No, WND, Problems At Macy's Can't Be Tied to Trump Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've detailed WorldNetDaily's fundamental misunderstanding of how business works, which may be a reason for its current financial situation, wihch is dire enough that WND editor Joseph Farah begged for money from his readers. One of those misunderstandings was its insistence on blaming problems at Macy's on its decision to stop Donald Trump's clothing collection.
Joe Kovacs does that yet again in a Jan. 4 WND article:
In the battle of Macy’s vs. Donald Trump, it appears the clear loser continues to be Macy’s.
On Wednesday, the retailer announced disappointing holiday sales, prompting its stock to drop more than 9 percent.
The company also released the locations of 68 of the 100 stores it plans to close, with more than 10,000 jobs reportedly being eliminated.
CNBC reported: ” As part of Wednesday’s announcement Macy’s said it will eliminate layers of management to cut costs and make more agile decisions. It also will work to reduce other non-payroll costs. As a result of these steps, the company estimates its work force will be cut by 6,200. Another 3,900 workers will be displaced by the store closures and some of these employers could be reassigned.”
As WND reported, Trump upended American politics in 2015 when he declared he was a candidate for president.
Macy’s promptly declared it was cutting ties and dumping Trump’s clothing line because of “disparaging” remarks about Mexicans.
[...]
The onetime reality-TV star is now the president-elect of the United States, just two weeks away from being sworn into office.
Meanwhile, Macy’s stock price has plummeted.
By contrast, actual reporters for genuine news outlets -- like CNBC, who Kovacs selectively cites -- Macy's is trimming its brick-and-mortar locations while building up its online business and off-price and specialty brands. No mention of Trump at all.
WND's Farah Touts Group of Extremist Israeli Rabbis Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah writes in his Jan. 10 WorldNetDaily column:
Many pundits and political leaders have repudiated the United Nations Security Council resolution denying Israel has any claims to Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem or any other lands captured in the 1967 war – 50 years ago this June.
But perhaps the best scolding I’ve seen the U.N. body get came from Israel’s nascent Sanhedrin, a group of judges attempting to reconstruct a Jewish ruling authority not existing in Jerusalem for more nearly 2,000 years.
About Resolution 2334, passed unanimously with an abstention from Barack Obama’s administration, which conspired in crafting it, bringing it to a vote and defending it after passage, the Sanhedrin had this to say, with which I entirely concur: “All the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Nation of Israel, and not to an invented nation with no legal or historic claim to the land. Pursuing this baseless claim weakens those who support it and strengthens the violence and evil that is growing in the world.”
[...]
Here I am, an Arab-American Christian, in total agreement with Israel’s Sanhedrin, which not only sees this issue the way clear-thinking people on earth do, but understand the way it is viewed by the Creator-God, who sees the beginning from the end and the end from the beginning.
Note Farah's somewhat be nign description of the Sanhedrin as just "a group of judges attempting to reconstruct a Jewish ruling authority not existing in Jerusalem for more nearly 2,000 years." In fact, it's a very far-right group.
We noted a few years back when then-WND reporter Aaron Klein was touting them that the Sanhedrin has links to the Meir Kahane movement banned in Israel for its incitement to violence. That link seems to be continuing with the Sanhedrin's desire to appoint Baruch Kahane, who may be Meir Kahane's son -- Kahane did have a son named Baruch, but we have het to confirm that -- as the high priest of the Sanhedrin in an attempt to fulfill prophecy that a new Jewish temple will rise on the Temple Mount, where an Islamic mosque currently resides. In 2015, the Sanhedrin encouraged West Bank settlers to attack security forces who came to evacuate an outpost there.
A Jerusalem Post article reports that the Sanhedrin supports the application of Torah law in place of the secular law of the State of Israel, and in February 2010 ruled that “it is obligatory for every Jew to exclude himself from the secular Israeli judicial system in every matter.”
Wait -- an attempt to have religious law supercede secular law? Doesn't Farah and WND normally rail against that sort of thing when it's called Sharia law instead of Torah law?
Again, Farah says he's "in total agreement" with the Sanhedrin, which must also include this narrow instance of religious law supremacy.
CNSNews.com's cheerleading for the nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general is almost embarassing in its utter bias -- the kind that CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, would be screming bloody murder about if a "liberal media" outlet acted like this.
