Annals of Conservative Media Criticism Topic: NewsBusters
How out of tune is the so-called media criticism at the Media Research Center? Tim Graham uses a July 1 NewsBusters post to berate Details magazine for writing a fluff article tangentally related to Barack Obama, sniping, "And they says bloggers are news-lite."
Details is a fashion magazine. Nobody's reading it for hard news.
Graham then complains that the Details article in question, on a definition of masculinity as defined by Obama, features "bold assertion and zero research." But isn't that pretty much how the MRCoperates?
Meanwhile, on the subject of Graham, Media Matters' Jamison Foser catches him trying to build a left-wing conspiracy out of the Obamas' failure to choose a church home in Washington (even though President Bush didn't have one either).
Newsmax Not Willing to Give Franken Credit for Win Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax published numerousfalseandmisleadingclaims about the post-election battle between Al Franken and Norm Coleman -- all of it designed to make Franken and his supporters look bad. Now that the contest is finally over with Coleman conceding defeat following a Minnesota Supreme Court decision, Newsmax isn't taking it as graciously as Coleman did.
A July 1 Newsmax article by Dave Eberhart asserts that "the sting of controversy has not lifted entirely from the field," uncritically quoting Michael Thielen the Republican National Lawyers Association as saying Franken "owes his victory to being selected by a Secretary of State instead of being chosen by the voters," adding:
"Coleman was defeated in November 2006 when the George Soros-backed Secretary of State Project poured money into [replacing] a competent secretary of state with an inexperienced political hack."
"This political hack, Mark Ritchie," he adds, "disenfranchised military voters, treated people differently based on the county they lived, and even ignored the attorney general’s opinion of absentee ballots all in his effort to deliver the Senate seat to Franken."
Eberhart failed to note that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled unanimously in rejecting such arguments:
1. Appellants did not establish that, by requiring proof that statutory absentee voting standards were satisfied before counting a rejected absentee ballot, the trial court‟s decision constituted a post-election change in standards that violates substantive due process.
2. Appellants did not prove that either the trial court or local election officials violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.
3. The trial court did not abuse its discretion when it excluded additional evidence.
4. Inspection of ballots under Minn. Stat. § 209.06 (2008) is available only on a showing that the requesting party cannot properly be prepared for trial without an inspection. Because appellants made no such showing here, the trial court did not err in denying inspection.
5. The trial court did not err when it included in the final election tally the election day returns of a precinct in which some ballots were lost before the manual recount.
Eberhart goes out of his way to avoid giving any credit to Franken for his victory; he quotes others who claimed that Coleman presented a flawed case and a professor who claimed that "Franken was lucky ... and Coleman was unlucky."
Hilmar von Campe -- the self-proclaimed former Nazi who's using Nazi tactics against Barack Obama -- began his July 1 WorldNetDaily column by claiming that President Obama said in his June 3 speech in Cairo that "Israel has been depriving the Palestinians of their homeland for 60 years."
Von Campe is lying -- Obama said no such thing. That direct quote does not exist.
Obama did say that "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they've endured the pain of dislocation." Even if von Campe paraphrased that to claim that Obama said "Israel has been depriving the Palestinians of their homeland for 60 years," he would still be lying.
Von Campe then bases the rest of his column on that opening lie, baselessly asserting that "Obama doesn't seem to know the history of the area he talks about nor visited Israel."
We've written von Campe to ask for a full retraction and public apology to Obama. We'll see what happens.
Meanwhile... Topic: NewsBusters
Media Matters details the cozy relationship between NewsBusters and the Fox Nation website: "as of 10:30 a.m. ET on June 30, six of the 13 stories that the Fox Nation was promoting on its front-page 'Media' section came from NewsBusters."
Your Molotov Mitchell Smear Video of the Day Topic: WorldNetDaily
Molotov Mitchell opens his July 1 WorldNetDaily video in his usual Obama-smearing way:
A lot of people ask me, "Molotov, how do you think we ended up in this crisis?" How did we elect a Congress full of anti-American socialists? How did we elect Barack Hussein Obama, the guy from Reverend Wright's church, the guy who's systematically destroying our economy and dropping charges against Muslim terrorists -- a guy who, I might add, refuses to unseal his citizenship records?
