that there’s no evidenceof voter and election fraud. His main message to the press trying to black out the issue: “Media should stop lying to the American people about the reality of both voter and election fraud. There are examples of both in every election. ” Baris continued: “The question this year has never been whether there was fraud, but rather how widespread it was and whether it was enough to impact the outcome of the election in any of these critical battleground states.”
Of course, Vazquez isn't going to tell you that Baris has been pushing falsehoods about alleged election fraud. Most notoriously, Baris has claimed that 132,000 voters in Fulton County, Ga., had been flagged as possibly ineligible, a claim Fulton County officials have called "false and baseless."
Baris has also claimed that "Joe Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia" -- which is also false.
Vazquez was not about to tell that part of the story, of course -- he had a victim narrative to peddle. And he was certainly not going to connect the dots and point out that one reason Twitter might have suspended his account was his peddling of false claims, which runs against Twitter's terms of service. Vazquez then wrote:
Just the News founder John Solomon released a report today arguing that “a mountain of evidence has been amassed in private lawsuits alleging there was, in fact, significant and widespread voting misconduct.” In Baris’s view, “the states in question essentially used Covid-19 as a predicate to put a moratorium on election integrity laws, including long-standing established laws and verification procedures.”
In fact, one reporter who looked into Solomon's claims found him to be "profoundly misleading" and the claims he makes left out information that discredits them. Vazquez also failed to mention that Solomon's overall work is suspect because of his shady dealings with Russian and Ukranian sources to launch thinly sourced smear campaigns against critics of President Trump.
In short: There is no reason Vazquez had to give an "EXCLUSIVE" interview to a dishonest writer who is seeking to perpetuate the fraud that the election was stolen from Trump -- unless perpetuating that fraud is the MRC's current editorial policy.
CNS Touts Extremist GOP Candidates, Hides Their Extremism Topic: CNSNews.com
Last summer, we documented how CNSNews.com touted then-Republican House candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene's pro-gun fanaticism while hiding the fact that not only is Greene a fan of the QAnon conspiracy theory, she spouted racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in videos she posted on Facebook. CNS stopped promoting Greene when that information became public. But now that Greene won her House race and will become a member of Congress, CNS feels it can start promoting her again -- while still censoring her extremism.
In a Nov. 20 article, Melanie Arter promtoed an appearance by Greene on Fox Business:
When asked what her priorities will be when she takes office, Congresswoman-Elect Marjorie Greene (R-Ga.) said Friday that she wants to fight back against Big Tech’s censorship of conservatives and end abortion, because she believes it’s “completely evil” and taxpayer dollars shouldn’t have to pay for it.
“I absolutely support President Trump 100 percent, and he inspired me to run. I got frustrated throughout his presidency watching Big Tech censor conservatives, so I’ll be fighting back on that, because everyone has the freedom of speech,” Greene said in an interview with Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.” “You know if my 17-year-old son can run across porn on Twitter, then I believe our conservative voices should be able he to be heard and not censored,” she added.
Arter made sure not to mention Greene's love of QAnon or her hateful Facebook videos.
But Greene is not the only extreme GOP candidate CNS is trying to mainstream. Managing editor Michael W. Chapman wrote in a Nov. 24 article:
Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert, who was elected to Congress on Nov. 3, reportedly has asked what the rules are to carry a gun on Capitol Hill and in her congressional office.
Boebert, 33, is from a largely conservative district in western Colorado. She is a defender of the Second Amendment and operates a restaurant called Shooters Grill, in Rifle, Colorado. She is sometimes seen sporting a Glock pistol on her hip.
[...]
Incoming House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) supports Boebert on the gun issue.
Like Arter, Chapman was also censoring information from his reader: Boebert, like Greene, has been a follower of QAnon.
That's not all. In articles on Nov. 5 and Nov. 18, Susan Jones listed both Greene and Boebert among newly elected "pro-life Republican women" in Congress without disclosing their QAnon extremism.
And on Nov. 12, Lucy Collins reported that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was asked "about two new members who were subject to controversy and ties to QAnon" but refused to identify them as Greene and Boebert.Collinsuncrfitically reported McCarthy's statement that "both of them have denounced QAnon," which is not true; while Boebert has since tried to distance herself from QAnon, Greene has not.
WorldNetDaily's obsession with pushing conspiracy theories about election fraud is sodeep, Joseph Farah is taking a break from recovering from a stroke to weigh in.
In his Nov. 30 column, Farah served up "6 reasons I'm not giving up on Trump," the first of which is a Trump talking point: "Trump won a landslide of votes legally cast by the end of "Election Day." Then came the as-yet-undetermined number of mail-in votes that were not authorized by state legislatures were arguably postmarked after Election Day and may not have been signed by certified voters.
By reasons 3 and 4, however, Farah is mostly copying-and-pasting unproven claims by Trump and whining that the Justice Department won't investigate, while also declaring that "There are paths to absolutely secure, free and fair elections in America – including, just to cite one example, blockchain technology." His final reason is simply a Trump ad: "It may be our only chance to preserve the nation from a massive mistake – changing horses in midstream, after an amazing first term, a mistake that could be irrevocable."
Remember that before his 2019 stroke, Farah was embarassing himself by acting like a ridiculous Trump fanboy.
