We would take Ken Shepherd's complaint that the idea that, as his May 21 NewsBusters headline states, "Conservatives Are Obsessed with Kagan's Sexuality" is just a liberal meme if we hadn't just highlighted a column by a conservative writer explaining how he is, um, obsessed with Elena Kagan's sexuality.

Also, Senate Republicans do not consitute the whole of conservatism, no matter what Sheppard suggests.

Posted by Terry K. at 12:34 AM EDT

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A May 21 WorldNetDaily column by Kent Clizbe forwards the brain-dead notion that because Elena Kagan has worked in academia, she is ipso facto a "socialist" and has a "love affair with socialism." Because Clizbe is so desperate to smear and not illuminate, he makes more false claims about Kagan:

Fast forward to 2003, Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, in the middle of a global war in which Americans were fighting and dying, was in "deep distress" because the American military was allowed to meet with prospective recruits on campus. Then, before the Supreme Court reversed, by a 9-0 decision, an appellate court's ruling that supported her stand, Kagan banned American military recruiters from using Harvard Law's placement office.

The stark difference between the pre-communist-covert-influence response in 1917 and Kagan's oh-so-PC response in 2003 is stunning. Recent research has revealed the extent to which American media and American academia were penetrated by Soviet covert influence operations, beginning soon after World War I. A side-by-side comparison of the attitudes towards America's involvement in military actions, 1917 with 2003, stuns any objective observer.

Kagan is helpless to be anything but an anti-American, socialist stooge. She is a product of an academic system that is permeated by the anti-American message, for nearly 100 years. To move up in American academia, one must be a PC true believer. he covert influence message planted by Communists carries on like an advertising campaign that never quits. After the anti-American messages were planted by agents of influence in American media, academia and Hollywood, the KGB's officers were mostly annihilated in purges. But the messages, like an advertising jingle stuck in your head, echo through the ivy halls, up till today.

In fact, Kagan is not anti-military. Further, Clizbe is engaging in a desperate and sleazy bit of guilt by association by suggesting she's a covert KGB agent by mere dint of working in academia.

We've previously noted Clizbe, writing at Newsmax, weirdly attacking Eric Holder for not making personal sacrifices on the War on Terror, while Clizbe's son  "went from a happy, engaged, charming 13 year old with straight A’s and a focus on the future, to a sullen, uncommunicative, high school flunky" because of Clizbe's long absences from home doing post-9/11 CIA work. Apparently, Clizbe's son becoming a teenager had no role in that. He similarly sleazily portrayed President Obama as a Soviet tool and the culmination of work begun by Lenin in 1920 to "undermine the culture, society, and economy of the United States."

Posted by Terry K. at 10:26 AM EDT

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A May 21 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas states:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it has “no records” of any communication either “to or from” its chairman that mentions Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham or Michael Savage.

The FCC made the declaration in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by CNSNews.com that sought all its records reflecting communications from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski mentioning the popular radio hosts. "No records of correspondence responsive to your request were located as a result of a search of records of the Chairman's office," said the FCC in a May 6 letter to CNSNews.com.
 
Despite this assertion, a letter about “hate speech in the media” specifically citing “radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh” was in fact sent to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski by a coalition of liberal groups last fall.

This seems to be an attempt by CNS to use its FOIA request play "gotcha" with the Obama administration to portray it as lying and hiding -- even though later in the article, Lucas concedes the possibility that the "gotcha" letter CNS cited may have been misfiled or thrown out.

Lucas also uncritically quotes right-wing activist and voting suppression expert Hans von Spakovsky baselessly suggesting that because the FCC wouldn't release internal discussions about " local ownership rules" as CNS sought in its FOIA request, that FCC officials are trying to "avoid a document trail." Lucas offers no evidence that refusing to release internal discussions about a policy that has not been -- and may never be -- introduced is in any way out of the ordinary.

Posted by Terry K. at 10:08 AM EDT

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On May 11, WND published an article by Bob Unruh repeating allegations made by attorney Larry Klayman against a manager at Persian News Network, a division of Voice of America. Klayman is representing someone who has filed a lawsuit against VOA claiming that she suffered "harassment after she expressed her pro-Iranian- freedom perspective." Unruh uncritically repeated Klayman's claims, including an assertion that the manager "has close ties to the Islamic regime; in fact his father is a mullah in Iran." Unruh adds that "Contacted by WND, [VOA attorney Paul] Kollmer-Dorsey declined to respond to any questions about the dispute, referring WND to a media contact at the organization. That office did not respond to requests for comment."

