The Echo Chamber: NewsBusters Cites WND Topic: NewsBusters
From a May 12 NewsBusters post by Mithridate Ombud:
World Net Daily points out that the Associated Press drove by a Swedish study that finds lesbians react differently to sex hormones than heterosexual women. Evidently, the desire of the AP was to claim that homosexuality is genetic, that it can't be helped.
Aside from the absurdity of citing WorldNetDaily as a credible source for anything -- given its history of bias, lies and plagiarism -- the article that Ombud cites isn't a "news" article at all. It's a May 10 commentary by Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America's Culture & Family Institute (where Knight's article was first posted). Knight is even more biased and agenda-driven on this issue than WND, which makes him even less of an authoritative source.
Non-Conservative News at NewsMax Topic: Newsmax
Cliff Kincaid might want to rethink his war on Dana Priest over the CIA secret-prison story that Kincaid insists is false. From, of all people, Ken Timmerman at NewsMax:
The U.S. government acknowledged yesterday that the CIA operated "a very high number" of secret flights that stopped in Europe en route to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba according to members of the European Parliament visiting Washington, DC.
[...]
The European Parliament commission says it has received "ad hoc information" from Eurocontrol, a private organization that tracks flight information for 36-member states, documenting 1,000 flights of CIA-operated aircraft. These included a Boeing 737, with registration number N313P, that human rights groups claim was chartered by a CIA front company to carry prisoners from Afghanistan to secret prisons in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan and Eastern Europe.
[...]
The aircraft made "several flights from Kabul, stopping in Poland, Romania, and Morocco along the way to Guantanamo," Fava said. "We don't think they were making refueling stops."
Original news on NewsMax that makes the Bush administration look bad? We're shocked, too.
NewsMax Promotes (Yet Another) Anti-Hillary Book Topic: Newsmax
To absolutely no one's surprise, NewsMax has glommed onto the latest anti-Hillary book. A May 12 article by Carl Limbacher promotes John Podhoretz's book "Can She Be Stopped?" accompanied by a summary of Podhoretz's 10-point plan to "expose Hillary as the far-left liberal that she truly is."
Perhaps just as unsurprisingly, Limbacher failed to note that Podhoretz trashed the last anti-Hillary book that came out (and was heavily promoted by NewsMax), Ed Klein's "The Truth About Hillary," as we've previously noted.
More News From the ADF's PR Division Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's aversion to actually talking to anyone at Ohio State University-Mansfield regarding the Scott Savage controversy continues with a May 11 article that recounts the case through the new angle of excerpting a May 6 Columbus Dispatch op-ed by Christopher Phelps, one of the professors who criticized Savage for recommending WND managing editor David Kupelian's book "The Marketing of Evil." It's a selective quoting of Phelps' op-ed, focusing on his claim that Kupelian's book is "unabashed bigotry" and a "screed."
Predictably, rather than responding to anything Phelps actually wrote, WND attacked Phelps as a leftist who has praised Marxism. And WND omitted a factual correction Phelps pointed out: Savage was accused of "harassment based on sexual orientation" -- which Phelps describes as "discrimination" -- not "sexual harassment," the term WND lifted out of inaccurate Alliance Defense Fund press releases and repeats here, falsely stating that Savage was accused of being a "sexual harasser."
WND also calls "The Marketing of Evil" a "bestselling" book and "one of the hottest-selling books in the country" but fails to provide evidence of it other than the deficient example of the book "topping Amazon.com's 'Current Events' bestseller chart for more than a week."
CNS' Anti-Democrat Slant Topic: CNSNews.com
A May 11 CNSNews.com article by Susan Jones starts out with the promise of a balanced presentation:
Darned Republicans, say Democrats, giving more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. Darned Democrats, say Republicans, opposing a bill that will encourage further economic growth.
And so goes the long-running argument in Washington over tax-cut legislation.