Farah spent his Dec. 9 column cheering the Texas lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court that would "invalidate 62 Electoral College votes of four battleground states and have them awarded to Trump because of fraud." It's mostly another copy-and-paste, this time from the legal filing and statements by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Farah concluded by declaring: "This could well be our last chance to root out the obvious stench that has been left behind in the 2020 election."
Of course, that Texas lawsuit was swiftly rejected by the Supreme Court, showing that once again Farah is betting on the wrong horse.
MRC's Graham Peddles More Bogus Attacks On Fact-Checkers Topic: Media Research Center
Tim Graham's mainjob at the Media Research Center is to whine that President Trump gets fact-checked more than Democrats, while studioiusly ignoring the inconvenient fact that Trump tells more lies than most Democrats (or even most Democrats combined). The whining continued in a Nov. 25 MRC podcast, where Graham ranted:
I always put air quotes around the notion of independent fact-checkers. It's really important to understand that most of the people who do fact-checking are liberal journalists working for liberal outfits. So the fact-checker at the Washington Post, under the motto "Democracy Dies in Darkness," is going to be a fact-checker who counts Trump lies and doesn't count Democrat lies. So the other day, when some liberal Hollywood celebrity -- like Barbra Steisand, I think in this case -- said Trump's lied 22,000 times, and you ask, where would the get a stat like that? The Washington Post fact-checker. And now, of course, liberals always mangle this number, because if they say there are 22,000 lies, that's not accurate, because the way they do it at the Washington Post is to say Trump has committed or uttered 22,000 false or misleading statements. So misleading statements and lies are not the same thing.
At lot of times, for example, that the Washington Post loves to do is Trump will say this is the best economy for black Americans ever and they'll say -- or the best unemployment for black Americans ever [sic], and they will say, well, the federal government didn't start measure black unemployment until 1972, therefore you're lying, or therefore it's a misleading statement. So there's a lot of times -- we all understand Donald Trump loves to exaggerate, you know, make things sound as good as they possibly can, but it's not a lie to say it was a good economy for minorities. This is where you say, again, the fact-checkers seem on a lot of occasions to be accomplishing things that just line up so neatly with the Democratic agenda.
In fact, the Post did not cite the fact that black unemployment statistics weren't kept until 1972 as a reason Trump's statement is misleading (or at least the sole reason; it did note times in which other government statistics claiming black unemployment was lower in 1953). Rather, it points out Trump does not deserve the amount of credit he is taking because it was (pre-pandemic) the continuation of a black unemployment rate drop that started in 2010.
In short: Graham is once again complaining that Trump is being fact-checked at all.
Graham then read from his and Brent Bozell's pro-Trump, anti-media book "Unmasked," huffing about how PolitiFact "gets large grants from liberal foundations like the Ford Foundation -- which is the biggest, most massive, most leftist foundations out there -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the leftist Craig Newmark Foundation." He then declared, "This is one of the reasons we got into the sort of 'fact-checking of fact-checkers' project we do here at NewsBusters. Because when you use categories like true, mostly true, false, mostly false, pants on fire lie, it has that image or proclamation of some sort of great, scientific statement. And I think we've discovered over the years there isn't science, there's a lot of opinion."
Graham went on to deny the fact-checking parity he has been effectively demanding for years: "Liberals can argue they shouldn't have to observe some quota in which everyone gets an equally true and false rating. We understand that -- we don't expect you to give Donald Trump an equally true and false rating. But wewould expect to smome extent that you wouldapply the same standards to Republicans and Democrats, and they have a really bad habit of not doing that." This from the guy who wants you to think Democrats are all liars and Trump merely "exaggerates" and "makes things sound as good as they possibly can" and that shouldn't he held accountable for it. And, of course, he went on to rant about Trump and conservatives were rated as liars much more often than Democrats as liberals. So, yes, Graham absolutely expects and demands fact-checking parity.
Continuing to read from his book (which is certainly a surefire way to fill out a half-hour of podcast time), Graham also complained that PolitiFact fact-checked Hillary Clinton's camapaign memoir and didn't find anything false in it, and "that includes blaming the news media for her loss (they were 91 percent anti-Trump)." In fact, "the media" -- as defined by the MRC's extremely narrow description of "explicitly evaluative statements" on theevening newscasts of CBS, NBC and ABC -- was anti-Hillary, and Graham and the MRC knew it. As we documented, the MRC found in the same 2016 "study" that claimed a 91 percent negative rating for Trump that "the media" was 79 percent negative against Hillary. But it downplayed those results in order to push the "media hates Trump" narrative.
Graham also denied that he and that MRC are trying to destroy fact-checking, citing a call from what he derisively called "the dopes at Snopes" worried that the MRC's anti-fact-checking jihad meant, in his words, that "we were going to declare all of, you know, every fact-check is a fraud, or that there is no such notion or facts or truth. You know, I think part of the problem here is that we disagree on what facts are sometimes, and there's so many times that on these matters of evaluation that liberals confuse their own opinions with the facts." Of course, Graham will never admit that he's doing the exact same thing.
