Despite Evidence, NewsBusters Still Insists Matthews Is 'Shill for the Democrats' Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 31 NewsBusters post by Justin McCarthy begins: "It is no secret that Chris Matthews is a shill for the Democrats and adamantly opposed to the Iraq War." Well, not quite; as we've documented, Matthews repeatedly bashed President Clinton during the 1990s to the MRC's delight, and the MRC (and McCarthy as well, we presume) has ignored Matthews' more recent praise of President Bush, which counters McCarthy's assertion that Matthews is "a shill for the Democrats."
McCarthy also asserts that Matthews "accused the Bush administration of engaging in 'criminality'" without noting that this is a factually accurate statement, and "inquired if Rudy Giuliani is 'a little bit Fascist'" without noting that Matthews suggested that he endorsed Giuliani's brand of fascism -- an implicit endorsement of Giuliani that also belies McCarthy's "shill for the Democrats" claim.
Ruddy: 'Hillary Does Not Generate the Same Animus She Did During the 1990s' Topic: Newsmax
In an Oct. 30 NewsMax column, Christopher Ruddy tries to portray himself as the voice of conservative reason. In an attempt to "peel away this onion of misperceptions" on the idea that "Hillary so frightens the GOP base — they will come out in droves for [Rudy Giuliani] on election day," Ruddy writes:
Today, Hillary does not generate the same animus she did during the 1990s. She’s modified her positions and image. Running one of the leading Web sites for GOP readers in the nation, I know that Hillary does not evoke the anger she once did.
Which makes us wonder if Ruddy reads his own website. As we've documented, Newsmax remains a hotbed of Hillary hate, led by columnists Dick Morris, John LeBoutillier and Stephen R. Smith. Indeed, as we've repeatedlypointedout, Morris has continued to write column after column of attacks on Hillary's campaign without disclosing that he is also serving as an activist against her campaign, which discredits him as an impartial analyst of the 2008 election.
Is Klein Rooting for Olmert's Death? Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Oct. 29 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein claimed: "Palestinian terrorists today expressed frantic concern for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's health following media reports he would hold a news conference announcing the diagnosis of a medical ailment," prostate cancer. Klein claimed that "WND's Jerusalem bureau received calls from almost a dozen terrorists, including senior leaders, asking whether the online news agency had any information about Olmert's illness and expressing concern for the prime minister," but he offers no evidence to support the claim and quotes only an anonymous "leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades" allegedly expressing concern about Olmert.
If the "terrorists" want Olmert to live -- and given Klein's implication through his schmoozing-with-terrorists gimmick that we should want the opposite of what the terrorists want, as well as Klein's longtime hostility to Olmert to the point of trying to undermine his government during a time of war -- it's only reasonable to assume that Klein wants Olmert to die from his disease.
Will he be honest and forthright about that desire in his WND articles? Time will tell.
Huston Smears McGovern, Doesn't Understand AP Topic: NewsBusters
It started with John Stephenson's callousness toward illegal immigrants, and Hate Week at NewsBusters rolls on with an Oct. 30 post by Warner Todd Huston needlessly attacking a George McGovern museum merely because the Associated Press had an article about it.
Insisting that "A South Dakota museum devoted to the political career of far-left Democrat George McGovern registered 5,000 fewer visitors last year than a Wisconsin museum devoted to mustard," Huston writes, "why is the AP pushing this thing? Could it be because of their affinity for McGovern's extreme left views? Do they want to urge people to attend to be exposed to McGovern's failed ideas of the past?" concluding, "So, AP, I have to say, don't bother me with the loser from 1972."
What Huston is really saying, of course, is that in his perfect little media world, liberals would be ignored unless they could be disparaged.
Huston also exhibits a fundamental ignorance of how the AP works. AP is a cooperative, which means that a majority of items it distributes are generated by the newspapers, broadcasters and others who are AP subscribers. The McGovern story apparently began life as a Oct. 17 article ($) in the Mitchell (S.D.) Republic newspaper, and the AP merely picked up the article for redistribution on its wires. It can safely be assumed that the AP did not "push" this article any more than the hundreds of others AP distributes on any given day -- unless, of course, Huston is arguing there mere distribution is "pushing," which parallels the Depiction-Equals-Approval Fallacy. In fact, individual news organizations make their own decisions on what specific AP copy to use or not use.
Further, given that this is a two-week-old story by a (presumed) AP affiliate, it's not exactly breaking news. Indeed, the Oct. 28 Chicago Sun-Times version of the AP article to which Huston linked shows that it was placed in the paper's travel section -- in other words, it was not used for political purposes but as a travel idea. And given the shortness of the item (four paragraphs), it was likely used as a filler article (if it indeed appeared in print, which is not clear from the web version of the article). Huston didn't tell his readers any of this.
