Meanwhile ... Topic: NewsBusters
Media Matters' Eric Boehlert reminds us that before the hue and cry over a general who asked a question during the Nov. 29 CNN/YouTube Republican debate was later found to have tenuous connections to Hillary Clinton's campaign, Brad Wilmouth declared in a NewsBusters post immediately after the debate that it "largely lived up to its promise to be a debate fitting for Republican voters as the vast majority of the questions used were asked from a conservative point of view."
New Article -- NewsBusted: The Huston File Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters' Warner Todd Huston goes above and beyond to peddle misinformation and shill for Fred Thompson. Read more.
Kessler Remains Uninterested in Freedom's Watch Funding Topic: Newsmax
We've previouslynoted Ronald Kessler's disinterest in the funding for the conservative group Freedom's Watch, even as he touts that it purportedly has more funding than the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org.
Kessler does so again in a Dec. 6 Newsmax article:
Freedom’s Watch has moved into its headquarters that were once occupied by the Washington Capitals on 9th Street NW in Washington. The 10,000 square feet of office space is laid out like Bloomberg’s offices, with lots of open space and few closed offices. The facilities include a so-called newsroom with plasma television monitors covering one wall and a television studio that will be used to broadcast programs nationally.
Since late August, Freedom’s Watch has spent $15 million on television, radio, and print ads. The targets have been anti-war critics who support a quick retreat from Iraq, MoveOn.org’s ad suggesting that Gen. David Petraeus betrayed the American people, and Columbia University’s decision to invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak.
Conservatives have long wondered why no one has stepped forward to provide as much funding to push their issues as the left-of-center MoveOn.org operations started by George Soros.
The new non-profit organization is designed to fill that void: Its funding will exceed that of entities that have been underwritten by Soros.
Again, Kessler shows no interest in telling his readers where the money to pay for these swank offices he's slobbering over is coming from -- even though, as we noted, he could easily have found out by reading his own website. One of those key funders is John Templeton Jr., son of John Templeton, whose financial analysis NewsMax has been touting for years.
Kessler also repeated the false claim that MoveOn.org was "started by George Soros"; as we've previously noted, it was founded in 1998 by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd. Soros gave money to the group starting in 2003.
TimesWatch Misleads on Vacation Home Story Topic: Media Research Center
In a Dec. 5 TimesWatch post (and MRC CyberAlert item) about a speech by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller on divisions in the American electorate, Clay Waters noted that Keller said "another defender of the national interest posted maps to my apartment -- and my publishers' -- on the internet, for the benefit of any lunatics who wanted to drop by and set us straight," prompting Waters to add: "This from the editor of the paper that in June 2006 showed how to find the weekend homes of Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld."
What Waters didn't note (but Glenn Greenwald did): The Times had published even more detailed information about the Clintons' house in Chappaqua, N.Y. (which we don't recall Waters objecting to), the Rumsfeld and Cheney house info had been published several months earlier in the Washington Post -- and Newsmax -- to no similar hue and cry, and the Times had Rumsfeld's permission to take pictures of his house.
Brennan Repeats Debunked Global Warming Stat Topic: Newsmax
In his Dec. 4 Newsmax column, done as a letter from Mother Nature to Al Gore, Phil Brennan writes:
This notion that mankind can be forced to reduce atmospheric levels of CO2 by reducing its carbon footprint — I love these disingenuous terms you invent to bolster your shabby case — is sheer nonsense, based as it is on the false notion that human activities are mainly responsible for the buildup of the greenhouse gas CO2 in the atmosphere.
Now Al, you know that the principal greenhouse gas is water vapor which accounts for about 95 percent of all the greenhouse gases floating around out there.
The other 5 percent is composed of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, with carbon dioxide being by far the greatest greenhouse gas contributor among them at 3.6 percent.
But carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities accounts for barely 3.2 percent of that, thus only 0.12 percent of all the greenhouse gases in total.
As we noted the last time Brennan made this assertion, RealClimate has debunked these statistics, calling them not only false but "irrelevant and not very sensible."