A VOA official Danforth W. Austin fired back in a letter to WND, which WND published May 19:

The Voice of America strongly rejects the allegations in Mr. Bob Unruh's May 12 article: "Lawyer accuses VOA manager of pro-Iranian bias." 

The Voice of America has a firm commitment to its congressionally 
approved charter that requires its programming to be accurate, objective and comprehensive.  Thus, we reject the article's claim that one of the editors in VOA's Persian News Network (PNN) is biased in favor of the government of The Islamic Republic of Iran.  The claim is not only unsubstantiated, it is false.

 How is it false? To begin with, the PNN program Mr. Unruh's article cites, "Parazit," is a popular satirical show.  During the segment in question, the show poked fun at the absurdity of PNN's alleged bias toward Iran.  At no time did the program side with the "mullahs in Iran."
 It is also untrue that the PNN editor's father is a "mullah in Iran" who sides with the current leadership.  His father is a retired professor of Islamic Studies; he was never a practicing clergyman.  In fact, he was forced to retire after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

 We ask that you set the record straight.



WND appended an editor's note to the letter:

Editor's note: During the preparation of the story, WND tried repeatedly to obtain a comment from VOA, including leaving a message on an answering machine at the organization. WND also talked directly to Paul Kollmer-Dorsey, but he declined to respond to any questions. The allegations in the report are from the lawsuit and a letter by Larry Klayman, the plaintiff's lawyer, to VOA.

Thus far, Unruh's article has not been corrected or updated, nor has a separate update article been published. Further, WND deletes its letters to the editor from its website after a week, so Austin's letter will be purged on May 26.That means unless Unruh's article is updated or a separate update is published, the other side of the story will disppear -- presumably, the way WND likes it.

Whether or not VOA responded to Unruh's supposed requests for comment is irrelevant to the fact that his article contained errors that WND thus far will not formally correct.

This treatment of a request for a correction runs contrary to WND editor Joseph Farah has established as his preferred treatment. As we detailed, Farah complained in a September 2008 column that a Kansas newspaper published a letter to the editor claiming that Rep. Steve King got incorrect numbers about immigration from WND; in fact, WND was attributing the claim to King. We'll let Farah take it from here:

I was hopeful the editor-publisher of the Morning Sun would recognize he had printed a letter that is defamatory, prejudiced, incendiary and just verifiably untruthful and retract it and apologize for it. Having been an editor and publisher of daily newspapers much bigger and more influential than the Pittsburg Morning Sun, I was actually confident of being able to reason with Stephen Wade. I was wrong.

He wrote back to me suggesting I pen a letter to the editor in response. Facts were not important to him. Reality is not important to him. Stephen Wade, like so many other media types in this strange new world, seems to think everything is just a matter of opinion. And that's scary.

So I wrote to Wade's bosses at GateHouse Media in New York demanding a retraction and apology – so far to no avail. Bottom line: I may have to sue these people, costing them and me a lot of money, just to motivate them to do what decent journalistic and business ethics should motivate them to do.

To sum up: In Farah's view letter to the editor in response to a letter to the editor was not sufficient to correct an error. But when WND makes false claims, it will not correct it but merely print the correction in a letter to the editor that's deleted from the website a week later.

Double standard, anyone? Unethical journalism, anyone?

Speaking of unethical journalism, in addition to publishing false claims that it won't correct, Unruh committed another violation of journalistic ethics by not disclosing a serious conflict of interest -- that Klayman is also working for WND.

UPDATE: Farah concluded is rant against the Kansas newspaper: "Nevertheless, because of arrogance or ignorance or stubbornness or pettiness, this little newspaper in this little town refused to do the right thing. That's the sad state of the media – even in small-town America." At WorldNetDaily, too.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:30 PM EDT

Updated: Friday, May 21, 2010 2:44 PM EDT

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Professional gay-basher Matt Barber writes in a May 20 WorldNetDaily column:

Media, here's your question: "Solicitor Kagan, do you identify as a lesbian?" Ms. Kagan, your answer is simpler still: "Yes" or "no."

Pipe down, lefties. Yes, it is relevant. Most liberals would disagree, but despite "progressive" protestations to the contrary, character does, in fact, matter. A majority of Americans still consider sexual morality – or a lack thereof – a pertinent factor in contemplating one's fitness for any public service – chiefly, perhaps, a lifetime appointment to our most supreme earthly court.