Remember that reference to a mustard museum earlier? Huston wasn't done working that:
Sorry, AP, but that just isn't very much. I worked at a museum in my youth and 25,000 would have had us in tears.
So, here is a little perspective about the Mustard Museum I mentioned.
The Mt. Horeb Mustard Museum in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin says that they welcomed 30,000 visitors last year. Yes, you read that correctly. A museum that showcases thousands of brands of mustard drew more people than the McGovern Museum.
A condiment is more popular than George McGovern.
Now, can we say that mustard has "a lot of friends around the country and world"?
How, exactly, does Huston's partisan smearing of McGovern fulfill the MRC's "media research" mission? We don't know either.
Yep. Having sympathy for illegal immigrants is a horrible thing. Next thing you know, people will want to treat them as human beings! That obviously cannot happen, as far as Stephenson is concerned.
Stephenson concludes by lamenting, "The article is one of the most transparent sympathy pieces I've seen in quite a while." Indeed, sympathy does seem to be an alien emotion to Stephenson.
In an Oct. 29 NewsBusters post, Mark Finkelstein complained that during an interview with Valerie Plame, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough "the name of the State Department official who first disclosed her identity was never uttered," whom Finkelstein claimed was Richard Armitage.
As we've repeatedlydocumented, Armitage was not the one who "first disclosed" Plame's identity. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby also leaked Plame's identity to reporters, and Robert Novak -- to whom Armitage leaked -- confirmed Plame's identity with Rove. Novak was merely the first to report Plame's identity, but that does not mean that Armitage was the first to disclose it.
We missed Aaron Klein's appearance on Fox News' "Red Eye," but he apparently did a good job of promoting his terrorist-chat schtick. (We suspect Klein was never asked about his own whitewashing of right-wing terrorists.) News Hounds has nominated one of Klein's statements for its "Outrageous Quote of the Week": "...not one US military, member of the military, was killed in Iraq for the first time since 2004 this past week, and almost no one's talking about it." and minutes later "In Iraq there were no casualties in the Al-Anbar Province last week, or in Iraq, US casualties..."
Conservative Media Dishonesty: The List Topic: The ConWeb
An Oct. 8 American Thinker article by Randall Hoven lists 101 instances of "media dishonesty" -- a list almost entirely devoid of conservatives. Hoven writes:
I did receive a few complaints for not having "conservatives" on the list. There turns out to be a good reason for that: there just aren't that many who pass the criteria for clear dishonesty in the public debate. It is probably also related to the fact that so few journalists are conservative. Some people did send me "conservative" candidates for my list, but they told me more about the submitters than the people on the list. I suspect Media Matters was the ultimate source of most or all of them.
So, to help Mr. Hoven out, here are some examples of conservative media dishonesty that we've documented, using the same criteria Hoven cited on his list:
1. Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily, plagiarism, undisclosed conflict of interest (2005). More than half of a WND article written by founder and editor Farah was copied without attribution from a Reuters article; the other half features a company Farah didn't disclose was a WND advertiser.
2. WorldNetDaily, fell for hoax (2005). WND reported that Terri Schiavo's husband sold the rights to his story to CBS for a TV movie. Turns out WND got its information from an April Fool's post on a blog.
3. WorldNetDaily, fabrication (2004). Claimed that Teresa Heinz Kerry, donated millions to "radical, anti-American groups" through an organization called the Tides Center. In fact, Heinz's donations were earmarked for specific environmental causes. Called on the falsehood, WND then peddled the logical distortion that "it is accurate to say that donors to Tides are indeed supporting all of its causes" because "donors to the Tides Foundation pay approximately 10 percent above and beyond the amount grant recipients get for administrative fees and overhead to Tides."
4. Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily, fabrication (2004). Klein falsely suggested that the charity Islamic Relief had ties to terrorists and that the orphans for whom it was raising money didn't exist. WND was forced to retract the article and apologize to the charity.
5. Jack Cashill, WorldNetDaily, fabrication (2002). Wrote a seven-part WND series suggesting that James Kopp was innocent of killing abortion doctor Barnett Slepian and was framed by liberal government officials "determined ... to protect the abortion industry." Six months after the series ran, Kopp confessed to killing Slepian.
6. CNSNews.com, misrepresentation (2005). An article asserted that when Democratic strategist said at a Democratic gathering that "They want to kill us, particularly in this city, and New York, and some other places," he was referring to Republicans, not -- as is clear from the context of Begala's remark -- Islamic terrorists. When Begala tried to set the record straight, then-CNS editor-in-chief David Thibault essentially called Begala a liar.
7. Dan Riehl, NewsBusters, fabrication (2006). Riehl asserted that S.R. Sidarth, the target of George Allen's infamous "macaca" statement, was "making fun of an Hispanic William & Mary student's death" on a University of Virginia discussion board; in fact, the person posting under Sidarth's name did not "make fun" of the students, merely linking to an article about it and offering no other comment.
