Long After Anti-Disinfo Board Was Shut Down, MRC Continued To Smear Its Former Leader Topic: Media Research Center
We'vedocumented how the Media Research Center falsely and maliciously smeared a proposed "disinformation governance board" by the Department of Homeland Security as an Orwellian "ministry of truth" -- despite the fact that it would have done no such thing -- and served up particular venom at the woman who would have headed the board, Nina Jankowicz, for calling out the lies and trying to fight back. But even as the board would not move forward, the MRC continued to attack Jankowicz for telling the truth. Clay Waters huffed in an October 2022 post:
The New York Times front page on Friday sounded a familiar refrain on the perils of conservative “disinformation” in “Exploding Online, Disinformation Is Now a Fixture of U.S. Politics.”
But beyond the latest tiresome rehash that reporters Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel made of what former President Trump is now spouting on his social media platform, the piece also relied on the dubious expertise of Nina Jankowicz, President Biden’s embarrassing pick for the ominously titled “Disinformation Governance Board,” before it was mocked out of existence this summer.
[...]
Trump didn’t win Wisconsin. But couldn’t the Times have found a less ridiculous “expert” for its latest iteration of election paranoia than Nina Jankowicz?
“I think the problem is worse than it’s ever been, frankly,” said Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation who briefly led an advisory board within the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to combating misinformation. The creation of the panel set off a furor, prompting her to resign and the group to be dismantled.
("Expert on disinformation" Jankowicz spread “disinformation” herself on Hunter Biden’s laptop and “Russiagate,” and was responsible for this cringe-worthy Mary Poppins parody.)
Waters then ranted that truth cannot possibly be objective: "Who decides what’s 'untrue,' especially when the 'science' is constantly in flux on COVID-related issues like the virus’s origin, the efficacy of masks, and the effectiveness of vaccines to stop transmission?"
A few days later, Catherine Salgado whined that Jankowicz was called on to talk about the issue of political disinformation, similarly denying that it can be objectively defined by dismissing it as "so-called":
The New York Times complained that alternative social media platforms are making so-called “disinformation” more “widespread” before the midterms.
Ironically, The Times cited the former head of the Disinformation Governance Board to support its claims. Social media “is not doing enough” to censor Americans, according to The Times.
The leftistNew York Times cited self-described “Mary Poppins of disinformation” and former head of the now-shuttered Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) Nina Jankowicz to condemn alternative social media and free speech.
“I think the problem is worse than it’s ever been, frankly,” The Times quoted Jankowicz, noting that Jankowicz resigned from the DGB following backlash.
Salgado went on to ccomplain that "The Times also screeched about a message former President Donald Trump shared on his Truth Social platform citing evidence that he claimed showed he won the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, before voter fraud" and that the Times called it "disinformation" -- but Salgado refused to call out Trump's lie for what it was.
Joseph Vazquez again spraed the lie that the DGB was "Orwellian" in a November 2022 post complaining that Jankowicz found a new job, laughably (and viciously) calling her a "Benedict Arnold" for doing so:
The former head of President Joe Biden’s defunct Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board found a new gig by registering as a foreign agent to fight so-called “disinformation."
Former DGB Executive Director Nina Jankowicz said in a Nov. 18 “foreign agents” filing with the Department of Justice that she would be hired as a “disinformation expert” with the U.K.-based Centre for Information Resilience. Jankowicz’ role involves acting as an “ambassador for CIR on the Hill, within the Federal Government, media, among tech companies / Silicon Valley, on ‘K Street’, and among potential philanthropic organisations.” It appears the self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of disinformation” may have turned out to be a Benedict Arnold. The filing states that Jankowicz appeared as a CIR ambassador on the taxpayer-funded National Public Radio on Election Day to "[d]iscuss Russian disinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms." But this is the same Jankowicz who parroted Biden’s talking points that the now-verified New York Post Hunter Biden laptop bombshell story was a “Russian influence op."
Of course, the Post's story wasn't verified at the time it was published (and when Jankowicz issued her tweet); as we've pointed out, the Post refused to offer any independent verification of it that would have countered the facct that it came from a right-wing, pro-trump, Murdoch-owned rag. Also, Vazquez failed to explain how Jankowicz is a "Bendict Arnold" for working for an organization located in Great Britain, America's closet ally.
An anonymously written Dec. 7 post desperately tried to find malevolent intent in Jankowicz doing basic prep for her DGB job, whining that she and the board "had incorporated at least five federal agencies, developed a basic work plan and exchanged emails with Facebook executives about a potential meeting."
A Jan. 21 post by Waters complained that Rolling Stone called out "right-wing paranoia" over the DGB and other efforts to fight disinformaiton and how Jankowicz was a key target:
The next so-called Republican conspiracy: opposing Biden’s indefensible “Disinformation Governance Board,” i.e., the “Ministry of Truth." The ACLU, belatedly rediscovering its civil liberties mandate, also opposed it. But Voght sympathized with the cringeworthy songbird, and proposed executive director of the Board, Nina Jankowicz.
Jankowicz spread her own anti-Republican election disinformation by decrying the Hunter Biden laptop story, making her a dubious choice for a potentially dangerous government agency.
Waters offered no evidence to back up his "Ministry of Truth" smear.
When DHS ultimately shut down the DGB for good, Luis Cornelio spent a March 29 post cheering about it, again lying that it would have been a "Ministry of Truth" and huffing, "The DGB came under scrutiny after it was revealed that DGB executive director Nina Jankowciz [sic] engaged in spreading disinformation against conservative leaders. " It's hard to take Cornelio seriously when he can't even spell her name correctly.
Chuck Norris Uses His Column To Sell Stuff Again Topic: WorldNetDaily
Chuck Norris has a habit of turning his column into commercials for whatever business venture he has a finaicial interest in or for which he's a paid spokesman, and he did that again in his Aug. 14 column. He started out innocently enough:
My wife, Gena, and I have a special fondness for the Hawaiian people and islands, just like many of you. It absolutely breaks our hearts to see the devastating loss of life and property through the wildfires that ravaged Maui and the Big Island.
We pray even now for the victims, their families, survivors, first responders and of course the firefighters.
Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara, commander general of the Hawaii Army National Guard, explained last Thursday, "We don't know what actually ignited the fires, but we were made aware in advance by the National Weather Service that we were in a red flag situation – so that's dry conditions for a long time, so the fuel, the trees and everything, was dry."
Planet Earth is a very volatile place, and natural disasters unfortunately hit her every week somewhere.
After fearmongering about disasters (human and manmade) as well as EMP attacks, Norris laughably declared: "I'm definitely not an alarmist or a fear monger, and I dislike those who are. Succumbing to fear literally robs us of life and paralyzes us from achieving our best. " Then came the hard sell:
Helping people be prepared for natural and man-made disasters is what prompted Gena and I to support and endorse some fantastic new survival resources we call "Round House Provisions," at https://roundhouseprovisions.com/.
Please watch this 50-second video I created about "Round House Provisions," then visit the Round House Provisions website to learn more about their excellent emergency survival and preparation supplies. There you will find some of the most tasty, nutritious and cost-effective options for long-term food and storage. You'll also find some of the latest and greatest delicious nutrition drinks to keep you fit for the future.
It may seem like a no-brainer to many, but on this volatile planet and in this terror-pervasive age, we all need to have "a personal survival kit" or a survival storage closet or room that contains essentials that could last us for three months at a minimum.
Below is my list of essential emergency supplies. I know that some of these are costly items, so I'd encourage you to save for each, and check them off until you have them all.
Norris doesn't quite explicitly disclose it, but he owns Round House Provisions. The promotional copy on the website declares: "Like the characters he portrays on screen, Chuck is an honest, reliable, hardworking man who’s always prepared to act and help those in need. With Roundhouse Provisions’ survival food and wellness formulas, Chuck strives to give everyone the tools to be a real-life action hero."
Norris is also trying to profit off of those very people in need, which makes him look a little less like a hero.
