MRC's Bozell and Graham Again At War With Grammar And Perspective Topic: Media Research Center
Last week, we noted that a column by the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell and Tim Graham cited an "early childhood memory" without explaining to which of the authors the memory belonged.
Bozell and Graham do it again in their May 2 column:
Saint Mary's Institute is the Catholic grade school in my wife's New York hometown, Amsterdam. It is affiliated with Saint Mary's Catholic Church, whose pastor Rev. John Medwid pens the opening to the Saint Mary's Institute annual newsletter.
Whose wife is being referred to here? We might assume that it's Bozell's, but it was revealed in February that Graham does all the heavy lifting in writing with Bozell's contributions unclear at best.
Either Graham has forgotten he deserves credit for his ghostwriter, or he has forgotten that it's a violation of grammar to offer a first-person perspective in a column authored by more than one person.
By the way, it seems that MRC division CNSNews.com has finally settled upon a way of properly crediting Graham after weeks of botching it. But at the MRC's main site, Graham got credit for a while but recent columns carry only Bozell's byline.
WND's Unruh Lies About Detention Bill Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems that one reason Bob Unruh left the Associated Press to join WorldNetDaily in 2006 was WND didn't believe in things like reporting facts. Indeed, Unruh's WND work is littlemore than propaganda for his pet causes that dismisses or ignores entirely facts that conflict with his right-wing agenda.
We see this yet again in an April 29 WND article by Unruh:
A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” according to critics.
The high court this week refused to review an appeals court decision that said the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals.
The firm of William J. Olson, P.C., which filed a friend-of-the court brief asking the court to step in, noted that not a single justice dissented from the denial of the request for review.
“The court ducked, having no appetite to confront both political parties in order to protect the citizens from military detention,” the legal team said in a statement to WND. “The government has won, creating a tragic moment for the people – and what will someday be viewed as an embarrassment for the court.”
WND reported when the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act were adopted and later challenged in court.
The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to “represent an enduring security threat to the United States.”
But Unruh is just regurgitating lies that even his fellow right-wingers have debunked. The conservative Washington Times wrote in 2012 of the military authorization bill whose renewal Unruh is attacking here:
All dramatics aside, no matter what the murky NDAA says or means, it cannot strip Americans of their constitutional rights. Chief Justice John Marshall laid out this logical principle in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, which established the standard of judicial review. He wrote that if a law conflicts with a rule or right under the Constitution, “the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the Legislature, [therefore] the Constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.” This is a bedrock principle of American politics. Even if the most expansive reading of the defense authorization is correct and it does represent some kind of White House power grab, it doesn’t matter, because any such provision negating rights held by citizens would be struck down as unconstitutional once it was adjudicated.
There also is the matter of the law’s political context. Those who argue that the NDAA is some kind of enabling act for an impending Obama imperium must also explain how such a bill was passed by a divided Congress, particularly the conservative Republican-controlled House. If control was Mr. Obama’s objective, it would have been more sensible to craft the legislation during the two years when San Francisco Rep. Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House, Democrats enjoyed a supermajority in the Senate and Mr. Obama was not so unpopular. He could have used those purported extraordinary powers to head off the “shellacking” he took during the 2010 midterm elections, assuming he thought he could get away with it.
The true test of the NDAA would be if Mr. Obama attempted to do what some people fear he might do, namely, begin a vendetta against his political opponents or others he wants to deal with “Chicago style.” But should we honestly believe Mr. Obama will soon order mass arrests and detentions of peaceful American citizens? That members of the military would carry out such orders, which go against all other laws and customs and the Constitution? That such actions would not be met with a flood of court cases, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience and active resistance? And all this would happen in an election year? It will take more than a scrap of paper to end freedom in America.
Needless to say, Unruh doesn't bother to report such things in his article -- he's all about fearmongering and propaganda, after all.
Will MRC Admit GOP's Obamacare Study Is Bogus? Topic: Media Research Center
Matt Hadro writes in a May 1 Media Research Center item:
House Republicans determined that just two-thirds of ObamaCare enrollees paid their first month's premium in the federal marketplace, but the broadcast networks ignored their finding on Thursday evening, though FNC's Special Report with Bret Baier ran a full story. If true, the report would drastically undercut the White House's number of ObamaCare enrollees.
Hadro won't tell you, but the operative term here is "if true." Turns out it isn't.
