Topic: Newsmax
We've previously detailed how serial misleader Betsy McCaughey has joined Newsmax to mislead about health care. Turns out she's equally adept at misleading about the stimulus as well.
We have more at Media Matters.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
McCaughey Misleads About Stimulus, Too
Topic: Newsmax We've previously detailed how serial misleader Betsy McCaughey has joined Newsmax to mislead about health care. Turns out she's equally adept at misleading about the stimulus as well. We have more at Media Matters.
Posted by Terry K.
at 7:46 PM EDT
Updated: Thursday, October 14, 2010 7:46 PM EDT
ConWeb Editors Defend Paladino, Bash Gays
Topic: CNSNews.com It's a bit strange that two ConWeb editors issued columns on the same day defending New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino's anti-gay remarks -- remarks for which he has apologized. CNSNews.com editor-in-chief Terry Jeffrey proclaimed that "Paladino spoke the truth about homosexual behavior," insisting that "For modern American liberals, there is no greater sin than to publicly express the view that there may be something wrong with homosexual activity and that children should not be taught to consider homosexual behavior morally equal to chastity and marriage." Jeffrey continues:
WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, meanwhile, was just as hateful in asserting that Paladino's remarks were "perfectly reasonable" (italics his):
Both CNS and WND are not exactly gay-friendly, so this was sadly predictable.
Posted by Terry K.
at 5:05 PM EDT
Farah Embraces Bogus Conspiracy
Topic: WorldNetDaily It wouldn't be Joseph Farah if he wasn't playing the victim and engaging in baseless conspiracy-mongering, and that's what Farah does in his Oct. 11 column:
Farah has let his darkly vivid imagination run away with him yet again. In fact, Goolsbee did not "know more than he should about the tax structure of Koch Industries"; as Politico notes, all the information about Koch's tax structure was taken from publicly available sources, including Koch's own website. Nevertheless, this gives Farah an opportunity to play his victim card and whine yet again how his Western Journalism Center was the subject of an IRS audit in the 1990s, just like "Every group and individual that made it onto Bill Clinton's radar screen by being critical of his administration." To do so, of course, Farah has to ignore the fact that, as we noted, a joint congressional committee in 2000 found no credible evidence that the IRS was biased against anti-Clinton groups. Farah then asserted: "Obama is a true disciple of Saul Alinsky, and he won't hesitate to use quasi-legal and extra-legal means to go after his enemies. Apparently he's already begun putting together the enemies list." Farah really wishes there was an Obama enemies list, and that he was on it -- that way he could sell more birther crap.
Posted by Terry K.
at 8:53 AM EDT
New Article: Pat Boone, Obama-Hater
Topic: WorldNetDaily The squeaky-clean '50s pop icon gets down and dirty in peddling lies and smears about the president. Read more >>
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:26 AM EDT
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
MRC Offended That NY Times Published Criticism of Geller
Topic: Media Research Center An Oct. 11 MRC TimesWatch post by Clay Waters critiques the New York Times' profile of anti-Islam blogger (and former Newsmax columnist) Pam Geller by complaining that the article quoted a former Geller ally, Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson. After noting Johnson's statement in the article that Geller is "enabling a real bigotry" through her venomous screeds, Waters writes: "Times Watch isn’t sure the point of the above, given that blogger Charles Johnson has washed his hands of the right and has no allies or credibility among conservatives." Why does it matter what other conservatives think of Johnson? Is his opinion any less valid now that he's no longer as extreme as Geller? Waters doesn't explain. Waters concluded by touting how Geller issued a "typically take-no-prisoners response" to the Times article on her blog. And the MRC proves once again that it has exempted itself from its own "Tell the Truth!" campaign.
Posted by Terry K.
at 7:34 PM EDT
Janet Porter's Back, And More Hateful Than Ever
Topic: WorldNetDaily A while back, we were wondering what happened to Janet Porter, who had stopped writing her WorldNetDaily column and suspended other activities as well. Well, Porter has returned to her WND column, and she has not mellowed in the least. She brings the vicious Obama smears in her Oct. 12 column:
Welcome back, Janet -- we missed your unhinged Obama-hate.
Posted by Terry K.
at 3:22 PM EDT
Caruba: Obama's Not Hitler, But ...
