Topic: Media Research Center
How long will the Media Research Center continue to take two sentences from a 2003 profile of Ted Kennedy out of context and falsely portray them as praise instead of the criticism they were intended to be? Read more >>
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
New Article: A Quote Not Yet Unquoted
Topic: Media Research Center How long will the Media Research Center continue to take two sentences from a 2003 profile of Ted Kennedy out of context and falsely portray them as praise instead of the criticism they were intended to be? Read more >>
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:59 AM EDT
WND Hates Google, But Will Take Their Money
Topic: WorldNetDaily WorldNetDaily has been a longtime critic of Google. WND editor Joseph Farah spent an entire chapter of his book "Stop the Presses!" attacking Google as an "immoral" company that "may not be able to discern right from wrong," mainly for purported discrimination against conservatives, not offering a customized version of its logo to mark Memorial Day, and because political donations by its employees lean heavily Democratic (oh, and because it purportedly doesn't place WND as high up in searches as Farah would like them to be). And in July, he accused Google of deliberately downplaying in searches WND's "content dealing with Barack Obama's eligibility," describing Google as "my old adversary." So, with such hatred, you think Farah would be doing everything in his power to not have any business dealings with Google, right? Wrong. Look at what we noticed on the WND website the other day:
That's right -- WND is a member of the Google AdSense ad network. That in and of itself is not news. A lot of websites use AdSense to generate revenue (including us). But WND's use of AdSense is massively hypocritical because of WND's self-proclaimed adversarial relationship with Google. So it seems that while Farah thinks Google is "immoral," it's perfectly happy to take their immoral money. Farah clearly doesn't have the courage of his convictions -- he's just too greedy.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:02 AM EDT
Monday, September 7, 2009
NewsReal Falsely Portrays Maddow Show Segment
Topic: Horowitz A Sept. 5 NewsReal post by Paul Cooper falsely portrays a segment on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" as on in which "guest host Ana Marie Cox called for censorship of blogs like NewsRealblog.com and WorldNetDaily (which is her focus)" and that "Cox and [guest Sam] Tanenhaus both are ready to call all moderate Republicans to silence and 'reign in' [sic] conservative blogs." But WND is more than the "focus" of the segment -- it's the only outlet mentioned. Not only is NewsReal not mentioned, despite Cooper's suggestion otherwise, no other "conservative blog" is either. And Cox didn't "call for censorship"; as Cooper goes on to write, she urged mainstream conservatives to denounce such fringe publications as WND and not mainstream their conspiracy theories. Cooper then writes:
But the birther issue is not the only conspiracy theory Cox cited. She also noted WND's role in promoting the "deather" issue -- the discredited idea that health care reformcontains "death panels" -- and that "it's currently warning that the White House is spying on your Facebook page." Cooper doesn't mention these -- perhaps because his fellow NewsReal writers, far from dismissing it, have endorsed the "death panel" attack. Further, Cooper's claim that "'Mainstream,' 'moderate' conservatives have denounced the Birther Conspiracy" belies the fact that such denunciation has not been consistent. As Cooper Cox and Tanenhaus note:
Indeed, while NewsReal sister publication FrontPageMag did denounce the birthers back in April, it has not done so in any significant way since then -- and we don't see Cooper exactly rushing to do any substantive denunciation now.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:30 AM EDT
Meanwhile ...
Topic: WorldNetDaily David Weigel at the Washington Independent has a good article on WorldNetDaily's role in promulgating conspiracy theories and attacking the Obama administration, such has its campaign against Obama adviser Van Jones. And MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," with Ana Marie Cox as guest host, highlights WND's conspiracy theories as well.