Every major world religion, thousands of years of history and uncompromising human biology have established that homosexual conduct is among other volitional behaviors rightly filed under "sexual immorality." Indeed, the majority of folks around the world – billions, actually – count this a timeless truth.

But the controversial nature of homosexuality is but one point of concern. Another involves potential conflicts of interest, "real or perceived." If we had a judicial nominee – widely believed a compulsive gambler – tapped to preside over gambling cases, would it not matter? If we had a nominee credibly rumored to use medical marijuana who might someday rule on the legality of medical marijuana, wouldn't such information be germane?

And before you liberals throw out that favorite red herring: "By this logic, Clarence Thomas shouldn't rule on cases involving race or sexuality because he's a black heterosexual male" – remember: skin color is a neutral, immutable characteristic. Being black is what someone is.

On the other hand, being "gay" is what someone does.

[...]

The question is important for context. The answer, for instance, might explain why Kagan drop-kicked our brave men and women of the armed services in the solar plexus, during a time of war, by banning military recruiters from Harvard while dean of the law school. She did so in protest of the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy, calling it "a profound wrong" and "a moral injustice of the first order."

[...]

Indeed, whether or not Elena Kagan self-identifies as a lesbian, she has proven herself a radical anti-military, pro-homosexual ideologue and activist. There's little doubt that she would take this activism with her to the high court.

Of course, the ideas that Kagan is "anti-military" and that she "bann[ed] military recruiters from Harvard" have been completely discredited.

Posted by Terry K. at 1:26 PM EDT

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We've noticed that NewsBusters -- and, indeed, the entire Media Research Center -- has been silent about the controversy involving Fox Sports' Chris Myers, who mocked victims of Hurricane Katrina by saying that "the people in Tennessee, unlike -- I'm not going to name names -- when a natural disaster hits people weren't standing on a rooftop trying to blame the government, okay. They helped each other out through this."

Perhaps that's because a NewsBusters blogger said the very same thing.

As Media Matters' Eric Boehlert notes, celebrity blogger Charlie Daniels wrote in a May 14 NewsBusters post:

What I want to write about is the people of Tennessee and the true volunteer spirit of the Volunteer State. In the limited coverage given the flood by the national media did you see anybody on a rooftop waiting for a coast guard chopper to pick them up?

No you didn't, because when something like this happens the good people of the mid south get their priorities in order. First, thousands of prayers went up to the one who is truly in charge. They didn't wait for or depend on the government; people took their personal boats into the flooded neighborhoods and picked up perfect strangers, taking them to the safety of higher ground.

Any chance NewsBusters will apologize (as Myers did) for Daniels' uncivil mocking of Katrina victims? Probably not , since NewsBusters is oblivious to its own double standards on media coverage of such disasters.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:23 AM EDT

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Joseph Farah spends his May 20 WorldNetDaily column complaining that "There are lots of people discovering today that 'news' is often manipulation," which is best exemplified by Walter Cronkite allegedly helped a group of college students in the 1960s to obtain Ed Muskie for a speech. Farah then suggests his own "news" organization doesn't manipulate the news: "independent news sources like the one you are reading are still as scarce as hen's teeth."

That, of course, is a bald-faced lie.

As we've detailed, Farah uses WND for activism -- read: manipuation -- and not journalism. That manipulation has surfaced yet again with Aaron Klein's distorted and false attacks on Elena Kagan masquerading as "news."

The capper: Farah hilariously whacks "phony 'newsmen' like Walter Cronkite" for "misrepresenting their own opinions as the facts on the ground." Isn't Farah even more phony of a newsman than Cronkite? And isn't misrepresenting opinions as facts the entire raison d'etre for WorldNetDaily?

Posted by Terry K. at 10:35 AM EDT

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As he did in February, Bob Unruh once again misleads about the nature of the complaint by a "Christian nutrition ministry" fighting with the Federal Trade Commission in a May 20 WorldNetDaily article.

Unruh's article is barely comprehensible, so we'll summarize, including the parts that Unruh wouldn't report: The "Christian nutrition ministry" Daniel Chapter One drew an FTC complaint for making specific health claims about the nutritional supplements it sells. Daniel Chapter One doesn't believe it should have to offer scientific evidence of the efficacy of its products and that customer testimonials suffice. The FTC has repeatedly turned down the claim.