Newsmax Promotes Dubious Abortion-Cancer Study Topic: Newsmax
A Dec. 4 Newsmax article by Sylvia Hubbard repeated a study claiming that "[h]aving an abortion raises a woman’s risk of breast cancer by at least 30 percent, and is fueling an 'epidemic' of the often fatal disease." But as we've detailed, the study, which originally came out in October, was done by a mysterious British researcher, funded by British anti-abortion groups, and published in a right-leaning publication that fancies itself to be a medical journal.
Hubbard reports none of this. While she does quote a spokesman for the American Cancer Society questioning the findings, she also quotes Jane Orient, managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons -- where the study was published, and whose conservative leanings we've previously documented -- saying she agreed with the findings: "Women need to know that the incidence of breast cancer is rising and it is paralleling the rise in induced abortion. The graphs are very, very clear. There are many strong reasons to believe abortion is a factor."
This suggests that the JAPS cares more about the results of the "research" it publishes rather than following the research wherever it goes. Remember, the JAPS published Madeleine Cosman's factually false anti-immigrant screed, which wildly overstated the number of leprosy cases in the U.S. Perhaps Orient needs to take some time away from justifying whatever lame study appears in her journal -- while ignoring the inherent bias in how it was funded -- and explain why the peer review process the JAPS purports to have didn't catch Cosman's errors (as far as we know, JAPS has never corrected Cosman's article).
MRC Builds Huckabee Up, Then Tears Him Down Topic: NewsBusters
Sometimes, The Media Research Center's right hand doesn't know what its, er, other right hand is doing.
Two Dec. 5 NewsBusters posts -- Scott Whitlock and Kyle Drennen -- criticize various media outlets for negative reporting on Mike Huckabee. Whitlock's first post complained that ABC's Brian Ross "continued his habit of offering up critical takes on Republican front-runners and ignoring Democratic scandals' by reporting on Huckabee's involvement while Arkansas governor in the pardoning of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond, who was later accused of murder after his release. Whitlock was put out that the story got its most recent push from the Huffington Post, which has "very liberal leanings."
Drennen's post similarly complained:
Following two days of positive coverage of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his front-runner status in Iowa, on Wednesday the CBS "Early Show" decided it was time to tear down the former governor’s campaign: "He's being dogged by new reports that he had a much bigger role in the parole of convicted rapist Wayne Dumond while he was Governor of Arkansas than he had previously been claiming."
Drennen also complained about "the use of the 'Huffington Post' as a legitimate news source, with no mention of it being a left-wing blog routinely filled with hate speech toward conservatives." He linked to fellow MRCer Tim Graham's HuffPo smear job, which, as we've detailed, cites a mere 19 posts out of the tens of thousands on the site to support its claim that HuffPo is "loaded with profanity and crude sexual and excretory metaphors."
But while one MRC division was attacking the networks for attacking Huckabee, another MRC division was, um, attacking Huckabee. As we've noted, CNSNews.com has unleashed a handful of articles in the past couple days bashing Huckabee for being not conservative enough.
The headline on Drennen's item read: "CBS 'Early Show' Builds Huckabee Up to Tear Him Down." The MRC is doing the exact same thing.
A Dec. 4 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh keeps up his brand of "journalism" by subjectively misdescribing a California law on diversity, allowing opponents of the law to frame the issue and refusing to allow any supporter of the law to react to the criticism.
The article's headline set the tone by exclaiming "Homosexodus!" -- an apparent attempt to capitalize on its similarly silly "Sexpidemic" head. Unruh goes on to call the law in question a "newly mandated homosexual indoctrination program." In fact, all the bill essentially does is add "sexual orientation" to a list of characteristic California schools are not allowed to "promote[] a discriminatory bias" against. By repeating the "homosexual indoctrination" canard, Unruh is invoking the depiction-equals-approval fallacy, and he offers no evidence here beyond the assertions of opponents that the law does, in fact, result in "homosexual indoctrination" -- something Unruh would never have gotten away with had he written this article for his former employer, the Associated Press.
