CNS' Jones Suddenly Discovers Original Reporting ... In Order To Attack Warren Topic: CNSNews.com
So CNSNews.com reporter Susan Jones is capable of doing more than stenography after all -- when it comes to attacking a Democrat, anyway.
After Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the Senate floor for reading a letter by the late Coretta Scott King critical of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, Jones fought back in a Feb. 8 article headlined "Warren Falsely Claims That Republicans 'Silenced Mrs. King's Voice on the Senate Floor'." Jones howled that "A liberal advocacy group is already fund-raising off Tuesday's Elizabeth Warren kerfuffle" and insisted that "In fact, Warren read King's very long letter in its entirety, and she had moved on to other complaints when she was finally interrupted by [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and asked to take her seat," further complaining that Warren "read from long-ago letters."
The next day, Jones was still whining, in an article complaining that "a white liberal from the Northeast dragged the name of Sen. Jeff Sessions though the mud, violating Senate rules in the process." But then it was back to Trump stenography mode as she touted how "a black conservative from the South stood on the Senate floor to reflect on 'what occurred last night'" -- Republican Sen. Tim Scott. She further touted how "Sen. Scott spent the rest of his speech explaining the discrimination he faces, not necessarily for being black, but for being conservative. He even read aloud some of the hateful messages that have come into his office because of his support for Sen. Sessions."
Jones quickly followed that up with an article focusing solely on how scott "read some of the tweets he's received, blasting him for supporting Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general" and described those who wrote them as "liberal" without providing any evidence that they actually were. The headline of Jones' article: "Sen. Tim Scott Illustrates How Liberals Show Tolerance."
So Jones could be moved to fact-check a Democrat but not a Republican. That's life at CNS.
In a Feb. 4 WorldNetDaily article, Radio America's Greg Corombos touts his interview subject, Jessica Vaughan of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, as an "immigration policy expert," though all she's doing is reflexively defending President Trump's immigration from certain countries by insisting it's not really a ban.
Corombos also writes: "Vaughan, a former visa officer, said the Obama administration failed to do even basic screening much of the time, including waiving required interviews with those seeking to go to the U.S. But she said the problems didn’t end there." Corombos is suggesting that Vaughan's work as a "former visa officer" has direct relevance to Obama's alleged policies; it's further suggested in the headline of his article, "Ex-visa officer: Obama failed to do basic screening of migrants."
In fact, Vaughan's CIS bio says she "has been with the Center since 1992," meaning any direct experience she had in working with visas as a former State Department employee was 25 years ago.
In other words, she never worked in the Obama administration and can't provide any direct experience as to what its visa policies were.
Indeed, Natasha Hall, an former immigration officer with the Department of Homeland Security, explains that "The process for any citizen of a Middle Eastern or majority-Muslim country to get into the United States is tortuous and has become more so over the past 15 years, with additional screenings, interviews and other background checks."
That's a misleading bit of reporting on the part of Corombos. But misleading reporting is whats WND is all about.
MRC Predictably Hates Boy Scouts' Decision to Admit Transgenders Topic: Media Research Center
As professionalLGBT-haters, the news that the Boy Scouts will accept transgender scouts did not go down well at the Media Research Center.
Sarah Stites whined: "Since 2013, the Boy Scouts of America have quickly caved to the progressive agenda, admitting both homosexual guides and scouts. As of today, transgender boys can now join troops." She huffed that "the networks did spin the news positively," adding: "Because scouts are required to acknowledge their duty to God, the BSA still prohibits avowed atheists and agnostics from membership. Eradicating this stipulation will likely surface as the next item on the progressive agenda."
Stites' complaining about the "progressive agenda" is rich, as if she and the MRC don't have an agenda of their own to promote.
Tim Graham -- known for his anti-transgender freakouts -- and Brent Bozell were even more whiny in their Feb. 3 column, asserting that the Boy Scouts of America "used to be derided as a 'traditional, values-based' organization" before it "folded on homosexual Scouts and then on homosexual scoutmasters." Now, they huff, " This cowardly shell of an organization should just scrap the references to God, and every God-respecting church should jettison their Boy Scout units to the nearest secular gathering place."
They rant about "libertine leftists" -- a favorite term of Graham's; remember, Graham actually writes this syndicated column and Bozell simply slaps his name on after the fact, something he was content to hide from the public until the truth came out -- and "homosexual celebrity lobbyists" who liked the changes and grumble that since "relativism is king" now, "Perhaps the next "reform" might be an 11-year-old Boy Scout declaring that he identifies as an Eagle Scout, negating the need for any stinking merit badges or review boards."
Did WND's Farah Really Engage In Violent Proests In the '60s? Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah has an odd habit of making grandiose claims about his supposed left-wing past -- marking with Martin Luther King and following the orders of Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda, for example.