CNS churned a whopping eight articles on Jan. 10, the first day of Sessions' confirmation hearing, designed solely to lionize him and promote his right-wing bona fides:
All but two of these articles focus either on statements by Sessions solely or answers to questions from Republican senators.
CNS mostly ignored the second day of the hearing on Jan. 11, refusing to devote an article to testimony critical of Sessions from Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and John Lewis. Instead, an article portrays as whining the complaint from another Democratic senator complaining that Booker's and Lewis' testimony was pushed to the end of the day.
This was joined by an article in which CNS reporter Penny Starr goes the ambush route in trying to get a Democratic senator to agree with her that Sessions is "a man of high character" and "a kind and decent man who has worked relentlessly for desegregation and justice."
Starr followed up with an article the next day touting how African-Americans testifying at the hearing "praised the senator as a man who has helped people regardless of their race." She didn't mention the testimony of African-Americans Booker and Lewis.
CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman contributed an article citing a 2016 speech in which Sessions attacked Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as having a "post-modern, relativistic, secular mindset" that is "directly contrary to the founding of our republic."
The cherry on the top of this bias is CNS editor Terry Jeffrey's column -- tonally similar to his website's biased "news" reporting -- in which he touts Sessions' hard anti-abortion stance and declares that "Sessions' views on abortion and same-sex marriage are right" and anyone who disagrees with him is "wrong."
That bias is reflected throughout CNS' Sessions articles -- which, again, if it involved a news outlet other than one the MRC didn't own, the MRC would be all over it.
UPDATE: We forgot one -- a Jan. 11 article by Melanie Hunter touting U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Peter Kirsanow -- whom Hunter doesn't identify as a conservative -- fawningly declaring that "Sessions’ approach to civil rights is consistent, is legally sound, intellectually honest, and has an appreciation and understanding of the historical bases for civil rights laws."
Oops: MRC Email Promotes 'Marijuana Investment Jackpot' Topic: Media Research Center
On Jan. 11, the Media Research Center sent out to its email subscribers a paid message from advertiser Agora Financial touting "The $50 Marijuana Investment Jackpot," which claimed: On Election Day, California, Nevada and Massachusetts all roundly voted to legalize recreational marijuana use. And that means that very soon dozens of tiny marijuana firms could skyrocket by 100%, 300%, 500% or higher. This is your chance to turn a single $50 bill… into an absolute fortune."
Agora Financial regularly advertises on right-wing websites -- it's part of the empire of Porter Stansberry, who once offered his dubious financial analysis at WorldNetDaily (he once claimed he was ready to flee the country at any time "with most of my wealth" to a country "that doesn't have any ties to America") and whose firm faced a $1.5 million sanction from the Securities & Exchange Commission over aggressive sales tactics. Oh, and he loves to hurl racist and anti-gay slurs.
The subject matter of the email, though, was a bit of a surprise. The MRC is not exactly pro-pot -- it dismissed 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson as a "pot-smoking" guy , and one of the few times it has anything nice to say about the so-called "liberal media" is when it notes criticism of pot and its legalization.
We can't imagine that went over well with the MRC's readership. Sure enough, the next day, the MRC sent out an apology email:
Dear MRC Supporter,
Yesterday morning, you may have received an email that was sent on behalf of one of our regular sponsors, Agora Financial. The email offered financial advice in the form of investing in marijuana stocks.
This message should have never been sent in conjunction with the Media Research Center. We are deeply sorry that you received it, and the MRC certainly does not condone marijuana use or investment in marijuana stocks.
Once again, we apologize for this mistake, and encourage you to contact us directly (actionteam@mrc.org) if you would like to discuss this further.
The MRC Action Team
We don't know enough about the MRC's inner workings to assess blame, but something cldearly slipped past the "MRC Action Team" and the email didn't get properly vetted before getting sent out.
WND Still Sucking Up to Arpaio Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh sure makes it sound serious in his Jan. 5 WorldNetDaily article:
A federal judge deliberately broke the rules, potentially benefiting a relative financially, overlooking and discounting his wife’s statements about his improper bias, and improperly communicated with other court officials about a case to punish “America’s toughest sheriff,” Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona.
All this according to an appeal of G. Murray Snow’s ruling by Arpaio, who retired from law enforcement at the first of this year.
Except one must remember that not only is Unruh a lazy reporter interested in reporting only the side of the story he agrees with -- on this case, Arpaio's -- but that WND has been carrying water and generally fluffing Arpaio for years. It was through WND's machinations that Arpaio sleazed the birther "cold case posse" into existence and put WND's Jerome Corsi on it, which helped ensure it could not be objective or taken seriously, though that wasn't the intent.