Unruh quotes numerous opponents of the law, most egregiously WND columnist Olivia St. John, who claimed in a Dec. 3 column -- without evidence, of course -- that the law will result in the state force-feeding children perverse material and videos vile enough to garner an R-rating in the local multiplex."
(St. John's column goes on to state -- which Unruh unquestioningly quotes: "When it comes to actively promoting sin to public school children, the homosexuals are light years ahead of adulterers, fornicators and substance abusers, who haven't yet implemented student-run organizations to convince children that such lifestyle choices are normal." What place does this have in a "news" article? What journalism school taught Unruh that this was a good, fair, balanced thing to put in one?)
While Unruh quotes state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell as saying the law "simplifies and clarifies existing civil rights protections for California students," he immediately allows another critic to attack the claim. O'Donnell's statement was apparently pulled by Unruh from a "a notice to all 'county and district superintendents'"; there is no evidence that Unruh contacted O'Donnell for a response. Unruh also pulled a quote from the bill's sponsor, State Sen. Sheila Kuehl -- whom he describes as a "Santa Monica Democrat, who lives an openly homosexual lifestyle" -- from a newspaper; there's no indication Unruh contacted her, either. Didn't want to catch those gay cooties over the phone, apparently.
This is an appallingly biased, unfair article by someone who has touted his long journalistic experience. But, sadly, it's par for the course for WND, who apparently has no problem printing such misleading tripe.
CNSNews.com seems to be gravitating toward a favorite Republican candidate -- and it ain't Mike Huckabee.
CNS has run three articles that are arguably critical of Huckabee in the past couple of days:
A Dec. 4 article by Fred Lucas reported that "some of [Huckabee's] Republican Party opponents are criticizing his record on illegal immigration as being un-conservative and not in line with what American voters want from their next president."
A Dec. 5 article by Randy Hall stated: "A group that opposes interaction between religion and government Tuesday accused Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. of violating federal tax law by using the school's resources to endorse Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. The group also asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate."
A Dec. 5 article by Nathan Burchfiel began: "As former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee surges in polls against other Republicans seeking the 2008 presidential nomination, fiscal conservatives are taking a closer look at his record and expressing concerns about his approach to taxes and other economic issues."
By contrast, Mitt Romney is getting much gentler treatment. A Dec. 5 article by Kevin Mooney repeats claims from "Rev. Lou Sheldon and other Christian leaders who do not see Romney's religious beliefs as a major impediment to his attaining the Republican presidential nomination. " Buty Mooney never really delves into the nature of historical criticism of Mormonism by evangelicals beyond noting Sheldon's observation that "[t]raditionally, many Christians have thought of Mormonism as a cult," and he gets the name of Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and longtime critic of Mormonism, wrong (calling him "Al Moulder").
Mooney cited Mohler in the context of ABC "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos asking Huckabee if he agreed with Mohler's view that Mormonism contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity -- a view for which Mooney offered no elaboration. If a prominent evangelical like Mohler holds such a view, why is CNS -- a news service that primarily caters to conservatives and evangelicals -- trying to paper it over instead of detailing it for its readers?
WND Ignores Own Reporting on Bossie Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 4 WorldNetDaily article reported on a lawsuit threat against CNN by David Bossie and the group he heads, Citizens United. Among the offenses for which Bossie and his group are seeking "a formal apology and public retraction" that Bossie is a "dirty trickster."
But evidence to support that claim can be found in WND's own reporting. As we've noted, WND reported in 1998 on Bossie's anti-Clinton shenanigans in the 1990s -- which included allegations of stalking a Whitewater witness and attempts to steal documents related to various Clinton scandals, on top of his release of doctored transcripts of former Clinton administration official Webster Hubbell that got Bossie canned from the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, where he worked as an investigator for anti-Clinton Rep. Dan Burton. Writer David Bresnahan stated in his lead that sources on the that committee wondered whether Bossie "was either extremely incompetent or was intentionally trying to sabotage investigations."
WND makes no mention of this -- even though WND originally reported it. Indeed, the article noted that Bossie was "a former chief investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight" without mentioning that he lost the job for doctoring the Hubbell transcripts.