He's at it again. In the Jan. 24 column in which he sneered that the participants in the Women's march were "hags," Farah said this about himself:
I was once on the other side – a participant in many leftist, anti-American, pro-communist demonstrations. I remember what they were like. I didn’t care back then. I had a completely different worldview. But I still remember how contemptuously we left behind the garbage. It was deliberate. We had no thought for the people who had to clean it up. We had no thought for the people who lived there. We smashed plate glass windows, turned over the cars of innocent victims and spit on those with whom we disagreed – figuratively and literally.
Farah took this further in in a Jan. 28 WND article promoting his new book "The Restitution of All Things": "I was an unregenerate, crazy young person. ... My background is with the far, far left, even in high school, arrested in all sorts of demonstrations. I used to help start riots and building takeovers at Colombia [sic] University as a teenager."
That's odd, since Farah apparently graduated from William Paterson University, not Columbia. And the biggest and most notorious protests at Columbia were in 1968, when Farah would have been just 13 -- around the same age he was when he claimed to have marched with Martin Luther King.
As with his puported MLK marches, we highly doubt that Farah was sufficiently politically aware at age 13 to be skipping junior high and schlepping from his New Jersey home into Manhattan for the sole purpose of protesting and rioting and taking over college buildings with college students several years his senior. (The fact that he misspelled "Columbia" adds even more doubt.) And Farah's lengthyrecord of lying proves that we cannot take his words at face value.
So we're adding the increasingly omnipresent "liar" graphic to this post. As he has always been, Farah is free to provide us with proof of his violent left-wing activism, we will freely apologize and remove the graphic.
MRC's Waters Still Whining That NY Times Reports Accurately Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's resident New York Times-hater, Clay Waters, loves to complain that the Times reports accurately on things he doesn't want reported. He does so again in a Jan. 30 post:
The front of Sunday’s New York Times featured David Barstow, known for blessing the paper’s readers with dubious Pulitzer bait every couple of years, tackling the story of authoritarian President Trump’s falsehoods , backed up by liberal good-government types, liberal plagiarist authors, and liberal “fact-checkers”: “‘Up Is Down’: Unreality Show Echoes a History of False Claims.”
[...]
The Times managed to endure eight years of the Clintons (plus Hillary Clinton's email lies) and Obamas, telling fibs about Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky...then Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Obamacare...but only now does the paper decide that we have a lying politician in the White House?
At no point does Waters defend the accuracy of any claim the Times identified as false; all he does is complain that "liberals" identified themand deflect the issue by bringing up irrelevant claims of alleged falsehoods by Democratic presidents when he knows they don't compare with the routine and pervasive lying Trump has done throughout the campaign and into his presidency.
Waters also huffs that "It’s no secret that Politifact, a liberal media creation, presses a left thumb upon the scales of “truth” to make Democrats come out cleaner than Republicans," linking as alleged evidence to a NewsBusters post touting right-wing columnist Mollie Hemingway engaging in pedantic hair-splitting over Planned Parenthood and mammograms.
Waters apparently doesn't realize that fact-checking is not a zero-sum game, or that "liberals" identifying Trump's falsehoods doesn't make them any less false. He's simply playing into his employer's war on facts to give Trump a pass on his lies.
WND's Farah Sucks Up to Breitbart Again, Takes Financially Safe Stance on Ad Boycott Topic: WorldNetDaily
After the election, Joseph Farah and worldNetDaily started sucking up to and latching onto Breitbart News, since its website was on the ascendacy through its close assocation to Donald Trump and WND's, well, wasn't. One of the things Farah did was to declare that any company that refused to run ads on Breitbart can forget about advertising with WND; Farah conveniently offered no proof that such companies had ever placed ads at WND, meaning that they probably haven't and WND is giving up no revenue from taking such a stand.
Farah was at it again in his Feb. 5 column, braving taking another stand that costs him nothing:
The federal government of Canada has pulled advertising from Breitbart.com.
In response, I’m going to do what I did when Kellogg chose to blacklist what many might consider WND’s competition in the independent online news community: Tell Canada to dump WND, too.
Our neighbor to the north might as well follow my advice as I have instructed my advertising department to block ads from the Canadian government as long as this anti-Breitbart hysteria continues.
[...]
This is not the first time I have stood with Breitbart against the assault on diversity of opinion and worldviews that conflict with certain advertisers. In December, when the cereal company Kellogg announced it was pulling ads from our friends at Breitbart, I announced we would neither solicit nor accept its advertising unless the company dropped its Breitbart boycott.
That’s our position on the Canadian government as well.
Again, Farah offers no evidence that the Canadian government has ever placed ads at WND, which means he is once again giving up nothing by taking this stand. He did, however, complain that "it appears that an “inquiry” from a Canadian newspaper – the Toronto Globe and Mail – prompted the ban" by the Canadian government on advertising at Breitbart, and "This same despicable media outlet suggested in its story celebrating the Breitbart ad ban that the blacklist should be expanded to include WND and other highly trafficked independent voices." He added: "While I am gratified that the marketing firm running ad campaigns for Canada chose WND to be one of 398 media outlets worldwide, I regretfully have to turn down the unsolicited offer – at least until the government stops discriminating against other independent media outlets like Breitbart."