As TPM detailed, the GOP survey was rigged to produce that result -- it included language that explicitly left out the fact some people would still have time to pay their premium after April 15, which is when the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked companies to return their answers.Nearly 40 percent of Obamacare enrollees signed up after March 15, which means their first premium wasn't due until after the committee finished collecting its data.
Having demanded that the media cover a bogus study, will Hadro now report that the study was bogus and admit no self-respecting news outlet should have covered it in the first place?
WND's Klayman: Under Obama, Whites Are 'At The Back of the Bus' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Obama and his cronies spent the next five years favoring African-Americans and people of color over all other groups of society, and it became painfully obvious that this socialist saw himself as the one person who could extract a pound of flesh for all the years of insidious discrimination against blacks, dating back to even the years before the founding of the republic. In effect, Obama and his friends – ranging from black Muslims, to anti-Semites, to anti-Christians, atheists and other ultra-leftists – saw his presidency as an opportunity to “settle the score” with not just conservatives but rich whites. If this meant bankrupting the country with higher taxes on rich whites and other means to extract what in effect were reparations, then this was the price that needed to be paid for past discrimination. It was time for “whitey” to pay up, and to hell with the economic and social health of the nation.
One saw this early on in Obama’s presidency, with his continuous references to “income inequality,” his role in increasing the tax burden primarily on rich whites, his choking, anti-capitalist over-regulation of businesses, his and his Democratic colleagues’ enactment of Obamacare, his alignment with racist anti-white black Muslims and others like Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah White, now deceased Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell (which helps explain his latent anti-Semitism, disdain for Israel and pro-Muslim/Arab foreign policies), his prejudicial comments during and after the Trayvon Martin case, where he condemned George Zimmerman and effectively called the incident a race-based attack on blacks, his 2012 presidential campaign, where he pitted African-Americans and other people of color, such as Latinos, against whites, and a host of other actions designed to favor blacks and people of color over whites.
In this context, and as I have written before, the irony is that under the Obama presidency there has been a role reversal; whites, and particularly rich ones, are now at the back of the bus. While it is not politically correct in today’s world for whites to raise this feeling in public, there has developed regrettably and tragically an undercurrent of deep resentment among whites, which is now starting to manifest itself in major ways.
In April, the unemployment rate dropped from 6.7 percent to 6.3 percent, and 288,000 jobs were created. CNS clearly had to spin that away: A May 2 article by Michael Chapman grumbled that "The national unemployment rate was 6.3% in April, which is the same unemployment rate America experienced halfway through the last recession, in the fall of 2008." At no point in his article did he mention that the rate declined 4/10 of a percent.
Another article by Chapman claimed that the "total unemployed" rate was 12.3 percent. Chapman then discredits himself by admitting that rate counts "have looked for full-time employment but have had to settle for a part-time job," which means they aren't "unemployed."
CNS cranked out three more articles designed to blot out the good news:
WND's Reporting On Evangelical Minister's Fall Eventually Makes Sense Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily usually doesn't devote original coverage to wrongdoing by evangelical ministers, especially one it has championed.
Doug Phillips has long been a WND buddy. in 2002, for example, WND touted how Phillips led a team of homeschoolers that found a dinosaur skeleton. In 2007, WND gave Phillips a column space to "highlight the stark differences between the secular left’s revisionist view of America’s founding and what he sees has 'the historical and providential record of the Christian legacy of law in liberty which was birthed for America at Jamestown in 1607.'"
Which makes it all the more unusual that instead of hiding or outsorcing to other outlets reports on the sordid sexually oriented allegations against Philips, an April 15 article by Chelsea Schilling was devoted to it, highlighting how Phillips "resigned from his position after confessing to an 'inappropriate' relationship" and "is now the subject of a lawsuit that claims he “methodically groomed” and made unwanted sexual contact with a young woman after serving as an authority figure in her life for more than a decade."
Until you get toward the end of the article, that is. Schilling devotes a section of it to homeschooling activist Michael Farris -- with whom Phillips worked for six years as an attorney for Farris' Home School Legal Defense Association -- throwing Phillips under the bus and distancing himself from the patriarchy/quiverfull movement Phillips was a leader in:
HSLDA Chairman Michael Farris told WND, “The reason Doug left HSLDA is because [President] Mike Smith and I, who were his bosses, were growing more and more uncomfortable as he started developing his patriarchy theory. We started limiting his ability to speak on those things while traveling on our behalf. We basically made it clear that he could not pursue those things with his HSLDA hat on. So he eventually chose to leave us so he could do those things because we were not comfortable with where he was headed.”
