NewsBusters: Birthers Have Been 'Disavowed' By GOP (Like Romney?) Topic: NewsBusters
Jeffrey Meyer used an Aug. 30 NewsBusters post to complain that MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked "a ridiculous question about birtherism" following her "inspirational convention speech." Meyer declared that birtherism is "an issue that numerous Republicans have disavowed since the beginning," adding, "Matthews’ obsession with a fringe group of individuals that have been disavowed by the Republican Party shows the bigoted and small mindset he represents."
If birtherism has been so soundly "disavowed" by Republicans, why did the Republican Party's nominee, Mitt Romney, invoke birtherism when he remarked, "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate"? Doesn't that make Romney a "fringe individual" by Meyer's definition?
Of course, NewsBusters immediately ran to Romney's defense over the remark, portraying it as a "joke" and criticizing people from trying to read anything more into it.
WND's Farah Even Lies About Himself Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah has demonstrated a disturbingpropensity to lie in recent days. His mendacity is so pervasive that he'll even lie about himself.
Farah starts his Aug. 30 WorldNetDaily column with a falsehood: that the Southern Poverty Law Center "inspir[ed] a shooting attack on the Family Research Council in Washington." In fact, nobody -- not even the FRC's Tony Perkins -- has provided any evidence whatsoever to prove that.
The rest of Farah's column is devoted to whining about a new SPLC piece on WND, which Farah claims "mixes misinformation, innuendo and outright lies to paint a picture of an extremist organization rather than what it admits is one of the most popular news organizations on the Internet." Farah then tried to rebut some of the article's alleged falsehoods, telling new lies in the process. For instance:
One of my board members is credited with joining me in an effort to revive the Sacramento Union, the daily newspaper I once ran, in 2004. Neither one of us was involved in any such effort.
The SPLC cites ConWebWatch for this claim; we wrote in a 2007 article that Farah and Richard Botkin were advisory board members for the Union revival. We cited a Sacramento Business Journal article that stated (emphasis added):
The advisory board for the magazine includes some folks who haven't been shy in the past about letting their politics show. It includes former GOP Assemblywoman Barbara Alby and Assemblyman Larry Bowler; Charles H. Bell Jr., general counsel to the California Republican Party and the Western Journalism Center; WorldNetDaily.com execs and contributors Richard Botkin and Farah, who also has a radio talk show; California Business Properties Association CEO Rex Hime; auto dealership founder Wes Lasher; developer Marvin L. "Buzz" Oates; and local ad exec Sal Russo.
In other words, Farah is lying through his teeth.
Farah also complains:
SPLC attempts to link me with R.J. Rushdoony, whom it identifies as the “father of Christian Reconstructionism.” Yet, reconstructionists, including the late Rushdoony, all know or knew I do not subscribe to their theological views.
Farah seems to be trying to split hairs here. He doesn't explain what "theological views" of Rushdoony he does not "subscribe to," but it's clear that Farah moves in reconstructionist circles -- the two were both (and Farah may still be) members of the secretive right-wing group the Council for National Policy, and WND board member Wayne Johnson is also on the board of the Rushdoony-founded Chalcedon Foundation. And as we've documented, Farah does hold some reconstructionist views, like opposition to public education and the death penalty for moral crimes such as adultery.
Farah writes:
The article contends an organization I founded, Western Journalism Center, “was hit with a $2 million libel suit for promoting a ‘report’ suggesting that White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster had been the victim of foul play, rather than suicide. (The suit was later dismissed.)” No such lawsuit was ever filed – though the Bill Clinton White House did, in fact, order a highly publicized Internal Revenue Service audit of WJC as a result of the investigation.
The SPLC's wording on this is imprecise, which Farah is trying to take advantage of. The specific allegation appears to be that a WJC-published article by Christopher Ruddy claimed that the Park Police had staged the scene of Foster's death, which resulted in a lawsuit by one of the Park Police officers named in Ruddy's article. That is sourced to Dan Moldea's book "A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited A Political Firestorm."Farah has previously denounced the book in a 1998 column as a "journalistic con job" and, even worse, boring -- but he did not challenge Moldea's depiction of the lawsuit.
Farah writes:
SPLC claims I was “scheduled to be a featured guest at a 2007 conference run by Vision Forum Ministries, an ultraconservative outfit whose director Doug Phillips is the son of Constitution Party co-founder Howard Phillips.” I have never been invited to speak at such an event!