8. Media Research Center, misrepresentation (1994). The MRC pasted quotes together -- one ellipsis represented a 28-page span -- from a book by former New York Times editor Howell Raines to falsely portray him as insulting Ronald Reagan's intelligence by the statement "Reagan couldn't tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it." In fact, Raines was referring to Reagan's fly-fishing skills.
9. Christopher Ruddy, NewsMax, fabrication (2000). Claimed that Bill and Hillary Clinton were selling their Chappaqua, N.Y., house because their neighbors have put the home under 24-hour video surveillance on the off-chance of being able to sell something to supermarket tabloids. His source? Anonymous sources "at some of America's most notorious supermarket tabloids."
10. James Hirsen, NewsMax, fabrication (2005). Claimed that U2 was "[t]eaming up with the legendary rock group U2 for a one-night only appearance." In fact, Santorum's campaign had merely purchased tickets for the concert to resell to donors. NewsMax then corrected the article without alerting readers to the fact that it had been changed or apologizing for its error, then misleadingly claimed that "NewsMax had never claimed that U2 or Bono were holding their concert for Santorum."
MRC-Fox News Appearance Watch Topic: Media Research Center
An Oct. 26 appearance by MRC's Business & Media Institute director Dan Gainor on the Fox Business channel (part 1, part 2) to chat up how businesses are aiding victims of the Southern California wildfires shows what we suspected: The same template for MRC appearances on Fox News is being applied to MRC appearances on Fox Business. As happens so often with MRC representatives on Fox News, Gainor appears solo on Fox Business, and neither he nor the BMI are identified as conservative.
Meanwhile, the template continues on Fox News: An Oct. 21 appearance by BMI's Amy Menefee on "Fox & Friends" (part 1, part 2) discussing "the media’s obsession with the 'R' word, Recession," is a solo appearance, and nowhere is mentioned that she or BMI are conservative.
Sheffield Thinks All Liberals Are Socialists Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 27 NewsBusters post by Matthew Sheffield asserts that "a recent study of Facebook profiles of BBC employees finds, surprise surprise, that Britain's taxpayer-funded network is utterly dominated by socialists."
Well, no. The Daily Mail article he cites as evidence does not use the word "socialist" -- which describes a specific political view; it uses the word "liberal" instead, as the excerpt of the article Sheffield quoted makes clear. Most of those self-identified "liberals" "either vote Lib- Dem ... or Labour," according to the article. Sheffield offers nothing to back up his suggestion that either Labour or the Liberal Democrat parties in Britain are explicitly socialist parties, or any other explanation of British politics -- or that the Daily Mail is a conservative newspaper that actually supported Hitler and Mussolini through much of the 1930s -- to put these statistics in perspective.
And as we've suggested, Sheffield offers no evidence to support his contention that "liberal" and "socialist" are interchangeable terms.
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, delivered a startling and historic two hour speech on the Senate floor Friday about "recent developments which are turning 2007 into a ‘tipping point' for climate alarmism."
Given that the Senate adjourned at 1:47 p.m. ET on Oct. 26 and no global warming-related items were on the agenda that day, Inhofe's speech has all the earmarks of having been made post-adjournment to an empty chamber for the benefit of C-SPAN cameras -- which makes it not terribly "startling" and rather less than "historic."
Sadly, Sheppard can't take his nose out of Inhofe's you-know-what to tell his readers the context of that speech.
Here's a shocker: Fox News actually takes a stab at telling the full truth about Peter Paul!
An Oct. 26 FoxNews.com article features Paul's new Hillary-bashing documentary, "Hillary Uncensored," but instead of merely regurgitating Paul's dishonest spin, the article actually details Paul's criminal history and lack of credibility, noting that "The allegations in the film are not new." Still it doesn't go far enough to counter all the false claims Paul made.
For instance, the article states one claim made in the film:
The Clintons later made sure Paul was kept in a Brazilian prison for 25 months, including 58 days in a maximum security cellblock nicknamed the "Corridor of Death," while the Justice Department waited to extradite him.
In fact, as the Department of Justice stated, Paul did not flee to Brazil until February 2001, and he refused to return after the United States Attorney's Office informed him that he was the target of a criminal investigation. Paul was arrested in Brazil in August 2001. Notice anything about those dates? They all occur after Bill Clinton left office, making it extremely unlikely that "the Clintons" had any direct hand in bringing Paul to justice. Further, the only reason Paul "was kept in a Brazilian prison for 25 months" was his own actions, not that of "the Clintons"; as the DOJ pointed out, Paul "contested" his extradition proceedings.
The article further states that "the securities fraud plea that he agreed to cop in March 2005 was to get out of jail after 43 months in Brazilian and New York prisons." The article doesn't mention, as the DOJ did, that at the time of Paul's plea, two of Paul's co-defendants, Stephen Gordon and Jeffrey Pittsburg, pleaded guilty to similar charges.