WND is apparently still so grateful for this that the bulk of Unruh's article is a rehash of birther stuff from the past month, even though it has nothing to do with the headline claim about the appeal, which involves a case regarding Arpaio's treatment of illegal immigrants. So concerned was Unruh about cramming all that irrelevant birther stuff in that he doesn't provide a link to the appeal he's writing about or even identify who Arpaio's lawyer is.
But anyway, let's take a look at the claims Unruh is dutifully transcribing from the Arpaio appeal. First up:
The case was filed in 2007 by Latinos who alleged the sheriff’s office profiled them in traffic stops. Arpaio and others in the office eventually agreed to a civil penalty and a change in policy, but Snow wasn’t satisfied, insisting on a court “monitor” for the office.
The appeal charges that Snow had improper communications with the court-ordered “monitor” for the sheriff’s office, allowed his brother-in-law to potentially benefit from his rulings and glossed over the accusations that had come from his wife: that he was biased against Arpaio.
[...]
The appeal argues that Snow’s off-the-record communications with a sheriff’s office monitor alone is enough to require action in the case.
As the Phoenix New Times notes, Snow has been open about having one-on-one discussions with his monitor over the case, and he said in a 2015 hearing when Arpaio's lawyers last raised the issue that such conversations were necessary for the court to supervise the monitor, adding, "I don't know how to do that without having some communication with the monitor."
About the other claim, Unruh wrote:
The appeal also charges Snow had improper “ex parte” communications with the monitor about the sheriff’s office and cites the fact that Snow’s brother-in-law was an equity partner in the law firm representing the plaintiffs in the case.
“Judge Snow knew that his brother-in-law was a Covington [& Burling law firm] partner and understood that this relationship raised a serious recusal issue. Nevertheless, he chose not to inform the parties of the conflict. Instead, he privately decided to remain on the case and keep the conflict confidential,” the appeal states.
But as the Phoenix New Times also points out, the issue of Snow's brother-in-law was adjudicated back in 2012 and Arpaio had no problem with it at the time:
Because Melendres [v. Arpaio] has been going on since 2007, only serious students of the case will recall an issue regarding Snow's brother-in-law, attorney Keith Teel, who is a partner at the Washington, D.C. branch of Covington & Burling, which took over representing the plaintiffs from the firm Steptoe & Johnson in 2010.
When his brother-in-law's firm entered the case, Snow has said that he considered whether this connection presented a conflict of interest.
Snow decided that since Teel doesn't work on Melendres or derive any real benefit from it, no recusal was required.
In 2012, the plaintiffs raised the issue of Teel, so Snow held a status conference, where he noted that "all parties argued that recusal in this matter was neither mandated nor appropriate."
Indeed, Arpaio was quoted in the Arizona Republic as stating that he had no problem with Snow as judge.
"I'm confident in this judge and the judicial system, and I'm not asking for the judge to be removed from this case," Arpaio said.
Unruh also rehashed an allegation from Arpaio's anonymous lawyers that Snow's wife said in a conversation with friends at a restaurant that "Judge Snow … was determined to conduct the litigation … in such a way as to ensure that Sheriff Joe Arpaio would not be re-elected as sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2016." Unruh didn't mention that Arpaio had his attorneys do a secret investigation of the claim, which have also involved Maricopa County attorney or sheriff's resources.
Rather than being fair and balanced and report both sides based on information easily available online , Unruh takes the lazy way out by sending some WND flunkie to Snow's courthouse chambers with the full knowledge that no comment would be made "Armie Gonzalez, contacted by WND in Snow’s courthouse chambers, told WND, 'We don’t talk to reporters.'"
Perhaps the fact that WND reporters like Unruh are so ridiculously biased is one big reason WND is in deep financial trouble.
NEW ARTICLE -- Slanties 2017: Time to Make the Slantie Chimichangas Topic: The ConWeb
It's time to honor (as it were) the worst ConWeb reporting and craziest ConWeb opinions of the year, with the bonus opportunity for a literal ConWeb deadpool. Read more >>
WND -- Which Likened Obama to Antichrist -- Gets Huffy Over Criticism of Trump-Messiah Comparisons Topic: WorldNetDaily
First, WorldNetDaily lashed out at Trump-Hitler comparisons, despite the fact that it spent the past eight years regularly likening President Obama to Hitler and other Nazis. Now, WND is looking askance at anyone who criticizes the idea that the election of Donald Trump was divinely inspired. Jack Minor writes in a Jan. 5 article:
After years of fostering the narrative of President Obama as a messiah, members of the media now seem to have developed a sudden aversion to attributing divine attributes to the leader of the free world.