Graham ultimately huffed of the Washington Post's Pinocchio ratings system: "I think we can all predict there's not going to be a lot of four-Pinocchio ratings for Biden. The Washington Post is not going to count how many thousands of lies or false statements that Biden's committed. Which only underlines this whole project was to make a rhetorical point and to score the other side's rhetoric was full of lies." hethen argued that political rhethoric should not be judged as true or false and that only "obviously false or tremendously misleading" statements should be held to account.
Again: All this whining from Graham is because Trump keeps being exposed as a serial spreader of falsehoods and misinformation, and not only doesn't he think Trump should ever face any consequences for that, he doesn't want Trump's lies to taint the rest of the right-wing media. So fact-checkers must be brought down.
CNS Promoted 'Unmasking' Claims -- But Was Silent When They Were Debunked Topic: CNSNews.com
As part of its being a loyal pro-Trump media outlet, CNSNews.com uncritically promoted claims from President Trump and his supporters that the process of "unmasking" -- the process of revealing what U.S. person is being communicated with by a foreigner who is being monitored by U.S. intelligence -- was a bad thing and used as a political weapon against Trump:
A February 2018 article touted how "Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit today seeking all documents involving former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power who reportedly sought to unmask more than 260 Americans in that election year.
A May 2018 item quoted a Mark Levin rant: "How about unmasking? How about unmasking of individuals in Trump world and leaking their names to the media?"
A July 2018 column by Tim Graham and Brent Bozell complained that "Obama intelligence officials were spying on the Trump campaign in 2016, unmasking identities in a search for dirt to bury him. "
In a December 2018 article, Susan Jones wrote of Michael Flynn that "Flynn's defenders note that he was the victim of illegal surveillance and unmasking by members of the Obama administration, but so far, no one in that orbit has been held accountable."
In May, Jones wrote about how then-acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grennell would be releasing "the names of the Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of people being surveilled by FISA warrants," adding, "As Ken Starr noted, the unmasking isn't the problem: 'The key is, who leaked the classified information? ...That is the crime. That's the very serious crime.'" The day after that article was published, Jones wrote another one quoting Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham demanding, ""The question for us as a Congress is, did the Obama administration use unmasking as a political weapon? That's the question that I want to answer."
That was followed by an article by Melanie Arter doing stenography for Trump: "Former Vice President Joe Biden can’t say he knew nothing about the unmasking of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn if he was one of the unmaskers, President Donald Trump said Wednesday. Biden was one of several Obama administration officials whose name appears on the declassified list of officials who requested the unmasking. Also listed are former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper."
CNS cranked out more unmasking-related articles in the following days:
Jones again touted how Former Vice President Joe Biden was among the many Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of an American citizen who turned out to be Gen. Michael Flynn," adding that Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz called this "bad news for Joe Biden ahead."
Jones stated that "Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) says Congress must investigate the "simply stunning" revelation that the Obama administration apparently interfered with the transition of power to the legitimately elected Trump administration," adding as she did in her previous article, "There is nothing illegal about unmasking names. But leaking those names, which is what happened to Flynn, is illegal."
Jones then reported that "Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN's John Berman on Thursday he doesn't remember why he requested the unmasking of a name that turned out to be that of incoming National Security Director Michael Flynn."
In yet another article, Jones wrote, "Recently released documents show that 16 Obama administration officials requested to know the name of the American citizen who was mentioned anonymously in foreign intelligence reports. That unmasked person turned out to be incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, whose name was leaked to a Washington Post columnist."
Jones then complained that "there was no follow-up" from an interviewer after Biden denied knowledge of an investigation into Flynn, adding that "Biden's name appears on the long list of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of an American citizen who turned out to be Michael Flynn.
But a few days after that flurry of articles, it was revealed that Flynn's name was never masked in regard to his phone call with the Russian ambassador, meaning talk of it being "unmasked" is moot, and that talk of "unmasking" regarding Flynn likely didn't involve that conversation. Jones and CNS censored news of that finding.
Neverthesss, CNS had apparently decided that "unmasking" was a thing -- probably because the Trump White House decreed that it was. Jones excitedly wrote in a May 28 article:
U.S. Attorney John Durham, as part of his investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia case, has been looking into the issue of unmasking.
But now, U.S. Attorney General William Barr has ordered a separate review, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec told Fox News's Sean Hannity Wednesday night[.]
This was followed by Arter writing that "Former Deputy Assistant General Rod Rosenstein was either complicit in wrongdoing in signing off on the FISA applications that led to the surveillance and eventual unmasking of former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn or Rosenstein’s performance of his duties 'was grossly negligent,' Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday."
On June 12, Graham complained: "When it broke that Biden, in his last days as vice president, joined a list of other Obama officials requesting the 'unmasking' of an American who turned out to be incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — which led to a smear about the former Army major general being a Russian pawn — the story drew merely 62 seconds of coverage: 55 seconds on ABC, 7 seconds on CBS, and none on NBC. Voters who rely on these cynics for 'news' wouldn't even understand the Big Picture: that Team Obama improperly spied on the Trump campaign and was still trying to ruin Trump's presidency during the transition."
Needless to say, Jones, Arter and Graham all failed to tell their readers that Flynn's name was never masked.
Finally, CNS' agitation got the results it was looking for, as detailed in a July 28 article by Arter:
Attorney General Bill Barr told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he has named U.S Attorney John Bash to investigate the issue of unmasking.