MRC Falsely Accuses Ariz. Governor Of 'Election Interference' (In A Campaign That Hadn't Even Been Announced) Topic: Media Research Center
How desperately does the Media Research Center cling to its narrative that right-wing extremists must never be "censored" no matter how much hate and misinformation they spread? It has cometo the defense of Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican who can't accept that she lost and is clinging to conspiracy theories to bolster claims of election fraud that she can't prove. Luis Cornelio wrote in an Aug. 14 post headlined "Damning Report Reveals Big Tech’s Interference in Kari Lake’s Election":
Newly obtained emails expose how social media platforms helped turn Arizona, once a reliable red state, into a hub of leftist politicians.
The Arizona Capitol Oversight, a non-profit organization, unleashed on August 10 emails exposing how Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, as then-Arizona secretary of state, coerced Twitter and Facebook to censor her leading opponents ahead of her contentious bid for Arizona governor in 2022. According to the damning report, Hobbs sought to “improve her political posture” ahead of the 2022 election. In one of the emails, dated November 12, 2020, Hobbs whined that she came under fire after the resurfacing of a 2017 tweet where she associated Trump voters with the “neo-Nazi” and sought special protection from one social media platform.
The emails indicate that Twitter pushed back against Hobbs’s hissy fit that Twitter was not doing enough to protect her, asking her to provide more evidence of her assertions. Hobbs responded back claiming, “I am not sure I can provide the information you are asking for because I reported and then blocked multiple users at the same time.” As if that wasn’t enough, Hobbs then aimed her censorship demands at Facebook, emailing the company on November 23 2021 to remove an unrelated post. The post in question was related to the Arizona elections.
Oddly, Cornelio didn't mention Lake at all in his post, only in the headline. He also didn't describe Arizona Capitol Oversight as anything beyond his euphemistic label of "a non-profit organization." In fact, it's run by Brian Anderson, a former staffer for Hobbs' predecessor as governor, Doug Ducey, so there's clearly some political bias at work in this report.
Cornelio went on to rant that Hobbs was trying to "censor posts that contained so-called misinformation." In fact, she was trying to fight undisputed lies and misinformation; as we've documented, one tweet she sought to have removed falsely claimed that the state's voter registration system is controlled by foreigners. Again, Cornelio did not explain why lies and misinformation in spcial media should never be corrected.
Cornelio then undermined the entire premise of his outrage with one sentence: "The censorship collusion continued from November 2020 all the way to the run-up of her gubernatorial campaign announcement." That's right -- all this happened even before Hobbs announced her gubernatorial campaign.In other words, this biased report is nowhere near as "damning" as Cornelio wants us to believe.
How can there be "election interference" in a campaign that hadn't even been declared? Cornelio did not elaborate.
WND Fearmongers, Spreads Conspiracies About COVID Surge Topic: WorldNetDaily
As the number of COVID cases increased over the summer, WorldNetDaily not only kept up its usualfakenews falsely smearing vaccines, it freaked out over possible mask requirements and other abatement measures. First, though, Joe Kovacs gave space to a right-wing senator's conspiracy theory in an Aug. 13 article:
A U.S. senator is reviving debate over the COVID pandemic, alleging on national television the health catastrophe was "pre-planned by an elite group of people" intended "for our loss of freedom."
The remarks from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., came during an interview with Maria Bartiromo of the Fox Business Network on Friday.
Bartiromo lamented about information suppression by the federal government as well as Big Tech.
[...]
Johnson explained: "This is all pre-planned by an elite group of people, that is what I am talking about, 'Event 201' occurred in late 2019, prior to the rest of us knowing about the pandemic. Again, this is very concerning in terms of what is happening, what continues to be planned for our loss of freedom."
In fact, "Event 201" was a simulation by governmentl and nonprofit officials to examine possible reactions to a pandemic, and there's no evidence that theorganizers knew that a real pandemic wasc oming -- something Kovacs hid from his readers.
As cases increased, Peter LaBarbera spent an Aug. 21 article fearmongering about possible mask mandates anbd hyping extremists declaring they won't comply with something tyhat didn't yet exist:
With new COVID variants, including BA.2.86 and EG.5, in the news, the same media and activists on the Left who were most fanatical about masks and other heavy-handed COVID policies during the pandemic are now pushing mask mandates again.
Conservatives warned it could be a precursor to a return to oppression in the name of fighting COVID, and vowed collectively not to "comply."
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, tweeted out the message: "COVID [does not equal] constitutional authority" above a tweet by Ryan Cunningham that states: "The WHO [World Health Organization], CDC, Biden Admin are fear mongering a new COVID variant BA.2.86 after highly mutated strain reported in Michigan. Sources in DHS and Emergency Management (my field) are already preparing for lockdowns and restrictions. Look at todays headlines. It’s a coordinated government & media campaign."
[...]
But with most Americans enjoying their freedom and thrilled the era of compelled mask-wearing is over – and conservatives already vowing not to comply with renewed COVID restrictions – it appears it would be a lot harder for elites to instill mass COVID paranoia and the tyranny that flows from it than it was in the initial phase of the pandemic under Donald Trump's presidency.
Never mind, of course, that it was LaBarbera that was instilling paranoia.
Bob Unruh followed with an Aug. 24 article pushing the very weird conspiracy theory that a new COVID outbreak is being manufactured to help President Biden's re-election chances:
The undue influences on the 2020 presidential election already have been documented: Mark Zuckerberg's $400 million handout to election officials who often used it to recruit leftist voters. And the FBI's interference when it falsely told media groups to censor accurate reporting about the Biden family's international business schemes because it was Russian disinformation, when it wasn't.
But the rampage of COVID-19 across the country also had an impact. Voting rules were changed, vote-counting procedures changed. voting periods extended until sometimes weeks after election day and more.
Now that the 2024 election is coming into view, it seems that COVID is surging again.
"Mandates are coming back just in time for the 2024 election cycle," conservative Collin Rugg posted online. "What impeccable timing!"
A report at Just the News noted Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk cited new COVID restrictions are "just in time for Democrats to reinforce the importance of mass mail-in ballots."
Unruh offered no evidence that mail-in ballots were in any way a problem in 2020.
LaBarbera returned to serve as stenographer for Donald Trump in an Aug. 31 article:
Former President Donald Trump in a campaign video Wednesday made a defiant reply to "left-wing lunatics" and "COVID tyrants" who are "trying very hard to bring back COVID lockdowns and mandates with their sudden fear-mongering about variants": "We will not comply."
Trump mocked the timing of the resurgent COVID hysteria, saying, "Gee-whiz, you know what else is coming? An election."
"They want to restart the COVID hysteria so they can justify more lockdowns, more censorship, more illegal drop boxes, more mail-in ballots, and trillions of dollars in payoffs to their political allies heading into the 2024 election. Does that sound familiar?" he said in the statement, which is posted on the "Team Trump" X account with the words: "COVID Tyrants want to take away our Freedom. Hear my words – WE WILL NOT COMPLY." (Team Trump is the official X account for the Trump campaign.)
[...]
There is widespread consensus on the Right, and even grudging acknowledgement on the Left, that COVID fears and lockdowns enabled emergency changes in various state election rules that were used to great advantage by Biden and the Democrats in the 2020 election against Trump.
Unruh hyped more fearmongering about almost entirely nonexistent restrictions in a Sept. 6 article:
There's no doubt that COVID-19, in its first form, was a catastrophe, killing some seven million people around the world after having come out, as most experts now believe, of a research lab in Wuhan, China, where bat viruses were being studied by scientists who wanted to know how to make them for lethal.
The death toll in the U.S. alone was about one million.
But subsequent variations all have since proven to be far, far less lethal.
Many people infected with a variant have reported nothing more than sniffles or brief cold-like symptoms.
It was the No. 3 cause of death in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, fourth in 2022, and so far in 2023, No. 7.
So why are headlines now insisting that mask mandates, those infamous shots and business-killing lockdowns coming back?
And do they have to?
A commentary by John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, charged that the precautions actually nothing to do with anyone's health.
Neither Unruh nor Davidson offered any evidence that COVID vaccines are "infamous" (beyond their right-wing bubble, anyway) or that vaccines are, in Davidson's words, a "Violation of basic civil rights."