We've previouslydocumented the efforts of WorldNetDaily and Newsmax to whitewash Paul's criminal history and pretend that Paul is someone who should be taken seriously.
UPDATE: The U.S. attorney who prosecuted Paul, Roslynn Mauskopf, was appointed by President Bush, further discrediting Paul's claim to be a victim of "the Clintons."
Media Matters gets to the crux of Newsmax's (the "m" is now lowercase, per a Newsmax logo change a few weeks back) criticism of it in an Oct. 25 article regarding Glenn Beck's statements about the California wildfires: "Media Matters quoted, but de-emphasized, much of the fuller context of Beck's remarks." In other words, Media Matters has committed the sin of quoting someone accurately.
Newsmax concludes its article: "Oh well, who care [sic] about the facts?" Which demonstrates that Newsmax doesn't care about copyediting.
Softball Interview Watch Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center empire published a couple of interviews with conservatives the other day. While not as obsequiously fawning and enabling as, say, FrontPageMag's JamieGlazov, they are quite friendly and devoid of challenging questions.
In an Oct. 24 interview of Ann Coulter, CNSNews' Randy Hall happily plays straight man:
"What was you reason for putting together a collection of what we would call your greatest hits?"
"In your new book, you thank one group of Americans as unyielding in their defense ofthe truth to every single attack on you. What is that group, and why do you think they support you so strongly?"
"Do you think all the food thrown at you by liberal college students should be collected and given to the poor?"
"Do they throw finer cuisine at conservatives who speak at Harvard University?"
Meanwhile, in an Oct. 25 interview of Evan Coyne Maloney, director of the anti-liberal film "Indoctrinate U," NewsBusters' Matthew Sheffield makes sure to work in the corporate line -- "You think, speaking of the media, do you think that part of the reasons that there hasn't been a lot of coverage [of Maloney's film] is that the media are liberal?" -- and he also finds common ground with Maloney on the horrible burden of being a conservative:
"Yeah, I've noticed kind of a similar thing. We just launched a comedy show on our web site but some of the audience doesn't quite get it. It's hard for them to understand anyone can be funny, and on film, and be conservative."
"I think it goes back-way back to the idea of the popular front. We on the right had to build up an intellectual structure to carry out our views ... And then you're supposed to go on to the mainstream."
"Yeah, exactly. What we need is someone on the right to say, hey that was a good idea that they had on the left to create a popular front so let's do the same thing, spend the money to train people to reach out to the average person."
Sheffield also lets slide Maloney's claim that "there's no right-wing George Soros handing out millions upon millions of dollars to groups like a conservative MoveOn.org ." Has no one ever heard of Richard Mellon Scaife?
NewsBusters Repeats False Smear of Hansen Topic: NewsBusters
An Oct. 25 NewsBusters post by Matthew Balan asserted that a segment of the CNN series "Planet in Peril" "failed to mention that NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen ... has received funding from George Soros, while mentioning that 'second biggest contributors to [global warming skeptic Senator James] Inhofe's Senate office are energy and natural resource companies.'" Balan further asserted that "Hansen received $720,000 from George Soros’s foundation [the Open Society Institute] in 2006." Balan's evidence for this claim was a Sept. 26 NewsBusters post by global warming misleader Noel Sheppard, who in turn cited an Investor's Business Daily editorial.
But the IBD doesn't claim that "Hansen received $720,000 from George Soros." Rather, it asserted that "Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship 'philanthropy,' by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's 'politicization of science' program."
Sheppard went on to chastise the media for not having "looked into this matter - you know, acted like journalists instead of advocates!" Of course, that's something Sheppard himself has no interest in doing, as we've noted; otherwise, he would have contacted Hansen for his side of the story before making (well, copying and pasting) his accusation. Had he done so, he would have learned the story behind the money and that Hansen says he "did not receive one thin dime from George Soros." Hansen added: "By the way, in case anybody finds out that George Soros INTENDED to send me $720,000 but could not find my address, please let me know! We are pretty hard pressed here."
That, of course, wasn't good enough for Sheppard. In a Sept. 28 post, he insisted that Hansen "failed to thoroughly refute the claims made against him." But Sheppard fails to offer any evidence to counter Hansen's denial and, thus, support his earlier assertion that Soros "gave $720,000 in 2006" to Hansen. While Sheppard concedes some shakiness by admitting that "we don't know whether he received a dime either directly or indirectly from George Soros or one of his foundations," he won't accept Hansen's denial at face value, the way he accepts whatever claim by global warming deniers that comes down the pike.
Given that, Balan is repeating a lie when he asserts that "Hansen received $720,000 from George Soros." Will this lie get corrected before it gets copied and pasted into today's CyberAlert? We'll see.