The Vision Forum Ministries page on the conference (which appears to have been canceled) would seem to prove him wrong. Here's a screen shot of Farah's bio from the page:
Farah also writes:
SPLC makes the completely unfounded accusation that “WND shilled for a publication titled ‘The Antichrist Identity’ that claimed President Obama is a crypto-Communist ‘apostle’ of the ‘New World Order’ who is setting up the planet for a takeover by ‘Jewish Masonic’ elites who will reduce the population by 5.5 billion and ‘enslave all of mankind under the thumb of a Jewish master race led by a world messiah of Jewish ancestry who is to rule from Jerusalem.’” This is a complete fabrication – made up out of whole cloth.
The SPLC points out that the publishers of "The Antichrist Identity" rented WND's mailing list to promote it, so it's not entirely untrue to call that "shilling." Besides, WND is no stranger to portraying Obama is the Antichrist, so it's unlikely that they saw the book as so extreme they should not accept money to rent out its mailing list to promote it.
Farah also repeats his disingenuous claim that WND has a wide variety of opinion because it published a couple of token liberals:
Yes, there are “ultra-conservative” views expressed at WND. But, of course, SPLC neglects to mention there are also ultra-liberal views expressed at WND in what is the broadest spectrum of political opinion to be found anywhere in the world.
Repeatedly, SPLC caricatures WND’s Judeo-Christian worldview as “anti-gay” and “anti-Muslim” – an incendiary and explosive combination that, according to the assailant, inspired a recent violent attack on Family Research Council, one of its other prominent targets, that resulted in the shooting of its security guard.
What SPLC does next is to use partial quotes from a long list of individual commentators over a 15-year period to suggest all of their opinions somehow represent those of WND. Of course, SPLC doesn’t quote from a single liberal contributor – people like Bill Press and Ellen Ratner – because that would contradict the thesis that WND is a monolithic, extremist company that pushes Christian dominionism.
In fact, as we've pointed out, of the three dozen or so columnists WND regularly publishes, Press and Ratner are the only liberals, apparently kept around only so Farah can claim that WND has "the broadest spectrum of political opinion to be found anywhere in the world." They're never promoted the way the "ultra-conservative" columnists are -- of which there are many more -- usually buried at the bottom of the commentary page.
Farah even complains of the SPLC article that "The race card is repeatedly played, too – ignoring the fact that WND showcases twice as many black columnists than any other news or commentary forum in the world." The fact that Farah treats that as a bragging point suggests that the only reason WND has so many black conservative columnists -- many more than the total number of liberals he publishes, by the way -- is to inoculate it from charges of racism.
That presumably gives WND licence to publish Pat Buchanan, known for his racially charged work, and to engage in a race-baiting campaign by publishing Colin Flaherty's articles depicting blacks as mob-prone thugs.
After all these disingenuous lies and misrepresentations, Farah still claims that "SPLC is a dangerous, repulsive group of liars and frauds with only two things in mind – making money through direct-mail scare tactics and recklessly putting targets on the backs of 'enemies,' like me, whom it demonizes with false accusations and misrepresentations."
MRC's Latest Freakout: A Skittles Ad Topic: Media Research Center
Earlier this week, the Media Research Center freaked out over an androgynous male model. Now, it's a candy commercial.
An Aug. 28 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr uncriticially repeats the claims of the right-wing American Family Association's One Million Moms about the alleged offensiveness of a commercial for Skittles candy "that features a young woman french kissing a walrus." Starr writes that the group argues "it is 'irresponsible' for Mars and Wrigley to make an ad of this kind that promotes a product used by children."
But neither Starr nor the AFA offer any evidence that the commercial was targeted at children -- after all, children aren't the only people who buy Skittles. Nor do they explain why all ads for everything, even products not for children, apparently must be dumbed down to a child's level.
The MRC wasn't done with the manufactured outrage, however. MRC chief Brent Bozell's Aug. 31 column also references the Skittles ad, insisting without evidence that "the ad is targeted to children." Bozell goes on to whine that "this is a thoroughly bizarre way to sell candy to children," adding that "upsetting people who protest indecencies to children doesn't bother them at all."
Again, no MRC employee has offered evidence that this ad was targeted to children -- the one thing that would make this something other than a manufactured controversy from a pair of right-wing groups peddling professional prudery.
Newsmax's Ronald Kessler is a Romney-fluffer from way back, so the Republican National Convention was too good a fluffing opportunity for him to pass up. Indeed, Kessler has been reporting from Tampa all week.