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:24 AM EDT
The Crazy Train Rolls On
Topic: The ConWeb The latest to board the crazy train that is the right-wing freak-out over President Obama's upcoming speech to students: A Sept. 4 Accuracy in Media column by Rita Kramer invokes the "Hitler Jugend," adding: "It's ridiculous to imagine Obama Youth, isn't it? Here? Once, in the beginning, it seemed ridiculous there too." Too bad for Kramer that Obama's not doing that. Jeff Poor began his Sept. 3 MRC Culture & Media Institute column by invoking Obama's purported narcisissm: "His weekly address on health care Aug. 22 mentioned the word “I” eight times ... The week before when he talked about health care, he said “I” 12 times." Poor goes on to baselessly denounce Obama's speech as "indoctrination" and that it "should serve as a larger reminder that this kind of manipulation of young people occurs every day in America at the hands of the NEA." Poor adds: "Conservatives of all stripes – social conservatives, libertarians, Christian conservatives and more – all need to unify to stop government from manipulating our young people." If any manipulating is to be done, Poor seems to be saying, it's conservatives who should be doing it. Meanwhile, Bob Unruh hides a partisan agenda in a Sept. 5 article highlighting the claims of the right-wing Liberty counsel and its founder, Mathew Staver, that Obama's speech is illegal. Unruh describes Staver as "A lawyer whose work has included myriad civil rights disputes and who has practice before the U.S. Supreme Court ," refusing to accurately identify Staver's right-wing, anti-Obama agenda. Kramer, Poor and Unruh all fail to mention that both Presidents Bush gave speeches to students or issued teaching materials, as did Ronald Reagan.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:31 AM EDT
Sunday, September 6, 2009
WND Takes Credit for Van Jones' Scalp
Topic: WorldNetDaily WorldNetDaily wasted no time in taking credit for Van Jones quitting as President Obama 's green jobs czar, throwing up an article and column to that effect on a Saturday night of a holiday weekend to do so. A Sept. 6 article credited Jones' resignation on "pressure mounted over his extremist history first exposed in WND." Joseph Farah's column was even less modest, carrying the headline "WND brings down the 'red czar'." He demanded: "Do you expect those so ferociously attacking WND as a 'conspiracy site' to recognize it was this news agency that first broke the Van Jones story in April and relentlessly pursued it for five months to the bitter end?" But WND's reporting on Jones was conspiratorial and littered with guilt-by-association accusations, such as an Aug. 13 article claiming that Jones "served on the board of an environmental activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a top director." This kind of reporting smacks of McCarthyism, pure and simple. Plus, there's the fact that WND's reporting is so unreliable and discredited that the first reaction any sensible reader should have is to dismiss it out of hand. Farah has no one to blame for that but himself, due to his longtime pattern of putting his hatred of Democrats before the truth. Farah seems to think that because WND's inflammatory actually had real-life consequences, WND is therefore not a "conspiracy site." He couldn't be further from the truth, given the fact that his website is claiming that Obama was to put his political enemies in concentration camps and kill Americans by forcibly giving them swine flu shots -- fearmongering that could have the effect of WND being responsible for the deaths of Americans. It wouldn't be a Farah column if he wasn't self-aggrandizing and self-pitying. The former comes when he conflates the questionable ties of an obscure government official to a presidential sex scandal: "Once there was a story of a blue dress. Now there's the story of a red czar." The latter comes when -- after denying that WND is a "conspiracy site" -- Farah asserts a conspiracy against WND:
But for WND, "unrelenting coverage" of the birth certificate equates to frequently false coverage. And as we have pointed out, that is not what WND has "always done," unless you append "when a Democrat is in the White House" to it.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:17 AM EDT
NewsBusters' College Thesis Double Standard
Topic: NewsBusters NewsBusters has been fretting that too much attention is being paid to a Regent University master's thesis written by Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, in which he supports numerous hard-right views, such as declaring working women and feminists "detrimental" to the family and the idea of married couples using contraception "illogical." Scott Whitlock complained about the Washington Post's "frenzied attack" on McDonnell over the thesis, later expressing his dismay that the Post has done "nine articles in five days" on "a 20-year-old master’s thesis on the family structure." Noel Sheppard suggested that the Post is doing to McDonnell what it did to George Allen, the 2006 Virginia Republican senatorial candidate who got caught on tape calling a staffer for his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, the offensive name "macaca," which Sheppard dismissed as "a word he uttered that likely nobody in the nation had ever heard of prior to that point." Sheppard doesn't explain how the relative obscurity of an insult somehow makes it less offensive. (As we've detailed, the MRC's Tim Graham got overly obsessed over this, and NewsBusters published false claims about the target of Allen's slur.) But some college theses are more equal than others at NewsBusters. A June 18, 2008, post by Clay Waters appeared to complain that not enough attention was being given to Michelle Obama's undergraduate thesis, even though it is four years older than McDonnell's:
Funny, NewsBusters has yet to describe the subject of McDonnell's thesis as indicative of an "obsession" with feminists and fornicators.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:44 AM EDT
