New Article: A Highly Compromised Disseminator
Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily, self-proclaimed exposer of government corruption, has been all but silent about two big government corruption cases -- Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff. Is it because they're Republicans? Read more.

NewsBusters Nonsense
Topic: NewsBusters
-- Lyford Beverage, in a Jan. 25 post, falls for the same fallacy that fellow NewsBuster Michael Rule did -- that anything the Bush administration says is automatically true because they're Republicans. Like Rule, Beverage claims that the NSA's eavesdropping isn't "domestic spying" simply because Michael Hayden said it wasn't.

(UPDATE: Beverage falls for it again in another Jan. 25 post, claiming that the Associted Press has "implicitly called him a liar by continuing to call the program 'domestic spying' when the White House has repeatedly pointed out the inaccuracy of the term.")

-- Clay Waters approvingly reported on an article by David Boaz of the Cato Institute in Reason magazine claiming "an undeniable pattern of media unease in the network and newspaper coverage of the nomination of conservative Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, compared to how those same outlets treated Bill Clinton's 1993 nomination of liberal ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg." But the report, by David Boaz, contains a serious whopper: "Obviously [Byron White's] replacement by the former general counsel of the ACLU was going to 'move the court dramatically to the left.'" Boaz makes no mention of the fact that Ginsburg compiled a largely centrist record on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals -- where she served for 12 years after her ACLU stint -- often voting with conservative judges such as Kenneth Starr and Laurence Silberman.

-- Cinnamon "The Terrorist Whitewasher" Stillwell weighs in with a Jan. 25 post linking Pete McCloskey, who is running as a Republican for Richard Pombo's House seat, to Lyndon LaRouche and Holocaust revisionists. Stillwell noted that "Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay’s names are invoked frequently" in articles on McCloskey, but she never says why. That would be because Pombo has been implicated in a Abramoff-like scheme to keep the FDIC from investigating a banking buddy of DeLay's. That seems like it would have been important to mention, but as we know, Stillwell isn't into stuff like that.

-- In a Jan. 24 post, Dave Pierre dismissed Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein, who wrote a column claiming that he didn't support our troops, as the product of a "sheltered, out-of-touch, Hollywood mindset." Pierre might want to rethink that stance: Stein also supports the great conservative cause of cutting off government funding for public broadcasting.

CNS Continues Disingenousness Streak
Topic: CNSNews.com
In a Jan. 25 letter to the editor, a CNSNews.com reader named Ed writes: "I find it incomprehensible that you trash fellow Vietnam vets like former Vice President Al Gore, Sen. John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha while glorifying President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who were not in Vietnam." To which the "editor" (presumably editor in chief David Thibault) responded: "Ed, I respect your viewpoint, but Cybercast News Service has never “glorified” the military records of President Bush or Vice President Cheney. It never happened and never will."

That is a disingenous response, one of several such responses emanating from CNS in the wake of its John Murtha hit job. CNS has not defended Cheney's military record because he has no record to defend, having recieved five deferments from military service during the Vietnam era.

While a quick search through CNS' news archive revealed no explicit examples of CNS "glorifying" Bush's military record, CNS attacked anyone who criticized it: It was a early promoter of attacks on CBS' report on Bush's National Guard record based in part on unauthenticated documents (while ignoring other questions about Bush's service not connected to the documents), and it served as an uncritical mouthpiece for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's accusations against John Kerry. Thibault himself was as eager to smear Kerry and CBS as his news service; a Sept. 20, 2004, commentary by him gleefully observed "the credibility of CBS News, its 72-year old anchor Dan Rather and their left wing media and public sycophants spiraling down the drain" and claimed that Kerry "set the events in motion" by saying "Reporting for duty" during his August 2004 acceptance speech, despite the fact that CNS was reporting on the Swift Boat Veterans in May, three months before the convention.

Any chance CNS will offer readers an honest response to its Murtha attack -- you know, that they're unabashed conservatives whose only mission was to attack a critic of a conservative president? Don't count on it.

ConWebWatch Speaks!
Topic: The ConWeb
Read an interview with me at Bloggasm.

Framing the Debate
Topic: NewsBusters
A Jan. 24 NewsBusters post by Michael Rule accuses CBS of trying to "frame the debate" over the NSA wiretapping program as "'domestic spying' and warrantless wiretaps," as if it was fictional that there weren't domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps going on.

Rule also quoted ex-NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden as insisting that the eavesdropping wasn't "domestic spying" without pointing out that Hayden is trying to "frame the debate" as much as Rule accuses CBS of doing, if not more. As a government official trying to defend the program, Hayden has a highly interest in framing the debate, and Rule should acknowledge that.

Let's not give the Bush administration a pass and assume it's telling the truth just because it's Republican, OK, Mike?

Compelling vs. Factual
Topic: NewsBusters
A Jan. 23 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard complained the no TV network "did justice to the extraordinarily compelling description of the NSA eavesdropping program" by former NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. NBC was singled out by Sheppard for ignoring "the most compelling statement made today by Gen. Hayden: 'Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such.'"

But "compelling," alas, is not the same as "factual." As Media Matters notes, Hayden never substantiates his claim that warrantless wiretapping would have prevented 9/11, and that the U.S. had information in hand that could have stopped 9/11 had bureaucratic snafus not gotten in the way.

A lot of things are compelling, but that doesn't make them factual. Doesn't Sheppard know that yet?

Bozell's Plantation
Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell has declared that Hillary Clinton's "plantation" remark was a "brazen appeal to racial tensions."

So that's what Bozell and Co. was doing when they repeatedly applied the "plantation" metaphor to Democrats.