NewsBusters Silent on NRO Reporting Scandal Topic: NewsBusters
While the folks at NewsBusters have been incredibly eager to report on questions about the veracity of Scott Thomas Beauchamp's columns for The New Republic, they have been silent about a similar scandal: apparently false claims in a military blog on National Review Online.
W. Thomas Smith Jr., who writes for The Tank blog for NRO, has been forced to backpedal on claims that between 4,000-5,000 Hezbollah gunmen had "deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling 'show of force'" and that "some 200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen" occupied a "sprawling Hezbollah tent city" near the Lebanese parliament.
The latest NewsBusters attack on Beauchamp is a Dec. 4 post by Bob Owens, who claimed the whole episode shows "just how disreputable the magazine truly is," even citing criticism of Beauchamp in a Media Matters column by Bob Bateman. Even though Bateman also touches on the NRO controversy, Owens doesn't clip it and doesn't say a word about it anywhere else in his post. Does Owens this National Review is now "disreputable" because Smith did the same thing he accused Beauchamp of doing? He doesn't tell us.
C'mon, NewsBusters, give us something. At least tell us why Beauchamp is so much more awful than Smith because he's a liberal...
Bush 'Vindicted' By Stem Cell Advance? Not Quite Topic: Media Research Center
In a Dec. 3 NewsBusters post and Dec. 4 MRC CyberAlert item, Brad Wilmouth claimed that "scientific advancements on stem cell research have vindicated George W. Bush's resistance to destroy actual embryos."
Well, not exactly: In a Dec. 3 Washington Post op-ed, James A. Thomson, one of the lead researchers in the scientific advancement Wilmouth referenced -- reprogramming skin cells to act like stem cells without the use of embryos -- took columnist Charles Krauthammer to task for suggesting the same thing:
Far from vindicating the current U.S. policy of withholding federal funds from many of those working to develop potentially lifesaving embryonic stem cells, recent papers in the journals Science and Cell described a breakthrough achieved despite political restrictions. In fact, work by both the U.S. and Japanese teams that reprogrammed skin cells depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research.
Thomson supports legislation to expand embryonic stem cell research and points out that "It remains to be seen whether reprogrammed skin cells will differ in significant ways from embryonic stem cells."
NewsBusters Ratches Up Clinton Conspiracy-Mongering Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters must've gotten a new shipment of tinfoil hats, because they're all about the Clinton conspiracy-mongering right now.
First, as we noted, a Dec. 1 post by Noel Sheppard asked if Hillary staged the hostage standoff at one of her New Hampshire campaign offices "to make herself look battle-hardened."
Now, a Dec. 3 post by Tim Graham goes old school in trying to resurrect an moldy Clinton scandal by starting with the headline, "Was the Report on Rudy's Mistress Security Squad a 'Dirty Trick'?":
In Monday’s Washington Post, media reporter Howard Kurtz is noting how Rudy Giuliani uses the "liberal media" as a foil in his campaign, and also offers the latest in a trend of adding prominence to his old WashPost colleagues at The Politico website for their scoop on Giuliani’s use of public money (for his security detail) for his messy private life (visits to his mistress in the Hamptons). Giuliani called the story "totally false," five years old, and a "debate-day dirty trick."
Kurtz did not ask about that "liberal media" and their double standard: that the public moneys wasted on enabling adultery was always a distasteful right-wing trash-for-cash story when the Clintons were in the spotlight (Troopergate, anyone?), and that a five-year-old Clinton adultery story was always something the liberal media would regard as news no one needed to read.
As we've previously detailed, the Troopergate story is mostly debunked -- not because it was a "five-year-old story" but because the troopers tended to back off their claims when actually testifying under oath. And Graham seems not to understand the difference between unverified, if not unverifiable, accusations by people with a personal grudge toward the subject (as the troopers were with Clinton) and documented evidence (as with Giuliani).