MRC Dishonestly Framed Congressman As Liar For Deviating From Right-Wing Narrative On Archer Testimony Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center spent the days before Devon Archer's closed-door testimony before a Republican-led congressional committee hyping the heck out of it as a yet another attack on Hunter Biden. Afterwards, it labored to frame the contents of Archer's testimony as devastating, even though that wasn't exactly the case. An Aug. 1 post by Curtis Houck whined that one non-right-wing media outlet didn't stick with his preferred right-wing narrative:
After being no-shows on Monday’s NBC Nightly News, NBC arrived via Tuesday morning’s Today to Devon Archer’s damaging remarks behind closed doors to the House Oversight Committee about what he saw in his time as Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner and confidant, including their stint on the infamous Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
This wasn’t entirely surprising as Today had been the only flagship network morning or evening newscast to allude to the hearing in the run-up to Monday with a seven-second nod on Friday.
[...]
“Ah, we’re following some new developments in the investigations that surround Hunter Biden. His former business partner testifying behind doors on Capitol Hill,” Today co-host Craig Melvin began, tossing to chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander by asking “what did we learn from” what’s leaked out.
Alexander caught viewers up to speed with what’s not in dispute, which was that he was “Hunter Biden’s former business partner” and “answered questions for about four hours”.
Then, the spin games began with Alexander touting the Democratic line that Archer believes Hunter merely “sold the illusion of access to his father” and the elder Biden “was never directly involved in” their shady ventures.
This was despite the fact that “Hunter put his father on speaker phone with clients and former business associates roughly 20 times over ten years”.
But Houck really didn't want the full story of Archer's testimony told; he later complained that another network "gave the other side" by quoting a Democratic congressman, Dan goldman, saying that "he never heard any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden."
Peter Kotara later complained that Goldman was allowed to appear on TV and offer his take:
Tuesday’s Morning Joe brought on Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) and teed him up to play defense for President Biden after the explosive Devon Archer testimony on the Biden family’s bribery and corruption. They contradicted Republican claims about the content of the closed-door testimony, and denied any wrongdoing by then Vice President Biden.
Goldman claimed that despite Archer’s testimony that Biden was on the phone at Hunter’s business meetings, he was only there to merely “say hello” and that Hunter was only selling the “illusion” of influence, as if that didn’t benefit him.
[...]
The problem was, that what Goldman said completely contradicted the Republican statements about Archer’s testimony. Goldman and Comer both were in the room listening to Archer’s testimony, but it was a closed-door session and the transcript currently had not been released to the public. If it is, one side will be exposed as liars.
Kotara didn't explain why the statements from Republicans -- whose goal it is to personally destroy Hunter Biden and his father -- should be trusted. Instead, he unleashed a nasty smear of President Biden and Hunter: "So we were supposed to believe the father who let his son become a crackhead all of a sudden started to care, and they got over Beau’s death by talking with Hunter’s business associates?"
Houck returned for an Aug. 2 post complaining that non-right-wing media was covering actual news instead of Archer:
With Tuesday’s third indictment of former President Trump, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC had their ticket out of having to acknowledge the scandals surrounding the Biden family, including reasons to continue skipping Burisma bribery claims and no longer probe Monday’s testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer.
Houck repeated this talking point while guest-hosting the Aug. 2 NewsBusters podcast.
An Aug. 3 post by Kevin Tober tried to frame Goldman as a liar:
On Monday, after Hunter Biden's business associate Devon Archer testified behind closed doors regarding President Joe Biden's involvement with his son, New York Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman went before the assembled cameras and microphones outside the committee room and lied through his teeth about what was said. While at the time we only had his word vs the word of Republican members who were also in the room, based on his track record, all fair minded observers knew he was lying.
When the word for word transcript was released Thursday, everyone who read it now knew for certain he lied. Later that morning, CBS News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge called him out when she went on CBS's streaming network to correct the record.
Host Anne-Marie Green first asked Herridge "Why are Democrats and Republicans disagreeing on the context of the transcripts."
This gave Herridge her chance to correct the lies that were spread by Goldman and others that Hunter Biden had not sought to use his father's influence to shake down foreign governments. "Earlier this week we just had to rely on the characterization from Republicans and Democrats about Devon Archer's testimony," she noted. "But now we can see the full transcript."
"You will recall that Democrat Congressman Dan Goldman said that Archer testified that it was the illusion of access to Joe Biden that Hunter Biden was offering to these clients. But in fact, when you look at the transcript what you see is that phrase, illusion of access, is in Dan Goldman's question. It’s actually not what Devon Archer testified to," she explained.
In fact, the article on the testimony Herridge co-wrote for the CBS website more or less backs up what Goldman said; she didn't accuse Goldman of lying as Tober claimed but, rather, merely claimed that Archer's answers were "more nuanced" than Goldman portrayed them as being:
The transcript shows Goldman used the term "illusion of access" in his line of questioning, and Archer's answers were more nuanced.
He asked Archer, "Is it fair to say that Hunter Biden was selling the illusion of access to his father?"
Archer replied, "Yes."
Goldman followed up, "So, when you talk about selling the brand, it's not about selling access to his father. It's about selling the illusion of access to his father. Is that fair?"
Archer replied, "Is that fair? I mean, yeah, that is — I think that's — that's almost fair."
"Because there are touch points and contact points that I can't deny that happened, but nothing of material was discussed," Archer said.
In short: Tober is lying by accusing Goldman of lying. Neveretheless, Tober concluded his post by declaring, "Good to see there's at least one honest reporter at CBS who is willing to call out the disinformation from the left regarding the massive Biden bribery scandal."
After another coverage count by Houck -- which, like before, omitted Fox News -- and another podcast guest-hosting gig where he repeated those numbers, it was back to dishonestly framing Goldman as a liar. Kotara did thte duty in an Aug. 4 post:
On Friday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts doubled down on their flagrant lies they promoted along with Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY) about Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer.
They claimed that now, with the transcript of the testimony released, that Goldman was correct, and later lamented that other networks were treating the Biden investigation as “equal” to the indictments against Donald Trump.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski opened:
But as we learned from Democratic committee member Dan Goldman, Archer may have actually contradicted [Chairman James] Comer's [R-KY] point. And yesterday, the transcript of that closed door interview was released, confirming Goldman's account. It turns out Archer told the House Oversight Committee that he has no knowledge of Joe Biden altering policy to benefit Hunter. Archer also said he was present for roughly 20 instances of Hunter putting his father on speakerphone in the presence of business associates. Archer said none of the conversations focused on business and that they talked about things like fishing and the weather.
This was one more massive spin to cover up their previous claims about the testimony before the transcript was released. Brzezinski’s dishonesty was shown by the fact that Archer did mention the weather and fishing, but the issue was that he was selling the Biden brand. Archer in the transcript stated that “I think ‘brand’ is the best way to describe it.” This completely dismantled MSNBC’s prior narrative of the “illusion of access” being sold as opposed to actual access to Biden. When the transcript was released, co-host Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski must have panicked and decided the only way to proceed without losing all credibility was to keep up the charade and hope no one noticed any other network’s coverage of the it or read the transcript themselves.
Unfortunately for MSNBC, their perfidiousness was laid bare not only by House Republicans and right-leaning networks like Fox News, but also by their fellow liberal network CBS. Astonishingly, the mainstream left-wing network actually called out Goldman for his lies about the content of the transcript where Archer tells Goldman that his description is “almost fair,” because Hunter is showing off that there is a degree of access.
Despite not actually saying what, exactly, was the "lie" Goldman told, he ranted: "Joe, Mika, and the rest of the MSNBC hosts gave new insight into just how depraved the leftist media really was. In an act of total desperation and terror, they were willing to verifiably lie directly to the world about something as simple as a transcript. For what purpose? To protect the Bidens and by extension, the political success of the Democratic Party. They made it clear that no one interested in honesty can trust them, the media exists solely to spread propaganda for the left." One can more plausibly argue that Kotara and the MRC are spreading lies to benefit right-wing narratives.
