Newsmax Tries To Attack Roger Ailes Bio Topic: Newsmax
Just because Newsmax has been broadly covering the Chris Christie bridge scandal doesn't mean it has abandoned its conservative agenda. As with the Media Research Center, that agenda is all that's needed to attack Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Fox News' Roger Ailes.
A Jan. 15 Newsmax article by David Patten highlights how "liberal media critic" Michael Wolff has criticized Sherman's book. Patten notes that "Wolff is no friend of Ailes, Fox News or its parent company, News Corp. Wolff wrote his own controversial book attacking Fox's founder Rupert Murdoch." But he fails tomake the more likely connection that it's a competing book, not media analysis, that's making Wolff criticize Sherman's book.
Patten also makes this odd complaint about Sherman:
Sherman insisted fact-checkers carefully reviewed his work prior to publication and said that repeated requests to interview Ailes were declined.
But Sherman never bothered to contact Fox's press department to share his myriad number of allegations against Ailes for "fact checking" and Ailes rebuttal, a standard journalistic practice.
If Fox wouldn't make Ailes available to Sherman, why would they acknowledge his book by permitting him to fact-check it? Yet Patten identifies no fact in the book that anyone at Fox News has substantively contradicted.
WND's Rush Adds Lies To His Obama Derangement Topic: WorldNetDaily
Erik Rush tells a whopper in his Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily column:
This week it was reported that Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett gave the “stand down” order during the Sept. 11 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of four Americans. This would in the very least convict President Obama of negligence in delegating such responsibility to an unelected, inexperienced subordinate, as well as explaining “all of the serial lies and the cover-ups and the obfuscation and all of the efforts that were made to distract people’s attention from this,” as characterized by talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.
In fact, the complete opposite was reported: Both the House Benghazi transcripts and the Senate bipartisan report found that no stand-down order was given, by Jarrett or anybody else. Rush is simply lying.
But when has the truth ever stood in the way of Rush's Obama derangement? (Remember, he thinks Malcolm X is Obama's father.) Rush blithely continues on to advocate a military coup:
There is the possibility that certain military personnel might lend their support to an effort by Congress to remove the president through methods other than impeachment, although this is less likely than it otherwise might have been given the widespread purge that has taken place within the military.
CNS Still Falsely Implying That Government Money Pays For Abortions At Planned Parenthood Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com has long cranked out highlybiased reporting that smears Planned Parenthood. One of its favorite tricks is to falsely imply that federal money pays for abortions there.
CNS performs that dishonest trick again in a Jan. 14 article by Barbara Boland:
Planned Parenthood’s net revenue increased 5% to total of $1.21 billion in its organizational fiscal year ending on June 30, 2013, according to its new Annual Report 2012-2013, and about 45% of that revenue--$540.6 million--was provided by taxpayer-funded government health services grants.
In the same report, Planned Parenthood said that in the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2012 it did 327,166 abortions.
Nowhere does Boland feels the need to mention that no federal money pays for abortions at Planned Parenthood because it's prohibited under the Hyde Amendment, and she makes no effort to prove that any non-federal government money does. Instead, she allows the juxtaposition to imply something she can't prove.
That's sloppy and slanted reporting. But that's how CNS rolls.
Who Is Jerome Corsi's Mysterious Benghazi Witness? Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi introduced a new source in a Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily article:
An eyewitness to the attack at the main U.S. compound in Benghazi interviewed exclusively by WND from Libya via Skype confirmed the report released Wednesday by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that concluded the Obama administration misled the American public by maintaining the incident was not related to terrorism.
Speaking from Libya, Ahmed Salem, a young political activist opposed to radical Islamic terrorism who witnessed the Benghazi attack, told WND that al-Qaida and other radical Islamic militia groups, including some from Egypt, launched a pre-planned, well-organized, heavily armed attack on the U.S. compound.