The new development prompting this story is that Daniel Chapter One is appealing the FTC's rulings to an appeals court by claiming a religious exemption to FTC regulations.

There -- we summed it up in four relatively brief sentences. Unruh, meanwhile, rambles on for paragraph after paragraph loaded with legal gobbeldygook and lots of pronouncements about religious freedom. At no point does Unruh explain why Daniel Chapter One wants to sell products whose efficacy hasn't been scientifically proven, or does he detail the product claims that are at issue, even though they are detailed in the FTC file. Also, at no point does Unruh make any apparent effort to allow the FTC to respond to the Daniel Chapter One's claims. Nor does Unruh explain how the nutritional products Daniel Chapter One sells are explicitly religious, which would presumably be a prerequisite for claiming a religious exemption.

Indeed, all we've seen here is a bad story written about a weak case. But that's what Unruh is all about, isn't he?

Posted by Terry K. at 2:28 AM EDT

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From a May 19 CNSNews.com article by Terry Jeffrey:

American Idol judge Ellen DeGeneres picked a love song written to be sung by a man to a woman for contestant Crystal Bowersox--a single mom with a boyfriend--to perform on the show’s semifinal program on Tuesday night.

Yes, CNS is a very serious news organization.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:16 PM EDT

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In his Feb. 19 Newsmax column, Dick Morris claimed that Sens. Arlen Specter and Blanche Lincoln, by the unfavorable results of their races, "are now reaping the harvest of their votes for healthcare." Except that Specter's and Lincoln's Democratic primary opponents didn't make their votes on health reform an issue in their campaigns -- indeed, support for reform is one thing all those candidates had in common.

We have more at Media Matters.

Posted by Terry K. at 3:00 PM EDT

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Aaron Klein isn't the only one at WorldNetDaily who's misleading about and distorting Elena Kagan's record.

A May 18 article by Drew Zahn purports to detail that in the Citizens United case, Kagan "argued that the federal government has the power to ban books it deems to be 'political electioneering'" and that "political pamphlets could run afoul of the law." It's a typically unfair and unbalanced article, quoting only Citizens United's David Bossie and others attacking Kagan's argument. Zahn also obscures the fact that the law Kagan was arguing in favor of upholding applied only to corporate spending on political campaigns, not individual spending -- which means that Kagan was not, as Bossie falsely claimed, arguing to ban political pamphlets like those issued by Thomas Paine.

Nat Hentoff churned out a set of Klein-like distortions of Kagan's views on free speech in his May 19 WND column -- even citing the Media Research Center as an authoritative source for his smears. Media Matters breaks it down.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:04 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, May 20, 2010 2:07 PM EDT

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Noel Sheppard complained in a May 18 NewsBusters post that "our nation's media couldn't care less" about "an international conference discussing the scientific holes in the theory of man-made global warming." Sheppard is referring to the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, spearheaded by the right-wing deniers at the Heartland Institute.

While  Sheppard ignores the institute's political leanings and downplays the biased, deniers-only nature of the conference, he does let slip -- though not until his final paragraph -- one reason why the conference has been ignored by "our nation's media": "Readers are advised that the Media Research Center is a co-sponsor of this conference."

That's right -- the MRC is helping to fund this biased conference.

But it seems that if this conference is so important to right-wingers, the right-wing media should be covering it as well. But it isn't.

CNSNews.com isn't covering the conference, even though its MRC parent is funding it. The MRC's Business & Media Institute has published several articles by Jeff Poor from the conference, but at no point in any of these articles does Poor disclose that the MRC is funding what he's writing about.

The only other ConWeb component we've seen covering the conference is WorldNetDaily, which sent Jerome Corsi to it. As we've noted, Corsi promoted a claim by one scientist at the conference without reporting that a previous claim the scientist made has been discredited.

This is not the first time that Sheppard has complained about media coverage of a subject that his own media has also ignored. On May 5, Sheppard lamented that "you may not know much about" devastating flooding in Nashville because of "all the attention media have given to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the failed car bomb attempt in New York's Times Square." Sheppard was followed by a NewsBusters complaint by Charlie Daniels that the flooding was "never really trumpeted in the national media."

But as Media Matters' Eric Boehlert pointed out, the Nashville flooding received even less coverage from right-wing news outlets such as the Washington Times and the New York Post, and Fox News ran half as many segments on the flooding that CNN did.

