Fluffy WND Profile of Anti-Abortion Extremist Skips Most of the Controversy Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 5 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh paints a fawning picture of anti-abortion lawyer Bryan J. Brown, whom he paints as a victim for his beliefs who is unable to obtain a license to practice law in Indiana. Unruh, as is his prediliction, tells the story only from Brown's point of view, making only a token attempt to contact the other side.
Unruh also allows Brown to spin away his history of anti-abortion extremism, uncritically repeating his claim that "Never mind that I had been a deputy attorney general in Kansas for four years, and constitutional law attorney working for the American Family Association for six years – all without any arrests for civil disobedience or even discipline issued against me. (Or arrests for any reason for that matter!) ... Never mind a clean record as an attorney since 1996. I was a former pro-life activist who had given himself to the Christian Right for all of his career, and for that I was to pay dearly."
In fact, Brown has been arrested numerous times. The Pitch reports that Brown was "arrested multiple times during 1991's infamous 'Summer of Mercy' abortion protests in Wichita" and "refused to pay a federal judgment against him in Indiana for the same kind of activism." Brown also led protests outside the homes of abortion doctors in Kansas and their employees.
That Indiana case seems central to Brown's problems there. He was a bullhorn-wielding leader of a protest against an abortion clinic in Fort Wayne, aiming for a turnout so large that it would force the city to mobilize the National Guard. The clinic obtained a judgment against Brown and other activists, and Brown defiantly refused to pay, to the point of bailing on a marriage and walking away from a job in what he called a "scorched earth" policy:
Nine months later, Judge Lee ordered Northeast Indiana Rescue and its three leaders to pay the National Women's Health Organization $61,616 for legal fees and expenses.
Brown and his wife divorced in December 1990. Ellen walked away with an eight-track studio recorder, a 1987 Ford Taurus and $2,750 from the sale of their New Haven, Indiana, home.
Except that Brown never sold his house. He simply quit his $45,000-a-year factory job, stopped making mortgage payments and drove away.
He would later explain it to the Wichita paper as a "scorched earth" policy.
"My enemies have pursued me, and I'm gonna make sure that they have nothing," he told the Eagle.
Unruh touches upon this incident, completely ignoring Brown's extremism and putting a positive spin on things:
Several years ago, a federal judge ultimately lifted a 20-year-old injunction that regulated pro-life protests at an abortion business in Indiana and – as part of the order – canceled a demand that the advocates for life pay the abortionists' legal fees that had ballooned to $350,000 with interest.
The ruling was from U.S. District Judge William C. Lee in the case of the Fort Wayne Women's Health Organization operated by abortionist Ulrich Klopfer and others at 827 Webster Street in Fort Wayne.
The abortionist and several women who never were identified went to court against Northeast Indiana Rescue, Brown and others seeking an order to keep sidewalk counselors away from women entering the abortion business. At the time, the business also was ordered not to interfere with legal protest activities.
The case also produced an order that the pro-life defendants pay $61,000 in legal fees to the abortion business, a payment that never was made and grew to $350,000 with interest over the years.
But it was canceled after the abortion business closed and the building was sold. It now is occupied by Brown's ArchAngel Institute.
Unruh fudges or completely botches several facts here. First, it didn't happen "several years ago"; it happened in 2009. Second, Unruh never mentions that Brown himself was named in the injunction -- fuzzily referring only to "advocates for life" or "the pro-life defendants" -- nor does he mention the extreme measures Brown took to avoid paying that legally mandated judgment, essentially violating the law. Third, as the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported, the clinic didn't close; it simply moved to a different location.
WND does love doing fluffy profiles of anti-abortion extremists. A 2002 article touted one extremist, Neal Horsley, operator of the notorious "Nuremburg Files" website, which listed the names and other personal information of doctors and workers at abortion clinics, with said names being crossed out when they die or are killed. Like Unruh's article, the 2002 WND article largely avoiding reporting any of the controversy, focusing instead on his difficulty of finding ISPs that would host his hateful work.
NEW ARTICLE -- Out There, Exhibit 54: A Hypocrisy-Induced Migraine Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center criticizes news organizations for reporting on Michele Bachmann's migraines -- but not the conservative website that broke the story. Read more >>
WND's Massie Likens Obama to Caligula Topic: WorldNetDaily
Mychal Massie's tirade of hatred against President Obama continues in his Aug. 8 column, in which he rants against "Pharaoh" Obama, claiming that the "sole purpose" of Obama's birthday party "was for the Pharaoh to have his loyal subjects swill wine, indulge in gluttony and behavior unfit to take place on the property of taxpayers, as they suffer." Massie then writes:
Like Nero – who was only slightly less debaucherous than Caligula – with wine on his lips Obama treated "we the people" the way Caligula treated those over whom he lorded.