Corsi tells us nothing further about Salem than the above. He does not explain how he became acquainted with Salem enough to Skype with him, and no picture of Salem is included in Corsi's article.
Curiously, a Google search for "Ahmed Salem Benghazi" uncovers no other reference to Salem being a witness to the Benghazi attack other than Corsi's article -- odd, since one would think that given how politicized right-wingers like Corsi have made the attack, Salem's story would have surfaced long before now.
That search, however, uncovers something else -- a November 2013 article in a magazine called the Libya Herald stating that a Libyan Special Forces officer in Benghazi named Ahmed Hamouda Salem was killed while manning a checkpoint.
Is Corsi's Benghazi source assuming the identity of a dead man? We have no idea. But given Corsi's history of substandard, vengeful reporting -- from going to Kenya to retrieve fake documents to pushing a story about Obama's wedding ring that was so false that Corsi's birther buddies were compelled to shoot it down -- there's no reason to take anything Corsi writes at face value.
Corsi is such a rabid Obama-hater, and he's put his agenda before the truth too many times, that he simply can't be trusted.
ABC Family’s controversial lesbian drama “The Fosters” returns from a hiatus tonight, Jan. 13, with its two women stars in bed, kissing. In Hollywood, that’s subtle pro-gay messaging.
The New York Times welcomed the show’s return with an interview with the creators in the Jan. 12 arts section. Apparently the show’s openly gay creators have been getting complaints from their gay audience about there not being enough sex scenes in the show.
[...]
The Times neglected to mention that this “family drama” was created by two gay men, Bradley Bredeweg and Peter Paige, who were also the creators and writers for the vulgar gay drama “Queer as Folk.” Bredeweg also recently joined the board for “Raise a Child,” an advocacy group that promotes same-sex foster couples, according to The Huffington Post.
Times critic Mike Hale called “The Fosters” the “most realistic” portrayal of same-sex couples on television. In an interview with The Times, Bredeweg and Paige admitted they sometimes get advice on how to convincingly portray a lesbian couple from their executive producer Joanna Johnson, who is a lesbian.
And because gays must somehow be tied to President Obama, Marsh obliges:
The show’s creators are well-connected in Washington. In a June 2012 interview with gay entertainment website, The Backlot, Paige revealed that the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center he works for “received a $13 million dollar grant from the Obama Administration to develop the first ever LGBT foster protocol, to protect gay and lesbian kids in foster care.” A search on Open Secrets revealed that the group similarly gave more than $36K, collectively, to Barack Obama’s campaign and Democrats in 2012.
Marsh concludes by lamenting, "'The Fosters' is only the latest broadcast TV show to depict 'The New Normal' of gay couples on TV that has become commonplace." Marsh, along with her fellow MRC employees, apparently prefer the "old normal," when gays could be discriminated against with impunity.
WND's Farah Dishonestly Washes His Hands of Cruz's Eligibility Topic: WorldNetDaily
So much dishonesty in Joseph Farah's Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily column. Let's start with this:
I have been labeled by the Big Media as “the birther king.”
I have been systematically blacklisted by all cable news networks for raising the issue of Obama’s eligibility and trying to discuss it rationally and openly.
False. Farah has never been interested in discussing Obama's eligibility "rationally and openly."
If he was, his website would have reported that all the major birther conspiracies have been discredited.
If he was, his website wouldn't have spent so much time trying to fluff Joe Arpaio and get a seat on his Cold Case Posse to ensure that the so-called investigation would be shoddy and biased.
In fact, Farah's actions over the past five years have been all about ensuring that birther conspiracies wouldn't be discussed rationally and openly.
Farah continues:
Having never scrutinized the basic facts still surrounding Obama’s questionable case for eligibility, the news media are already in a feeding frenzy over the potential eligibility of conservative Republican Ted Cruz, who has not even announced his intentions about running for president in 2016 or thereafter.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is transparent now: It was never a matter of what the Constitution said for the news media. It was never a matter of the established facts of Obama’s parentage and birth. It was all about protecting Obama.
