CNSNews.com does a reversal of its recent attempts to portray late-night comics' jokes as "news" with an Aug. 8 article by Michael W. Chapman that attacks a joke CNS does not approve of.
Chapman uses the article to complain about Conan O'Brien doing a gay-priest joke, giving the Catholic League's William Donohue free rein to attack it. Chapman, however, fails to mention one significant conflict of interest: his boss, Brent Bozell, is on the Catholic League's board of advisers.
After uncritically repeating Donohue blaming the Catholic Church's child sex scandals on "gay priests," Chapman writes:
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and deacons, 1950-2002, found that 81% of the victims were male, and 78.2% of the victims were ages 11-17. (Specifically, 50.9% of victims were age 11-14 and 27.3% were age 15-17.
But Chapman fails to report that the John Jay researchers have warned against using their report to link homosexuality and pedophilia as Donohue was doing:
"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse."
A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls -- a ratio found to be about 80-20.
"It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior," Terry said. "Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity." Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.
Of course, reporting that truth conflicts with the MRC's anti-gay agenda.
WND: Real Americans Didn't Vote For Obama Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems WorldNetDaily still can't get over the fact that President Obama won re-election. But it seems to have moved on from portraying it as a harbinger of the apocolypse to merely denigrating anyone who voted for him.
An Aug. 2 WND article promoting WND writer Jerome Corsi's book "What Went Wrong" portrays those who voted for Obama is not real Americans, starting with the headline "How Obama won with demographics, not Americans":
When Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election many in mainstream America wondered just what was going on with their friends and neighbors – who must have voted for the left-leaning agenda-driven Democrat.
Now some answers are coming out, amidst the release of “What Went Wrong: The Inside Story of the GOP Debacle of 2012… and How it Can Avoided Next Time,” a ring-side seat to an election many pundits thought was an easy victory for Republican Mitt Romney.
[...]
For example, instead of assembling a campaign and agenda that would appeal to all Americans, Corsi notes, Obama put together a package that capitalized on identity politics, appealing to African-Americans who overwhelmingly picked Obama, Hispanics who chosen the incumbent 71 percent to 27 percent, union workers, unmarried women and the lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender crowds.
Last time we checked, however, blacks, Hispanics, union workers, unmarried women and "the lesbian, homosexual, bisexual and transgender crowds" were all Americans.
WND also makes clear that Corsi is a highly biased reporter:
Corsi’s work recalls Phyllis Schlafly’s warning decades ago that establishment Republican candidates – like Romney in 2012 and Sen. John McCain in 2008 – are destined to lose.
The reason? “Centrist” Republican presidential candidates offer voters nothing more than an “echo” of their liberal Democratic opponents, not the “choice” voters want – the choice that exists only when conservative Republican presidential candidates run hard-fought contests on conservative principles, directly challenging leftist presidential contenders like Barack Obama.
Democrats in swing states have transformed vote fraud and abuse into an ongoing process in a never-ending political campaign that can be challenged only by the passage of vigorous voter ID programs.
In fact, voter fraud does not exist to any meaningful extent and is already illegal, and Corsi's support for "vigorous voter ID programs" demonstrate that Republican and conservative support for such laws is rooted in voter suppression, not protecting voting integrity.
Bozell Almost Admits Conservative Papers Don't Make Money Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell writes in his Aug. 9 column of the Washington Post's sale to Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos:
Obviously, many expect (or just hope and pray) that Bezos can find a way to make newspapers profitable again. That might explain why the Post Company's stock jumped almost $25 a share. But if Bezos can't manage that, he'll get credit as a pro-journalism philanthropist. After all, the other Washington newspapers, the Times and more recently the Examiner, have been labors of love, not money.
That may be the closest Bozell has come to admitting that conservative newspapers don't make money. But notice a key omission: Bozell never describes the Times and Examiner as conservative.
Which makes Bozell's suggestion that the Post was losing money because it's a part of the dreaded "liberal media" utterly disingenous. Unlike the Post, which was profitable until the digital revolution and overall newspaper industry downturn, the Times and Examiner have never made money. So by Bozell's reasoning, doesn't that mean those papers' conservative message is responsible for them being money pits?
Of course, it doesn't work that way in Bozell's world -- anything that goes wrong in the "liberal media" is always the fault of ideology, even when there are more obvious and logical explanations.
Bob Unruh does a fine job of stenography in an Aug. 7 WorldNetDaily article:
House Republicans suspect election officials joined with the Internal Revenue Service in a strategy that curbed the effectiveness of conservative organizations in the 2012 election.