Saturday, September 5, 2009
WND Embraces Conspiracy-Mongering Reporter's Swine Flu Fearmongering
Topic: WorldNetDaily In a Sept. 1 and Sept. 3 WorldNetDaily article on swine flu vaccines -- a subject about which WND is fearmongering -- Chelsea Schilling references a claim by "investigative journalist Wayne Madsen" that "even scientists who helped develop a vaccine for small pox are saying they will not take the vaccine and urging friends and family to refrain from taking the injection as well." But Madsen has a record of making dubious claims -- including claims about Barack Obama's birth certificate that apparently even WND didn't find credible enough to embrace. Madsen has already made one discredited claim about swine flu: that it is the result of "gene splicing" and could not have occurred naturally. In fact, research has shown that the progenitor for the virus first surfaced in pig farming and processing operations in 1998. WND reported in October 2008 that one claim in a lawsuit filed by Philip Berg over Obama's birth certificate was that "Wayne Madsen, Journalist with Online Journal as a contributing writer and published an article on June 9, 2008, stating that a research team went to Mombassa, Kenya, and located a Certificate Registering the birth of Barack Obama, Jr. at a Kenya Maternity Hospital, to his father, a Kenyan citizen and his mother, a U.S. citizen." But WND has not referenced the claim since, suggesting that it doesn't believe it to be true (despite WND's history of reporting false claims on the subject). Madsen has also claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is working with increasingly discredited birther lawyer Orly Taitz and conservative groups in the U.S. to use the birth certificate issue against Obama in retaliation for the Obama Administration's pressure on Israel to restrict expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem. You'd think that this would be a claim tailor-made for WND, since it merges two of its favorite obsessions, the birther stuff and Aaron Klein's efforts to portray Obama as pro-Muslim and anti-Israel (mostly through anonymous sources). But WND has curiously kept its hands off that claim as well. Do they not believe it? Or are they a functioning part of Netanyahu's conspiracy? Given that WND apparently can't trust Madsen's reporting on other subjects it's interested in, it's strange that Schilling has decided he is trustworthy on the subject of swine flu vaccines -- even though he has previously been discredited.
Posted by Terry K.
at 10:13 AM EDT
Newsmax Boards the Obama School Speech Crazy Train
Topic: Newsmax Newsmax boards the right-wing crazy train over President Obama's speech to students with a Sept. 4 column by Dan Mangru, a columnist for Newsmax's financial website. After initially claiming that he saw "nothing harmful " in what Obama was planning to say to students, Mangru quickly descends into that Obama might grade students on how they react to his speech, which then devolves into him irrationally asserting it to be fact:
By the end, Mangru is in full rant mode:
Perhaps Mangru needs to stick to financial analysis.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:25 AM EDT
Friday, September 4, 2009
Examiner News Article Reflects Editorial
Topic: Washington Examiner The Washington Examiner unsurprisingly joins the right-wing freak-out over President Obama's speech to students, using a Sept. 4 editorial to call it a "Dear Leader" speech and asserting, "providing mass life-counseling to school kids is not what presidents are elected to do." Also unsurprisingly, the Examiner fails to mention that Republican presidents have engaged in the same kind of "mass life-counseling to school kids." Perhaps unsurprising as well is that an Examiner news article directly reflects the editorial's agenda. The Sept. 4 article by Leah Fabel touts out one school district is refusing to show Obama's speech to its studentsand highlights how "conservatives blasted it as an attempt to indoctrinate young minds." Fabel gives space to the Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey to claim that the White House sent "detailed instructions to schools nationwide on how to glorify the president and the presidency, and push them to drive social change" but doesn't give similar space to anyone who sees no partisan, megalomanical agenda. Fabel also follows in the editorial's footsteps by failing to note that Republican presidents have also given speeches to students. With such biased reporting, the Examiner runs the risk that its news content is portrayed as anti-liberal and pro-conservative as its news content.
Posted by Terry K.
at 2:31 PM EDT
We Criticize the Critics
Topic: WorldNetDaily Phil Elmore writes in his Sept. 3 WorldNetDaily column that President Obama is "brittle" and "oversensitive" and "cannot abide criticism," while his supporters regularly express "their deep and abiding outrage over those who've had the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to question the Obama administration's motley crew of radical left-wing advisers, czars, consultants, and bureaucrats." Elmore goes on to take a swing at us in the process:
Actually, as we detailed, Elmore did a lot more than that to earn this coveted award in the column we highlighted:
There's a huge difference between "daring to question" Obama and making crazy, factually challenged statements about him. Too bad Elmore doesn't see the difference. Indeed, Elmore provides a link in his current column to radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, which serves as more evidence of Elmore's own unhinged approach. Elmore seems to be unaware that the right to criticize and question others sets in motion the right of others to criticize and question you. And if you're making false claims and using unhinged rhetoric, expect to be criticized for it. That's our job. If Elmore can dish it out, he should be able to take it.