We will presume that by making this statement, Farah is admitting the opposite -- that his birther crusade was all about destroying Obama, not about the truth.
Farah makes that even more clear by writing the following:
So if anyone has the right and the duty to weigh in on Ted Cruz’s eligibility, it’s me – even though no one is asking.
My answer is, “I don’t care.”
I don’t care because the Constitution was not written and ratified to be applied to some and not others. If no one cared about Obama’s questionable eligibility, despite his shocking lack of transparency and thin paper trail, then they have no business questioning Ted Cruz – who has released his birth certificate, renounced his Canadian citizenship and upheld every provision of the Constitution to the best of his ability throughout his life.
For the record, I would have preferred if the issue of natural born citizenship were openly debated and discussed before Obama assumed office and began his all-out jihad on the Constitution. I would have preferred if my colleagues in the news media had taken seriously their responsibility to be watchdogs on government and hold all politicians accountable to the rule of law. I would have preferred if the motivations of those of us seeking the truth about Obama’s eligibility status and life story had never been impugned.
But now that’s all water under the bridge.
Our country is in shambles.
“The new birthers” got their way.
For better or worse, they set the standard of eligibility by precedent.
They can’t have it both ways – revising the standard up when they don’t like the candidate and down when they do.
Actually, it's Farah who's trying to have it both ways. He raised a stink for five years about Obama's purported non-eligibilty, all the while censoring any research proving otherwise. He has never proven his main conceit, that Obama was not born in the U.S. -- the one thing that might make Obama ineligible for the presidency -- and whines that he's been blackballed for putting conspiracy theory ahead of facts.
Now that Farah has a potential candidate who aligns much closer to his right-wing ideology than Obama does, but is by his own definition arguably ineligible to be president becuase he, unlike Obama, was not born in the United States, Farah is taking his ball and going home. He won't be sending Jerome Corsi to Canada to wave around fake documents, nor will Aaron Klein be devoting a WND-published book to Cruz's radical associations.
WND haslongrefused to get involved in the issue of Cruz's eligibility like it did Obama's, which only proves the hollow, dishonest partisan intent of the whole enterprise.
Farah doesn't give a damn about the Constitution. All he was ever interested in was bashing Obama by turning the birther issue into Obama's Vince Foster. Farah should stop lying to the public by pretending otherwise.
Seventy-four percent of the U.S. military personnel who have given their lives serving in the Afghan War died after Feb. 17, 2009, when President Barack Obama announced his first increase in the number of U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, according to CNSNews.com’s database of U.S. casualties in the war.
In the more than twelve years that have passed since U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan with the aim of removing al Qaeda from its sanctuary there, 2,162 U.S. service personnel have given their lives in and around Afghanistan in support of U.S. military activities in that country.
As has been typical of CNS' Afghan body-count obsession, there's no mention of the far higher U.S. troop death toll in Iraq, the vast majority of which occurred under President Bush. Meyer doesn't explain why she's ignoring the Iraq death toll.
WND's Unruh Promotes Dishonest MRC Christie Coverage Study Topic: WorldNetDaily
You can count on WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh to uncritically forward right-wing talking points without bothering to check them for accuracy, and he serves up another slice of lazy reporting in a Jan. 13 WND article:
The Media Research Center reported late last week just after the news broke that aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a presumptive front-runner for the 2016 GOP nomination for president, apparently were involved in a traffic scandal, there had been 17 times more coverage on that issue than in the last half year over the IRS misbehavior.
The organization reported that the story broke Wednesday and accused the governor’s aides of punishing a mayor with a huge traffic jam after he refused to endorse Christie.
Within 24 hours, ABC, CBS and NBC flooded the airwaves with 34 minutes and 28 seconds on the topic.
MRC reported that since July 1, the networks allowed 2:08, that’s two minutes and eight seconds, coverage of the IRS scandal.