An Aug. 9 post by Tober cheered how Fox News and its biased reporters were pushing those very right-wing narratives:
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy is back from his parental leave and he's already making waves in the media. Late Wednesday afternoon, Doocy had an opportunity to ask President Joe Biden, during an event in New Mexico, about Devon Archer's testimony directly implicating him in his son Hunter's overseas business dealings by saying he was put on the phone with Hunter's partners. As you can expect, the President was not happy with the question. In fact, he snapped at Doocy and said it was a "lousy question."
The exchange did not air live on television but thankfully was caught on camera. Doocy went on Fox during Your World with Neil Cavuto to break the news and let viewers see the exchange.
That, of course, is the media world the MRC wants us all to inhabit: highly biased, with right-wing narratives presented without the faintest criticism.
And none of these posts mentioned that Archer is a convicted criminal who has been sentenced to prison for his role in a scam involving the sale of fraudulent tribal bonds, then lost an appeal on the sentencing earlier this year.
Mark Swanson played dutiful stenographer for an Aug. 27 Newsmax article:
The former Ukrainian prosecutor general at the center of the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal said he was fired as a result of a pressure campaign brought by the Obama administration, specifically at the “insistence of the then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
Viktor Shokin told Fox News on Saturday night that he was fired “because I was investigating Burisma.”
Shokin, through a translator, dropped the bombshell remarks during an interview on “One Nation.”
Shokin took it one step further, adding that it’s his belief that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden took bribes. It’s only a belief because Shokin was fired before he could investigate further to prove it, he said.
"Had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in," Shokin told Fox News. "That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others."
[...]
Shokin said he was forced out in March 2016, fired by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, over pressure from Biden’s office, ostensibly for allowing corruption in the government and his own office with impunity.
Joe Biden made the demand in a December 2015 trip to Ukraine, threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Shokin was fired.
That was followed by more stenography the next day in an article by Nicole Wells:
Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland told Newsmax on Monday that with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin speaking out, hopefully "the final shoe has now dropped" on the Bidens.
"I was in the meeting [with] then-Vice President [Joe] Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and he bragged and he said, 'Well, I told the Ukrainian government unless they fired that special investigator they were going to lose a billion dollars in aid,'" McFarland told "The Chris Salcedo Show." "Everybody in the audience went, 'Ha ha ha,' and Biden said, 'And they fired him right away.' And I'm thinking, Really? Is the vice president of the United States really admitting that he interfered with a bribery investigation in Ukraine?"
Speaking through an interpreter, Shokin told Fox News on Saturday night he was fired "because I was investigating Burisma," specifically at the "insistence of the then-Vice President Joe Biden."
[...]
"If you look back at the timeline, the first thing that they said at the 2020 election, when the Hunter Biden laptop came out, the story was well, it was all Russian disinformation," she said. "And then when that turned out not to be the case, well, it was just Hunter Biden. Joe knew nothing about it. Well now, when it turns out that's not the case – Joe Biden was in the meetings, he was on the speakerphone – now their new version is, well, he may have known about it, and Hunter may have taken the money, but it didn't affect policy."
Neither Swanson nor Wells did any fact-checking for their respective articles, and they really should ave, because Shokin can't be trusted. As others have pointed out, there were calls for Shokin to be fired -- not only by Biden but also from top Republicans and the international community -- not because he was investigating corruption but, rather, because he was not investigating it. Further, such demands are in line with how U.S. foreign policy is conducted, which is often conditioned on countries taking certain actions.
Newsmax is not exactly enhancing its reputation as a credible media outlet by uncritically repeating false claims.
Obama Derangement Syndrome Never Stops At WND Topic: WorldNetDaily
Obama Deramgement Syndrome never ended at WorldNetDaily, even though Barack Obama has been out of the White House for years. WND has amply demonstrated that in recent weeks by suggesting that Obama murdered his chef and promoting the bitter rage of his estranged grifter half-brother, but there's so much more. Joe Kovacs devoted an April "news" article to chortling how a "Jeopardy" contestant got Obama's "heritage" wrong:
Barack Obama's mysterious heritage continues to perplex even the smartest of contestants on "Jeopardy."
On Wednesday night's episode, in the category titled, "Our nation of immigration," a photo of Barack Obama was displayed, with host Ken Jennings reading the clue:
"Famous Americans of this heritage include Barack Obama, seen here on a visit to the old country."
The returning champion, Kat Jepson, an artist originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, responded: "What is Kenya?"
Jennings ruled her incorrect, even though many Americans may sympathize with that answer, since Obama's birthplace and precise family heritage have long been matters of controversy.
Neither of the two other contestants, Ben Chan nor Laura Caton, proffered a guess.
Jennings explained the "correct" response, saying: "You can see the flag, he's actually in Ireland."
A June 27 article was a reprint of the introduction of a new book compiling essays by right-wing anti-Obama authors about how horrible Obama supposedly was:
Barack Obama’s presidency was historic. Pundits said it, celebrities tweeted it, and the community organizer from Chicago was not shy about constantly bringing it up.
And it was true.
Over a decade after his inauguration, we are still living in his shadow. His history of economic decline, racial division, and terrorist appeasement is our present. The third term of his presidency under Biden makes him inescapable even long after leaving office. The Biden administration is extending his fundamental transformation of America. Its open borders, woke military, critical race theory, terrorist appeasement, and wealth redistribution are a continuation of Obama’s war on our national sovereignty, on the middle class, on the family, and on free enterprise. From a new administration staffed with all his old people to the familiar economic misery that Americans thought they had left behind, it is as if the Obama administration never ended. And, as the nation endures a third term of Obama, many wonder if it will ever end.
His legacy of defeat abroad and division at home is all around us. From race riots to defeat in Afghanistan, from the war on the middle class to massive power grabs, we are not only still living out his history, but it’s clear that we will go on living there until we break free. Obama made history, but not the way that the mainstream media would have it. The truly historic elements of his presidency were not his accident of birth and choice of racial identification, which a political establishment obsessed with identity politics told Americans would serve as a national atonement for racism. Now that his third term is taking place under an old, white male figurehead, it is clearer than ever that identity is not history. The true legacy of Obama and Biden lies in the impact of their destructive radicalism on the country, not what box they checked on their census form. The community organizer from Chicago did not heal our racial wounds. Instead, he presided over a historically divisive era that reversed generations of improvements in race relations.
But Obama did not just divide Americans by race (“Punish your enemies”), but by gender (“You know, there’s a reason we haven’t had a woman president before”), by faith (“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”), by all the flavors of sexual identity, and by every sort of identity politics. He broke America, and the fractures of our time are the aftershocks of his destruction.
Pointing out that there has never been a woman president is dividing Americans by gender? Weird.
A July 3 column by editor Joseph Farah -- who remains prone to flareups of ODS -- served up out-of-context statements he called "a few choice quotes from Barack Hussein Obama. This is painful, indeed. Our first president who was a "community organizer." This included the "civilian national security force" statement Farah has obsessed about for years, which we documented way back in 2008 was not about the establishment of a paramilitary force under Obama's control, as Farah has long suggested, but about using civilian "soft power" as part of foreign diplomacy.
Farah continued to rage: "Obama was telling us who he was. He is still telling us who he is and hinting toward a destination that is not America. Then came Joe Biden. All it took was one rigged election." He then likened Obama and Biden to "the evil geniuses that came before," like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. (What was that about WND not liking it when people likened Trump to Hitler?)
Wayne Allyn Root --who is also prone to ODS fits -- ramped up the Obamaphobic rage in his July 21 column:
It's so damn obvious. You'd have to be delusional, naive, a moron or a Democrat not to understand what went down.
You'd have to be delusional, naive, a moron or a Democrat not to understand our country has been sold out.
And you'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to understand this wasn't President Joe Biden's plan. Biden has always been former President Barack Obama's "useful idiot."
The answer to every question about who committed the crimes, who sold out our country, who the mastermind is, is always the same ...
IABO: It's Always Been Obama.
[...]
What did Obama know and when did he know it? Obama was president when all this went on. Obama was in charge when Biden was robbing us blind. Obama oversaw all this crime, corruption, extortion and tax fraud.
Obama was president when his vice president's son ran around the world on a one-man crime and sex spree. Hunter Biden acted like he represented the United States government, while snorting coke and smoking crack off prostitutes' backs ... while having sex with possibly underage girls, filming it all and putting it on his laptop – opening the entire United States to blackmail.