For years after Obama’s election, establishment media described Obama often with soaring language, sometimes in photographs capturing him in a halo.
But now they seem alarmed by the claim that the GOP thinks President-elect Donald Trump is Jesus.
The issue began when Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus and Co-Chair Sharon Day sent out a statement celebrating Christmas, as the party has done for many years.
Part of the statement read: “Merry Christmas to all! Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.”
Some immediately seized on the phrase “new King” to suggest that since Trump was the new president, the passage was a reference to him, and the RNC was comparing Trump to Jesus Christ.
Minor goes on to cite various isolated instances in which people have ascribed messianic qualities to Obama. He doesn't mention the rhetorical pro-Trump excess that has billowed forth from the place that published his article.
The biggest Trump fangirl at WND has been Gina Loudon, who proclaimed that Trump is "the candidate we have been waiting for all these years since Ronald Reagan" and literally credited his election as president for saving Christmas, asserting that "It has never felt so good to say Merry Christmas, because I believe now that the overreaching government won’t take it from us and replace it with something agnostic or satanic." And she, like the RNC, also suggested that Trump was our new Savior.
Numerous other WND writers, meanwhile, were quick to ascribe Trump's victory to divine intervention, apparently not considering that the opposite of their biased religious interpretations might be true: that Obama was the divine blessing and that Trump is the divine curse.
And while Minor and WND have long been critical of Obama-Messiah comparisons, WND also has a record of portraying Obama as the Antichrist.
MRC Pretends Trump Didn't Mock A Disabled Reporter Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center reacted in two predictable ways to Meryl Streep's Golden Globes speech calling out Donald Trump.
First was to declare that she should not be listened to because she's a rich Hollywood liberal. For instance:
Karen Townsend and Alexa Moutevelis Coombs huffed that Streep "delivered a dramatic, sanctimonious diatribe to the viewing audience and her fellow leftists in the audience" that featured "laundry list of perceived wrongs that must be righted by liberal Hollywood." They added: "Hey, Meryl, shut up and act."
Dan Gainor pointed out that Streep is "a major Democrat funder -- giving $113,810 to Democrats since 2012" and "appeared at the DNC convention as part of a huge lineup of Hollywood celebrities."
Scott Whitlock grumbled that "All three networks on Monday eagerly hyped liberal celebrities trashing Donald Trump at Sunday night’s Golden Globes awards."
Matt Philbin harrumphed that Streep's speech was "just another instance of an entitled Hollywood gasbag using her position to speak whatever the opposite of truth to power is."
The second was a lame attempt to counter Streep's claim that Trump once maliciously mocked a disasbled reporter. Townsend and Coombs claimed Streep "accused Trump of mocking a disabled reporter for gestures he regularly uses." Whitlock dismissed the mocking as mere "comments and gestures Trump made about journalist Serge Kovaleski in 2016." Philbin insisted that the mocking was "something that didn’t happen" and that "the incident that gave Streep the genuine frowny face wasn’t itself genuine."
The evidence Townsend and Coombs and Philbin cited to deny the mocking was a post by an obscure pro-Trump blog purporting to offer "The Catholic Case for Donald Trump" insisting that Trump mocks everyone like that so it's totally OK.
In fact, as actual fact-checker Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post documents, Trump's claim that he did not know Kovaleski prior to the incident he mocked the reporter for -- pointing out that Trump's assertion that "thousands" of Muslims celebrated the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11 lacked a factual basis -- was not credible, and "as the evidence shows, Trump clearly mocked Kovaleski."
The MRC's Curtis Houck later mocked the Associated Press for doing a fact-check on Trump's tweet-storm dismissal of Streep as "overrated." He said nothing about the fact-checks proving the MRC wrong about Trump's mocking of Kovaleski.
Bob Unruh writes in a Jan. 3 WorldNetDaily article:
A posting at Real Climate Science has delivered a body blow to the global-warming agenda – now called “climate change” since the globe doesn’t appear to be warming anymore.