And what kinds of things has he been reporting? Exactly what you'd expect.
In an Aug. 28 column, Kessler was in full fawning mode:
Ever since I first interviewed Mitt Romney in 2007, I have been amazed at his one-dimensional portrayal in the press. Few people in public life have contributed as much as he and Ann Romney have to helping others, yet the media rarely tell those stories.
Now the GOP convention is planning to relate some of those stories to spotlight Romney’s human side, raising the question: Why has it taken so long?
The answer is that the press has not been interested in running positive stories that portray Romney’s human kindness and that Romney himself has refused to turn those acts of kindness into political talking points.
Kessler lovingly quotes one of Romney's sons, and he repeats for the umpteenethtime the story of how Romney helped a Bain Capital associate find his missing daughter.
In his Aug 30 column, Kessler's fluffing target is Romney's wife:
President Obama may be the celebrity president, but Ann Romney showed at the GOP convention that she is the new star.
Unlike Obama, who has offered mainly broken promises, Mitt Romney’s wife came across as genuine. Unlike Obama, she was not divisive. And unlike Obama, she embraced success and offered real hope that this country can be turned around by the man she has known since she was 15 years old.
“This man will not fail,” Ann Romney said. “This man will not let us down.”
You may recall that Kessler skeeved us all out back in 2007, when he wrote about Ann Romney's "good carriage, rosy complexion, square jaw, and blond mane," creepily adding: "When she is not flashing her truly unbelievable smile, she may lower her eyes demurely. But Ann Romney is not demure — she may be modest, but she isn't meek. She is unpretentious, but she isn't shy. She lowers her eyes, thinking, and then looks up directly at her interviewer and dazzles him with that smile."
Kessler managed to restrain himself from going that far this time.
What Would A ConWeb Writer Have to Do to Get Fired? Topic: The ConWeb
The ConWeb was, unsurprisingly, incredibly happy that Yahoo Washington bureau chief David Chalian was fired from his job for being caught on a hot mic saing that Mitt Romney was "happy to have a party with black people drowning." For example:
NewsBusters' Matt Sheffield, who broke the story (but originally falsely identified Chalian's voice as that of an ABC News employee) declared that Chalian's remark was "the perfect example of the pervasive anti-Republican bias Mitt Romney faces in his bid to unseat President Barack Obama." Sheffield later touted Chalian's firing, then bashed NPR's Gwen Ifill for defending him.
WorldNetDaily columnist Diana West called Chalian's remark "a race-bait too far."
The thing is, though: Such firings for making outrageous remarks very rarely happen in the ConWeb, where writers are simply not held to the same standards as those in the so-called "mainstream media." The most outrageous remarks and unprofessional journalistic behavior have not only gone unpunished but have been rewarded in some cases.
In 2009, CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr called Harry Reid a baby-killer by likening him to King Herod. She's still employed as a reporter.
In 2005, WND was forced to retract a story by Aaron Klein that falsely smeared the charity group Islamic Relief by claiming it is linked to terrorism and accusing it of making a fraudulent appeal for money for orphans that don't exist. Not only is Klein still employed by WND, he now hosts a talk show on a New York radio station.
in 2009, WorldNetDaily's Erik Rush likened President Obama to a cellblock rapist. Not only does WND still publish his columns, Rush was named "Vice President of Administration and Strategic Alliances" for Pink Pagoda Girls USA, a group that claims to be "involved in rescuing baby girls in the People’s Republic of China from infanticide as a result of that nation’s 'one child per family' policy."
In 2011, WorldNetDaily executive news editor Joe Kovacs utterly botched a story by claiming that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's name came up "at least nine times on [Supreme Court] dockets involving Obama eligibility issues" stemming from her connection as Obama's former solicitor general. In fact, none of those docket items has anything to do with "eligibility issues." Kovacs remains employed at WND, still dutifully transcribing pearls of wisdom from his idol, Rush Limbaugh.
In 2006, NewsBusters blogger Dan Riehl led a personal attack on a Democratic campaign tracker who was the target of Virginia Senate candidate George Allen's notorious "macaca" remark, falsely accusing him of making racial slurs. Riehl remained a regular blogger at NewsBusters for the next year and a half; he later became a regular blogger at Breitbart.com. Earlier this year, he hurled sexually explicit tweets at Salon editor Joan Walsh, which has not affected his blogging status at Breitbart.