The allegations were revealed in a letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Report, which has been holding hearings and seeking evidence about the extent of the IRS targeting of conservative and Christian organizations.
[...]
It cites as an example a Feb. 3, 2009, email from William Powers, an FEC official in the Office of the General Counsel, to Lois Lerner, then-director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, seeking information about the American Issues Project and the American Future Fund.
Powers asked about the status of the groups’ applications for tax-exempt status and the IRS review process. He referenced prior conversations with Lerner regarding American Future Fund.
Since Uhruh is serving as a right-wing stenography, you won't learn that the IRS has denied that any confidential information was exchanged or -- more importantly -- House Republicans have provided no evidence of confidential information being exchanged.
And Unruh is certainly not going to tell you that he's offering nothing but a suggestion of wrongdoing from selectively leaked emails from partisan sources that don't actually establish any malfeasance.
Newsmax Keeps the Peter King Presidential Boomlet Going Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax is doing its best to try and keep its manufactured Peter King presidential boomlet alive by highlighting his opinions on the news of the day. Some headlines from the past few days:
And, apparently making sure it's not putting all of its eggs in one basket, Newsmax does a shout-out to a benificiary of a previous manufactured presidential boomlet:
NEW ARTICLE: Going Out In A Blaze of Bias Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSnews.com's Fred Lucas is taking his talents for biased and misleading reporting to Glenn Beck's The Blaze. Read more >>
WND's Resident Limbaugh Sycophant Cranks Out More Stenography Topic: WorldNetDaily
Rush Limbaugh sycophant and stenographer Joe Kovacs captured the latest pearls of wisdom from Limbaugh's mouth for an Aug. 7 WorldNetDaily article:
Radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh says American newspapers are dying not because of a flawed business model or the influence of the Internet, but for one reason left-leaning journalists don’t wish to admit.
“When are you people gonna realize it is your content that’s being rejected? It’s your content that is your problem as much as anything else,” Limbaugh said Wednesday on his top-rated program.
“You’ve got shrinking circulation, shrinking ad pages, shrinking ad revenue, and you wonder why your readers don’t even patronize your sponsors – and you don’t even think to look at the number one reason why people would open a newspaper, and that’s what’s in it! The content.”
Since Kovacs is a stenographer, he's certainly not going to challenge Limbaugh's claims. Kovacs won't tell you that the country's major conservative papers have always lost money and would be out of business if they were subject to a free market instead of propped up by right-wing billionaires.
Kovacs' Limbaugh sycophancy is so complete, he dutifully and uncritically transcribes Limbaugh's boasting about how own show's revenue:
Regarding the economics of the news media, Limbaugh said while newspapers across the nation are dying, his radio program is soaring.
“We’re not losing money here at EIB (the Excellence in Broadcasting Network). We’re thriving,” he said. “We are continuing to grow. We use the same business model.”
Needless to say, Kovacs made no mention of a major radio station owner planning to dump Limbaugh's show from dozens of its stations in part because of decreased revenue it has experienced in the wake of Limbaugh's tirade of misogyny against Sandra Fluke.
WND Is Tweeting Race-Baiting's Greatest Hits Topic: WorldNetDaily
Yesterday, we noted that WorldNetDaily tweeted out a link to an race-baiting article that was published more than a year ago. WND's trip down race-baiting's memory lane continues with today's Twitter flashback:
This story is slightly newer than yesterday's -- it's an article by WND's resident race-baiter Colin Flaherty originally published last October. So there's that.
As it just so happens, WND is publishing an updated edition of Flaherty's self-published race-baiting tome "White Girl Bleed A Lot."
Newsmax Hides Otto Reich's Link to Newsmax Topic: Newsmax
Andrea Billups writes in an Aug. 2 Newsmax article:
A former U.S. ambassador has sued three Venezuelan executives, accusing them of racketeering, bribing authorities for energy contracts, and defamation.
The 48-page lawsuit on behalf of Otto Reich, who was Venezuelan ambassador under President George H. W. Bush, was filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday. The suit claims the men paid kickbacks to government employees in Venezuela in exchange for lucrative contracts for power plant construction.
But as you go deeper in the article, the lawsuit is really all about Reich complaining that the people he's suing cost his consulting firm business by allegedly spreading rumors about who he was working with.
In other words, it's a pretty arcane lawsuit. Why should we care? Billups does a lot of resume citation to try and make us care:
Reich, 67, who served as ambassador from 1986-1989, and later assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs under President George W. Bush, now heads his own Washington, D.C., consulting firm, Otto Reich & Associates (ORA).