Topic: Accuracy in Media In his Oct. 11 Accuracy in Media column, Alan Caruba plays the game of likening the Obama administration to the Nazis while denying he's doing any such thing:
You gotta love how Caruba so blatantly contradicts himself. He's too consumed with Obama-hate to take much care in keeping up the pretense.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:33 PM EDT
MRC Misleads on Unemployment Numbers
Topic: Media Research Center An Oct. 8 MRC Business & Media Institute article by Julia Seymour promoted how the latest government numbers show "a loss of 95,000 jobs in September, and an additional 15,000 losses in July and August and an unemployment rate still at 9.6 percent." But Seymour obscures the facts behind those numbers. While Seymour noted that 64,000 private sector jobs were added in September, she didn't mention one number that you'd think would please the anti-government types at the MRC: As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, government jobs were reduced by 159,000, half of those temporary Census workers. Are Seymour and her BMI overlords suddenly big fans of government employment now that it can be used as a cudgel against a Democratic president? It appears so. Seymour also reported that according to Gallup, "the unemployment rate is actually much higher at 10.1 percent." Near as we can tell, this is the first time BMI has embraced the Gallup number. Why? Because as Media Matters details, for most of the summer, Gallup's unemployment rate was actually lower than the government number -- as low as 8.9 pecent at the beginning of August. Reporting that would have interfered with BMI's anti-Obama narrative.
Posted by Terry K.
at 7:27 AM EDT
A Noel Sheppard Smackdown That Wasn't
Topic: NewsBusters Among the many, many invocations of purported "smackdowns" detailed by NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard over the past month, the most recent was an Oct. 10 post headlined "George Will Smacks Down Paul Krugman With Simple Reaganomics." In it, Sheppard gloated over how "Will smacked a monster drive down the middle of the fairway that would make Tiger Woods proud" in responding to Krugman's assertion that claims that no further stimulus is needed "which bears no relationship to what's actually happening" by asserting that "when the Reagan tax cuts kicked in, we had a booming job creation which, relative to the size of this economy, would translate to 7 million new jobs." When Krugman responded to that by saying, "that boom in federal spending never happened. Once you take out the stuff -- the special emergency spending, it just never happened. And, you know, Reagan had the help of a huge cut in interest rates," Sheppard himself went off:
Sheppard manages to misfire on both of his attacks. As to the first, Krugman clarified himself in a column the next day:
So, contrary to what Sheppard claimed, Krugman was not denying that increased federal spending occured; he was trying to point out that it resulted in a larger federal government. As for Sheppard's other attack: Media Matters states that economists generally attribute the "Reagan recovery" to the lowering of interest rates from 13 percent to 7 percent. Since interest rates are already near zero, Obama does not have that available to him for a stimulus tool, as Reagan did. it seems that the smackdowner has become the smackdowned.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:06 AM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 12:13 AM EDT
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
AFA's News Operation A Hellish Place to Work
Topic: The ConWeb We generally don't monitor OneNewsNow, the American Family Association's "news" operation, because it makes no pretense to be a fair news website, as the ConWeb components like Newsmax, CNS, WorldNetDaily, et al., do. Plus, there isn't enough time in the day to take down all the bias and falsehoods there. It turns out things there are worse than even we imagined. Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches has an article detailing the hellish work envionment at the AFA that also confirms everything we presumed about OneNewsNow:
(h/t Right Wing Watch)
Posted by Terry K.
at 8:41 PM EDT
WND Still Peddling Bias, Falsehoods About 'Nutrition Ministry'
Topic: WorldNetDaily WorldNetDaily's reporting on the battle between the Federal Trade Commission and the so-called "nutrition ministry" Daniel Chapter has apparently passed from the heavily biased Bob Unruh to Brian Fitzpatrick, but the reporting isn't getting any better. An Oct. 9 WND article by Fitzpatrick screamed that "Two federal agencies, backed up by state and local police, have swooped down on a peaceful Portsmouth, R.I., ministry like Eliot Ness busting up one of Al Capone's Prohibition-era breweries." Fitzpatrick interviews only Daniel Chapter One representatives and makes no apparent attempt to verify the information they gave him; there's no indication in the article that Fitzpatrick even bothered to contact any federal officials for their side of the story. Thus, Fitzpatrick shovels out horsepuckey like this:
If Fitzpatrick had bothered to read the FTC's administrative complaint against Daniel Chapter One -- again, there's no indication he did even that level of rudimentary research or his article -- he would have know that the FTC specifically laid out several instances in which Daniel Chapter One did just that. It claimed one product "inhibits angiogenesis -- the formation of new blood vessels" which "can stop tumor growth," that another product "battles cancer," and that yet another product can serve "as an adjunct to cancer therapy." Rather than providing coherent defense of the idea that products that make such claims should have scientific backing for their claims, Fitzpatrick allowed the owners to blather on about faith and the evils of medicine:
Fitzpatrick even botches the name of one of the agencies allegedly involved in the raid, referring to the "Federal Drug Administration." That, presumably, is the Food and Drug Administration. Fitzpatrick has reporting for WND for a couple months now. Between his shoddy reporting and his obvious right-wing, anti-gay bias -- an old Townhall bio shows he once served on the board of directors of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality and is a former senior editor for the professional prudes at the MRC's Culture & Media Institute -- he's fitting right in at his new employer.