Likening Obama to Caligula was not enough for Massie. (It never is for such obsessed haters.) He goes on to complain that Obama and his wife are "debas[ing]" the White House "with their pan-ghetto behavior." What the heck is "pan-ghetto behavior"? Sounds like Massie's just making up words no instead of just rifling through his thesaurus.
Meanwhile, Massie is still spewing his spelling-challenged hatred on his Twitter account, like this:
"Buttzilla" is Michelle Obama. Massie thinks he's immune from charges of racism because he's black, but is there any other way to describe likening a black woman to an ape?
What a sick, cynical, hate-consumed shell of a man.
Here is the entirety of an Aug. 6 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard:
That's right: Sheppard is repeating a Republican talking point about President Obama, calling it "marvelous" and adding "Hehehe!" for additional approval.
How does this fit with the self-proclaimed "media criticism" mission of NewsBusters and the Media Research Center? How does such partisan political activity not violate the MRC's 501(c)3 nonprofit status?
Aaron Klein Guilt-By-Association Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've previously detailed how Aaron Klein's method of guilt-by-association works. He displays it again in an Aug. 6 WorldNetDaily article:
The U.S. military's Muslim chaplain program was founded by a terror-supporting convict while the Army's first Islamic chaplain, who is still serving, has been associated with a charity widely accused of serving as an al-Qaida front.
Following a plot uncovered last week to target Fort Hood's Army base – one year after the same base was the subject of a shooting massacre by a Muslim army psychiatrist – closer scrutiny of the military's Islamic chaplain program may be warranted.
Pfc. Naser Abdo was arrested just days ago with a backpack full of explosives. He reportedly admitted planning a terror attack on Fort Hood soldiers.
In previous media profiles, Abdo, a convert to Islam, described becoming more religious after he signed up for the Army.
In a television interview with HLN News, a spinoff of CNN, Abdo discussed a conversation he had with a Muslim army chaplain. Currently, there are only six Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military.
What Klein wants you to believe: The entire Army Muslim chaplain program is suspect because it was created by someone who later turned radical and because the Fort Hood terror suspect once talked to a Muslim chaplain, the contents of which conversation Klein cannot possibly know. Neither Klein nor his researcher, Brenda J. Elliott, make any apparent attempt to contact anyone involved with the chaplain program for their point of view -- it's all attack and smear.
Also of note: The word "reportedly" or variations appears in Klein's article five times. That seems like a lot, and it certainly gives away Klein's guilt-by-association intent.
Of course, the same game can be played against Klein, who has admitted his fealty to the beliefs of violent far-right extremist Meir Kahane.
CNS Politicizes Deaths Of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com is desperately eager to blame the deaths 30 American troops, including 22 Navy SEALs, in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan on President Obama. An Aug. 8 article by Susan Jones complains that "President Barack Obama issued a statement, but has not yet spoken publicly" about the incident.
What's the point of Jones writing this article? None other than to attack the president and accuse him of not caring about the troops.
In keeping up with its body-count tradition, Jones adds: "As CNSNews.com reported last week, at least 64 percent of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan have happened on Obama’s watch."
CNS has chosen to politicize the deaths of American troops. Is that allowed under the Media Research Center's nonprofit tax status?
WND Proves 'Erroneous' Description of Geller Is All Too True Topic: WorldNetDaily
In an Aug. 4 WorldNetDaily article plugging Pamela Geller's new WND-published book, "Stop the Islamization of America," Joe Kovacs writes that Geller "has been erroneously labeled by the leftist Salon.com as "a right-wing, viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger." Not only does Kovacs explain why that claim is "erroneous," he demonstrates that the description is completely accurate.
Indeed, Kovacs uses the very next paragraph tolaunch into one of Geller's favorite anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, that the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero is a "victory mosque:
"The mosque story has been a game-changer," writes Geller, noting outrage over the attempt by Islamic supremacists to erect a triumphal mosque upon the sacred site of the attack on the World Trade Center towers has awakened the American populace to what's really taking place.
"In early December of 2009, the New York Times – on its front page – heralded the arrival of a 15-story mega-mosque going up at Ground Zero. It was shocking. I don't know what was more grotesque: the jihadists' triumphal mosque, or the New York Times' preening of it."