[...]
Reich, who served a year as a temporary assistant secretary of state, resigned from the Bush administration in 2004. He has been described in media accounts as a rock star in Latin America where he hosted a Spanish-language version of CNN's popular "Crossfire" program. He also served as a foreign policy adviser to presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.
But Billups overlooks a few things. As we've detailed, Reich ran a pro-contra propaganda operation during the 1980s with the American public being the target of said propaganda -- U.S. government agents targeting Americans with propaganda is generally frowned upon. Reich was also a champion for a convicted terrorist, Orlando Bosch, being allowed to enter the U.S.
For all of Billups' touting of Reich's resume, though, she fails to report the one thing that likely explains why this story exists in the first place: Reich is on the advisory board of LIGNET, a "global intelligence and forecasting" service operated by ... Newsmax.
This is nothing more than in-house promotion disguised as "news."
WND's Silly Attack on Fort Hood Shooter Topic: WorldNetDaily
Chelsea Schilling's Aug. 5 WorldNetDaily attack on Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan is rather desperate and silly, starting with the headline "The pampered, good life of Fort Hood shooter":
Nearly four years after Islamist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allahu akbar!” (“Allah is greater!”) and brutally murdered 14 people (including an unborn baby) and injured 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas, he now receives free helicopter rides from the local jail nearly every day, lives in a private room built to accommodate his medical needs, wears a beard against Army regulations, travels with his own security detail, has received numerous trial delays and collects a full salary of about $80,000 a year – all while many of his victims say they’ve been forgotten.
Yes, we know Hasan's a horrible person who likely deserves the death penalty he will likely get for the shootings, but come on. Being a paraplegic (which Schilling mentions nowhere in her article) in prison is hardly anybody's idea of a "pampered, good life."
Despite Schilling portraying Hasan's "free helicopter rides" as some kind of fun perk the Army hands out to people who commit massacres, it's actually part of the security measures being undertaken for Hasan's trial. Certainly Schilling wants Hasan to survive his trial so he can be properly executed, right?
And Hasan has continued to receive his salary because it's military procedure, not because it's giving Hasan special treatment (some are trying to change this policy). It's not like he can go anywhere to spend it, anyway.
But Schilling is not done complaining yet:
Hasan, 42, is facing 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder at his trial begins Tuesday. The New York Times reported the Army has spent more than $5 million on Hasan’s case and secured the courthouse with massive sand-packed barriers to protect him from explosions.
The Army has paid for Hasan’s military defense lawyers, paralegals and experts for his defense. Hasan also enjoys a heavily guarded trailer near the courthouse. The court-martial is expected to last at least a month.
No other inmate at the Bell County jail is treated the same way.
Perhaps because other inmate at the Bell County jail (allegedly) killed 14 people and needs that level of security.
It seems that Schilling -- who has a long trail of error at WND -- didn't think about such things before writing this article.
Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Brent Bozell Topic: Media Research Center
One wonders how Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell can keep a straight face in his appearances when he's being so obviously disingenuous and hypocritical.
In his weekly appearance on Sean Hannity's Fox News show, Bozell ranted:
BOZELL: I said today to Cruz, Lee, and Rubio, this morning as a matter of fact, I told them that when you are attacked this viciously and this personally, it means you're doing something right. Because, and this is not liberalism anymore, Sean. This is radicalism. I'm not going to call them liberals any more. Because there's a certain decency in liberalism that doesn't exist with these radicals.
And to hear Chris Matthews six times call United States Senators “haters”! And this is the man who then turns around and says that he wished he could put a CO2 pellet in Rush Limbaugh's head and watch it explode! He comes from a network where people have wished for the death of Dick Cheney! And he's going to call conservatives haters?
That's right -- the man who called President Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead" and who was too cowardly to offer any meaningful criticism of Rush Limbaugh's tirade of misogyny against Sandra Fluke (and who employs people that heartily endorsed Limbaugh's slut-shaming) is offended that Chris Matthews said something mean about a conservative.
In another Fox News appearance, Bozell agreed with Fox host Neil Cavuto that new Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos should "try a little editorial balance. ... Last time I checked, that has not hurt Fox News, or the Wall Street Journal, or even USA Today."
Bozell did not call attention to certain facts that disproved Cavuto's assertions -- namely, that he was being interviewed by a conservative-leaning Fox host that featured no liberal counterbalance.