It shows the Arctic sea ice today is about the same thickness as it was 75 years ago.
That’s despite the massive spread of SUVs, the use of coal-fired power plants to generate heat for homes and gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers.
The posting Tuesday from Steven Goddard, blogs under the pseudonym Tony Heller, featured the image of a 1940 Townsville Daily Bulletin report that “ice measurements were on an average only 6 ½ feet,” according to a just-returned expedition of Soviet explorers.
The blogger noted that in 1940, Arctic sea ice was two meters thick.
Then, alongside a posting of a New York Times image stating the ice was “only about seven feet thick” in 1958, he wrote it was “about two meters thick” then.
And he posted an image from the Danish Meteorological Institute, dated Monday, that shows much of the Arctic sea ice cover was some two meters thick or more.
“All of the official fake news agencies and fake government agencies have been claiming that Arctic sea ice is getting thinner,” he said, citing online headlines from NOAA that “Arctic sea ice getting thinner” and the same from Scientific American.
This being Bob Unruh, no effort is made to talk to anyone else, such an actual climate scientist, on the issue -- he's simply taking Goddard/Heller at his word. (Goddard/Heller's degrees are in geology and electrical engineering.)
He shouldn't. DeSmog Blog reports this detail about Goddard/Heller's background:
Steven Goddard is known for a 2008 article in The Register where he posited that Arctic Sea ice is not receding and claimed that data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showing the opposite was incorrect. Goddard later issued a retraction on his statement.
Meanwhile, PolitiFact debunked another assertion Goddard/Heller mad , that the hottest year on record was 1934, not 1998, and that NASA scientists were fudging data to claim otherwise.
Unruh is such a terrible reporter -- er, stenographer that he gets a basic piece of information wrong. He claimed that Steven Goddard "blogs under the pseudonym Tony Heller," but the opposite is the true: Heller is the real name, Goddard is the pseudonym.
These two peddlers of biased misinformation deserve each other, it seems.
Unruh fills out the rest of his article with the usual denier propaganda, including that "Scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which has gathered the signatures of at least 31,487 scientists who agree that there is 'no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.'"
But as we've documented -- Robinson is a close buddy of WND managing editor David Kupelian -- very few of the signatories to Robinson's petition scientific background in climatology, there's no apparent verification mechanism to ensure that the signatories do in fact have the scientific qualifications they do claim, and the existence of millions of science graduates that makes the 31,000-plus signatories (a number that has stayed static for years) a drop in a fringe bucket.
Newsmax Doesn't Understand Difference Between Weather And Climate Topic: Newsmax
A Dec. 30 Newsmax article on an upcoming cold snap carries the headline "Coldest Snap in US in 15 Years Coming, Climate Change or Not." The article itself, by Clyde Hughes, does not reference climate change.
We'll leave it to Neil deGrasse Tyson to school Newsmax on the difference between weather and climate, and how one can have a cold snap even as the overall climate is warming.
WND's Corsi Cites Another 'Trusted' Source, Flip-Flops on Turkey to Bash Obama Topic: WorldNetDaily
In 2011, WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi cited "trusted Kenyan professionals" in an attack on President Obama, accusing him of breaking obscure "promises" he made to various people in the country. In fact, the report those "trusted Kenyan professionals" were paid by WND to put together was plagiarized in large part from other media reports; WND stuck an editor's note at the top of Corsi's article that only partially explained the problems with it.
In other words, beware whenever Corsi claims his sources are "trusted." Which means there's a big red flag on this Dec. 26 WND article by Corsi:
Turkish government intelligence has determined Mevlut Mert Altintas, 22 – the police officer who recently assassinated Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov while the ambassador was giving a speech to open an art gallery in Ankara – was a member of the Gulen organization, which claimed to be the same group that staged an unsuccessful coup in Turkey in July.
WND reported Nov. 3 the Clinton Foundation was engaged in a pay-to-play scheme to obtain Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s support for the Obama administration decision to give asylum to Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim imam the Erdogan government holds responsible for the attempted coup July 15.
He’s now living in Saylorsborg, Pennsylvania.
Trusted sources close to the Turkish government have explained to WND on the condition of anonymity that assassin Mert Altintas, born in 1994, joined the police in Turkey in 2012 and graduated in 2014, when Gulen’s organization, known in Turkey as the Fetullah Terrorist Organization, or FETO, was at the peak of its power in Turkey.