Geller says news agencies consistently ignored the fact the vast majority of Americans opposed the structure.
"Americans didn't want a victory mosque marking the site of the 9/11 attacks. They didn't want an insult to the 3,000 Americans who were murdered there by Islamic jihadists and for whom Ground Zero is a cemetery."
Kovacs repeats Geller's tirades at the media, demonstrating what a utterly hateful, vindictive far-right person she is:
"The dirty smear merchants over at Media [anti]Matters understood what was happening and issued a directive to the leftwing lemmings: 'do not have Geller on national television.' The very same day that Goebbels-inspired post ran, Chris Matthews canceled my TV appearance for that evening. And the media, both left and right, have generally followed suit. They will only have me on if they have no choice. If I make news vis-a-vis a lawsuit or rally or some other newsmaking event and they are forced to, they do so reluctantly. If they can get my lawyer instead, they will because they have become so fearful of the truth."
[...]
"They found their card, the dawah card," says Geller. "Dawah is Islamic proselytizing, and the media decided to proselytize for Islam. Dhimmi Diane Sawyer's show on Islam was a horrible lie. Overwhelmingly terrible. I don't imagine that even Hamas-linked CAIR would have dared to write such a fallacious and dangerous script filled with obvious lies.
"ABC followed up the propaganda hour with Sunday morning's notorious stealth jihadist, Christiane Amanpour, whose obvious Jew-hatred and predilection for submission has become the hallmark of her embarrassing career. She did not disappoint. Amanpour framed and packaged this hot-button issue for Al-Jazeera audiences, not American ones. But America wasn't buying– Amanpour was bombing, dead last. A very great sign of things to come."
Why wouldn't WND publish this book? Geller somehow manages to hate Muslims and the mainstream media more than WND does.
Pat Boone Denies He's Calling Obama A Jihadist, Does It Anyway Topic: Newsmax
Pat Boone begins his latest column, published at WorldNetDaily and Newsmax, by declaring: "Let me be very clear, right off the bat. I'm not calling the president or his administration, his closest White House advisers and consultants, jihadists."
Needless to say, that's exactly what Boone has done by the end of the column:
What is "jihad"? It's an Islamic word, variously interpreted as "the struggle" or "the journey." But a struggle for what? A journey toward where?
"Jihad" is currently understood as a word for "holy war" – and that's exactly how we see it in action, as destruction and violence and the killing of thousands erupts suddenly and viciously all around the world. The "struggle" is obviously for the domination, the subjugation of all peoples under a Shariah society. Whether or not the Quran is correctly understood as commanding this, the several million fatally committed to jihadism believe they are doing the will of Allah.
And if they could have their way, if they could force their will on us,what would America be like? All citizens would take their orders from an all-powerful government; those who obey without question might have some privileges, those who don't would be imprisoned or killed; religious freedom would be nonexistent; "wealth" would be "distributed" at the whim and direction of the religio/political dictators; and courts would dole out punishment according to the jihadist guidelines.
Impossible in America? Are you watching what's been happening all around us, just the last two and a half years?
[...]
Joe Biden, that is exactly what we tea-party "terrorists" have been yelling at you and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and those who just agreed in "bipartisan" legislation to add 4 trillion more to our impossible debt! Is our president a "terrorist," too?
Or a "jihadist" who has found the path, the "journey" to the economic collapse of our country, with all the resulting "fundamental transformations"?
In other words, just another sleazy Obama-bashing column from the supposedly squeaky-clean entertainer.
Ellis Washington Being Ellis Washington Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ellis Washington serves up another heaping helping of word salad in his Aug. 5 WorldNetDaily column.
Washington devotes a big chunk of his column to repeating the Democrat-bashing views of one Dr. Levon Yuille, whom Washington calls "like John the Baptist – a clarion voice of reason crying out in the wilderness." WAshington doesn't mention one other example of this "voice of reason": opposing hate crimes protections for gays because he finds it "demeaning [to] the black community."
Elsewhere, Washington declares that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and that Detroit "is the slave plantation the Democratic Party has created." Cue yet another anti-liberal rant:
Other liberal Ponzi schemes include: abortion, unionism, federal regulations, welfare, pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Obamacare, QE1, QE2, the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009 ("Stimulus"), etc. Since FDR's "New Deal" of the 1930s and '40s, literally trillions of dollars have been stolen from the earners and given to people who didn't earn the money and don't deserve it. All welfare programs are disguised Ponzi or money-laundering scams where the money is funneled back into the Democratic Party coffers, slush funds, Mafia unions and political action committees.