As for the patriarchy movement, Farris said the teachings are not widely accepted in the broader homeschool community.
“It’s a minority of homeschoolers that believe in it,” he said. “But unfortunately, until very recently, they were getting a lot of visibility in certain places. We have sought to avoid inviting any patriarchy speakers to speak at our national conference.”
While state homeschool organizations run their own events and may choose to have such speakers, Farris said HSLDA has never promoted them.
“Doug has never been invited to speak at our national conference since he left,” Farris said. “We have tried, by example, to keep this stuff outside the mainstream of the homeschooling movement.”
He added, “Frankly, we think it’s time for us to stand up and publicly say this is just wrong.”
Farris, who said he has known Phillips for two decades, expressed concern that Phillips could re-emerge in the homeschooling movement and as a leader in a Christian ministry.
As we've previously noted, Farris' claim not to be a part of the quiverfull movement is dubious given the fact that he has 10 children.
Farris is an even bigger buddy to WND than Phillips was. By contrast, WND has yet to devote any original coverage (or any coverage at all that we're aware of) to allegations that Patrick Henry College -- founded by Farris and where he still serves as chancellor, and where WND editor Joseph Farah sent at least one of his children -- ignored allegations of sexual assaults involving the school's students or blamed the victims.
MRC Obsesses Over Sterling's Long-Ago Dem Donations, Ignores He's A Registered Republican Topic: Media Research Center
Scott Whitlock huffs in an April 28 Media Research Center item:
In just over 36 hours, the three network morning and evening shows have already devoted 70 minutes of coverage to racist comments apparently made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Yet, ABC, CBS and NBC have ignored Sterling's long history of supporting Democrats, including Senator Patrick Leahy, Bill Bradley and Gray Davis.
But Whitlock failed to report that -- as we noted when his colleagues at NewsBusters also obsessed over Sterling's donations to Democrats more than20 years ago -- Sterling is a registered Republican.
The "MSM ignored something" meme fails when the person making the accusation is ignoring something as well.
Fox News Is Too Liberal for WND Columnist Topic: WorldNetDaily
Recently, Laura Ingraham was a guest on Howard Kurtz’s Sunday Fox show, “Media Buzz.” She offered what I thought was an intelligent solution to a problem that has been annoying me for some time.
As we all know, Fox remains an oasis on TV, the only news network that isn’t in the tank for Obama and the liberals. However, in attempting to comply with Roger Ailes’ desire that Fox be “fair and balanced,” too many shows have fallen into the habit of teaming up a liberal and a conservative, and having them spend five or 10 raucous minutes shouting over each other and trading insults. We wind up with a lot of heat and absolutely no light.
Ingraham’s suggestion was to unload the liberals and, instead, invite conservatives on board and let them hash out their differences. She’s right. We already know the liberal positions because we read them in every newspaper and we hear them trumpeted every day over at the three major networks, along with CNN and MSNBC.
It would be far more enlightening to hear Republicans share their differences over immigration reform, same-sex marriages, gun laws, health care and foreign policy. What’s more, we would be spared ever again having to listen to the likes of Juan Williams, Geraldo Rivera, Bob Beckel and Alan Colmes flapping their gums.
CNS' Jeffrey Manipulates Numbers To Downplay Issue Of Minimum-Wage Workers Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com loves to play fast and loose with economic numbers. Editor in chief Terry Jeffrey demonstrates again how it's done in an April 30 article:
A majority of the Americans who worked for the minimum wage or less in 2013 were 24 years old or younger, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and only 0.8 percent of American workers were 29 or older and worked for the minimum wage or less.
[...]
In total in 2013, according to the BLS, 143,929,000 people were employed in some kind of job in the United States. Of these, a total of 3,300,000—or about 2.3 percent—earned the minimum wage or less. Of those earning the minimum wage or less, 1,663,000 were between 16 and 24 years old. That equaled about 50.4 percent of the people earning the minimum wage or less.
Another 436,000 earning the minimum wage or less were from 25 to 29 year of age.
That leave 1,201,000—or 0.8 percent of American workers—who earned the minimum wage or less and were older than 29.
What Jeffrey fails to spell out: These numbers mean that 36% of people making minimum wage were older than 29.
But for some reason he's rather compare it to the much larger pool of all workers -- making the number deceptively insignificant. Wonder why that is...
WND Finds A New Person Who Will Smear Obama As A Nazi Topic: WorldNetDaily
One of WorldNetDaily's favorite pastimes of the Obama presidency is to liken him to Hitler and various other Nazis. It even had a former Hitler Youth, Hilmar von Campe, repeatedly push the slanderous attack, demonstrating he hadn't completely renounced Nazi propaganda techniques.