At the oversight hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked, “Thirty-eight people unmasked Michael Flynn's name, 48 times in a two-month time frame. Several people at the Treasury Department unmasked Michael Flynn's name. Is this an issue that Mr. Durham is looking into?”
“I’ve asked another U.S. attorney to look into the issue of unmasking, because of the high number of unmaskings, and some that do not readily appear to have been in the line of normal business,” Barr said.
And that's pretty much the last any CNS reader heard of the alleged unmasking "scandal." Why? Because that investigation turned out to be a bust. As an actual news outlet reported on Oct. 13:
The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter.
The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. The department has so far declined to release the results of Bash’s work, though people familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the “unmasking” of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy.
[...]
Bash’s team was focused not just on unmasking, but also on whether Obama-era officials provided information to reporters, according to people familiar with the probe, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation. But the findings ultimately turned over to Barr fell short of what Trump and others might have hoped, and the attorney general’s office elected not to release them publicly, the people familiar with the matter said.
You will not be surprised to learn that CNS devoted no article to the unmasking probe being a failure, let alone question why Barr refused to publicly release the report. In fact, the only mention of the probe's failure at CNS in the two months since it was first reported (by others) came in passing in an Oct. 22 article by Arter, buried deep in a transcript in which CNN host Chris Cuomo noted that "the DOJ passed on its latest investigation in terms of bringing any charges about unmasking."
MRC's Fondacaro Parrots Fox News In Hypocritically Crying Hypocrisy Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to complain about the "revolving door" of media people who go to work inside Democratic administrations -- but they get really snippy when it's pointed out that it's even more of an issue with Fox News employees who worked for the Trump administration. This time, in a Nov. 24 post, Nicholas Fondacaro lets a Fox News host do all the hypocritical handwaving:
With President-elect Biden stocking up on staff to fill his cabinet, we’re already starting to see the revolving door between politics and the liberal media begin to turn again. Fox News Channel media analyst and host of Media Buzz, Howard Kurtz was on the case Tuesday night as he pointed out the men and women of The Swamp who were leaving the CNN and MSNBC payrolls to go work for Biden. Of course, he also pointed out the hypocrisy of how Fox News was criticized with President Trump.
“As Joe Biden starts to staff his administration, the revolving door between media and politics is spinning once again,” Kurtz reported at the top of theSpecial Reportsegment.
[...]
After noting that President Obama had hired over two dozen journalists for his administration (the NewsBusters count had it at 30), Kurtz pointed out the liberal media’s hypocrisy. “That musical chairs tradition is widely viewed as routine, but Fox News drew criticism for those who moved between the network on the Trump administration, including John Bolton, Heather Nauert, Bill Shine, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” he said.
So the MRC came up with 30 people across the entire non-right-wing media of numerous outlets over an eight-year presidency. By contrast, 21 employees from just a single company, Fox News, worked for the Trump administration -- which doesn't even count Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle not just becoming Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend but vociferously campaigning for Trump's re-election. Despite the apples-and-oranges comparison, Fondacaro rushed to join Kurtz in hypocritically screaming "hypocrisy!" cheering how "Kurtz called out CNN’s Trump attacker turned Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken":
That hypocrisy largely came from the likes of CNN. In the summer of 2018, Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter pontificated about how there had “never” been a “love story” like Trump and Fox News. “Fox and Trump, Trump and Fox. You know they're close. But do you realize just how close” he declared at the time. “[T]his kind of relationship has never existed between a U.S. president and a TV network. It. Is. Unprecedented.” Meanwhile, CNN had already failed to inform viewers of Blinken’s change of position.
And in March of 2018, Anderson Cooper did an entire segment complaining: “It's a presidency that was essentially born on reality TV, and now the lines between reality and TV may be blurring even further.” He was saying that because Trump had taken Larry Kudlow from CNBC to be the director of the United States National Economic Council.
In that 2018 post, Fondacaro played the same hypocrisy card, falsely pretending that Trump's obsession with a single media outlet, and vice versa is exactly the same thing as people from numerous companies choosing to work for a Democratic administration, whining that it was "totally false" for Stelter to point out "the handful of Fox News people Trump had hired and suggested that Fox News was “propp[ing] up” the Trump presidency as if without them it would collapse."
When Stelter brought up Guilfoyle dating Trump Jr., Fondacaro went into whataboutism mode:
While Stelter tried to make their dating sound out of the ordinary, the liberal media was actually married into the Obama administration.
According to The Washington Post, “CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides,” who was Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state. ABC reporter Claire Shipman was actually married to then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, so where were the concerns about all of ABC being tainted by their marriage? There’s a lot more where those came from.
Of course, there's a difference between being married to the deputy secretary of state -- a non-political job -- and being the girlfriend of the president's son and trading on her Fox News fame in actively campaigning for Trump, which Fondacaro offered no evidence Moseley ever did. (Deputy news bureau chiefs don't have that kind of fame, something that apparently escaped Fondadcaro.) Also, ABC was not "tainted" by Shipman's marriage to Carney because Shipman stopped covering politics when Carney, a former journalist, became press secretary.