Washington is not big on education either:
For example, let's examine one of liberalism's favorite and most worthless bureaucracies – the Department of Education. Currently the DOE budget is $107 billion per year. All 50 states are mandated to send money to the DOE to pay for the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and then some of those same dollars are "redistributed" back to the states with many strings attached (i.e., 2+2 =5, federal education testing scams, education atheism, Outcome Based Education, No Child Left Behind, LGBT agenda ["Heather has 2 Mommies"; "Daddy's Roommate,"], etc.).
Like we said, word salad. And not a particularly tasty mix, either.
MRC's Gainor Obsesses Over One Obama Word (And Goes Birther) Topic: Media Research Center
Remember how CNSNews.com has been obsessed with every little word President Obama says or doesn't say? Well, a different division of the Media Research Center empire has taken that obsession to a whole new level.
MRC vice president Dan Gainor writes in his Aug. 5 column:
No matter what the news of the day has been, Obama's favorite topic has been himself. In his first 41 speeches back in 2009, Obama talked about himself nearly 1,200 times - 1,198 to be exact. Scarily enough, the condition seems to have gotten more acute.
In 40 speeches and remarks on the national debt, Obama has talked about himself 39 times more than he has the debt - more than 3,200 times about Obama to a mere 160 about the national debt.
Let me put that another way, keeping in the spirit of the president's birthday. Picture two big cakes. The first has 160 candles on it. It's burning pretty bright - a bit more than three times the number of candles the graying Obama should have. Then imagine the other cake in the shape of an "I." That cake has more than 3,200 flaming candles on it - alarming party-goers and smoke detectors alike. That's not a cake, it's a weapon of mass destruction.
Yes, Gainor counted -- or, more likely, made some poor MRC intern count -- every time the word "I" appeared in Obama's speeches.
On top of that, Gainor appears to be going birther: "But that's our president as he turns 50, or Hawaii 5-O, if documents are to be believed." Gainor seems to be suggesting that they can't.
It looks like WorldNetDaily may have found themselves a new columnist -- after all, birtherism is how Diana West got the job.
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Victoria Jackson Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
The communist "Christians," (Obama, Wallis and the Circle of Protection) twist Matthew 25 to push their welfare agenda. What Bible verses do they twist to condone the infanticide they support? The partial-birth abortion? The gay marriage?
While Obama prays for the poor, his policies of massive spending are creating inflation, which will result in each welfare recipient's check buying half as much as it did before he was in office. Therefore, he is actually "cheating" the "poor" he pretends to care so much about.
And, let's be truthful about how "the poor" actually live in this country. "Poor" people today own a car, a big-screen TV, a VCR and a DVD player. My husband can attest to this. When he was on the S.W.A.T. team doing drug raids, he witnessed the fact that the "poor" had more expensive television equipment than we (middle class) have ever owned or even wanted to own.
I wonder how much Obama personally tithes. He is a "devoted Christian," right? In 2008, USA Today reported Joe Biden and his wife gave an average of $369 a year to charity during the previous decade.
Maybe Obama should spend more time reading the Constitution and the Holy Bible instead of the Communist Manifesto and the Holy Quran.
NewsBusters Declares: Twitter Has A Liberal Bias! Topic: NewsBusters
It seems that no instance of liberal bias, real or imagined, gets past the eagle eyes of the Media Research Center. Why, even Twitter is biased!
No, really, An Aug. 5 NewsBusters post by Aubrey Vaughan declares that "Twitter has selectively crafted a list of suggested news accounts that suspiciously skip over any conservative news pundits." He continues:
The news list suggests 51 accounts. Populating that list are six ABC accounts, three NBC accounts, two CBS accounts, three MSNBC accounts, six CNN accounts, two NPR accounts, two PBS accounts, three BBC accounts, two NY Times accounts, two Huffington Post accounts, and a combination of other arguably liberal accounts including Newsweek, the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, AP, Reuters, ProPublica, Bloomberg News, and Slate. Excluding two government news accounts (FBI Press Office and West Wing News), two technology accounts (Digg and Wired's Gadget Lab), and three more specialized news accounts (Life.com, the Onion, and Al-Jazeera English), that leaves only two more accounts: Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
While liberal media outlets are greater in number and it makes sense to include all the major networks, Twitter does not promote the the media accounts equally. MSNBC's David Gregory and Rachel Maddow are suggested. CNN's Anderson Cooper, Larry King, Ali Velshi, and Jack Gray are suggested. Each network station also has a number of their TV personalities suggested. Absent from the list are suggestions to follow Fox News personalities like Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, or radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, completely swaying the list in favor of liberal media outlets and their even more liberally inclined opinion journalists.