But the balance ends there, and Jones resorts to anti-Democratic, pro-Republican spin that CNS justloves. At one point, Jones writes, "Democrats frequently resort to emotional arguments intended to make those who are not wealthy resent those who are," but she makes no similarly pejorative comment about Republicans. In fact, she implicitly praises the Republicans' tax plan, writing, "Some analysts say extending the tax cut on investments will goose the stock market and juice the economy, just as earlier tax cuts did."
Today's ConWeb Spin Point Topic: NewsBusters
That massive NSA database compiling the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans? Old news.
We've already documented NewsMax's version of the spin point. The MRC has echoed it as well; a May 11 NewsBusters post by Rich Noyes similarly claimed that "there may not even be much 'news' here" since it is similar to a Dec. 24 New York Times article. And anyway, Noyes wrote, the program "seems like a thoroughly innocuous database of the same information that appears on your phone bill, but with your name, address and other personal information removed."
NewsMax's Zombie Falsehood Topic: Newsmax
A May 11 NewsMax article attacks a USA Today article on a massive NSA database that compiles the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans as old news, "though liberal media outlets have been blaring the story as a shocking revelation all Thursday morning." According to NewsMax, "CBS's '60 Minutes' blew the lid off the agency's domestic wiretapping in Feb. 2000, when the Clinton administration was using it for all sorts of unauthorized purposes." The article links to a December 2005 NewsMax item as proof.
But the NSA monitoring program specifically referenced in the December NewsMax article, called Echelon, predates the Clinton administration, as ConWebWatch has documented. Further, the article doesn't even claim, as the May 11 NewsMax article says it does, that "the Clinton administration was using it for all sorts of unauthorized purposes," let alone offer evidence to support that claim.
Further, the December article implies that under Clinton administration orders, "the NSA had even monitored and tape recorded the conversations of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond." This is false; that monitoring took place in the 1980s, well before Clinton took office. A NewsMax article more explicitly making that false claim abruptly disappeared from NewsMax's website without explanation.
Quote of the Day Topic: NewsBusters
"The liberal media are nothing if not militantly in favor of sex, and everything that enables it to be more frequent and fearless."
-- Tim Graham, in a May 10 NewsBusters post attacking a New York Times article on anti-contraception conservatives.
New Article: The Evil of Marketing, Part 2 Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's hyping of criticism of a WND editor's book: Shameless marketing, or the result of a secret deal between WND and the Alliance Defense Fund? Read more.
Guilt by Association Watch Topic: Accuracy in Media
A May 9 Accuracy in Media article by Jennifer Verner keeps up AIM's attack on Washington Post reporter Dana Priest over her Pulitzer-winning series exposing the CIA's secret prisons. This time around, Verner plays the guilt-by-association card by attacking Priest's husband, William Goodfellow, "a far-left political activist and current executive director of the Center for International Policy (CIP), who has been at the vanguard of many of the most rabid attacks on Bush Administration policy." But Verner engages in some wobbly research to back up her claims.
According to Verner:
In 1974, he [Goodfellow] wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the New York Times that served to excuse the genocidal Pol Pot's forced evacuation of the Cambodian people from the cities. The piece was so influential that it is still quoted by Noam Chomsky and his followers to this day.
Verner gets the date wrong; Goodfellow's op-ed actually appeared July 14, 1975. As to Verner's suggestion that the op-ed was "widely circulated" beyond its Times appearance, searches on Google and Nexis failed to turn up a complete copy of it. Nexis contains an abstract summary, while two paragraphs of it appear (and have been repeated) on the Internet.
Verner also offers no evidence to support her claim that the op-ed is "quoted by Noam Chomsky and his followers to this day." A search of the archive of Chomsky's Z Magazine turned up only one reference to Goodfellow's op-ed: a June 1977 article co-written by Chomsky citing Goodfellow's claim regarding "the testimony of U.S. AID officials that Phnom Penh had only a six-day supply of rice."
Verner also attacks Joseph Wilson, who was a speaker at a CIP conference, claiming that his "statements about what he found in Africa and his wife's role in his mission have been completely undermined by a Senate Intelligence Committee report." In fact, much of the Senate Intelligence Committee report's "undermining" of Wilson appears not in the body of the report but, rather, in a partisan addendum written by Republicans.