If the right-wingers' own media won't cover Sheppard's favorite subjects, what right does he have to complain that the "mainstream" media isn't covering them?

Posted by Terry K. at 12:05 PM EDT

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In her May 19 Newsmax column (also appearing at the New York Daily News), S.E. Cupp claimed that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has "dumped around 95,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf."

In fact, experts believe that the amount of oil spilled is much higher. As NPR reports, the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates:

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.

A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.

The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.

[...]

Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, also got a similar answer, using just pencil and paper.

Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark.

"I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he said.

Chiang called the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect."

It seems Cupp is lowballing the spill numbers to fit with her column's theory that it would be expensive and counterproductive to clean up that relatively small amount of oil.

Posted by Terry K. at 11:11 AM EDT

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Joseph Farah writes in his May 19 WorldNetDaily column:

Elena Kagan is the natural pick for Obama.

He telegraphed nominees like this way back in 2001 as a second-term Illinois state senator when he was interviewed on Chicago Public Radio's "Odyssey" program on WBEZ 91.5 FM. You can listen to it with your own ears right here.

But here are the key comments about the nature of the Supreme Court and how he would change it: "If you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order; as long as I could pay for it I'd be OK.

"But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in the society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted – and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that."

So far, so good. Farah is letting Obama's words speak for themselves. Obama is clearly pointing out that the Warren Court was not as radical as people think it was and positing that the civil-rights movement relied too much on the court system and not enough on grassroots efforts. At no point does he express a preference for any particular approach, merely providing a history lesson.

Then Farah blows it by lying about what Obama said:

That is worth reading over and over, again, if for no other reason than to have a frame of reference for teaching your children and grandchildren about the way the Constitution of the United States is being shredded by this administration and Obama's cohorts in the Congress.

The Warren Court wasn't radical enough for Obama. He wants one that is more radical – one that is willing to "break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" and mandate "redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in the society."

Wrong. Obama did NOT say the Warren Court "wasn't radical enough." He did NOT say he wants a court that would "break free" from the Constitution. He did NOT say he wants a court that mandates "redistribution of wealth."

Farah is lying to you.

Farah is telling you to believe him and not your own eyes.

Do you understand now that Obama is building a tyrannical regime in which unaccountable government officials overrule the Constitution and dictate to the American people the way things are going to be?

Could it be any clearer?

Well, yes, Mr. Farah, it is crystal clear that you  hate Obama so much that you will shamelessly lie about him -- even when you've provided his own words that prove you wrong.

And if you're willing to lie so shamelessly when you can be that easily fact-checked -- and a year and a half after your website discredited itself by repeating the exact same lie -- what lies are you telling when you're hiding the real truth from your readers?

The fact that you, Mr. Farah, lie so blatantly and shamelessly is one key reason why no real journalist or any genuinely educated reader takes WorldNetDaily seriously.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:20 AM EDT

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Remember Hilmar von Campe, the self-proclaimed former Nazi who keeps the lessons of his childhood alive by engageing in the Nazi tactic of the Big Lie by repeatedly portraying President Obama as a Nazi? Well, he's back, and WorldNetDaily is more than proud to host even more of his slurs.

In his May 19 WND column, von Campe hauls out his tired smears once again -- even claiming that "Adoration of Hitler existed then as it exists today for Obama – not just in the U.S., but also in Europe, with blind acceptance of his fantasies." He also trots out discredited lies like this:

Hitler created his own private army, the SS, which included the Gestapo, which reported directly to him. He killed about 300 opposition personalities, including a former chancellor. He destroyed the armed threat of the competitive storm troopers (SA) by killing the leadership.

While speaking at the University of Colorado in July of 2008, Obama spoke of wanting to create such an armed force: "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as well-funded."

In fact, Obama was talking about diplomatic and humanitarian efforts, not additional military forces.

Von Campe even lashes out at minister Jim Wallis, calling him a Nazi too:

Hitler created the German Christians. The leading "bishop" Mueller promoted the Nazi ideology in religious language. The Rev. Jim Wallis was recently presented as spiritual adviser to Obama. I suspect that he has the same task as Mueller – to fool naïve Christians. 

Hilmar von Campe is a vile old man who pretends his use of Nazi tactics -- the kind he purports to abhor -- are somehow noble. We'd say that WND should be ashamed to publish von Campe's hateful screeds, but we're fairily sure no WND employee is capable of that emotion.

Posted by Terry K. at 2:30 PM EDT

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