Posted by Terry K.
at 7:22 PM EDT
Kessler's Favorite Push-Poller Complains About Supposedly Bogus Polls
Topic: Newsmax Ronald Kessler's Oct. 11 Newsmax column repeats unsubstantiated claims by pollster Gabriel Joseph of ccAdvertising that "pollsters find respondents are reluctant to identify themselves as Democrats" and that any poll sampling registered voters instead of likely voters is "biased" because it oversamples Democrats. What Kessler doesn't tell you -- which he didn't the last time he featured Joseph in his column -- is that Joseph is a Republican pollster who's notorious for push-polling, which makes his complaints about the veracity of others' polls seem more than a tad disingenuous in comparison. Instead, Kessler benignly describes Joseph as running a company that "conducts polls for a range of candidates, interest groups, and members of Congress." Kessler had been doing so well last week by properly identifying Brad Blakeman as a conservative whose attacks on Democrats should be dismissed as partisan hackery.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:02 PM EDT
WND Paints Parents As Victim, Glosses Over Abuse
Topic: WorldNetDaily An Oct. 8 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh claims that an hours-old baby "was snatched from her parents by authorities in Concord, N.H., after social services workers alleged the father is a member of Oath Keepers." Unruh continues:
The facts show, however, that this isn't exactly the case. The Manchester Union Leader reports that there's much more to this story:
The Union Leader also notes that the DCYF also noted Irish's purchase of "several different types of weapons including a rifle, handgun and Taser." Unruh doesn't mention Irish's cache of weapons, let alone explain why he feels the need to have a Taser. Unruh also doesn't mention the name of the infant's mother. Most disturbingly, Unruh plays down the abuse allegations, uncritically repeating Irish's claim that it presumably "pertained to an incident weeks earlier in which one of his fiance's older sons allegedly was struck by a babysitter." WND has a sad history of burying the background of abusive parents who serve as symbols of WND's far-right agenda. As we've detailed, WND -- based on reporting by Unruh -- promoted a family as role models for homeschooling while burying the family's history of a controlling and abusive father (who wouldn't even allow his children to have birth certificates), a meek and acquiescent mother, sexual abuse by a family friend, deplorable living conditions, and a substandard homeschool education. A follow-up Oct. 11 article by Unruh concedes in the first paragraph that this is an "abuse case" -- but then never mentions it again, trying to change the subject by making the Oath Keepers mention the issue, not the abuse. Unruh does note Irish's weapons cache this time but offers no explanation of why Irish needs a Taser. Unruh also quotes the local Oath Keepers guy as calling for a "peaceful gathering in support of both the due process rights of the parents," but he doesn't mention that the day after the baby was taken, the FBI reported threats against the hospital where the baby was born. Face it: Condoning child abuse is just something WorldNetDaily does. Is that because many of its staffers, Unruh included, homeschool their children?
Posted by Terry K.
at 7:33 AM EDT
Newsmax Drools Over Palin
Topic: Newsmax Newsmax has been touting Sarah Palin's appearance in an Obama-bashing video series for a couple weeks now, and now that the appointed day is almost here, the hype machine has been cranked up. An Oct. 7 article touted Palin's appearance at Newsmax's offices for the taping of her segment, with more than a bit of sycophancy on both ends:
This generated a similarly sycophantic article from U.S. & World Report's Paul Bedard, who portrayed the visit as "the latest and clearest example of her plans" to run for president in 2012. Newsmax followed up with an even more sycophantic teaser of what Palin said in her webcast (which airs later today):
Sycophancy, ho! The actual interview, we suspect, couldn't possibly be as exciting as Newsmax has made it, regardless of its desire to make money off Palin's name. UPDATE: We've watched Palin's webcast, and it pretty closely echoes attacks on Obama by her fellow right-wingers. Our account is posted at Media Matters.
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:41 AM EDT
Updated: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 10:23 PM EDT
Monday, October 11, 2010
Meanwhile ...
Topic: Horowitz Media Matters, as part of its examination of Byron Williams, who got into a firefight with police as he was headed to shoot up the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU in San Francisco after claiming inspiration from Glenn Beck, has a sidebar on Discover the Networks, the David Horowitz website purporting to be a "Guide to the Political Left." Turns out Williams drew some inspiration from DTN's conspiratorial musings as well.
Posted by Terry K.
at 7:42 PM EDT
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