Fondacaro closed his post by huffing, "It’s only a matter of time before the Biden administration started to hire the “journalists” that covered him and helped to prop up his campaign." But neither of the two people he named immediately prior to that -- Stelter and Cooper -- have indicated they will leave their CNN positions to work for Biden.
Fondacaro is so deep into his hypocrisy (and his deliberate lies) that he can't see how ridiculous he looks.
WND's Election Conspiracy-Mongering, Part 4 Topic: WorldNetDaily
Even as the Trump campaign's attempts to overturn the election they lost met with failure after failure in court, WorldNetDaily'scolumnist have continuedtopush conspiracy theories supporting those doomed efforts. Let's take a look at what they've claimed since the last time we checked.
The height, breadth, length and depth of the American left's criminal conspiracy to steal the presidency and nullify our Constitution is unparalleled in our history, and ranks with the many stories in the Bible when corruption was so pervasive in the elite strata of government and the clergy that there seemed no hope for its overthrow.
We are truly witnessing corruption of biblical proportions that God alone can deliver us from. We don't yet know how this struggle will end, but we do know that He has empowered President Trump and a massive MAGA army of constitutionalists to wage war in the cause of truth in a manner unseen since the founding of this nation.
President Trump broke the Alinsky Box by turning out a Red Tsunami of freedom-loving voters on Nov. 3, and I believe that if we all press in and fight like tigers to defeat the leftist coup, we WILL save this nation and smash the domestic and foreign enemies behind it.
There's one more way to cheat that is really, really easy. That is called "electronic voting." It's so easy to cheat with electronic voting because the whole thing is run by computers that can be controlled by the people who make the software. Thankfully, most of those people are Democratic friends.
The only real problem that can happen with electronic voting is when the other guy is SO popular with the voters and your guy is SO unpopular that you have to stop the computers in the middle of the election night and change the software to help your guy catch up – AFTER everyone thought the other guy won. Whew! That's a tough one.
If you do that, then there is a pretty good chance the voters will think something is wrong with the election.
Any serious person who has listened to Sidney Powell or witnessed a media appearance from her during this past week can hardly doubt her sincere belief in the veracity of the corruption claims that have been brought to her attention. By distancing themselves from Powell, the Trump legal team allows her the freedom to pursue these allegations of corruption across party lines.
Sidney Powell is a serious lawyer who has poignantly stated that she never says anything she cannot prove, and who has had, up until this moment, a generally unassailable reputation.
[...]
Before counting Sidney Powell out, think back to the last time the whole political establishment united across party lines to disavow a determined and indomitable political force. It was the year 2016, and that force was Donald J. Trump. We all know how that scenario played out.
I drafted a "Declaration of Restoration" that frames the legal path forward. My prescription then and now is invoke this law to alter, not abolish, our government, by the use of the emergency powers of the president, to impose necessary election reforms through a new presidential election with just two sections: 1) a re-vote for president and all down-ticket races; and 2) a binding referendum question allowing voters to affirm or reject the reform package as a guarantee of election integrity in all future elections.
Hillary Clinton pronounced on Aug. 25 that Joe Biden should not concede the election under any circumstances. In retrospect, I believe she was baiting a trap for conservatives to jump on her with both feet and thus preemptively neuter any argument from our side that Trump should not concede. I never took that bait, and I'm saying, loud and clear right now, that Donald Trump should not vacate the White House unless he does so because he agrees he legitimately lost the election and was not cheated out of it through election fraud.
If he knows the election was fraudulent and he really did win, he has a legal and moral duty to preserve the republic by implementing an election do-over.
While votes in numerous states across America are still in doubt, former Vice President Joe Biden has rushed in, taken the highest seat of honor, and exalted himself for all the world to see -- but the master of the banquet (the Electoral College) has not yet arrived.
As rampant voter fraud is being uncovered in every contested swing state – attested to in signed affidavits from multitudes of witnesses – the 2020 U.S. presidential election is anything but settled.
[...]
As for fake President-Elect Joe Biden, what is becoming clearer each day is that amidst all his lies and deceit, he seems to have made at least one honest statement during the 2020 campaign. In a rare appearance on Oct. 24, he stated, "We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter-fraud organization in the history of American politics."
As a lawyer who once represented the Maricopa County Elections Department, it has been appalling for me to see the mainstream media (MSM) breathlessly blabbing over and over that there is no "evidence" of election fraud.
They even had the nerve to claim that Sidney Powell, a former high-level Justice Department attorney, who served as lead counsel in more than 500 appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, had no evidence of fraud in the presidential election. They pretended she just put her hard-earned reputation on the line to hold a press conference with Rudy Giuliani based on lies. Sadly, the MSM is able to fool a lot of the public, because the public doesn’t understand the law.
Powell and the Trump legal team have compiled hundreds, if not thousands, of affidavits from people swearing to election fraud in the presidential election. Affidavits are evidence.
Many court cases are decided based on evidence from affidavits alone. If affidavits aren’t considered evidence, then millions of court judgments going back many years in this country must be thrown out.
Over those years, the same people decided that they liked the way the CCP rolled in controlling the Chinese nation and its people. They liked the way Christians and other religious minorities were controlled. They liked the black market for human organ transplants. They liked the reality of a government that told its population how things were going to be, and that was the end of the discussion. Maybe they decided that America should be more like China and that open debate should be censored here, just as it is there. Maybe they decided that tyranny was the world's future.