As we've documented, the MRC coverage study relies on a dishonest apples-and-oranges comparison -- the breaking news of the Christie scandal vs. a story that broke two months before the MRC started counting. Also, the lack of coverage also meant that the networks ignored news that the scandal was overblown.
Unruh mentioned none of that, of course -- it's not his job to tell the whole story, just the part that advances the political agenda of his employer, no matter how dishonest it is.
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Gleefully Pushing A Scandal Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham's Jan. 9 NewsBusters post carried the headline "WashPost Gleefully Pushes Scandal as Christie's 2016 Doom: 'Bridge Scandal Engulfing Christie'." Graham huffs that the post is "leaping all over Gov. Chris Christie," adding, "The partisan Post is on fire today."
Graham's complains might be taken a little more seriously were they not immediately preceded on NewsBusters by a post by Matthew Balan gleefully pushing a different so-called scandal by leaping all over President Obama:
ABC, CBS, and NBC ballyhooed former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's attacks on President Obama and other high government officials on their Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning newscasts. NBC's Brian Williams and CBS's Norah O'Donnell also trumpeted the former Cabinet official's "devastating critique" of the President in his upcoming memoir.
The partisan MRC is on fire. Too bad Graham doesn't see the irony.
WND Loves Allen West's Race-Baiting of Obama Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh writes lovingly of Allen West's race-baiting attack on President Obama in a Jan. 14 WorldNetDaily article:
War hero and former Republican congressman Allen West is asking how long it will take for “you people” – white Americans – to realize that their president “abjectly despises” them.
In a commentary posted Tuesday on his website, West, who represented Florida in Congress after an extended career in the U.S. military, confronted the issue of racism.
[...]
He said Obama’s and Holder’s advocacy for leniency for those who cause trouble essentially makes them racist.
“This is my clear and succinct message to white Americans. How long will it be before ‘you people’ realize you have elevated someone to the office of president who abjectly despises you – not to mention his henchman Holder. Combined they are the most vile and disgusting racists – not you,” he wrote.
The commentary was prompted by Holder’s recent demand that schools “rethink ‘zero tolerance’ disciplinary policies” because they “disproportionately punish minorities.”
A Hill report on the issue said “alarming numbers of young people are suspended, expelled or even arrested for relatively minor transgressions like school uniform violations, schoolyard fights or showing ‘disrespect’ by laughing in class, Holder said during a speech.”
West said the accompanying new federal guidance from the departments of Justice and Education “encouraging (i.e. threatening) schools to adopt disciplinary policies that are ‘fair, nondiscriminatory, and effective’” is a threat from the Department of Justice.
Unruh says nothing about the racist language West is using, or why he deserves special dispensation for saying such things because he is a black conservative.
CNS' Vespa Tries to Distract From Christie Scandal Topic: CNSNews.com
Matt Vespa was on Chris Christie defense patrol at CNSNews.com, desperately trying to distract from BridgeGate.
Vespa wrote a Jan. 10 blog post headlined "Five Reports of Political Bullying that DON'T Involve Chris Christie," adding the standard right-wing equivocation:"Christie's administration may have caused some traffic problems, but he fired the ones allegedly responsible for the act. Obama did nothing after the IRS fiasco was unearthed."
Vespa followed that with a rehashing of a 14-year-old story of how Al Gore's presidential campaign allegedly caused a traffic jam to hinder voting for his primary opponent. Vespa laughably begins his post by stating, "This isn't meant to excuse what happened on the George Washington Bridge."
Yeah, whatever you say, Matt. But it sure looks like you'd rather talk about anything else but that.
No, You Didn't Read It At WND First Topic: WorldNetDaily
The latest in WorldNetDaily's series of "You Read It Here First" front-page graphics touts Jerome Corsi's Dec. 30 story on Salem Communications' purchase of the company that owns Regnery Publishing and other conservative-orientated operations, paired with a Jan. 13 Yahoo article.