And you think Obama didn't know about any of this?
[...]
Folks, either you believe Obama is a fool, the dumbest and most clueless moron to ever occupy the White House ... and Obama knew nothing ... Obama saw nothing ... Obama heard nothing ... Obama is a clone of Sgt. Shultz on "Hogan's Heroes" ...
… or you're starting to understand that Obama was the mastermind. Obama was "the tutti di capo" – the ultimate "Big Guy" – the boss of bosses.
And all this crime, corruption, extortion and treason was carried out with Obama's approval and permission. All these world-class criminals, traitors and useful idiots were working for Obama, were following Obama's plan and carrying out Obama's orders – and were protected by Obama's DOJ and Obama's FBI.
And it's Obama right now still giving the orders. It's clear Biden is a brain-dead puppet with dementia and diapers. Half the time this half-wit doesn't know where he is – or who he is. The CEO of Burisma reportedly said Hunter was dumber than his dog. Where do you think Hunter got that from? He's a chip off the old block. Hunter is as dumb as a box of rocks, simply because his father is as dumb as a box of rocks. Two useful idiots.
You don't have to be a genius, or a brain surgeon, to figure out IABO: "It's Always Been Obama."
Obama was the mastermind then. Obama is the mastermind now.
What did Obama know and when did he know it? He knew everything – because he was the guy giving the orders.
And he still is.
Yep, that's some serious Obama derangement right there.
Obamaobsessive Jack Cashill devoted his Aug. 30 column to gushing over the above-noted anti-Obama book WND touted a couple months earlier:
Having written four books about Barack Obama, I read Jamie Glazov's new book, "Barack Obama's True Legacy," not expecting any surprises. To my surprise, I was pleasantly surprised.
Glazov, the editor, assigned subject matter experts to review Obama's policy decisions as president, with a focus on foreign policy. This strategy provides a depth of reporting not found in other assessments of the Obama presidency, my own included.
It's unlikely that future Obama historians will know more about the Muslim Brotherhood than Robert Spencer, more about communism than Trevor Loudon, more about Benghazi than Clair Lopez, more about Israel than Daniel Greenfield or Dov Lipman, or more about Russia than J.R. Nyquist, just to name a few.
Cashill then quoted from the opening essay:
The opening chapter by John Drew sets the tone for what follows. Drew first met the future president when Obama was a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
The Obama Drew meets is a closeted homosexual and an uncloseted anti-colonialist and wannabe communist revolutionary. "There's going to be a revolution," Drew remembers Obama saying. "We need to be organized and grow the movement."
We've previouslynoted that Drew was never as close to Obama as he has suggested, having actually met him only twice -- at least one of which was a social occasion -- and he had graduated from Occidental before Obama even started school there. So maybe he's not the reliable critic Glazov and Cashill want us to think he is.
The fact that Glazov's book starts out with a guy who spent the Obama years exaggerating his alleged closeness to the guy for right-wing gain doesn't bode well for the book as a whole. Or for Cashill's credibility as well; he eagerly swallows arguments by the book's writers that Obama was "groomed by a communist-Islamist alliance" to be president and touted in the headline of his column that the book portrays Obama as a "real-life Manchurian candidate."
Cashill concluded with a wannabe book blurb: "Future historians would do well to ignore the reporting of the legacy media altogether. For those interested in the real story, 'Barack Obama's True Legacy' would be a much better place to start." He doesn't explain why obsessive Obama-haters should be trusted on anything.
NEW ARTICLE -- The MRC Flips Over Elon Musk, Part 14: Helping Musk Hate Soros Topic: Media Research Center
Elon Musk baselessly smeared George Soros as someone who purportedly "hates humanity," and the Soros-haters at the Media Research Center were there for it. PLUS: The MRC censors the fact that Musk praised the Unabomber. Read more >>
MRC Hypes Alleged Hunter Biden Whistleblower, Downplays That He's A Criminal Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to get mad when the non-right-wing media ignores whistleblowers who promote conservative narratives. (If you're a whistleblower who doesn't advance those narratives, however, the MRC will attack you.) And the MRC had another narrative-friendly whistleblower to tout over the summer. In a July 25 post hyping "FOUR New Biden Scandals on Burisma, Hunter’s Life of Corruption" (which puts the MRC's overheated total of such "scandals" to be well over 60), Curtis Houck hyped how "The Fox News Channel's flagship newscast Special Report led Monday with this development (as would numerous FNC shows after them)" while non-right-wing media ignored it. The hype about Archer's planned testimony continued:
Tim Graham touted it in his July 26 column, declaring that "New scoops are underlining this is a Joe Biden scandal."
Cassandra DeVries gushed in a post the same day: "According to New York Post article by former MRC Bulldog Award winner Miranda Devine, Hunter Biden’s close friend Devon Archer said Hunter used his father’s position as the Vice President to impress foreign executives and win their money. Hunter Biden frequently called his father when meeting with business partners and investors, introducing them to his father or asking his father for advice."
Houck cheered in his writeup of the July 26 White House press briefing that biased reporter Fred Lucas of the right-wing Daily Signal "was the lone reporter to ask former Hunter Biden business associate and friend Devon Archer being slated to testify next week behind closed doors to a House committee."
Houck used a July 28 post to promote that NBC "even made an allusion to next week’s potential bombshell testimony from former longtime Hunter business partner and confidante Devon Archer."
On the day of the planned testimony, July 31, Mark Finkelstein touted Fox News hyping it and bashed MSNBC's "Morning Joe" for not playing along with the approved right-wing narrative:
Meanwhile, over on Morning Joe, the panel trashed Trump for having alleged a corrupt Biden-Ukraine connection. Host Jonathan Lemire andPolitico's Sam Stein suggested that Trump didn't learn from the experience of having been impeached over similar allegations he made.
But incredibly, while dismissing Trump's assertions,they failed to even breathe the name of Devon Archer, and the testimony he was expected to offer.Lemire made a passing, innocuous-sounding mention, of Hunter Biden having "once served on the board" of Burisma. No reference to the fact that, as NBC News has reported, Hunter and his company raked in $11 million from Burisma.
Finkelstein then alluded to a little problem with their newest star whistleblower, but then tried to build a conspiracy theory around it:
Morning Joe also suppressed the news that the Biden Justice Department made a highly unusual Saturday request to the judge overseeing Archer's conviction in an unrelated case to expedite his sentencing and jailing; presumably a tactic intended to pressure Archer to curb his enthusiasm for anti-Biden testimony.
So, according to Finkelstein, the problem with Archer is not that ie's a convicted criminal, it's that he's going to be punished for being one.
Another post that day, by Bill D'Agostino, ranted that non0right-woing cable news channels mentioned Donald Trump too much and Archer not enough:
On the day that Devon Archer, a business associate and longtime friend of Hunter Biden, testified before the House Oversight committee, CNN and MSNBC instead flooded the airwaves with their favorite topic: Donald Trump. Between 6:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. eastern, CNN and MSNBC made a combined 759 mentions of Donald Trump, while at the same time mentioning Devon Archer just 48 times.
During the specified timespan, MSNBC featured 461 mentions of the former President, while CNN supplied the remaining 298. Meanwhile, CNN mentioned Devon Archer only 37 times during the same period, while MSNBC mentioned him just 11 times. That’s a more than 41-to-1 ratio of Trump mentions to Archer mentions for the latter network.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe during the 8:00 a.m. hour somehow managed to bring up the former President by name a jaw-dropping 70 times (212 times across the whole show). Meanwhile, Archer was not discussed at any point during that program’s four-hour runtime.
D'Agostino failed to provide a similar count for Fox News so there would be a point of comparison. On the other hand, his post was translated into Spanish the next day.
Another July 31 post, by Kevin Tober, whined that people on CNN didn't take Archer's testimony seriously:
On Monday afternoon, while Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer was behind closed doors testifying before the House Oversight Committee regarding the Biden family’s corrupt business dealings, CNN host Dana Bash and congressional correspondent Manu Raju wore their profound ignorance on their sleeve with the pants-on-fire claim that Republicans have thus far put forward zero evidence showing Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s business dealings.