In 2001, WND published a column by Anthony LoBaido in which he blamed America for the 9/11 attacks: "All that is evil in the world can be found in New York: MTV, the United Nations, the U.N. abortion programs, the Council on Foreign Relations, New Age Church of St. John the Divine, WallStreet greed, Madison Avenue manipulation and of course more confirmed AIDS cases than the rest of America combined. Let's remember the filthy sodomite gay parade last summer in New York." WND editor Joseph Farah defended LoBaido's right to say what he did, and WND has continued to publish him ever since. (That column, though, was mysteriously deleted without explanation.)
The only direct dismissal for a beyond-the-pale statement we can recall in our 12-plus years of monitoring the ConWeb is Newsmax columnist John L. Perry, who was dropped after a 2009 column in which he rooted for a military coup to resolve the "Obama problem."
For anyone in the ConWeb to chortle over Chalian's dismissal is utterly hypocritical, since none of these right-wing "news" organizations holds their employees to the same standards.
UPDATE: Remember, the head of the MRC, Brent Bozell, has set the extremist bar pretty high by calling Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead." If nobody at the MRC was outraged by that, it's no wonder that Penny Starr is feeling a lot of job security.
WND's Corsi Still Denying Reality on Obama's Grandmother Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi has taken a break from swimming in the cesspool of Obama gay-sex rumors to take a stab at propping him his rapidly crumbling birther conspiracy. This effort, though, demonstrates just how pathetic he's become.
In an Aug. 29 WorldNetDaily article, Corsi tries to make a big deal out of a British documentary on Barack Obama that included a scene inside the Kenyan home of his grandmother, Sarah Obama, where there hung a 2005 calendar that described Obama as "The Kenyan Wonder-Boy in the U.S."
This, of course, adds absolutely nothing to the manufactured debate of where Barack Obama was born, but it gives Corsi a reason to rehash the story of an interview in which Corsi and others have insisted that Sarah Obama said that Barack was born in Kenya.
As we've pointed out, the Anabaptist minister who conducted the translator-facilitated interview, Ron McRae, is an Obama-hater who cite only "common knowledge," not any actual facts, to back up his claim that Obama was born in Kenya.
Corsi also fails to mention an interview Sarah Obama did earlier this year with Salon's Irin Carmon, in which she explicitly denied that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. That's just one of the many things contradicting the birther narrative that Corsi and WND have kept hidden from their readers.
With each desperate, shoddy article he writes, Corsi reveals himself to be nothing more than a desperate, shoddy man who only knows how to destroy, not add to anyone's knowledge. How pathetic.
NewsBusters -- Which Called Michael Moore 'Corpulent' -- Complains That Christie's Weight Is Being Talked About Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters is having a fit over alleged references to Chris Christie's weight in the media:
Tim Graham was unhappy that the Los Angeles Times made reference to Christie's "big, fat rear end," despite the fact that the paper was quoting Christie himself.
Ryan Robertson grumbles that one newspaper put a headline on a story about Tropical Storm Isaac, “Isaac, Huge and Slow,” below a picture of Christie, lamenting that "some in the liberal media were far too busy thinking of jokes they could make at the New Jersey governor’s expense rather than actually listen to what he had to say."
You'd think such righteousness would mean that NewsBusters would never be so gauche as to comment on the weight of a liberal, right?
Wrong. A Sept. 27, 2011, NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard describes filmmaker Michael Moore as "rather corpulent," going on to add that "this portly schlockumentarian has never met a cheeseburger he'd say no to."
Sheppard wasn't done with his fat-mocking, though. He went on to describe Joy Behar as "hardly the poster child for the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition."
And we haven't even gotten to the NewsBusters commenters who go even farther. For instance, in this thread, here's a selection of what commenters call Moore:
"fat freaking moron"
"fat slob"
"fat Marxist lying slob"
"fat, disgusting, psuedo-commie, stupid piece of corpulent crap"
"Fatty"
"fat boy"
"fatso"
"Wow, hes so FAT!"
"porky"
NewsBusters clearly wasn't offended enough by these insults to delete them, which tells us their outrage over Christie's weight being highlighted is utterly hypocritical and meaningless.
WND Writer Defends Putin's Prosecution of Pussy Riot -- And Putin, Too Topic: WorldNetDaily
Following in the footsteps of Ed Koch at Newsmax, Kevin DeAnna uses an Aug. 28 WorldNetDaily column to defend the Russian prosecution of the punk band Pussy Riot for "hooliganism" -- then takes it a step further by defending Russian leader Vladimir Putin as nothing more than "simply a Russian nationalist."