There's just one thing wrong here: It's a lie. As we documented, Corsi's "WND Exclusive" appeared more than two weeks after Buzzfeed reported Salem's purchase on Dec. 13.
So, no, you didn't read that story at WND first. And don't expect WND to whip up an honest graphic stating, "You Read It Here Two Weeks Later."
NewsBusters Promoted Blog Reportedly Created By Fox News Chief Topic: NewsBusters
Media Matters details how, according to Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Roger Ailes, the Fox News chief was behind the creation of an anonymous blog called The Cable Game for the purpose of promoting Fox News and trashing its rivals, and tapped Fox contributor Jim Pinkerton to serve as a ghostwriter for it.
NewsBusters took Ailes' bait. A search of NewsBusters' archive shows that it cited the now-defunct blog in four items:
A 2011 post by Tim Graham repeating the blog's claim that MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell likes to wear pricey cloths.
A 2008 post by Mark Finkelstein quoting Pinkerton himself citing the blog on Fox News.
A 2007 post hat-tipping the blog for promoting a claim that Fox News had the most balanced election coverage.
A 2006 post by Matthew Sheffield telling readers to watch the blog for updates on the resignation of an MSNBC president.
Further, as the archived version of the website shows, NewsBusters was on The Cable Game's blogroll.
Will NewsBusters tell its readers that it publicized a blog secretly created by the head of a cable news channel to trash his competition? Don't count on it.
WND Promotes Birther's Dubious Israel Prophecy Book Topic: WorldNetDaily
Last year, WorldNetDaily published a book by Carl Gallups -- a rabid birther who also posts under the name PP Simmons -- claiming that an Israeli rabbi wrote a "cryptic note" before his death that Jesus is the Messiah. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is also looped into this, as a Jan. 13 WND article promoting a Gallups radio appearance notes:
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has finally died, and now the prophetic significance of his passing will be the broadcast across America and the world tonight.
Pastor and author Carl Gallups will be on the popular radio program “Coast to Coast AM” late Monday night and early Tuesday morning to discuss the astonishing Sharon factor in his revelatory new book “The Rabbi Who Found Messiah: The Story of Yitzhak Kaduri and His Prophecies of The Endtime.”
[...]
When Sharon still was in office, vibrant and in command of his faculties, a venerated rabbi predicted the Messiah would not come until after Sharon’s death.
Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri died shortly after the stroke Sharon suffered put him in a coma in 2006. But before the beloved Kaduri died, he wrote a cryptic note in which he named the Messiah with whom he claimed to have had a mystical encounter. On the 108-year-old rabbi’s instructions, the note would be released a year after his death.
The note, when posted eventually on the rabbi’s website, showed Kaduri had revealed the Messiah’s name as Yehoshua, or the formal Hebrew pronunciation of Yeshua, or Jesus.
As a result of this unusual prophetic twist and the recent release of a book and movie about the life and death of Kaduri, the death of Sharon has renewed interest in Christian and prophecy circles around the world.
WND doesn't report that Gallups is trying to fudge his prophecy as it relates to Sharon. Richard Bartholomew reports that Gallups has posted on his blog: "Kaduri ‘prophesied’ that Jesus would NOT come until Sharon died. Today, Ariel Sharon has died. Kaduri did NOT say the Messiah would come immediately but rather that the Messiah would NOT return before the death of Sharon. This Kaduri prophecy has come true. Did God use the flawed Rabbi? With this prophecy and the revealed NAME of the Messiah it does make one wonder, doesn’t it?" Bartholomew adds: "In other words, we have a remarkable confirmation that an unexpected event indeed did not occur."
Bartholomew also points out that Kaduri's prophecy was, in fact, that Sharon would be the last Israeli prime minister -- which Gallups might want to discuss with Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Given Gallups' love of discredited birther conspiracy theories, there's no reason to take his prophecy story seriously either.