Mitchell goes on to attack pastors for not being as right-wing as he is, bashing Joel Osteen (a WND target) and asking, "When Notre Dame was defiling its own name by honoring 'resident' Obama, why didn't the cardinals step in and put a stop to it?"
Mitchell concludes: "America will not survive if the church doesn't take a stand. Jesus never ran from controversy. So if you pastor or priest does, I suggest you leave. My wife and I had to do it. Leave and find a church where the leadership isn't afraid to take a stand for what is right."
Remember, Mitchell has said that he embraces "sexual purity" through "the abolition of homosexuality" as well as lamenting "the lost value of extremism." Makes you wonder about what kind of church Mitchell attends (he is, after all, a self-admitted Christian Zealot) -- and whether he will go all James von Brunn on us sometime in the future in order to fulfill his "abolition of homosexuality" and "lost value of extremism" mandates.
Examiner Columnist: Sanford Just As Patriotic As Fellow Adulterers FDR, JFK Topic: Washington Examiner
The award for the most bizarre defense of Mark Sanford's affair comes from Noemie Emery, who in a July 1 Washington Examiner column declares that Sanford is just like Alexander Hamilton, FDR and JFK in that history shows that leaders who cheat on their wives can still be good Americans:
Another thing to remember in these situations is that snap judgments made at a distance can have little basis in fact. Is it true a man's character is all of a piece, and one who breaks vows to his wife will also break vows to his country? Think again.
Of course, Sanford's patriotism isn't the issue -- it's that he abandoned the state he was supposed to be leading for five days to fly to Argentina to be with his mistress without letting anyone know where he was.
UPDATE: Emery also makes this observation:
Unhappy families are not alike, and neither are those who have made them unhappy: Gary Hart was a flake, Bill Clinton a delayed/prolonged adolescent, Eliot Spitzer a creep; Jim McGreevey and Larry Craig even creepier.
So homosexuality, suspected or actual, is "creepier" than procuring prostitutes?
Aaron Klein Labeling Aversion Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've longdocumented Aaron Klein's aversion to labeling right-wingers as right-wingers. That aversion shines through once more in a June 30 WorldNetDaily article.
In it, Klein asserts that Israel's Kadima party "is considered a "centrist" party politically, although in reality its politics are leftist." He then states that Kadima "supports a Palestinian state and under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert engaged in negotiations with the Palestinians that reportedly included the willingness to relinquish sections of Jerusalem and 94 percent of the West Bank." But he doesn't explain why such a stand is "leftist."
By contrast, Klein states that the Likud Party "states it stands against giving up Jerusalem. Likud officials also say they are against halting Jewish construction in the strategic West Bank." If Likud supports the opposite of what Kadima does, then that means Likud must be the opposite of Kadima's as well -- that is, right-wing. But Klein never states Likud's political orientation -- the words "right-wing" or "conservative" appear nowhere in his article.
The article's central claim is the kind of hollow attack thatKlein has been peddling lately. Klein purports to quote "top minister in the Israeli government"as saying that "It seems there is a coordinated assault between the U.S. and some European countries to remove Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his party and to replace them with the Kadima party."But the minister is anonymous ("due to possible political fallout from his comments," Klein claims) and, by Klein's own admission, "does not have any proof of possible U.S.-European collusion to influence the composition of the Israeli government."
In keeping with the Likud labeling aversion, Klein also curiously fails to even mention the name of the party Lieberman belongs to (Yisrael Beiteinu), let alone its political orientation (right-wing).
WND's headline writers, however, betrayed Klein's aversion. The article's subhead reads: "Top minister claims aim is to replace right-wing coalition in Jerusalem."
MRC Ignores Full Story of 'Suppressed' Report Topic: Media Research Center
Various Media Research Center outlets have touted claims that the Environmental Protection Agency suppressed a report by an EPA researcher that criticized the idea of global warming. But these outlets aren't telling the whole story.
A June 30 CNSNews.com article by Christopher Neefus repeats the claims made by Alan Carlin, whom he describes only as a "career professional" -- that "raised questions about the validity of the agency's conclusions that carbon emissions are a cause of global warming and a danger to human health." But Carlin has no demonstrated expertise in climate science -- indeed, he doesn't appear to be a scientist. According to his bio, he holds degrees in physics and economics.