Graham does, to his credit, try to sorta tamp down the idea that the nefarious Hillary was behind the Giuliani story, adding that "A liberal media outlet can be aggressively anti-Republican without needing assistance from a rival campaign." But calling the Politico a "liberal media outlet" ignores the Politico's attacks on Democrats and its symbiotic relationship with the conservative Drudge Report.
Feder Dishonestly Defends Himself Against SPLC Topic: Horowitz
In a Dec. 3 FrontPageMag article, Don Feder attacks the Southern Poverty Law Center for attacking him in a Nov. 1 item noting Feder's appearance at a conference in Latvia run by a group called Watchmen on the Walls, which the SPLC calls "anti-gay." Feder never contradicts this assertion about Watchmen on the Walls -- which there is ample evidence to support -- instead claiming that "Most of the 2-day conference ('The War on Christians And The Values Voter in 2006') had nothing to do with homosexuality, but focused on attacks on Christians from the courts, Hollywood, the news media, etc."
One of the speeches Feder gave at the Latvian conference is essentially a "we need more white babies" speech; another attacks Hollywood for issuing "toxins far more lethal" than "chemical waste or nuclear waste," one of them being "[t]he normalization of homosexuality."
Feder then dishonestly attacks the SPLC's depiction of him. Feder writes:
As for my dangerous liaisons ("Feder is involved with several extremist groups"), SPLC noted that I'm a member of the advisory board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform "an anti-immigrant group whose leader has compared immigrants to bacteria."
[...]
The "bacteria" stuff refers to a 1997 Knight-Ridder article on FAIR founder John Tanton. "Bacteria" was the way the author of the article characterized Tanton's views on immigration. Tanton himself never used the word.
In fact, here's what the March 17, 1997, Knight Ridder article said about Tanton:
He founded FAIR in 1979 after others in the zero-population movement declined to take on the hot topic. In his characteristically blunt manner, Tanton explained his obsession with immigration, likening the flood of humanity to America's shores over the past 400 years to a plate of bacteria in a medical lab.
"You put a bug in there and it starts growing and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grows until it finally fills the whole plate," Tanton said. "It uses up the medium. And then maybe it crashes and dies."
Yet somehow, in Feder's eyes, Tanton didn't say the word "bacteria," so it's OK.
Feder is also a little shaky on the facts. He goes on to refer to "Arkansas' Fayetteville State University"; it's in North Carolina.
Klein Sat on Story to Protect His Book Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Dec. 3 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein -- with the misleading headline "Israel covered up murder by Abbas' group?" -- begins: "Did Israel deliberately hide Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' organization's responsibility for the murder of a Jew until the completion of last week's U.S.-sponsored Annapolis summit?"
Why, WorldNetDaily would never do such a henious thing as delay reporting something for political reasons, would it?
Well, actually, yes.
A Nov. 30 article describing how "the leftist British lawmaker George Galloway abruptly booted WND's Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein and radio talk-host Rusty Humphries from his London office and handed them over to Parliament police, claiming the two were Zionist operatives who had breached security by falsely presenting themselves as reporters" includes this particularly interesting nugget:
The entire fiasco, which occurred in June, was recorded on audio tape.
Klein, author of the recently released book "Schmoozing with Terrorists," said he and Humphries had refrained from releasing the tape until after the publication of "Schmoozing" for fear Klein would lose some Hamas sources.
Once Klein did go public with it, he immediately raced to Fox News to tell his story. The guy's got a book to sell, y'know. And now that it's in print, it's apparently no big deal for him to burn his sources -- which makes you wonder about the veracity of the book. After all, who's going to believe a Palestinian militant who claims that Klein libeled him in his book? Seems to us that the chatting-up-terrorists gimmick gives Klein perfect license to write whatever he wants, true or not -- who's going to make the effort to contact his terrorist buddies to fact-check it?
So, what's the difference between waiting a few days to report something so as not to jeopardize peace talks and waiting six months to report something to protect a reporter's sources, at least until said reporter's book (making him and his employer a little coin) was printed? The latter is arguably more dishonest.
But given that "Schmoozing with Terrorists" itself is based on a dubious gimmick, such dishonesty is par for the course for Klein and WND.