Perhaps they saw that electronic voting machines were the perfect way to rid themselves of those pesky elections, where anything could happen (such as a President Donald Trump in 2016).
They might even have decided that just a few states could control an entire national election with undetectable fraud.
And maybe now they have been caught. Was their effort a conspiracy? A well-organized fraud? Or is it simply treason?
It is the just decree of Heaven that a traitor never sees his danger till his ruin is at hand. -- Pietro Metastasio
The bottom line, fellow patriots and true Americans, is that because time is short before November's presidential election is truly lost for good, the president must put his fears aside, fire Blowhard Bill, appoint a non-swamp-infected interim AG and clean out the rats' nest. In so doing, the interim AG must order his department to support the president in his election contest and take steps, if necessary, to lay the groundwork for the declaration of martial law, until the fraud that "elected" Biden and Harris is fully uncovered and a new election held – one without mail-in ballots and crooked computer systems like Dominion to tabulate and "count" the votes.
Short of that, violent revolution may be on the horizon, as it was in the early stages of the formation of our republic.
Thus far, Bill Barr and Christopher Wray have been remarkably mum on the topic of election integrity, and in some cases their comments have even undercut the president's position. As far as we can tell, virtually none of the massive resources these men can bring to bear have been deployed to get to the bottom of what happened in this election cycle.
Surely, though, if the law enforcement machinery of the United States government can turn on a dime to investigate a decades-old and completely unsubstantiated (in fact, refuted) allegation of sexual assault against a model citizen like Brett Kavanaugh, it could also, in theory, bestir itself to examine whether the reported result of our recent presidential election was legitimate or not, and whether fraud was a significant factor or not.
My view, Mr. President, is that getting answers to these questions about election integrity is probably the most grave and pressing task that either Mr. Barr or Mr. Wray will ever tackle in the course of their long careers of public service. We have a right to expect that they will answer the call. If they don't, you should not hesitate to dismiss them and find someone who will.
Hard Labor: MRC Spins Away Rubio's Self-Own Tweet Topic: Media Research Center
Alex Christy really earned his Media Research Center paycheck in a Nov. 26 post, given the amount of effort he exerted in trying to spin a goofy self-own by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio into a profound statement.
Christy set up his post as sneering at a "typical liberal CNN commentary" by host Brianna Keilar, who pointed out that Rubio's daily Bible verse are typically accompanied by a political attack on Democrats, calling it a "one-two punch." Nuh-uh, says Christy, who timed them:
Does anyone who actually uses Twitter think that tweets that are posted 25 minutes apart are a "one-two punch"? The one was "just before" the other? The cabinet-picks tweet was at 9:08 AM, the Proverbs quote at 9:33. Would you say a 9:08 CNN "news" segment was right next to one 25 minutes later?
Christy did not say whether Rubio tweeted anything in between those two tweets; if not, those two tweet would, in fact, be "right next" to each other on Rubio's feed.
That second tweet from Rubio was a highly ratioed statement that "Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline." Keilar pointed out that not only did many people in the Trump administration go to Ivy League schools (including Trump his own bad self, who claim an degree from Penn), Joe Biden and Joe Biden will be the first presidential ticket in 44 years in which neither attended an Ivy League school. Christy responded with an, um, alternate interpretation:
She then tried to paint Rubio as a hypocrite by showing all the Ivy Leaguers in the Trump Administration including Trump himself, all she did was prove that Republicans aren't a bunch of proudly ignorant anti-intellectuals. They're not mocking expertise, they're mocking the arrogance of liberal experts.
Ironically, Keilar suggested the Republicans hate educated people and then pointed out their Ivy League degrees. It's the CNN types who never acknowledged any expertise on the Trump team. For example, Keilar then mocked "Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and senior advisor whose portfolio constantly eclipses his expertise, went to Harvard."
Keilar would go onto allege that Kushner got into Harvard because his father made a $2.5 million donation to the school, but that misses the point. Kushner, while being routinely mocked by the experts, helped get more Middle East peace agreements in four years than the entire Ivy League/Georgetown-to-State Department pipeline got in the preceding several decades.
Yeah, it's so difficult to negotiate peace deals between countries that were never at war. Christy didn't epxplain why Kushner going to Harvard under daddy's donation made him better at that.
Dick Morris Rants About 'Election Fraud' At Newsmax Topic: Newsmax
Despite years of laughably failed prognositications, Newsmax inexplicably thinks Dick Morris deserves a platform to suck up to President Trump. And since Trump's current platform is making baseless and discredited claims that the election was stolen from him, Morris is ranting about that too.
"I think that the issue of scale, you have obstruction from the secretaries of state, you have obstruction from the courts, the Democratic-controlled courts, and it's very hard to penetrate that to get evidence enough to reverse several million votes, but there certainly is enough episodic evidence to establish a pattern of fraud," Morris told Tuesday's "American Agenda."
Morris also questioned Attorney General Bill Barr's statement earlier Tuesday that the Justice Department had uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would tip the results of the presidential election.