But von Campe died a couple years back, leaving WND bereft of a handy source of Godwinism. But it has found another supplier, as described in an April 28 WND article by Laura Adelmann:
Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, with its messianic characterizations – the photographs in which a halo was cast around his head, the worship-like adulation from crowds – gave Holocaust survivor Anita Dittman nightmares.
About Adolf Hitler.
The petite 86-year-old over the weekend told a riveted audience at Olive Tree Ministry’s “Understanding the Times” conference it’s because she sees clear parallels between Nazi Germany and present-day America.
A young girl in Germany when Hitler came to power, Dittman said her experiences amplified the alarm she felt.
[...]
Dittman said her nightmares were triggered by the left’s gushing adoration of Obama as a perceived savior.
Establishment media were equally enamored with Obama and failed to vet him to the American public, as most famously exemplified by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who described experiencing a “thrill up (his) leg” when he heard the then-candidate speak.
The media’s infatuation helped cultivate the atmosphere that ushered Obama into the most powerful office on earth.
Establishment media reporters didn’t question his qualifications or competencies; conservative news outlets that investigated his birth certificate were openly mocked.
Media also never asked him hard questions about his disturbing history of close associations with communists and terrorists that included Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, she said.
Liberals’ blind idolization of Obama mirrored Germany’s hypnotic fascination with Hitler, Dittman said of the racist tyrant whose vitriolic rhetoric dehumanized the Jewish people as a prelude to his attempts at total annihilation.
Obama’s empty rhetoric that energized his followers chilled Dittman, who compared it to lies peddled in Germany painting promises of a bright future.
Why is WND promoting this woman's claims, despite the obvious? Why, to make money, of course:
Her miraculous story of God’s overwhelming providence that preserved her life despite brutal Nazi persecution is told in the soon-to-be released and uplifting WND documentary film “Trapped in Hitler’s Hell.”
A 20-minute preview of the film, which was produced by WND founder, Editor and CEO Joseph Farah and directed by WND Films Vice President George Escobar, premiered at the conference where Dittman revealed her concerns for America.
See? WND has learned how to profit off libelous smears.
Newsmax Promotes Gay Republican's Claim of Attacks From Left Topic: Newsmax
California congressional candidate Carl DeMaio has been making the rounds of the conservative media -- helped greatly by Fox News -- complaining that he's being attacked by Democrats. Newsmax joins the parade with an April 30 article by Bill Hoffmann:
Carl DeMaio, an openly gay candidate for California's 52nd Congressional District, says liberals have been trashing him simply because he's a Republican.
"I don't wear my orientation on my sleeve, it's who I am. But it doesn't define the thorough breadth of what I am in terms of a leader for San Diego," DeMaio told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
But, DeMaio added, a number of left-leaning groups who claim to want to support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender candidates have worked against him strictly because of his GOP affiliation.
Um, isn't that what's supposed to happen -- that DeMaio's political identity is placed before his sexual orientation? He can't exactly claim discrimination because the complete opposite is happening.
DeMaio is also quoted as saying, "These progressive activists are willing to put aside what they claim to want to achieve for LGBT Americans in the name of partisan politics." But isn't what most LGBT Americans want is for their sexual orientation not to be an issue? Isn't that precisely how liberals are treating DeMaio?
Indeed, DeMaio has backed off social issues, in part to attract more conservative supporters. And Hoffmann fails to mention that the conservative National Organization for Marriage has gone after DeMaio for "holding the hand of his gay lover."
So, to sum up: Liberals oppose DeMaio because of his policies; social conservatives oppose DeMaio because he's gay. That's pretty much the way it's expected to be, isn't it?
Colin Flaherty Takes His Race-Baiting to Breitbart Topic: WorldNetDaily
Colin Flaherty hasn't fearmongered about "black mob violence" at WorldNetDaily for more than a month now. It turns out he has decided to take his race-baitingtalents elsewhere.
In an April 30 article at Breitbart, Flaherty tells us about how a "shaky cell phone video shows a group of black teenage boys punching, knocking down, and kicking a white teenage boy, leaving him dazed and confused on the school bus floor." Flaherty's surely impeccable source for this? "The student's uncle found out about the incident and spread the word on Facebook."
Flaherty finally had the impact he couldn't get from WND -- his article got linked by the Drudge Report, it has thousands of comments from like-minded race-baiters, and he claims his WND-published book is "back at #1" at Amazon (which is true if you only count very niche subcategories).