CNS' Jeffrey Thinks Marriage And Children Fight Poverty Topic: CNSNews.com
Terry Jeffrey uses his Jan. 8 CNSNews.com column to portray getting married and having children a surefire formula for financial success:
Could differences in family structure contribute to differences in family income?
In 2012, households headed by females without a spouse had a median income of $30,686. Households headed by a male without a spouse had a median income of $42,358. Households with married couples had a median income of $75,535.
What about children? Could they make a difference?
Single women did better if they had no children. The median income for a female householder who had no children was $42,147 in 2012. The median income for a single woman who had one or more children 18 or younger was $25,493.
But married couples did better with children. The median income for a married couple with no children under 18 was $70,902. The median income for a married couple with one or more children under 18 was $81,455.
Indeed, married couples with at least one child under 18 earned a mean (as opposed to median) household income of $101,738 in 2012.
But according to Think Progress, marriage and children are not the panacea Jeffrey seems to think they are:
Kristi Williams, associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University, did some research and found that more than two-thirds of single mothers who married ended up divorced by the time they were 35 to 44. On top of that, marrying and then later divorcing leaves them worse off economically than if they had just stayed unmarried. And marriage promotion campaigns don’t seem to help. An evaluation of programs in eight cities found that they didn’t lead to a lasting improvement in marriage rates, relationship quality, or children’s economic wellbeing. On the other hand, they “resulted in modest decreases in fathers’ financial support and parental involvement,” she writes.
Yet even the marriages that last don’t end up offering women much of a lifeline. Firstly, Williams and her fellow researchers found that the pool of potential partners in low-income communities doesn’t offer single mothers many chances for finding stable partners with economic resources. “The new unions that single mothers form tend to have low levels of relationship quality and high rates of instability,” she writes. Meanwhile, those who do marry and stay together still don’t see a lot of pay off. “[W]e found no physical or psychological advantages for the majority of adolescents born to a single mother whose mothers later married,” she reports.
And as Slate's Matthew Yglesias details, the real reason marriage decreases poverty is shared living expenses:
Having roommates really did greatly improve my personal finances when I was in my early 20's. And the same thing happened when my wife and I moved in together. We split the Internet bill, shared one Netflix account, etc. But the greater efficiency of shared expenses isn't really what's magical about marriage, and what's magical about marriage isn't really what leads to the poverty reduction.
Nevertheless, Jeffrey rants about spending money to lift people out of poverty, claiming that "left-wing politicians will no doubt increasingly target for redistribution the wealth of married, two-parent, hard-working, diploma-earning families who cause this nation's income inequality by living exactly the sorts of lives we must live if we wish to remain free."
Just because Newsmax has been broadly covering the Chris Christie bridge scandal doesn't mean it has abandoned its conservative agenda. As with the Media Research Center, that agenda is all that's needed to attack Gabriel Sherman's new biography of Fox News' Roger Ailes.
Erik Rush tells a whopper in his Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com has long cranked out 
Jerome Corsi introduced a new source in a Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily 
It wouldn't be the Media Research Center if its writers weren't 
So much dishonesty in Joseph Farah's Jan. 15 WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com, it appears, will not stop doing Afghanistan body counts in order to attack President Obama.
You can count on WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh to uncritically forward right-wing talking points without bothering to check them for accuracy, and he serves up another slice of lazy reporting in a Jan. 13 WND 
Tim Graham's Jan. 9 NewsBusters 
Bob Unruh writes lovingly of Allen West's race-baiting attack on President Obama in a Jan. 14 WorldNetDaily 
Matt Vespa was on Chris Christie defense patrol at CNSNews.com, desperately trying to distract from BridgeGate.
The latest in WorldNetDaily's series of "You Read It Here First" front-page graphics touts Jerome Corsi's Dec. 30 
Media Matters 
Last year, WorldNetDaily published a 
Terry Jeffrey uses his Jan. 8 CNSNews.com 