"I'd like to know the number of people they had doing it and what they did," Morris said. "But this fraud was so deeply concealed within the voting machines that it was almost undetectable. You would need a top-level forensic computer expert to go in there and detect it.
"These voting machines were designed by people who worked for Hugo Chavez with the sole intention of creating a system that could be hacked without anyone knowing about it, results that could be flipped, votes that could be altered, and I'm not sure DOJ probed it to that level."
Questionable claims about Chavez -- the Venezuelan leader who died seven years ago -- are a staple of right-wing conspriacy theories about the election.
Morris got his own column on Dec. 2 to rant further about this, plus the upcoming Georgia Senate runoff:
After the stolen presidential election of 2020, Georgia Democrats are looking to compound their malfeasance by stealing the two outstanding Senate runoffs there and, with them, control of the U.S. Senate. Republicans, who should be kicking themselves for letting the Democrats steal Georgia in November, are about to let them do it again in the January, 2021 second round Senate elections.
We can’t let them steal Georgia a second time.
If we lose the Senate, the White House, and the U.S. House of Representatives, the Democrats will use their victories to alter fundamentally our entire system of government.
[...]
This nightmare scenario will happenunless the Georgia State Legislature and the state’s governor (all nominally Republicans) act now to stop the very same election fraud that delivered the state to Joe Biden in November.
The very same inspectors, election officials, and rigged vote tabulating machines are standing by to do in January what they did in November. And they will do it unless we stop them.
Morris then demanded thatthe runoff use "hand counting of ballots" be used in the runoff and a list of voters be made public in order to "review them to spot irregularities like unregistered voters, votes from people who have moved away, and votes from persons who are deceased."
How Is CNS' Jones Spinning Skyrocketing COVID Rates Now? Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com -- mainly Susan Jones -- reported on coronvirus after the presidential election pretty much the way it did before the election: downplaying the number of cases and deaths in an attempt to make President Trump look good.
Jones' Nov. 10 article started ominously: "The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts a total of 9,913,553 COVID cases in this country since January, with 105,142 new cases reported on Monday alone." But then she went into her usual bogus downplaying: "As the number of COVID cases escalates, deaths are nowhere near the record set in mid-April."
The next day, Jones attacked Dr. Michael Osterholm, a member of President-elect Joe Biden's COVID-19 advisory board (not that Jones was ready to identify Biden as presient-elect, mind you) for predicting the U.S. could see 200,000 cases by the Christmas holidays because "he is on record as advocating another lockdown." She then tried to deflect by throwing out per-capita coronavirus numbers:
According to the latest data from the federal Centers for Disease Control Prevention, 122,910 new COVID cases were reported in the past 24 hours, or 34.6 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days.
Total deaths, based on death certificates submitted to CDC, stand at 237,731, or 0.3 per 100,000 people in the last seven days.
But Osterholm's prediction has turned out to be correct: the number of new cases has averaged more than 200,000 over the past week.
An average of 4,256 people died of COVID in September, about the same as the average 4,206 who died in June. Those two months mark the low point so far for COVID deaths in this country.
According to NCHS, the 3,982 COVID-involved deaths for the week ending September 26 -- the most recent time period for which the data is fairly reliable -- is 76.69 percent below the mid-April peak, when 17,087 COVID deaths were reported; and 51.51 percent below the second peak of 8,213 COVID deaths in early August.
By Dec. 1, however, Jones had to admit a little bit reality about rising case and mortality numbers, while still desperately invoking the higher April numbers for comparison:
"COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across the United States are rising," the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website.
Based on the most recent death certificates submitted to CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, COVID-involved deaths in recent weeks are indeed rising, but they remain far below the record 17,089 deaths counted in the week ending April 18.
But in a Dec. 10 article, Jones was back in hard-spin mode even as cases and deaths skyrocket by focusing on an age group with the lowest fatality rate:
The number of COVID-involved deaths in this country -- 15,594 in the last seven days -- is now reaching levels not seen since the mid-April peak, according to the official tally maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But of the 261,530 COVID-involved deaths recorded by NCHS as of Dec. 9, fewer than one percent (2,450 or 0.93 percent) involved people age 34 or younger. This includes school-age children forced to learn remotely; and college-age people who, along with the rest of us, are discouraged -- and in some cases barred by executive order -- from patronizing bars and restaurants indoors.
People aged 35-44 -- this includes prime working age people -- account for 4,917 of total COVID deaths so far, or 1.88 percent.
According to death certificates submitted to and recorded by NCHS on a rolling basis, at least 7,367 people (2.81 percent) ages 44 or younger had died of COVID as of Dec. 9.
That's the kind of spin that keeps one employed at CNS.
FALSE: MRC Misleads To Falsely Claim All-Female Biden Comms Team Is A 'Lie' Topic: Media Research Center
Nicholas Fondacaro has gotten away with lying on behalf of the Media Research Center for so long, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck has apparently decided to give it a try. Houck ranted in a Nov. 30 post:
Between late Sunday and Monday morning, the liberal media showcased their latest double standard between Democratic and Republican administrations and a failure to grasp reality. This time, outlets hailed President-Elect Joe Biden’s hiring of the “first” all-female White House communications team that’s “breaking barriers” despite the fact that the Trump administration’s top communications officials are all women.