During a panel discussion on the Archer testimony, Bash claimed that the Archer testimony is all about “whether or not Republicans can find any evidence, which they have yet to put forward, of their repeated accusation that the President, Joe Biden, had knowledge of, or a connection to Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China.”
Either Bash doesn’t follow the news, or she’s lying to her audience. Even before Monday’s revelations from Archer detailing how involved Joe Biden was with his son, it’s been heavily reported that Hunter gives his dad a cut of the money he shakes down from foreign governments. In one text message, he referred to the elder Biden as the “Big Guy” and admitted he gives him a ten percent cut.
On Monday, Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer testified behind closed doors before the House Oversight Committee regarding the Biden family’s corrupt business dealings including a bombshell revelation that Hunter put his father Joe Biden on the phone with his business associates over twenty times. This at the very least proves President Biden’s repeated claims that he was unaware of his son’s business activities was a flat-out lie. Despite this, NBC Nightly News had no interest in this story. While ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News covered the Archer testimony, NBC pretended it never happened.
Instead, the network ran a nearly two-minute-long segment on the U.S. women’s soccer team and an interview with athlete Megan Rapinoe. Clearly, NBC’s priorities were in order.
You mean like it's Tober's priority to attack any non-right-wing outlet who doesn't uncritically parrot right-wing narratives?
In neither post did Tober mention that Archer has a criminal record.
Newsmax and its columnists were quick tostart promoting Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign -- not because it actually wants him to win, of course, but out of the hope that it might hurt President Biden's re-election efforts. That promotion -- and amping up of his alleged victimhood over his anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories being fact-checked -- continued over the summer:
Newsmax even uncritically touted Kennedy insisting that Russia has been "acting in good faith" when it comes to ending invasion of Ukraine, even though Newsmax has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine.
Newsmax also played cleanup for Kennedy after he made the bizarre claim that the COVID-19 virus was "ethnically targeted" to spare Jews. After running a wire article critical of Kennedy, it gave him airtime on Newsmax TV to defend himself:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Newsmax on Thursday that he has never been antisemitic and a smear campaign against him is trying to censor him from speaking out about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and other topics.
"I said this under oath today because I'm so angry at those charges," Kennedy, who testified earlier in the day before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."
"In my entire life, I have never uttered a single antisemitic phrase, word or anything, or racist [phrase]. Because of my family, and because I've spent a lot of time in Israel, and I have an organization over there, my support for Israel is stronger than anybody on Capitol Hill.
[...]
During the hearing, Democrats grilled Kennedy over reported comments he made that the COVID-19 vaccine was ethnically targeted to affect whites and Blacks and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. He claimed he was referring to how the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the coronavirus showed that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races.
"I've been smeared using phrases that were taken completely out of context and attributing meanings to them that I never intended, and it's a way of censoring me," Kennedy said.
The study Kennedy cited, however, said nothing about the virus being "ethnically targeted."The Newsmax article did not explain what, exactly, was purportedly taken out of context. The article also did not mention that Kennedy previously claimed that opponents of vaccine mandates (like himself) had it worse than Anne Frank during the Holocaust; Kennedy eventually apologized for that.
Newsmax did more cleanup for Kennedy after his July 20 congressional appearance, in an article by Solange Reyner:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2021 tweet about the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron after he received a COVID-19 vaccine was just "pointing out facts," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, argued Thursday during a GOP-led hearing on government censorship by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
"When you look at Mr. Kennedy's tweet, there was nothing there that was factually inaccurate. Hank Aaron, real person, great American, passed away after he got the vaccine. Pointing out, just pointing out facts," Jordan said in opening remarks while discussing an email the White House sent to Twitter to request Kennedy's tweet be taken down.
In fact, Aaron died of natural causes, not the vaccine, which means Kennedy was lying by suggesting otherwise.
Newsmax also gave Kennedy space to whine on July 28 that he was not being given Secret Service protection, which is given only to "major" candidates -- something he has not yet proven himself to be. A paywalled Aug. 1 article, though, seemed to admit that Kennedy was pushing this claim "is likely a bid to try to win over voters as he seeks to topple the sitting president in his party's primary, political strategists say."
There were a few instances in which Newsmax treated Kennedy like the Democrat he claims to be. A July 12 article by Nicole Wells repeated an Axios report that Kennedy "is flouting established party customby selling merchandise that is not made in America or by union workers." An Aug. 15 article by Jeffrey Rodack noted confusion over Kennedy's position on abortion after saying he supported government restrictions on it (which warranted a second article as well); his campaign later had to issue a clarification of his stance. An Aug. 30 article by Nick Koutsobinas, however, highlighted one of the few views on which Kennedy is actually like a Democrat, calling for government-subsidized home loans.
MRC Rages At Scientific Study Showing Right-Wing Media To Be Untrustworthy Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Bill D'Agostino grumbled in a July 31 post:
According to NBC News, a “landmark study” by 27 “academic researchers” has concluded that conservatives in America are far more likely than their left-wing counterparts to consume news from untrustworthy sources. We’re all supposed to take this immensely seriously, but even a cursory look at the study reveals a host of embarrassing problems with the methodology.
The fact that the first thing D'Agostino did is attack the NBC article for a small error miscounting the number of researchers involved tells you that he will be doing a lot of partisan ranting and not much serious questioning of the study, which he called "garbage" in his headline. Indeed, his attack on the study's definition of untrustworthy sources is all about partisan narratives:
According to the “overview” section, untrustworthy news sources were defined as those which published two or more articles rated “false” by Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program (3PFC) before February 16, 2021:
[...]
In other words, if Meta’s fact-checkers disagreed with two articles published on any given news site between January 1, 2020 and February 15, 2021, then the researchers condemned that entire site to the “untrustworthy” bin. So strong was their faith in the 3PFC partners’ judgement that they let the validity of their entire dataset hinge upon it.
Meta lists the following organizations as members of its 3PFC program for the U.S.: AFP, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, Televisa Univision, The Associated Press, The Dispatch, and USA TODAY. Of these eleven, only Check Your Fact could be considered reliably right-of-center. One could also make an argument for The Dispatch, though honestly not a very strong one.
It should be obvious just how flimsy this categorization method is. Because only two articles needed to be flagged by any of these organizations in order for an entire news source to be “untrustworthy,” even a couple of biased or misinformed fact checkers had the potential to dramatically skew the data. That’s a bad sign, considering how preposterous the slant is at some of these fact checking organizations. As NewsBusters has documented extensively, PolitiFact alone is more than stilted enough to wreck the dataset.
D'Agostino is effectively whining that fact-checkers fact-check conservatives, a longtime MRC complaint. He also clearly believes in the right-wing canard that any news source or fact-checker that is not explicitly right-wing is "liberal" or "left-wing" because they do not unquestioningly parrot right-wing narratives the way the MRC does. Also, the Dispatch is indisputably a conservative publication, but D'Agostino is basically insisting that it's not right-wing enough because it criticizes Donald Trump.
D'Agostino then moved to whataboutism:
But the issues run deeper than that. Unfortunately for the authors of this study, fact checkers and the corporate media in 2020 were wedded to quite a few narratives that have since proven to be utterly false.
For example, if you’d asked anyone working at a 3PFC member organization in December of 2020, they’d have told you that lab-originated COVID-19 was a conspiracy theory, cloth masks were effective at preventing coronavirus transmission, and Hunter Biden’s laptop was unauthenticated Russian disinformation. A few of them might even suspect that then-President Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
How many articles discussing these topics did the fact checkers incorrectly flag as false in 2020? And how many of those erroneous flaggings caused researchers to improperly banish entire news sites to the naughty corner? The study did not address these issues, and in fact there is no indication that the researchers even considered them.
As we've noted before, the New York Post -- the right-wing, pro-Trump propaganda outlet that broke the Hunter laptop story -- failed to offer at the time its story was published independent verification of the laptop that would have countered reasonable questions about it being "unauthenticated Russian disinformation" and it being sourced to a such a partisan publication. There also continues to be a lack of direct evidence that the COVID virus was "lab-originated" as D'Agostino insists, and masks do, in fact, slow COVID transmission.