Vaughan seems to have decided that if a news organization is not explicitly conservative -- like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News -- it must be liberal. He doesn't offer the metrics by which he has decided this; we weren't aware that, say, the Economist was "liberal."
Vaughan then rather laughably fails to see bias where it's most obvious:
Admittedly, the suggested accounts on the government list are much less biased. It actually follows a greater number of Republican than Democrat politicians, but that can be explained by the fact that it follows all the major 2012 presidential contenders, and no Democrats are running against President Obama. In addition to following candidates, the Republican suggestions include former Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain, Ambassador Condoleezza Rice, House Speaker John Boehner, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The high-ranking Democrats on the list include Obama, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, and press secretary Jay Carney.
A clear Republican bias is "much less biased" to Vaughan? That seems to confirm our theory that conservatives don't think there is such a thing as conservative bias.
WND Makes Another Embarrassingly False Article Quietly Disappear Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember how WorldNetDaily has made false statements in articles -- and even entire false articles -- disappear without explanation or even a correction, contrary to how a real news organization would act? Well, it's done it again.
An Aug. 4 WND article repeated statements by Rush Limbaugh marking President Obama's birthday:
"Tomorrow is Obama's birthday," he said today. "Not that we've seen any proof of that."
He continued, "But tomorrow is Obama's birthday and they're trying to rally Obama's base by sending out fundraising letters.
"What? What? … What, Snerdley, what? We haven't seen any proof of that. They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday. We haven't seen any proof of it. Sorry. It is what it is," he said.
Just one little problem: that's actually what Limbaugh said last year, not this past week.
After MSNBC's Rachel Maddow picked up the story as portrayed by WND, she was huffily excoriated by NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard for presenting last year's Obama-bashing as this year's, declaring it a "bald-faced lie" and ranting, "Why are media members today allowed to lie with total impunity?" (Funny -- we could say the samething about Sheppard.)
Maddow apologized on the next night's show, explaining that she made the mistake of trusting a WND article.
This is a highly embarrassing error for WND to commit, especially since WND editor Joseph Farah co-wrote one of Limbaugh's books and WND regularlydevotesarticles to Limbaugh's radio pontifications. This tells us that people at WND don't listen to Limbaugh's show as closely as they want their readers to think.
As per its usual style of violating journalistic ethics in handling errors, WND simply deleted the article without telling readers it was deleted and issuing a public correction; it still resides in Google cache for now. Somehow, we suspect Farah issued a private apology to Limbaugh.
Of course, Maddow's apology wasn't good enough for Sheppard, for he ranted again in an Aug. 6 post:
However, is the far-left MSNBC now relying on far-right publications for its research? Are there really no resources at a division of Comcast, General Electric, and NBC to do some basic fact-checking beyond a website that those associated vehemently disagree with at every turn?
And are YouTube video descriptions considered credible enough for MSNBCer's to cite dates from?
Doesn't give you much confidence in the veracity of any of their reporting.
Is Sheppard agreeing with Maddow that nobody should be foolish enough to trust WND? If so, why isn't NewsBusters forcefully making this case to its readers? Perhaps for the same reason it won't criticize a conservative publication for publishing unflattering information about a conservative presidential candidate.
Sheppard goes on to complain that Maddow "felt the need to attack Limbaugh by accusing him of racism" by playing other Limbaugh sound bites, but Sheppard doesn't dispute the characterization, so he must agree that Maddow's clips accurately depicted Limbaugh's racial insensitivity.
CNS Whitewashes Perry Prayer Rally Topic: CNSNews.com
An Aug. 5 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr touts the prayer rally today in Houston authorized by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Starr quotes only from Perry's proclamation for the rally and a Perry spokesperson. The only opposing view Starr provides is a single sentence: "Critics have said the prayer rally is designed to advance Perry’s political ambitions."
But that's only one component of the criticism of Perry's rally. Starr doesn't mention that one major criticism of the rally is the far-right nature and history of hateful comments by the groups and ministers who are putting on the rally for Perry. Right Wing Wach has compiled a fact sheet about them.
Starr also failed to report signs of low attendance at the rally. The Houston Chronicle reported on Aug. 1 -- four days before Starr's article was published -- that only 8,000 people had signed up to attend the rally at Houston's Reliant Stadium, which seats 71,500.
So much for CNS' purported mission statement of "fairly present[ing] all legitimate sides of a story."