DeAnna lists other henious activities by the group, such as "public orgies, shoving chicken into their vaginas at a supermarket and overturning police cars (with officers inside)." His source for this is a post on the Lew Rockwell website that also goes way conspiratorial by suggesting that the State Department funneled money to the group with the goal of "undermining a foreign leader viewed as out of favor with Washington."
DeAnna's ultimate goal, though, is to denounce conservatives who came to Pussy Riot's defense. He begins his column by stating, "What do conservatives do when the institutions they are fighting to defend join the other side? Unfortunately, the American right has an answer to that question – fight harder than ever to save their enemies." He goes on to complain that "The band’s ideology is typically boring leftism, which American conservatives seem determined to misinterpret. The reason is because it might get in the way of bashing Russia."
DeAnna concludes with a Putin-defending rant:
Russia is targeted precisely because it is conservative. The vast majority of Russians were outraged at P—y Riot’s stunt. As Putin himself noted, there’s a reason they didn’t target a mosque. The real audience was the left-wing American and European media, which never misses an opportunity to promote degeneracy when it is directed at Christian or Western targets.
Putin is not perfect, and Russia is certainly corrupt, though it was far worse before Putin’s takeover. Putin is simply a Russian nationalist, doing his best to strengthen his own country’s interests. Perhaps used to our own leaders deliberately sabotaging us, this may appear threatening to Americans. If anything, Putin has not gone far enough, making concessions to Islamists in a shortsighted attempt to try to hang on to Russia’s Muslim southern territories.
It’s probably not surprising that American conservatism has been reduced to defending free speech only for leftists and concealing its own powerlessness with swaggering bellicosity against media-approved enemies. The problem is that’s not where the enemy is anymore.
There actually is an imperialist, left-wing power that interferes with other countries. It pushes mass Muslim immigration on Western nations. It tries to displace traditional values in Christian countries. It hands over former American allies to the Muslim Brotherhood. It supports progressive activist organizations with millions of taxpayer dollars in collusion with far-left activists like George Soros. That country is the United States.
American conservatives should be angry about the subversion of their own country, not following the left’s orders yet again by bellowing attacks against the Third Rome.
DeAnna, by the way, is a WND staff writer who's the former head of a far-right student group called Youth for Western Civilization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center notes has received the benefit of fundraising from Cliff Kincaid-approved racist Jared Taylor.
The MRC Declares War on Androgyny Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Philbin uses an Aug. 27 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute item to rant about how Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams praised a Japanese Toyota commercial featuring an androgynous male model:
Sound creepy? Not to Williams. This, she wrote, is “the changing way gender is portrayed in advertising.” The model “represents a new understanding that gender isn’t always neatly defined, and that if a man can be alluringly beautiful, that shouldn’t be anything to be laughed at or scared of.”
Unfortunately, we Americans aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate what Williams asserted was “definitely an idea worth sharing.”
“Why is the ad not running in America?” she asked. “No doubt because it would immediately gay indoctrinate all our menfolk and then there would never be any more babies made and Mitt Romney would never become president.”
That, of course, is exactly the mocking nastiness that greets any conservative critique of the “queering” of mass culture.
Actually, such conservative critiques are, if anything, more mocking and nasty than the response. Philbin helpfully provides an example:
In 2011, the Culture and Media Institute caused a media firestorm by pointing out that clothing manufacturer J.Crew’s marketing materials featuring the company president painting her young son’s toenails hot pink was a nod to the gay agenda.
Philbin, like the CMI piece he's referencing, is making the entirely unsubstantiated assumption that pink on a boy automatically equals "gay agenda" when it may just be that the kid's a 5-year-old who likes bright colors.
Philbin never explains why gay people, perceived or otherwise, are not allowed to be depicted in advertising, but he's on an anti-gay roll:
That agenda is advancing. No TV show is complete these days without a gay character or storyline. Gay activist group GLAAD is in a committed relationship with CNN. GM recently began its own campaign marketing to American gays.
So companies shouldn't try to make money by marketing to gays? Really?
Remember, the MRC has an anti-gay agenda, and apparently all androgynous people are guy, so they must be denounced too.