Yes, WND seems to be cozying up to another dictator -- in this case, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But wait: Hasn't WND been critical of Erdogan, particularly in the wake of his actions in the failed coup attempt of last year? Yep -- a couple weeks before Corsi's article came out, WND's Leo Hohmann was misleadingly painting Erdogan as the "best friend" of President Obama after a Christian U.S. pastor was jailed in Turkey purportedly as part of Erdogan's "brutal crackdown on religious minorities and dissidents in the wake of a failed coup five months ago." On Dec. 10, a WND article by Art Moore claimed that Wikileaks showed that Erdogan's son was importing oil sourced to ISIS. And an October article by Bob Unruh rehashes criticism of Obama for having "quickly sidled up to Erdogan when he was elected."
But WND doesn't like Gulen either, despite his alleged link to the coup attempt. After the coup attempt failed, WND reported that Gulen "has links to the Clintons."In November, Corsi cited "sources close to the Turkish government" (not identified as "trusted") to claim that "The Clinton Foundation was engaged in a pay-to-play scheme to obtain Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s support for giving asylum to the Turkish Muslim preacher the Erdogan government holds responsible for the attempted coup, Fethullah Gulen." Never mind the fact that Gulen has lived in the U.S. since 1999, predating the existence of the Clinton Foundation.
Corsi rehashes the purported Clinton links in his Dec. 26 article, as well as a claim that "Also, military intelligence sources in Turkey continue to tell WND that Obama administration officials have consistently 'looked the other way' regarding terrorism in Turkey, refusing to budge on Turkey’s requests to extradite Gulen."
Corsi uncritically uses the Erdogan terminology for Gulen-linked groups in Turkey by calling the Fetullah Terrorist Organization or FETO, though Corsi cites no instances of "terrorism" FETO has committed. Indeed, Corsi's only source for his article are those purportedly "trusted sources close to the Turkish government" who are presumably anti-Gulen and are eager to paint him as a "terrorist."
Corsi doesn't mention the close ties between Obama and Erdogan WND has been concurrently reporting on, or why WND is suddenly flip-flopping to cozy up to Erdogan. But we can guess: Corsi's simply taking whatever side he thinks will do the most political damage to Obama at a given time.
Has Corsi told his "trusted" Turkish government sources that WND has bashed Erdogan? Probably not.
And that placement of Obama-hating over all means Corsi can't be "trusted" any more than his sources.
MRC's Graham Hypocritically Attacks Wash. Post for Exposing TV Station Owner's Right-Wing Bias Topic: Media Research Center
The Washington Post did a big story last month on how Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of TV stations in the country, required its local news operations to run negative stories about Hillary Clinton during the election and worked with Donald Trump's campaign to air interviews with him on those stations.
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham was mad about this, becuase he is a terrible media critic and doesn't think right-wing media should face the same scrutiny as the "liberal media" the MRC pays him to attack. So he ranted about it in a Dec. 25 post:
Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi dug into the Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group to warn of conservative pro-Trump bias. The headline at the top of the Style section front page was “How a giant TV company helped Donald Trump's campaign.” It’s nothing like giant TV companies like, say, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, or (“not for profit’’) PBS. But pro-Trump bias is offensive inside the Post headquarters. The major networks demonstrating a pro-Hillary bias is just favoring compassion, intelligence, and diversity.
A hostile source inside Sinclair leaked internal e-mails to the Post. We can only imagine how much fun it would be to read internal e-mails from the Post (especiallywhen the managing editor was Kevin “I Love Obama” Merida).
Needless to say, Graham offered no evidence that any of those "liberal media" outlets he cited issued "must run" orders from corporate on stories attacking Trump, like Sinclair did for anti-Hillary stories.
Graham also defended Sinclair's softball questions to former presidential candidate and later Trump surrogate Ben Carson: "How does Farhi think these questions are remarkably biased? They might not be hardballs, but they’re not kissing Carson’s ring. They’re bland and open-ended inquiries. It's nothing like Gayle King (from the "giant TV company" CBS) gushing to the Obamas about her favorite Obama inauguration photos."
Graham didn't mention how Farhi rep orted that Sinclair "managers have been particularly close to Carson, who practiced medicine in Baltimore for many years," and "aired his hour-long autobiographical promotional film, called 'A Breath of Fresh Air, A New Prescription for America,' just before Carson’s official announcement [of his presidential campaign]. The Carson infomercial was produced by a company run by Armstrong Williams, which paid Sinclair an undisclosed fee for the airtime."