Having effectively proven the study correct by spreading right-wing misinformation, D'Agostino moved on to building a conspiracy theory:
Furthermore, it’s impossible to check which news sources were incorrectly labeled, because the study did not name any of the news sites researchers examined. Instead the authors provided a link to a satellite website run by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) containing replication code, along with a note which stated: “ICPSR will receive and vet all applications for data access.
A jaded cynic might suspect that this secret list of “untrustworthy” news sources was little more than a directory of every right-leaning website with a Facebook account. Such a jaded cynic might further suspect the authors were afraid to make their secret list public because doing so would give the game away.
D'Agostino concluded by ranting that there's no objective definition of truth and that anyone who studies media misinformation is automatically on "the left":
This study represents the left’s latest childish attempt to prove with data that the American right is misinformed, and that therefore some authority must police what information they can access. But the researchers’ efforts are undone in an instant by the same fundamental question which every proponent of censoring misinformation inevitably fails to answer: who gets to decide what’s true and what’s not?
Many academics on the left who claim to study so-called misinformation do it in the hopes of convincing the rest of us that they deserve that power. The reality is that fact checkers funded by the Poynter Institute are no more qualified to be arbiters of the truth than anyone else is, and no amount of politically-motivated research will change that.
So yes, 27 activists are pretending they’ve proven once and for all that the people who disagree with them politically are a bunch of dupes who read fake news. That tells us next to nothing about America’s “news ecosystem,” but it does speak volumes about how thoroughly the social sciences have been infested by overt political actors.
A jaded cynic may also suspect that D'Agostino is attacking this study so fiercely because he knows that right-wing media is, in fact, unreliable and must try to smear anyone who points out that inconvenient fact as untrustworthy and partisan (like him). The MRC has used this same tactic in itsrepeatedattacks on website-ratings service NewsGuard. And it's quite rich for D'Agostino to accuse researchers of being "overt political actors" when he gets paid quite well by the MRC to be an overt political actor parroting a defined narrative. Meanwhile, D'Agostino and the MRC never discuss the one thing that would keep right-wing media from being dismissed as low-quality: improving the quality of right-wing media. Remember, the MRC killed its "news" division CNSNews.com rather than try to improve it, slapping the nameplate on a right-wing blog thatfollow even fewer journalistic standards than CNS did.
Desoite his history of partisanship, D'Agostino wants you to believe he's no less qualified to be an "arbiter of the truth" than someone who has academic training in research, and that anyone who does have such training is presumed to be an "activist" on "the left" and an "overt political actor." Who's pushing embarassing garbage now?
WorldNetDaily has been resorting to ridiculously biased and omission-laden stories from the notoriously unreliable Gateway Pundit to try and manufacture sympathy for participants in the Capitol riot, and it happened again with a republished Aug. 17 article written by Gateway Pundit chief Jim Hoft:
January 6 political prisoner Ryan Samsel has been held in prison without trial now since January 2021.
During his two-and-a-half years without trial Ryan has been moved around to 17 different facilities. Ryan has been beaten, abused, tortured, and neglected since his arrest in January 2021.
Earlier this week The Gateway Pundit received exclusive photos from Ryan Samsel’s prison cell at the FDC in Philadelphia. The cell was a size of a closet with a light on all of the time. The cell had a thin blue mattress, no sheets or blankets, no clothing, and he was kept here for five months straight.
The photos are just shocking. This is taking place in America today. This is who we are.
[...]
Ryan believes the government tortured him for months so he would rat out the Proud Boys. They even beat Ryan numerous times and kept him locked down so he couldn’t communicate with anyone.
This torture is taking place in America today.
Where is the Republican Party?
Where is the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch?
Missing from Hoft's manufactured pity piece is any substantiation of the claims he makes about Samsel, as well as any mention of what Samsel did. The latter was summarized by the Department of Justice when he was indicted:
According to court documents, Samsel was captured in publicly available video taken of a crowd pushing and pulling on barricades on the west side of the Capitol. In the process of pushing the barricades to the ground, Samsel and others knocked over a U.S. Capitol Police officer, causing a head injury as the officer’s head hit the ground. In another confrontation, according to court documents, Samsel attempted to pull a riot shield from a uniformed U.S. Capitol Police officer.
We thought right-wingers didn't like it when police officers were assaulted. But that's not all; he had quite the criminal record even before the Capitol riot. As a more fact-based news outlet reported, Samsel has been accused of attacking other people, usually women, at least six times, and he had at least four prior convictions for crimes that sometimes left his victims fearing for their lives. At the time of the riot, he had an open warrant regarding accusations that he broke into a woman’s house to attack her and was on parole for brutally assaulting his pregnant girlfriend.
And we're still not done. Last year, Samsel reportedly wrote a letter talking about getting rid of politicians with a woodchipper, and he has previoiusly made several statements about stabbing or punching FBI agents.
Samsel claims to have been beaten by jail guards after an argument over toilet paper escalated. But it does appear that he's getting back what he did to other people.
There's a reason Hoft censored that information -- he wants to falsely portray Samsel as a martyr when he's really nothing more than a thug who apparently can't take what he's been dishing out for years. And it raises even more question sabout WND's desire to remain in business that it considers Hoft and the Gateway Pundit -- who, again, are being sued for defamation for falsely accusing a pair of Georgia election workers of fraud -- to be a reliable news source worth republishing without question.
MRC Repeats Bogus Biden 'No Comment' Claim On Maui Wildfires Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Kevin Tober was in full manufactured-outrage mode in an Aug. 14 post:
On Sunday, President Joe Biden spent another weekend on vacation on the beach in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware while the country literally and figuratively burned. While Biden was getting into his presidential limo, he was asked by two reporters for his thoughts on the rapidly rising death toll due to the out-of-control wildfires in Hawaii. Biden’s callous response of “no comment” led to outrage on Twitter and elsewhere throughout the country. Despite the newsworthiness of Biden’s dismissal response to the death and destruction, all three evening news broadcasts ignored it.
[...]
Meanwhile, on Fox News Channel’s Special Report, anchor Bret Baier spoke to White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich about the latest Biden controversy.
“The President spent several hours on the beach at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware yesterday,” Baier said. “And when he was leaving, after that, reporters asked him about the rising death toll in Hawaii, specifically Maui, those wildfires.”
After airing Biden’s dismissive comments toward those killed or injured, Baier responded: “He said 'no, no comment.' And that got a lot of criticism online and elsewhere.”
From there, Heinrich confirmed that “It did get a lot of criticism.”
“He ran for office on his own empathy. The White House was asked today in the briefing if he had been instructed, you know, not to comment on this or if he planned to comment about it in the future,” Heinrich noted.
But Tober -- and, apparently, Fox News -- censored one important fact: Nobody actually heard Biden say that. As we documented, the claim that Biden said "no comment" comes from a White House press corps pool report by Rob Crilly of the right-wing, anti-Biden British newspaper Daily Mail, who admitted he never actually heard those words but claimed that "lip readers in the pool" claimed he said it. Tober's fake outrage came as he hypocritically criticized network news for "bias by omission."
Then again, facts don't matter much at the MRC but advancing right-wing narratives do -- which is why Tober spent so much space praising Fox News for repeating this unsubstantiated attack. So the MRC continued to push this bogus narrative. It published an Aug. 25 column by Ben Shapiro citing the alleged incident to declare Biden to be an "narcissist":
This week, Biden visited Maui. He did so nearly two weeks after the worst wildfire in modern American history killed hundreds of Americans. Meanwhile, Biden vacationed in Delaware on the beach, telling reporters he had "no comment" on the situation; he then jet-set off to Lake Tahoe before finally heading to Lahaina.
Rich Noyes dutifully pushed the narrative again in an Aug. 26 post, quoting Tober in doing so:
The August 8 firestorm on the Hawaiian island of Maui took at least 115 lives, with another 388 officially listed as missing more than two weeks later. Five days after the devastation, a vacationing President Biden was asked about the horrifying death toll. “No comment,” he said.
[...]