WND's Corsi Returns to the Cesspool of Obama Gay Rumor-Mongering Topic: WorldNetDaily
Unable to admit that his birther conspiracy has been utterly discredited -- he won't even concede that Mike Zullo's cold case posse, of which he is a de facto member, completely botched the birth certificate coding stuff -- Jerome Corsi must find ways to distract from his failure. As befits the personality of himself and his boss, Joseph Farah, he's chosen to fully embrace his inner sleazybottom-feeder, peddling rumors that Barack Obama is gay.
He's been doing this for a while now, but he's been wading deeperanddeeper into that cesspool in recent months as the birther conspiracies he's peddled for years have imploded.
Corsi's latest attempt at slime-peddling is an Aug. 28 article focused around Obama assistant Reggie Love and how "the Internet" was "abuzz with speculation" that Love temporarily stepped down from his position because of college photos that "purported to show a heavily inebriated Love surrounded by fellow students assisting him in engaging in a homosexual act at a party."
Corsi then goes on to tout how the Drudge Report "toyed with headlines, photos and page placement over the years that give the impression Love was something more than a presidential assistant" to Obama, then finally moved to peddle completely unsubstantiated rumors that Obama and Love have had a sexual relationship.
Corsi presents not a single fact in support of this claim -- only rumors. This is the WND "news" standard now, apparently.
One of Corsi's sources for his sleaze on Love is Wayne Madsen, whom we've previously noted peddling false birther claims and discredited anti-vaccine conspiracies. This is the best "source" Corsi has, by the way.
Corsi has never cared about the truth -- he only wants to destroy Obama. His new obsession with homosexuality only confirms that. (Though, for all we know, it may be more than a professional interest.)
AIM's Kincaid Quotes Racist Jared Taylor -- Again Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid really, really likes Jared Taylor and his racist group American Renaissance.
In an Aug. 28 AIM column, Kincaid approvingly quotes Taylor's opinion on:
Jared Taylor, who runs the organization American Renaissance, comments, “Rachel Maddow wonders whether Mitt Romney is trying to get ‘the white vote.’ What an idea! Everyone tries to cultivate blacks, Hispanics, and even Asians, but wouldn’t it be ‘racist’ to cultivate the white vote? Actually, because they cast 76.3 percent of the votes in the 2008 election, anything that shifts even one or two percent of whites your way is worth doing.”
Taylor told AIM, “Hispanics were only 7.4 percent of the electorate [in 2008], so getting just one percent more of whites to vote for you is like getting 10 percent more Hispanics. If you were Romney, where would you concentrate your efforts?”
[...]
Jared Taylor, author of the book, White Identity, has been banned from most programs because he dares to talk about whites as people with special interests of their own, separate from various minority groups. “Only whites must always act as individuals and never as members of a group that promotes shared interests,” he notes in his book, in commenting on the politically correct mindset that prevails on racial matters in America.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the far-left group that is said to have inspired the violent homosexual to open fire on the Washington office of the Family Research Council, has smeared Taylor as a “white nationalist.”
Calling Taylor a "white nationalist" isn't a smear -- it's the truth. Here's more of what the SPLC says about Taylor:
In his personal bearing and tone, Jared Taylor projects himself as a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist — a kind of modern-day version of the refined but racist colonialist of old. He is the founder of the New Century Foundation and edits its American Renaissance magazine, which, despite its pseudo-academic polish, regularly publishes proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. Taylor also hosts a conference every other year where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.
[...]
Blacks, Taylor writes, are "crime-prone," "dissipated," "pathological" and "deviant."
Taylor, whose 1992 Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America makes similar points in a book format, went further out on the racist limb in 1993 by speaking at a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that has described black people as "a retrograde species of humanity." Today, Taylor's New Century Foundation is intimately related to the council through "common membership, governing bodies, trustees and officers," according to the foundation's tax forms.
In the late 1990s, Taylor came out with The Color of Crime, a booklet that tried to use crime statistics to "prove" that blacks are far more criminally prone than whites — and that argued, based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes a hate crime, that black "hate crimes" against whites exponentially outnumbered the reverse. That racist booklet is now a staple in white supremacist circles. Taylor's New Century Foundation also plays host to biannual American Renaissance Conferences, suit-and-tie affairs that attract a broad spectrum of the participants from the racist right, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and eugenicists. The conferences nearly always have an international presence. Speakers have included such prominent figures in the European radical right as Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party, and Bruno Gollnisch, the then second-in-command of Jean Marie Le Pen's immigrant-bashing French National Front.