Neither Graham nor Farhi noted that Williams, who is also Ben Carson's handler, is in business with Sinclair. His Howard Stirk Holdings owns several TV stations that are operated by Sinclair through "sidecar" LMA agreements.
If any of this bias and cozy self-dealing happened with a non-conservative owner of TV stations, Graham would be screaming bloody murder. But Sinclair's bias is the kind of bias he likes.
WND Is Back to Likening Obama to Hitler Topic: WorldNetDaily
Remember when WorldNetDaily got all huffy about people likening Donald Trump to Hitler despite its own lengthy history of likening Barack Obama to Hitler and other Nazis? Now WND is back to its old Godwin-ing tricks.
Scott Lively writes in his Jan. 3 WND column, headlined "OBAMA'S HITLERIAN DEPARTURE":
Immediately after D-Day in World War II, the American forces of the Allied coalition set their focus on the liberation of Cherbourg, France, in Normandy. The City of Cherbourg, with it’s heavily fortified deep-water harbor, became a key strategic foothold and transportation hub for America in northern France, allowing supply ships to deliver a steady stream of troops and cargo directly to the continent for immediate deployment to the front lines.
However, when he realized that Germany would soon lose control of Cherbourg, Adolf Hitler ordered Rear Adm. Walter Hennecke to make the city and harbor unusable. Hennecke so thoroughly demolished Cherbourg and filled the harbor with debris and mines that Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross for “a feat unprecedented in the annals of coastal defense” on the day after his surrender.
As I watch our current occupant of the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, spend the final days of his disastrous presidency frantically working to make the Executive Branch unusable to President-elect Trump, I cannot help seeing the parallel.
[...]
Clearly, Obama’s vindictive strategy is repulsive even to many liberals, and reflects similar egomaniacal errors of judgment to Hitler’s. Like Obama, Hitler presumed himself to be a great strategic genius. After the fall of Cherbourg, while lauding Hennecke, Hitler ordered Cherbourg’s Gen. Friedrich Dollmann to be court-martialed then micro-managed subsequent maneuvers, making tactical blunders that cost the Germans the entire peninsula, and eventually the war.
Like Hitler, Obama’s bad decisions invariably lose territory for his team: and each new bruise to his self-image requires a greater need for revenge, further clouding his judgment. During his administration, Democrats have lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 12 governorships. Abroad, Obama has lost most of the Middle East, virtually destroyed our relationships with Israel and Russia, and squandered America’s formerly deep reservoir of goodwill with countless nations by forcing “gay marriage” and Soros’ “open borders” agenda on them.
WND columnist Michael Brown once declared that "This horrific name-calling needs to stop, not only because it defames the living but also because it mocks the dead – specifically, the victims of Hitler and his henchmen." He was talking aboutTrump-Nazi comparisons, of course. He might want to send a copy of his column to his fellow anti-gay activist Lively.
CNS Unemployment Numbers Distortion Watch, Last Licks Edition Topic: CNSNews.com
The jobs report for December was the last one to come out under the Obama administration, so CNSNews.com had to get their last cherry-pickingdistortion of the numbers in while they could.
The main story by Susan Jones focuses, as usual, on the labor force participation rate, telling us that "the number of Americans not in the labor force has increased by 14,573,000 (18.09 percent) since January 2009, when Obama took office." Jones surprisingly concedes the dishonesty of that number, admitting that it is "continuing a long-term trend that began well before Obama was sworn in." It's not until the seventh paragraph that Jones reports that there is also a record number of Americans who are employed, and she buried in the 17th paragraph the fact that 156,000 jobs were created in December.
The first sidebar, by editor in chief Terry Jeffrey, bemoaned that manufacturing jobs continued to decline, glossing over the fact that -- as the chart accompanying his article illustrates -- manufacturing jobs have been on a general downward slope for a good 30 years. Jeffrey further bemoaned that there are more government jobs than manufaturing jobs.
The second sidebar, by managing editor Michael W. Chapman, once again played up relatively high black unemployment, implicitly blaming Obama while leaving out the important contextual fact that black unemployment has always been roughly double that of white unemployment.
Theh final sidebar, also by Chapman, repeats his imaginary claim that the U-6 number is the "real unemployment" figure, grousing that "it is not often reported by the mainstream media." As we've explained, it's a factual misnomer since that particular number counts people are employed part-time but seeking full-time work.