Instead of pouncing on Biden’s blunders, the media politely hid them from viewers. After Biden’s inexplicable “no comment,” MRC’s Kevin Tober found none of the three evening newscasts mentioned it amid their otherwise heavy coverage of the Maui disaster.
Nicholas Fondacaro uncritically repeated the claim in an Aug. 31 post:
While communities in Maui were being incinerated and the list of the dead continued to grow (surpassing 100 as of the writing of this piece), President Biden was publicly flaunting his storied callousness as he continued his vacation and gave a firm “no comment” when asked about the wildfires. It being election season, CNN News Center knew they needed to do something to distract people. So, on Thursday morning, they took White House talking points and claimed it was Republicans who didn’t care about the people. But at no point did they provide any evidence.
Fondacaro didn't explain how Biden's alleged comment could be "firm" when nobody actually heard him say it.
WND's Root Still Fearmongering About COVID Vaccines Topic: WorldNetDaily
Wayne Allyn Root just can'tstopspreading falsehoods and misinformation about COVID and its vaccines (or COVID itself). He went on another fearmongering bender in his Aug. 13 WorldNetDaily column:
There is a silent tragedy of epic proportions going on in our country. It's silent because the media refuse to connect the dots.
Have you noticed the tsunami of recent headlines about high-profile Americans who "died suddenly" or suffered heart attacks, strokes or blood clots at young ages. Celebrities, athletes, entertainers and CEOs are dropping dead or having heart attacks.
Still, the media whistle past the graveyard.
There are always a thousand excuses. Anything and everything, EXCEPT blaming the COVID-19 vaccine. It can never be the vaccine.
Strange thing though: Virtually every one of these dead, crippled, disabled or seriously ill people have one thing in common: they were vaccinated. What a wild coincidence!
He then started spreading stories:
I'll soon write a column about 65 friends, acquaintances and business associates of mine, people I personally know, who have died or suffered serious illness since being vaccinated. The numbers are piling up. These are not coincidences. It's a pattern. Studying a pattern like this used to be called "science."
In the meantime, I have one up-close and personal story that every American needs to hear. Last week I went out to dinner with one of my best friends (let's call him Mike). He told me the story of his own sister, who was badly injured and disabled by the COVID-19 vaccine. He then informed me she's a big fan of mine and watches my Real America's Voice TV show every Saturday. He said she'd like to talk to me and share her story.
We spoke yesterday. Here's her story.
Let's call her Jane. She is an accomplished female CEO. Jane runs a medical organization that helps children. She wanted to stress to me how healthy she'd been before getting the vaccine. She traveled the world on business and lugged her own luggage everywhere. She biked 15 miles a day. She took one-hour spin classes. She ate healthy. She was on no medications.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jane never got COVID-19. She continued biking 15 miles several times per week. She walked 3 miles a day.
Then her doctor pressured her to take the COVID-19 vaccine. She was worried and skeptical, but eventually she relented. She took one Pfizer jab. One. No second jab. No booster. Just one.
That's all it took to ruin her life. Jane will never be the same.
Within four hours she felt extreme nerve pain. Pain the likes of which she'd never felt in her life. Mind-numbing pain.
Then came the racing heart. Heart palpitations. Severe muscle twitching. Severe muscle weakness. Shortness of breath. Horrible fatigue. Brain fog so bad she could no longer focus, or deal with even basic tasks.
Next came blurred vision. Sensitivity to light and sound. Dry eyes and dry mouth. Dizziness. Ringing in her ears so loud she couldn't think. Hair loss in clumps. Severe heartburn. Circulation problems: Her feet turned purple. She could barely walk. Internal tremors so bad, it felt like a cellphone was vibrating inside her body. She is in so much pain at night that she can't sleep.
Jane also suffered from menstrual problems after getting the vaccine. She hemorrhaged so severely this past February that she was hospitalized and eventually required emergency surgery.
By March it was a new issue requiring hospitalization. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to explode. It went from 60 beats per minute to 165 within seconds. Her heart condition is so serious that she fears she could "die suddenly" at any time.
This is Jane's new normal. She was perfectly healthy all her life. Then she took the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Her life instantly changed after that one vaccine. Now it's difficult to walk to the bathroom.
You will not be surprised that no documentation was provided for any of this. His misinformation continued:
The facts are out. The CDC's own internal report shows over 117,000 excess deaths among American children since the vaccine. CHILDREN. That's more excess dead children in two years than all the U.S. soldiers killed in the Vietnam War in a decade.
Life insurance companies report more excess deaths among working-age Americans since 2021 (the year the COVID-19 vaccine began) than at any time in history. What do working-age Americans have in common? The Biden administration forced them to take the vaccine or lose their jobs.
Ed Dowd, the former Blackrock money manager, who analyzes numbers for a living, says the disability rolls have grown by millions since the vaccine. MILLIONS. That's why there is such a severe shortage of employees.
We've previously debunked claims about using insurance information to claim people are being killed by COVID vaccines, and his claim about "CDC's own internal report" showing that the vaccine has killed children has also been discredited. He closed with more fearmongering:
We know this is happening. The next victim could be you, your spouse, your children.
To do nothing now; to make believe this isn't happening; to hope it goes away; to try to cover it up; is no longer about ignorance, or delusion, or even greed.
At this point, to do nothing, to refuse to act, is a combination of pure evil, mass murder and crimes against humanity.
Actually, the evil one here is Root, who believes he must continsally spread proven lies to stay relevant in the righ-wing media bubble.
The son of a prominent conservative activist has been convicted of charges that he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan, 6, 2021, bashed in a window, chased a police officer, invaded the Senate floor and helped a mob disrupt the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
Leo Brent Bozell IV, 44, of Palmyra, Pennsylvania, was found guilty Friday of 10 charges, including five felony offenses, after a trial decided by a federal judge, according to the Justice Department.
Bozell’s father is Brent Bozell III, who founded the Media Research Center, Parents Television Council and other conservative media organizations.
[...]
Prosecutors said that before the riot, Bozell helped plan and coordinate events in Washington in support of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement. They said that after Trump’s rally near the White House on Jan. 6, Bozell marched to the Capitol and joined a mob in breaking through a police line. He smashed a window next to the Senate Wing Door, creating an entry point for hundreds of rioters, according to prosecutors.
After climbing through the smashed window, Bozell joined other rioters in chasing a Capitol Police officer, Eugene Goodman, up a staircase to an area where other officers confronted the group.
Later, Bozell was captured on video entering office of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. He appeared to have something in his hand when he left, prosecutors said.
Entering the Senate gallery, Bozell moved a C-SPAN camera to face the ground so it could not record rioters ransacking the chamber on a live video feed. He also spent several minutes on the Senate floor.
Bozell roamed thorough the Capitol for nearly an hour, reaching more than a dozen different parts of the building and passing through at least seven police lines before police escorted him out, prosecutors said.
Where won't you find news about Bozell's conviction? On any website controlled by his father. The Media Research Center's two main sites -- NewsBusters and MRCTV -- censored all mention of it, as they have eversince his arrest.
Bozell pere, however, did make a euphemistic statement on his Twitter account: "We're terribly disappointed in the decision. This isn't the time to say all I want to say. We love our son and thank you for your prayers." Sounds a bitlike President Biden talking about his son, doesn't it? Ironically, Bozell's employees routinelymock Joe for standing by his son. Since those employees appear to be sufficiently afraid of their boss to tell the truth, don't expect them to provide consistency here.
We've documented how the Media Research Center falsely and maliciously smeared a proposed "disinformation governance board" by the Department of Homeland Security as an Orwellian "ministry of truth" -- despite the fact that it would have done no such thing -- and served up particular venom at the woman who would have headed the board, Nina Jankowicz, for calling out the lies and trying to fight back. But even as the board would not move forward, the MRC continued to attack Jankowicz for telling the truth. Clay Waters huffed in an October 2022 post:
Chuck Norris has a habit of 
How desperately does the Media Research Center cling to its narrative that right-wing extremists must never be "censored" no matter how much hate and misinformation they spread? It has cometo the defense of Kari Lake, the Arizona Republican who can't accept that she lost and is clinging to conspiracy theories to bolster claims of election fraud that she can't prove. Luis Cornelio wrote in an Aug. 14 
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