More recently, Taylor has sounded off against all black culture, railing in a 2005 article in American Renaissance, "Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina" that "the barbaric behavior" of the city's black population after the hurricane revealed a key truth: "Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization —any kind of civilization — disappears."
Kincaid has long sought to mainstream Taylor. In 2011, Kincaid ludicrously claimed that "there is no evidence that American Renaissance by any objective standard is a racist organization" -- a claim he tried to walk back a few days later. Kincaid also approvingly quoted Taylor in a May article.
How does Kincaid's boss, Don Irvine, feel about Kincaid's regular invocation of a white supremacist on the AIM website? He must approve, otherwise it wouldn't be happening, right?
Richard Bartholomew catches Joel Richardson misleading about the prevalence of child brides in the Islamic world in an Aug. 16 WorldNetDaily article. Bartholomew points out that Richardson is overstating the issue, ignoring factors other than religion that drive the situation as well as the existence of age-of-consent laws in Muslim countries, and misleadingly boils down the issue to Muslims "simply emulating the behaviour of Muhammad in his marriage to Aisha."
Bartholomew adds, "What a shame that Richardson appears to put less energy into providing truthful witness than he does into trying to discern signs of the coming Muslim Anti-Christ."
NEW ARTICLE: A Cog In The MRC's Anti-Gay Outrage Machine Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Hadro's job at the Media Research Center involves getting upset every time a gay person appears on CNN. Read more >>
WND Falsely Suggests Obama Stealing From Your Smartphone Topic: WorldNetDaily
An Aug. 24 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh carries the headline, "Is your smartphone donating to Obama's campaign?"
The implication, of course, is that Obama is stealing money from you through your smartphone -- a shocking allegation if it were in any way true.
Needless to say, it's not. Not even Unruh accuses Obama of theft. Rather, it's about potential scams perpetrated by gaining access to personal information stored in smartphones. Unruh's only mention Obama doesn't come until the 17th paragraph of his article, and it's limited to noting that "Barack Obama’s campaign already uses a campaign app to identify registered Democrats by first name, last initial and age."
Once again, WND has stuck a highly misleading, potentially libelous headline on an article that doesn't support the allegation being made.
MRC Spending $300,000 Preaching To the Choir At RNC Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is dropping some serious coin to promote its anti-media message at the Republican National Convention. From an Aug. 27 CNSNews.com article by Pete Winn:
From now until Sept. 2, the media watchdog group, which is the parent organization of CNSNews.com, has rented three 14 ft- by-48 ft. billboards along Route 60 -- the primary road running from the Tampa airport to the convention site, the Tampa Bay Times Forum.
In addition to the billboards, a plane will fly a 40 ft.-by-80 ft. aerial banner around the city, weather-permitting, and a mobile billboard truck with the same slogan will drive around the Tampa area displaying the slogan.
High-powered projectors will also shine night-time projections with the message onto buildings surrounding the downtown convention site. And "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" buttons, bumper stickers and signs will all be handed out around the outside of the convention hall, according to MRC Marketing Director Ed Molchany.
The $300,000 Tampa campaign is part of an overall $5 million “Tell the Truth 2012” campaign that MRC President L. Brent Bozell III announced in January, during the New Hampshire primary.
Does the fact that the Media Research Center has to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get its message out to a highly targeted audience that should theoretically already be receptive to it indicate the weakness of that message? If the MRC thinks so, it certainly won't say so in public.
Winn's boss, Brent Bozell, is quoted as making this curiously worded statement:
“Our goal is not--and I underscore this--our goal is not to do what they do, which is to attempt to elect or defeat a candidate," said Bozell. "We want a level playing field. We want the rules to apply to both sides. If you are going to have hard-hitting investigative reporting on one side, perfect. Then have hard-hitting investigative reporting on the other.”
Bozell has to say that the MRC's efforts are not intended "to attempt to elect or defeat a candidate" -- the MRC would be violating its 501(c)3 nonprofit status if Bozell wasn't tossing out that disclaimer and keeping up the pretense that it's not an arm of the Republican Party and the Romney campaign.
However, Bozell is simply lying when he says that "we want the rules to apply to both sides." The MRC has never applied the same rules to, say, Fox News that it applies to the "liberal media." And the MRC's "Tell the Truth!" campaign is hostile to media outlets that tell the truth about conservatives.
Matt Philbin uses an Aug. 27 Media Research Center Culture & Media Institute 