Neefus also uncritically repeats a claim from Carlin's report that "Global temperatures have declined for 11 straight years." That's false -- annual global average temperatures have both risen and fallen over the past 11 years, and most climate scientists not on the take from oil companies reject the idea that those temperatures are any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist.
Neefus' bias is evident in the way his article was structured -- the EPA was not permitted to respond to the claim until the final four paragraphs of his 36-paragraph article.
NewsBusters has also been enthusiastic about promoting Carlin's claims. Noel Sheppard, in a June 28 post, copied part of a CBSNews.com article on Carlin -- but not the part where the EPA stated that "Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false."
A June 30 NewsBusters post by Sam Theodosopoulos similarly treated Carlin as trustworthy by failing to note that the EPA disputes Carlin's version of events.
UPDATE: Also missing from these MRC reports is a critique of Carlin's study from an actual climatologist:
One can see a number of basic flaws here; the complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales, the common but erroneous belief that any attribution of past climate change to solar or other forcing means that CO2 has no radiative effect, and a hopeless lack of familiarity of the basic science of detection and attribution.
[...]
So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.
Meanwhile, Carlin himself tells TPM that he put together the report in just four days and that "I didn't have time to fix all the problems -- and they still aren't fixed."
Ruddy's Revisionist Take on 2008 Election Topic: Newsmax
In a fawning June 28 Newsmax profile of John McCain ("John McCain is back — and he's in a fighting mood! The Arizona senator looked even younger and fitter than during his recent presidential campaign when I caught him last week on C-SPAN"), Christopher Ruddy offers up a revisionist view of the 2008 presidential campaign that leaves out certain inconvenient facts.
Ruddy writes:
In September, the McCain-Palin ticket was narrowly ahead in the polls. Then the roof caved in. The Bush administration announced that the entire U.S. and global economy was on the verge of collapsing. Bush requested a $1 trillion blank check to bail out the banks. McCain's campaign was doomed.
In blaming Bush for McCain's defeat, Ruddy fails to note McCain's own actions regarding the financial crisis. He first reacted by asserting that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" -- a dubious claim that his later redefinition of "fundamentals" didn't improve -- then suspended his campaign to return to Washington and deal with the crisis. That move that backfired when 1) McCain made no apparent contribution to solving it, and 2) McCain bailed out on a scheduled appearance with David Letterman in announcing his campaign suspension, only to appear with Katie Couric at the time he told Letterman he was heading to the airport to go to Washington, which resulted in days of mockery by Letterman. (Plus, his campaign wasn't exactly suspended.)
Ruddy then asserted: "Despite carrying George W. Bush’s political baggage and unpopularity, McCain did better than expected — Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the vote rather than the landslide numbers many had predicted." That comports with Newsmax's previous attempts to downplay the meaning and magnitude of Obama's victory; by contrast, when President Bush won re-election in 2004 with 51 percent of the vote, Ruddy asserted that "the American people voted decisively to re-elect President Bush."
AIM Sneers At Gay Event In White House Topic: Accuracy in Media
In a June 30 Accuracy in Media blog post, Don Irvine noted a report on President Obama hosting "the first ever Pride month celebration at the White House," which he claimed was an attempt "to repair relations with gays and lesbians." Irvine then sneeringly added: "Maybe next he can repaint the White House a nice shade of pink and hang the rainbow flag in front tos how his commitment to the gay cause."
Remember that AIM employs Cliff Kincaid, who thinks homosexuals should be "condemned just as tobacco companies are condemned for trying to get them to smoke" and is appalled that Rachel Maddow, "a lesbian with hair so short that she looks like a man," is even allowed on TV, let alone have her own show. so it appears that AIM's hostility to homosexuality comes straight from the top.
Examiner Cites Dubious Medical Group Topic: Washington Examiner
A June 28 Washington Examiner editorial cites Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, to support the editorial's claim that "Obamacare will make it even harder to get a doctor's appointment without a lengthy wait." But the Examiner fails to note AAPS and Orient's history of out-of-the-mainstream views.