Next month will bring the first report of job numbers under Donald Trump. Will CNS be as diligent at cherry-picking numbers under Trump as it has been under Obama? We shall see.
WND's Hohmann Attacks Newspaper For Not Hating Muslims As Much As He Does Topic: WorldNetDaily
The headline of Leo Hohmann's Jan. 3 WorldNetDaily article says it all: 'Refugee' named Mohamed sexually assaults disabled U.S. woman, media silent." It's time to fearmonger about scary Muslims again, as is Hohmann's job at WND, and to paint all Muslims in general, and Muslim refugees in particular, as potential criminals and rapists.
Actually, the headline is wrong in one key respect: Hohmann admits the "refugee named Mohamed" was convicted not of sexual assault but, rather, attempted sexual assault.
But it's the "media silent" part that Hohmann is really hammering this time around:
WND called the executive editor of Aberdeen’s daily newspaper, the American News, and asked why nothing has been reported on the crime committed by Mohamed. He said he had no knowledge of Mohamed’s arrest, trial or conviction.
“I’m not seeing it in our system, and I really don’t recall it,” said editor J.J. Perry when asked about the case Tuesday by WND. “I’ll have to talk to our court reporter. It might be we just missed it on the docket.”
The newspaper’s court reporter, Elisa Sand, did not attend the trial, WND was told by officials who were present on Dec. 20.
Nor has the case received any coverage from local TV stations in South Dakota or neighboring Minnesota.
Hohmann did not name any other instance where a case of attempted sexual assault warranted blanket media coverage.
The next day, Hohmann was in full attack mode against the Aberdeen newspaper for not hating Muslims like he does:
A South Dakota newspaper that failed to report on the case of a Somali man convicted of trying to molest a severely handicapped woman, changed gears Wednesday after being outed by WND and decided to publish a story about the crime.
The story ran on page three of the Aberdeen American News under the headline “Sentencing later this month for a man convicted of attempted sexual contact.”
But the newspaper left out an important detail.
The convicted sex criminal, 39-year-old Liban Mohamed, was a recently arrived refugee brought to the state from Somalia at the invitation of the U.S. government. He had been in the country only about a week and in Aberdeen only one day when he wandered up to a group home and tried to molest a 31-year-old mentally handicapped woman who was sitting outside the facility.
[...]
WND contacted AAN Executive Editor J.J. Perry and asked why he omitted the information about Mohamed being a refugee.
“Because I don’t know that it was a fact he was a refugee. We weren’t there [at the trial],” Perry said, after which he was reminded that the state’s attorney, Christopher White, confirmed for WND that Mohamed was a refugee and that this information was offered by Mohamed’s own defense attorney at trial. It was part of the court record in the defense attorney’s opening statement.
Hohmann went on to rant that no picture of "the convicted sex offender" has been released ("South Dakota is one of the few states where mugshots of convicted criminals are not considered public record," he huffed), and went after a social-services group involved in resettling refugees for not addressing "how it could leave a man from Somalia, in the country for only a week, on his own to wander the streets looking for a vulnerable female."
Hohmann also complained that "The U.S. State Department and its federal contractor, Lutheran Social Services, have sent 939 Somali refugees to South Dakota since 2002, all of them being placed in Sioux Falls. More than 99 percent of all Somali refugees are Muslim." If this crime is the only one Hohmann can come up with in 14 years of Somali resettlements in South Dakota, isn't that a pretty good record?
Bizarrely, both of Hohmann's articles are illustrated with pictures of Somali refugee camps in Keny, which is nowhere near South Dakota. Apparently that's an acceptable substitute when you can't get a picture of the perp to reinofrce the otherness that's a key to Hohmann's anti-Muslim obsession.
Joseph Farah writes in his Jan. 10 WorldNetDaily 
On Jan. 11, the Media Research Center sent out to its email subscribers a 
Bob Unruh sure makes it sound serious in his Jan. 5 WorldNetDaily 
First, WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center reacted in two predictable ways to Meryl Streep's Golden Globes speech calling out Donald Trump. 
Bob Unruh writes in a Jan. 3 WorldNetDaily 
In 2011, WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi 
The Washington Post did a 
Remember when WorldNetDaily 
The jobs report for December was the last one to come out under the Obama administration, so CNSNews.com had to get their last 
The headline of Leo Hohmann's Jan. 3 WorldNetDaily 