Yeah, It's Stunning, All Right
Topic: Newsmax
A Jan. 24 NewsMax article summarizes a "stunning analysis" by Victoria Toensing in the Wall Street Journal that repeats the false claims she made -- such as Jamie Gorelick's wall (a favorite NewsMax canard) and the FISA law's alleged inapplication to modern electonic eavesdropping -- even after Media Matters debunked Toensing's claims.

More Disingenuous Defense
Topic: CNSNews.com
Following up on his previous dubious claims, CNSNews.com editor in chief David Thibault serves up a few more disingenous defenses for CNS' attack on Rep. John Murtha in a Jan. 24 column.

Thibault responded to criticism from New York Times columnist Frank Rich by bringing up the Jayson Blair scandal: "Frank, you haven't forgotten the scandal in which Blair fabricated quotes, whole interviews and plagiarized from other news sources for articles that your paper's editors gladly published without practicing any due diligence, have you?" Thibault added that "CNSNews.com was, proudly, the first news organization to report on the existence of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004."

But as ConWebWatch has documented, CNS obscured the Swift Boat Veterans' political ties and made no effort to fact-check the group's claims against John Kerry.

Thibault also pretended that he and CNS aren't partisan operatives, responding again to Rich: "But I haven't worked at the Republican National Committee in nine years Frank. And before that job, I spent five years in the liberal newsroom of WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. I guess y'all must have missed that little point on my bio, eh?"

This ignores the fact that CNS has a long history of pro-conservative, anti-liberal activism disguised as journalism -- as does Thibault, who has lied about Paul Begala, declared that Jeff Gannon is "no conservative," and attacked supporters of John Kerry as "chumps," "simply naive" and accused them of holding an "unfortunate political mindset that cares not a whit about the cultural erosion in America." He also said: "I want George Bush to win re-election."

Naaah, Thibault's not a partisan conservative at all.

Thibault, by the way, offers no evidence that WJLA is "liberal" beyond the standard conservative presumtpion that because it's "mainstream" media, it must be liberal.

NewsMax Back to Supressing Scaife Link
Topic: Newsmax
A Jan. 23 NewsMax article recounts an item by Editor & Publisher columnist Greg Mitchell about an editorial by the Richard Mellon Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review endorsing a U.S. pullout from Iraq. NewsMax insists on calling him "Richard M. Scaife" and adds that he "has been named by Time magazine as one of the most influential Americans and was recently listed in the Financial Times as one of the world’s 25 most influential billionaires."

While NewsMax repeats Mitchell's statement that Scaife is "one of the chief funders of conservative think-tanks and activist causes around the country," it failed to tell its readers one significant fact: One of the "activist causes" Scaife funds is NewsMax, as ConWebWatch first reported back in 2002 and which NewsMax first acknowledged on its website only last year, after the New York Times pointed it out.

Two Levels of Wrong
Topic: WorldNetDaily
Craig R. Smith manages to work multiple levels of wrongness into this paragraph in his Jan. 23 WorldNetDaily column:

Back in the 1990's, President Bill Clinton (with sidekick Al [Gore]) used these same "illegal" searches on at least one American citizen, Aldridge Aims. Mr. Aims hadn't called al-Qaida or Hezbollah. In fact, he was an American on American soil. But he was selling secrets to our enemies. Clinton authorized the surveillance of Aims without a warrant. Thankfully he did. Aims now sits in a federal prison for the rest of his life so he can't hurt America any more.

Aside from painfully misspelling Aldrich Ames' name, Smith is wrong to claim that the Ames-related warrantless searches were "illegal." They were not illegal in 1993, when they were conducted. The FISA law that governs such searches did not cover them until 1995.

New Article: Out There, Exhibit 37: Betraying the Lost Cause
Topic: Newsmax
NewsMax trashes the Confederacy in order to trash the Clintons once more. How will that go over with its conservative readers? Read more.

Stillwell Hides Background (Again)
Topic: NewsBusters
Cinnamon Stillwell -- she of the Israeli extremist whitewashing -- checks in again with a Jan. 22 NewsBusters post, copiously citing a group called MEMRI as claiming that the recent Osama bin Laden audiotape was mistranslated by "the media," implying that this was done deliberately (this is a site that criticizes "the media," after all).

What Stillwell fails to report (in this instance, anyway) is that MEMRI has been criticized as a group that specializes in translating articles that portray Arabs and Muslims in a negative light.

So we're guessing by Stillwell's new post that NewsBusters has no problem with someone who apparently sympathizes with violent extremists writing for them.

Lack of Disclosure Watch
Topic: CNSNews.com
A Jan. 20 CNSNews.com article by Randy Hall on state funding restrictions on abortion clinics in Texas identifies Planned Parenthood as "the nation's most frequent provider of abortions." But Hall applied no descriptors to the anti-abortion groups featured in the article, the Texas Alliance for Life and STOPP International, not even describing them as "pro-life" groups.

Texas Alliance for Life's agenda is probably easy enough to figure out by name alone, but STOPP International's isn't, and it would seem to be an important one to note that is relevant to this article: STOPP has a specific agenda to attack Planned Parenthood, which perhaps colors what they have to say just a tad.

Sell, Sell, Sell
Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily abandons the pretense of pretending an ad is a "news" article with a Jan. 21 article headlined "Meet WND's newest advertiser." WND goes about it in a strange way, though.

WND editor Joseph Farah is quoted as stating: "We value our advertisers. ... They make it possible for millions of readers to get their news for free – news often found nowhere else." But nowhere in the article is the advertiser (Right Wing Stuff) actually named, though it states what it sells ("the largest selection of liberal-baiting merchandise on the Net"). Meanwhile, WND has treated other advertisers as providers of actual news. WND apparently values some advertisers more than others.

If I were Right Wing Stuff, I'd complain.