The editorial states that "Since a third of all Medicare patients already have trouble finding a doctor to treat them, under Obamacare those waiting lines will be very, very long indeed," but it doesn't note that AAPS is actively working to exacerbate that shortage by encouraging doctors to quit Medicare (as we've noted).
Orient and AAPS have a history of aligning with fringe views over the years, from opposing mandatory vaccinations of children to supporting doctors who prescribe obscenely high doses of opiate painkillers to patients to promoting conspiracies over the death of Vince Foster.
Cashill Still Can't Stop Peddling Obama-Ayers Conspiracy Theory Topic: WorldNetDaily
Via Salon (via Wonkette), we learn that Jack Cashill has still not given up on his loopy conspiracy theory that William Ayers ghost-wrote Barack Obama's book "Dreams From My Father." In a June 28 American Thinker article, Cashill proclaimed he had new evidence that "should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams."
As before, when Cashill's smoking gun was a purported shared affinity for nautical references between Obama and Ayers, this so-called evidence is less than compelling. The smoking gunthis time centers around both authors quoting the same Carl Sandburg poem about Chicago.
There's other stuff about anonymous helpers and "759 striking similarities" and "birds of paradise" and "bamboo sticks," but Cashill demonstrated long ago that he's too conspiracy-minded, and proven wrong about said conspiracies, to be trusted.
As Salon notes, "by Cashill's standards, Dreams From My Father was also ghost-written by Paul Krugman, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress, among many others."
July 4th is a good day to demand that President Barack Hussein Obama—born in Mombassa, Kenya, raised in Indonesia, and leaving no paper trail in America—resign before he does further harm to all Americans, to the American dream, and to the hope of freedom in the hearts of men and women everywhere in the world.
As you might imagine, Caruba offers no supporting evidence whatsoeverfor his assertion that Obama was "born in Mombassa, Kenya." If he's relying on the claim purportedly made by Obama's grandmother, that's a lie.
The AIM version of Caruba's column tries to softens the claim but only makes it nonsensical by adding "if he really was" before "born in Mombassa, Kenya." Still, neither that nor the Family Security Matters version of Caruba's column that also includes the softer version offers any evidence to back up the claim.
In his June 27 column published at WorldNetDaily and Newsmax, Pat Boone joins the birther conspiracy by repeating discredited claims.
Boone wrote of the birth certificate released by the Obama campaign: "Some found the document, which does not list the hospital of birth or attending physician, to be fake." In fact, FactCheck.org has "seen, touched, examined and photographed" the certificate and declared to the authentic -- a claim that has not been credibly contradicted. Further, WorldNetDaily itself has declared the certificate to be "authenti" -- a claim it has never retracted.
Boone also asserted that "some reported seeing a videotaped proclamation by his paternal step-grandmother that she was in the delivery room and saw Barack H. Obama born in Mombasa, in what is now Kenya!" As we've detailed, the claim that Sarah Obama made such an assertion is bogus.
Boone also forwards some baseless theorizing by the right-wing United States Justice Foundation that Obama's mother was "about to have her child in Kenya, had booked a flight to Hawaii but was prohibited from flying because delivery was so imminent." Boone (or the USJF, for that matter) offers any evidence to back up this claim.
And that's pretty much it -- discredited claims and baseless right-wing conspiracy-mongering. That's all Pat Boone has to offer. Sad, isn't it?
Newsmax's Perry: Obama Ain't Got No Class Topic: Newsmax
In his June 29 Newsmax column, John L. Perry declares that President Obama has no class. His proof: Just look at the guy!
No, really -- that's it. Perry offers no specific examples but instead speaks in generalities, insisting that "It’s a bit like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s celebrated dictum non-defining hard-core pornography: 'I know it when I see it.'" What Perry purports to be his evidence also lacks specifics. Among them:
The way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks down his nose.
The way he hasn’t learned to tie a four-in-hand necktie like the men do.
The haughty way he fakes erudition off his teleprompter screens and proffers profundities on subjects in which he lacks credentials.
The way he behaves not only as if it’s all about him but also as if he’s all about all that is.
Yes, Perry really did say that the fact Obama occasionally doesn't wear a tie is incontrovertible evidence not only that he has no class, but that he also can't tie a tie. Nice fit of Obama Derangement Syndrome there, John.