Currently, women hold the positions of White House communications director (Alyssa Farah), deputy White House communications director (Roma Daravi), deputy White House press secretary (Sarah Matthews), press secretary for the First Lady (Stephanie Grisham), press secretary for the Second Lady (Kara Brooks), vice presidential communications director (Katie Miller), and White House press secretary (Kayleigh McEnany).
[...]
These three networks weren’t alone as flacks from the Associated Press, The New York Times,The Washington Post, and the taxpayer-funded NPR and PBS also willfully shared this lie far and wide.
Actually, the lying flack here is Houck, as evidence by his linking to a tweet from Farah as evidence. He pulls a dishonest sleight-of-hand by deliberately not comparing apples to oranges, referencing Trump's "top communications officials," obscuring the fact that two deputy press secretaries in Trump's office, Judd Deere and Brian Morgenstern, are, um, men. Since the Biden deputy press secretaries will also be women, it's absolutely true that the White House comms team under Biden is the very first all-female team.
Houck's failure to grasp reality continued as he whined, "Not everyone willfully ignored this falsehood, but instead of correcting the record or offering fact-checks, many of these same actors chose to explain why this narrative wasn’t a lie and instead fully accurate." He then lashed out at one of his great personal enemies, CNN's Brian Stelter, for accurately pointing out that men work in the White House comms office.
Houck concluded by sneering, "Stelter’s incapable of feeling shame, so he won’t cop to this narrative being a case of jiggery pokery." Says the guy who's so incapable of feeling shame that he's lying to our faces -- and he'll never cop to it, because he knows his employer will let him get away with it just as Fondacaro has, even though such blatant lies damage what little reputation for accuracy the MRC has.
WND Censors News Of Fox News Settlement Over Seth Rich Conspiracies Topic: WorldNetDaily
In late November, it was announced that Fox News had settled a lawsuit filed by the family of Seth Rich -- which reportedly involves paying the Rich family a seven-figure settlement -- over a false story it published on its website pushing the conspiracy theory that Rich, a Democratic staffer who was murdered in 2016, was killed because he leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks.
Strangely, WorldNetDaily has not reported the settlement to its readers. Why? Perhaps because it narrowly avoided getting sued itself.
Aswe'vedocumented, WND loved pushing Seth Rich conspiracy theories. Not only did it enlist notorious conspiracy-mongerer Liz Crokin to write stories about Rich, it treated claims from fraudster Jack Burkman seriously, and it leaned into its longtime Clinton hatred to suggest the Clintons may have been involved in Rich's death. We've also documented that WND knew or should have known at the time it was pushing those conspiracy theories that they were false, since Jerome Corsi knew so at a time when he was still employed by WND in 2016 (something WND also hasn't admitted to its readers).
WND even created a GoFundMe page to purportedly fund reporting to "help crack" Rich's murder, cynically and falsely suggesting that the Rich family supported it; the campaign raised less than $5,000 and nobody has donated to it in more than two years. (The fact that WND fired all its reporters as it sank into financial insolvency might also be an issue in doing any sort of reporting on that or anything else.)
While WND has largely stayed away from spreading Seth Rich over the past couple of years, neither has it told readers the conspiracy theories are frauds. WND columnist Jack Cashilll didn't get that message, though, pushing those conspiracy theories anew in a column appropriately published on April 1.
WND largely staying away from this story also means that it hasn't apologized to its readers for treating lies as truth. Until it can start to behave honestly, there's no reason to believe it has learned any lessons from its ongoing death spiral, and therefore hasn't demonstrated that it deserves to live.
The Media Research Center loves to complain that President-elect Biden gets asked "softball" questions in media interviews:
An unbylined Nov. 26 Newsmax 
CNSNews.com has long been obsessed with hating transgendered people, particularly the idea that a boy who identifies as a girl might be allowed to use girls' locker rooms and restrooms -- and that President-elect Joe Biden supports transgender rights. For instance:
The Media Research Center's Joseph Vazquez thinks he got a big "EXCLUSIVE" scoop in a Nov. 23 
Last summer, we documented how CNSNews.com touted then-Republican House candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene's pro-gun fanaticism while hiding the fact that not only is Greene a fan of the QAnon conspiracy theory, she spouted racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in videos she posted on Facebook. CNS stopped promoting Greene when that information became public. But now that Greene won her House race and will become a member of Congress, CNS feels it can start promoting her again -- while still censoring her extremism.
WorldNetDaily's obsession with pushing conspiracy theories about election fraud is 
Tim Graham's 
As part of its being a loyal pro-Trump media outlet, CNSNews.com uncritically promoted claims from President Trump and his supporters that the process of "
The Media Research Center loves to complain about the "revolving door" of media people who go to work inside Democratic administrations -- but they get really snippy when it's pointed out that it's even more of an issue with Fox News employees who worked for the Trump administration. This time, in a Nov. 24 
Even as the Trump campaign's attempts to overturn the election they lost met with failure after failure in court, WorldNetDaily'scolumnist have 
Alex Christy really earned his Media Research Center paycheck in a Nov. 26 
Despite years of 
CNSNews.com -- mainly Susan Jones -- reported on coronvirus after the presidential election pretty much the way it did 
Nicholas Fondacaro has 
In late November, it was 