Posted by Terry K.
at 11:53 AM EDT
WND Misleads on White House Archiving
Topic: WorldNetDaily A Sept. 2 WorldNetDaily article by Chelsea Schilling falsely portrays the scope of archiving the Obama White House plans to do of archiving its presence on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Schilling uncritically repeats claims by the National Legal and Policy Center that the White House "is hiring a contractor to harvest information about Americans from its pages on social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr." In fact, as the right-wing Hot Air has detailed, the NLPCs claims are faulty:
The headline of Schilling's article -- "On Facebook, MySpace? Obama's got your e-mail; White House spammer-in-chief wants contractor to track critics" -- manages not only to falsely suggest that the White House wants to collect information about everyone on those sites, it falsely suggests that the White House is specifically targeting its critics, something for which there is absoulutely no evidence. A Sept. 4 WND article by Aaron Klein repeats the NLPC's faulty analysis, again falsely suggesting that the White House wants to gather information on all users, not just interactions with White House pages on those sites.
Posted by Terry K.
at 9:26 AM EDT
Who's Exploiting the Children?
Topic: Horowitz NewsReal joins the right-wing freak-out over a speech by President Obama to schoolchildren with a Sept. 3 post by Joseph Klein:
Before Klein goes off the deep end with this, he might want to see what his boss, David Horowitz, is up to:
So, Horowitz is using Alinskyite tactics to accuse Obama of ... using Alinskyite tactics. And is writing "a new booklet" that he "must blanket on college campuses" -- that is, in Klein's words, exploit the children -- to do so. Horowitz needs to explain why, if Alinsky's tactics are so horrible, he's using them too.
Posted by Terry K.
at 1:30 AM EDT
Taitz Still Filing Frivolous Lawsuits; WND Still Silent
Topic: WorldNetDaily Orly Taitz apparently remains persona non grata at WorldNetDaily -- it still hasn't reported on her activities since she promoted the discredited "Kenyan birth certificate" that WND touted without bothering to verify its authenticity beforehand. Wonder if WND will ever have the guts to tell its readers why it has decided to ignore Taitz, despite their longtime symbiotic relationship. Too bad, because Taitz has filed a new lawsuit on behalf of another soldier who refuses to fulfill her military obligations because of purported "irreparable injury due to forced and involuntary compliance with unlawful and/or unconstitutionally rendered orders" because Obama's citizenship hasn't been verified to her satisfaction. The filing is quite entertaining -- not the least of which is the reference to "the monstrosity of being compelled to wage war under an illegal dictator compared by many and actually comparable to Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin, and Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier" -- but this passage caught our eye:
Yes, Taitz is submitting as evidence the discredited "Kenyan birth certificate," even though her former fawning admirers at WND have discredited it. Also note that Taitz is claiming that Obama is "an unnaturalized or even an unadmitted illegal alien" based on a statement by Rep. Watson (which Taitz does not detail further). What Taitz is apparently referring to is this statement by Watson: "People look at the United States as a country that has changed it's way and elected someone from Kenya and Kansas, I'll put it like that." Which, of course, is evidence of exactly nothing. It's a statement about diversity, not a legally admissible claim about Obama's parentage. WND has taken the occasional stride in debunking the most obviously false birth certificate-related claims -- for instance, a Sept. 2 article by Jerome Corsi arguing that a "Kenyan birth certificate" being offered for sale on eBay is a forgery. Why won't WND demonstrate that it truly is, in Joseph Farah's words, "beholden only to the truth" by telling the truth about Orly Taitz instead of silently cutting ties?
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:51 AM EDT
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Cashill Still Peddling Killer's Sob Story
Topic: WorldNetDaily Jack Cashill's Sept. 3 WorldNetDaily column is, in most part, a letter from current Cashill cause celebre Steven Nary, who's serving a prison sentence for killing a man in 1996. Cashill declared that Nary "unintentionally killed" man. Yeah, choking a guy for "not more than five minutes" was totally unintentional. Lying to the police was apparently unintentional too.
Posted by Terry K.
at 6:18 PM EDT
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