In fact, we can't remember the last time Bozell or anyone else from the MRC did anything other than a solo interview on Fox. Nor can we remember when Fox has ever had on anyone from the MRC's liberal counterpart, Media Matters (disclosure: my employer).
If Bozell and Fox News are so committed to journalistic balance, we have a challenge. How about letting, say, Eric Boehlert appear along with him in his next Hannity spot? Waddaya say, Brent? Are you up for it, or are you a coward?
MRC's Matt Philbin Smears Michelle Obama Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Philbin, the managing editor of the Media Research Center's Culture & Media Institute, is unusually sleazy for a right-wing activist -- you might remember him, for example, sliming Sandra Fluke as a "horizontal laborer" and a "Lincoln Tunnel Hitcher."
Well, he's at it again. In an Aug. 6 tweet, Philbin made a thinly veiled attack on both Michelle Obama's looks and her healthy-eating efforts, writing, "Michelle's gonna fight obesity thru hip-hop -- a music who's arguably most famous lyric is "I like big butts."
We'd complain about how Philbin continuees to hold a job at the MRC, but it appears being a jerk is a mandatory job function -- after all, his boss has called President Obama a "skinny ghetto crackhead."
WND's Loudon Lies About Margaret Sanger, Wishes Obama An Unhappy Birthday Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah readily concedes that his website knowingly publishes misinformation. Perhaps that explains Gina Loudon's Aug. 4 WND column.
it's a long screed about how she wishes that President Obama has a miserable birthday -- "I guess your day will be rather dark, like a lot of children’s birthdays around the U.S. for your policies of demise and death" -- and is chock full of misleading, if not entirely false, claims. Like this:
You blew out the lights on all babies. Around 5.6 million American babies have been aborted since you took office and will never blow out the candles on their own birthday cakes. Mr. Obama, you know around half of those aborted are female, yet you keynoted the Planned Parenthood gala this year. You gladly accepted an award in the name of the known eugenicist, Margaret Sanger, whose entire goal in founding Planned Parenthood was to “eradicate the black race.” You see more than $1 million per day of taxpayer money going to pay for killing those baby girls, Mr. President. Your war on baby women has dimmed the cake by about another 2.8 million little female lights.
We have not been able to find any evidence that Sanger said that her goal in founding Planned Parenthood was to "eradicate the black race." The only people who have used that quoted term are right-wing anti-Planned Parenthood activists.
What Loudon may be referring to is the "Negro Project," an effort by Sanger to bring family-planning clinics to the deep South. FactCheck.org reports that anti-abortion activists love to take a certin Sanger quote -- "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" -- out of context:
Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to gain the trust of the community:
Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose, that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim.”
[...]
The project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”
Perhaps Obama might have a better birthday if people like Loudon weren't spreading malicious lies.
Newsmax Fawns Over Discredited D'Souza Topic: Newsmax
A July 31 Newsmax article by Andrea Billups is little more than a press release promoting the new film Dinesh D'Souza is making.
Billips touts how D'Souza's previous film, "2016: Obama's America," was "the second-highest-grossing political documentary in history" and "used arguments made in his bestselling 2010 book 'The Roots of Obama's Rage' to argue that Obama had deep-seated anger against the country he leads, a feeling that he absorbed from his father, a Kenyan who resented British colonialism."
But Billips is careful not to mention the fact that D'Souza's highbrow birtherism was discredited upon his book's release, which made his film equally discredited, regardless of how well it did at the box office.
Since Billips endeavored to include no negative information about D'Souza in her article, there's also no mention of D'Souza being ousted as president of a Christian college after 1) spending way too much time making his anti-Obama film, and 2) claiming to be engaged to his mistress while still married to his wife.
Billips does, however, tell us how much D'Souza wants to make his upcoming film the most popular documentary ever, ahead of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," because "We have to dethrone the fat guy. It's too embarrassing to be right behind him."
CNSNews.com does a reversal of its recent attempts to portray late-night comics' jokes as "news" with an Aug. 8 article by Michael W. Chapman that attacks a joke CNS does not approve of.
It seems WorldNetDaily still can't get over the fact that President Obama won re-election. But it seems to have moved on from portraying it as a 
Brent Bozell writes in his Aug. 9 
Bob Unruh does a fine job of stenography in an Aug. 7 WorldNetDaily 
Newsmax is doing its best to try and keep its 
Rush Limbaugh sycophant and stenographer 
Andrea Billups writes in an Aug. 2 Newsmax 
Chelsea Schilling's Aug. 5 WorldNetDaily 
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah 
A July 31 Newsmax 
