Bozell Lies About Air America Topic: Media Research Center
If the Media Research Center is going to be running around accusing people of not reporting a story, it should be a little more accurate about what's not being reported.
An Aug. 9 statement by MRC chief Brent Bozell claims that there is a "media blackout" on financial irregularities at a New York City Boys & Girls Club because of allegedly loaning money to liberal radio network Air America. Bozell describes Evan Cohen, the figure named in the club's irregularities, as "the chairman of Air America."
NewsMax's Double Standard on Scandals Topic: Newsmax
We learn from an Aug. 9 NewsMax article that the fact that Jeanine Pirro's husband was convicted of tax fraud and fathered an out-of-wedlock child is "old news" and "dirty laundry."
Despite this sudden turnabout on the propriety of reporting on the personal scandals of a public figure, don't expect NewsMax to repudiate its reporting of every scandalous thing it could find about the Clintons, regardless of its veracity. Heck, it won't even admit that Ed Klein's anti-Hillary book has factual errors in it.
New Article: Accuracy in Spin Topic: Accuracy in Media
The only accuracy that Accuracy in Media seems to care about these days is accurately repeating conservative talking points. Read more.
NewsMax's New Favorite Politician Topic: Newsmax
To nobody's surprise, NewsMax is heavilypromoting Jeanine Pirro's planned candidacy for Hillary Clinton's New York Senate seat -- heck, it was doing that back in June.
What do you think the chances are that NewsMax will tell its readers about Pirro's extremely well-paid (by taxpayer money) driver-slash-bodyguard (even as she was laying off attorneys from her DA office due to budget cuts)? We're thinking somewhere on the slim-to-none side of the spectrum.
Joseph Farah, Minuteman Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has declared his fealty to the Minutemen border-watcher group, proudly proclaiming in an Aug. 1 column that "I volunteered to join this courageous band of American patriots as a volunteer border watcher this fall."
Is Farah aware that he will be spending his Minuteman stint with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? David Neiwert tells all about it.
Perhaps Farah should spend a column explaining why he has chosen to associate with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
New MRC Blog Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has a new group blog, NewsBusters, headed by Matthew and Greg Sheffield, described on the "about" page as "the creators of the creators of the influential web site RatherBiased.com." Um, OK...
We can see that ol' MRC bias slipping in already: Dead conservative-friendly journalists are getting a better sendoff than dead journalists the MRC doesn't like. Thus, NewsBusters serves up headlines like "Pro-war Iraq journalist Steven Vincent, RIP" ("Unlike many (most?) journos covering the war in Iraq, Vincent supported the invasion," poster Clay Waters of MRC's TimesWatch noted) and "David Shaw, RIP" (Shaw wrote a series claiming that news coverage of abortion was tilted toward the "pro-choice" view), the death of ABC's Peter Jennings gets only the headline "Peter Jennings Dead."
Apparently, the MRC doesn't want Jennings to rest in peace.
Logrolling In Our Time Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 8 WorldNetDaily article pimping WND managing Editor David Kupelian's new WND-published book "The Marketing of Evil" claims on the front-page link blurb that the book has received "widespread, rave reviews."
Kupelian, you may recall, wrote the loopy "Media Matrix" essay that somehow overlooked WND's own matrix of lies and deceptions presented as truth, as ConWebWatch has noted.
WND Hides Identity of Shooting Victims Topic: WorldNetDaily
From the Washington Post, we learn something else that WorldNetDaily Jerusalem reporter Aaron Klein has not told WND readers about the case of Eden Natan Zada. Of the four people that AWOL Israeli soldier Zada killed on a bus in Gaza Aug. 4 (whom Klein has described only as "Arabs"), two of them were Christians.
WND Breast Alert Topic: WorldNetDaily
Another WorldNetDaily article on something overly sexy, this time an Aug. 6 article about a large-breasted mermaid sculpture. With a picture, of course. And a bonus shot, too: a picture of former attorney general John Ashcroft standing in front of a topless statue at the Justice Department.