These are just two paragraphs out of Verner's commentary; this provides a good reason to assume that the rest of it is similarly loosely researched.
WND's News Priorities Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily won't write about Republican corruption, but it will spend its precious resources to compile an article about a newspaper publisher arrested for DUI.
The presumed purpose of the WND article was to demonstrate the purported arrogance of the "mainstream media," but it notes that the paper immeidately ran an article on the publisher's arrest and quotes a newsroom employee saying, "The attitude here is great transparency and I appreciate that." Ironically, that's a transparency that doesn't exist at WND; witness its refusal to disclose its business and personal interests in the subjects it covers and unwillingness to fully disclose the financial details of its legal defense fund.
Tell It To Who? Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell's May 9 column, in taking glee in promoting recent indiscretions by Democratic politicians, complained that no TV network has reported that a business associate of Democratic Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson "pled guilty of bribery." Bozell then added: "Tell that to Duke Cunningham."
MRC readers may wonder what Bozell is talking about. A search of MRC's archives reveals that not only is this the first time Bozell has mentioned Cunningham's name in reference to his long trail of bribery and corruption -- and it is only a mention, since Bozell writes only that and doesn't go into the details of Cunningham's corruption -- it the first mention of Cunningham in relation to his corruption anywhere on the MRC website.
MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, hasn't done much more. Its first news article related to the Cunningham case appeared in February -- nearly three months after Cunningham resigned his congressional seat. (He was mentioned in three commentary items at CNS prior to that.)
CNS' News Priorities Topic: CNSNews.com
Interesting that CNSNews.com has the time to compile some snarky-but-lame comments by the head of a gun-rights group about the Patrick Kennedy case -- "I'd rather go quail hunting with Dick Cheney than get in a car being driven by a Kennedy" -- despite the extremely tenuous link between gun rights and driving under the influence. Then again, it is just a recycled press release that didn't require any actual reporting.
Meanwhile, CNS has yet to report on the hookers-and-limos scandal that has touched the Porter Goss resignation story, even though there's plenty out there to report upon.
'Censored Again'? Nope Topic: WorldNetDaily
The headline of a May 9 WorldNetDaily column by Scott Savage -- the Ohio librarian at the center of a controversy sparked by his recommendation of a book by WND managing editor David Kupelian -- reads, "Persecuted librarian censored again." An editor's note states that the column was originally written for the magazine of the American Library Association. It claims that the ALA "said the piece was 'timely and well-written' and publishable 'at its current length'" but that it "abruptly changed its mind and informed Savage he had to cut the column in half or not see it published."
WND makes no case that Savage was "censored," as the appearance of this column at WND demonstrates. Requesting that the column be edited is not prima facie evidence of "censorship." Certainly WND has edited or requested edits to items it has published. That's not censorship; that's part of the publication process. Additionally, WND offers no independent confirmation of the ALA's action, nor does it offer a chance for the ALA to respond to Savage's claims.
Moreover, given that WND has served as the public-relations division of the Alliance Defense Fund by promoting Savage's plight unsullied by any attempt to contact anyone at the Ohio university where Savage works for a response, it's difficult to argue that Savage was "censored" in the first place.
Will Savage figure out that he is, at least in part, just being used by WND to pump sales of Kupelian's book?
Coy About Canceled Conservatives Topic: NewsBusters
In a May 8 NewsBusters post on how "liberals are up in arms about their sacred turf of non-FNC television being invaded" due to Glenn Beck's new show on CNN Headline News, Matthew Sheffield wrote that both Fox News and MSNBC "have pulled shows out from underneath other right-of-center hosts Matt Drudge and Michael Savage." While Sheffield ascribed a reason for Drudge's cancellation -- "he dared to show a picture of a prenatal operation" -- he failed to note the reason for Savage's cancellation.
That, of course, was because Savage told a caller to "get AIDS and die."