Flaherty's race-baiting finally hit the jackpot, and he couldn't be happier about it. Which tells you all you need to know about Flaherty's motivations.
MRC's Bozell and Graham Mock Idea of Gay Etiquette Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham start their April 30 column by writing:
The times they are a-changing in ways even Bob Dylan didn't foresee.
I have an early childhood memory riding my bike and coming across a discarded booklet on proper social etiquette. It had the perfunctory rules. Gentlemen always open doors for ladies. Stand when a lady comes in the room. And so on. But the one I remember vividly is this: A lady always extends her hand first in greeting. Why? Fifty years ago I could understand the concept, but even then, I thought it was a bit much. Today that rule's been abandoned.
Whose "early childhood memory" is this? Perhaps it's Graham's since he's been shown to be the actual writer and Bozell just the figurehead. But this is the kind of problem you have when you have a singular memory described in a column written by two people.
Conflicts in literary perspective aside, Bozell and Graham's goal is to further the MRC's anti-gay agenda by mocking the idea of the Washington Post hiring a columnist to address issues of gay etiquette:
"Steven Petrow will be joining our advice ranks," declares the Post, "with a special emphasis on LGBT and straight etiquette issues." Petrow, states his bio, is "the go-to source for modern manners ... known as Mr. Manners." Why was he chosen for the job? He will tell you it's largely because he's the former president of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.
His column is called "Civilities" (get it, homophobes?), and Mr. Manners will tackle many thorny etiquette issues as well. In his introductory piece, he outlines some of the issues he's dealt with in the past.
He muses about the gay cop who wrote in to say he was subjected to homophobic jokes, feeling it was his colleagues' way of convincing him to resign. Or the gay widower upset that his in-laws omitted him from his husband's obituary. Or the most vexing question of them all: How to introduce a married same-sex couple? (Answer: They "should be referred to as you would any legal spouse, and that's 'husband' and 'wife.'")
Questions, questions. "Do parents pay for their gay son or lesbian daughter's wedding?" "Is a dad expected to walk his son down the aisle?" "What pronoun (and restroom) is appropriate for a person who is transgender?" "How do you respond to 'assimilated' gays who find 'flamboyant' ones embarrassing?"
How do you respond to an entire industry you find embarrassing?
Well, you've just seen you Bozell and Graham respond to something it finds embarrassing -- with sneering and derision for their fellow Americans.
NewsBusters' Blumer Unhappy That White House Was Allowed To Respond To An Attack Topic: NewsBusters
One of the standard Media Research Center liberal-media tropes is claiming that the media covers only one side of an issue. For some MRC employees, covering one side of a story is OK as long as it's the side of the story they want covered.
Among those MRC employees is Tom Blumer. He starts going wrong in an April 30 NewsBusters post by insisting that Sharyl Attkisson is a "credible" and "authoritative" source on the Benghazi so-called scandal. Indeed, the big Attkisson "scoop" that Blumer regurgitates -- that a newly released memo proves "reveal direct White House involvement in steering the public narrative about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, toward that of a spontaneous protest that never happened" -- is pretty meaningless. As Media Matters and David Weigel note, the memo merely shows that the White House agreed with the CIA's early assessment that an inflammatory video touched off the Benghazi attack, is consistent with other intelligence briefings at the time, and that the memo was about the anti-American protests occurring in the region at the time, not just Benghazi.
Blumer then write: "Naturally, Poltico didn't run a story on this until this morning so it could present the White House's defense. It's here, if you can stand it." Apparently, it's a bad thing for a reporter to give Democratic White House to be given an opportunity to respond to something in the news.
We suspect Blumer would be praising Politico if the White House it delayed its article for was headed by a Republican.
WND Perpetuates Lie That Donald Sterling Is A Democrat Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily was quick to hop on the guilt-by-association bandwagon by trying to tie racist basketball team owner Donald Sterling to Democrats through a few long-ago donations. They're still at it.
Appearing on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' show, WND editor Joseph Farah said that Sterling is a a “lifelong Democrat” and a “big time Democrat.” Meanwhile, an April 29 WND article delcared that Sterling "has a lifetime record of donating only to Democrats, such as former California Gov. Gray David [sic] and former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, a former NBA star."
Neither Farah nor his website mention, however, that Sterling is a registered Republican, which would seem to discredit this particular line of attack. But if WND told the truth, it wouldn't have anything to write about, would it?