Condemnation Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 5 WorldNetDaily article by Art Moore notes the Council on American-Islamic Relations' condemnation of the killing of four people and wounding of a dozen others on a bus in Gaza by AWOL Israeli soldier Eden Natan Zada -- then quotes two "terrorism experts"-cum-bloggers, Robert Spencer (last seen around these parts trying to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in the death of a family that turned out not to be Islamic-related at all) and Steven Emerson, attacking CAIR for not sufficiently condemning Islamic terrorism to their satisfaction.
A quick check of these so-called experts' blogs, Jihad Watch and Counterterrorism Blog, shows that neither Spencer nor Emerson have condemned the Zada killings.
CNS Spin-O-Rama Topic: CNSNews.com
Today's CNSNews.com "Fact-O-Rama" is a sidebar to a surprisingly balanced article by Jeff Johnson on financial improprieties at a New York City Boys & Girls Club that have a link to Air America Radio. Unlike the article, the Fact-O-Rama manages to be quite misleading.
The headline is "Left's Silence on Air America Scandal." The front-page promo claims that the B&G Club scandal "has received almost no attention in the establishment media." Of course, "the left" and "the establishment media" are not the same thing, no matter how much CNS' overlords at the Media Research Center think they are.
But the actual "Fact-O-Rama" has an even greater disconnect between headline and copy. It has the same "Left's Silence on Air America Scandal," but instead, it discusses the ownership of Air America's New York affiliate, citing a only a "CNSNews.com Commentary" as a source; more precisely, the source is an Aug. 3 column by Michelle Malkin. Whoever copied-and-pasted the "Fact-O-Rama" out of Malkin's column gives some infor on someone named "Jackson" but failed to give the guy's first name. Presumably, it's Jesse.
WND Perpetuates Killer As Victim Topic: WorldNetDaily
Another Aug. 4 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein portrays Eden Natan Zada, the AWOL Israeli soldier who shot and killed four people and wounded a dozen others on a bus, then later killed by a mob responding to the deaths, as a victim of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
While Klein doesn't claim in that that Zada was "murdered" by the mob as he did in an earlier Aug. 4 article (a designation he did not apply to the four people Zada killed, as ConWebBlog noted), he does state that Zada "was killed when he was assaulted by a mob of angry Arab bystanders and witnesses."
But Klein continues the lionization of Zada as a victim of Gaza withdrawal, using the following quotes:
-- "Had he not been enlisted, had they not forced him to be scheduled to uproot Jews, there wouldn't be any deaths."
-- "[Eden] was a quiet kid. Withdrawn. But very nice. We certainly were in shock when we heard what happened. But when [the IDF] made him serve and then sent him to jail for refusing, something in him changed."
-- Zada was "a humble and very shy Jew. The disengagement really broke him."
A third Aug. 4 WND article by Klein repeats the quote, from a purported friend fo Zada's, that "Had he not been enlisted, had they not forced him to be scheduled to uproot Jews, there wouldn't be any deaths." But not until the very last paragraph does Klein quote someone -- for the first time anywhere in the three stories he wrote Aug. 4 on the incident -- as noting that Zada "took the lives of innocent people."
NewsMax, True to Form Topic: Newsmax
Once again demonstrating that there is apparently no conservative misdeed NewsMax will not try to minimize by claiming that a Clinton did it worse, an Aug. 5 NewsMax article compares Robert Novak's profanity-laced departure from a live CNN interview with something Bill Clinton did.
New Article: Joseph Farah's Current Bitterness Topic: WorldNetDaily
A new exhibit in the Out There section: The WorldNetDaily editor seems unusually bitter about Al Gore's new TV channel. It must be that defamation lawsuit filed against WND by a Gore fund-raiser. But why won't Farah give us the full story on that lawsuit? Read more.
A mob of Palestinians tonight murdered a Jewish Israeli man in a police uniform after he opened fire on a bus and killed four Arabs, allegedly in protest of the Gaza withdrawal plan.
Klein does not describe the four victims the man killed anywhere else in his article as being "murdered," just the killer himself. In fact, he quotes several people calling the man, an AWOL Israeli soldier named Eden Natan Zada, as a victim of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
A guy who shot four people to death is a victim? Hey, it's keeping with WND's theme of the day, in which Israelis are apparently not to blame for criminal behavior (a strange stance given that WND is normally a law-and-order kind of website). WND also serves up another sympathetic article by Klein on convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, whose release WND has previously agitated for.