But according to the "despicable" Globe and Mail article Farah is citing, WND was simply on a "list of 398 sites approved for online federal advertising" compiled by the government's media-buying agency, and it's unclear whether any Canadian government advertising ever appeared at WND. Farah didn't mention that the Globe and Mail flagged two other right-wing sites on the government whitelist: Gateway Pundit and Newsmax.
The Globe and Mail also had this to say about WND:
And the list of approved sites for government ads still includes a number of other fringe outlets which have been criticized for fomenting hatred and conspiracy theories such as the racist “birther” movement championed by Trump.
[...]
WND.com (World Net Daily) was a leading voice of the birther movement, and its WND Books division published a book promoting the conspiracy. On Monday afternoon, the site’s lead story suggested the airport protests which erupted over the weekend in response to Trump’s ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries was “just the start of ‘chaos’ planned by Muslim Brotherhood.” The article was by Leo Hohmann, whose new book, published by WND Books, is titled Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad. On Tuesday, a leading WND writer decamped to InfoWars, another fringe site which traffics in conspiracy theories.
Farah shockingly didn't respond to this other than a tepid statement that "While we believe WND would never incite racial hatred, discrimination or the subversion of Canada’s democratic system of government, we don’t believe Breitbart does, either." (He presumably didn't want to concede that a Canadian news outlet scooped WND on the fact that its own reporter -- Jerome Corsi -- quit WND for Infowars.)
CNSNews.com hedged its bets a bets at first on the idea of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice. As chatter grew about him, it published an op-ed by Larry Pratt of the right-wing Gun Owners of American and birther-adjacent lawyer William J. Olson fearing he might not be sufficiently pro-gun enough.
But when the selection of Gorsuch was officially announced, CNS went into its usual fawning/stenography mode:
CNS' Barbara Hollingsworth also cranked out a one-sided article (the only kind she writes, it seems) headlined "Law Profs: Judge Gorsuch’s Record Puts Him Well Within Nation's Legal Mainstream." Not only does Hollingsworth not identify the ideology of any of those law professors -- though given that she writes for CNS, we can presume all of them are conservative and she would not have bothered to talk to anyone not pushing the Trump administration line on Gorsuch -- one of those offering praise, curiously, is John Yoo, infamous for his work in the Bush administration in providing legal justification for "enhanced interrogation," which many have called torture, so he might not be the best judge of what is in the "legal mainstream."
WND's Muslim-Hating Reporter Now Just Telling Lies Topic: WorldNetDaily
It seems that simply hating Muslims is no longer enough for WorldNetDaily reporter Leo Hohmann. He apparently feels he must start spreading lies about them.
Hohmann's Jan. 29 WND article starts off with a justification of President Trump's attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States -- and a falsehood:
Trump’s executive orders slapping a 120-day moratorium on refugee resettlement and a 30-day ban on those entering on visas from seven terror-sponsoring countries has been met with protests Sunday at airports in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Minneapolis.
In Hamtramck, Michigan, the nation’s first city to elect a Muslim-majority city council, protesters descended on City Hall Sunday with signs that included “Ban Bannon” and “We are all Immigrants.”
There were no such protests when former President Obama restricted Christian refugees from entering the U.S. from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and other Muslim countries.
There were no such protests over Obama's "restriction of Christian refugees" from Muslim countries because Obama did no such thing. As we've pointed out whenever CNSNews.com reporter Patrick Goodenough obsessed over the purported lack of Christian refugees from Syria, the statistics showing unusually high numbers of Muslim refugees vs. Christian ones are skewed because, as Goodenough occasionally admits, those numbers come from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Christian refugees tend not to go through UNHCR operations. It also discounts the fact that Muslims who don't agree with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad are being persecuted as well.
Hohmann goes on to cite his fellow WND Muslim-hater, Philip Haney, claiming that there will be "lawsuits, ugly protests, and an all-out effort to create chaos in the streets of U.S. cities" when Trump more provocative acts such as moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Why? Hohmann answers his own question: "The reason is simple. This isn’t 1968 or even 1978, when Islam in America consisted primarily of a few thousand Nation of Islam and Black Panther activists."
Even the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies blew that malicious stereotype out of the water, stating that by 1965, "about 100,000 to 150,000 Muslims lived in the United States."
If Hohmann really believes every Muslim in America in the 1960s was either in the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam, there's no reason to take him seriously as the "expert" on Muslims in America WND is trying to potray him as.
From there, the descent into anti-Muslim paranoia by Hohmann and Haney came quickly:
More than 300 U.S. cities and towns have been stacked with Sharia-compliant Muslims through refugee resettlement and myriad other visa programs that have been expanding for four decades.
Meanwhile, groups that agitate for Muslim “civil rights,” which tend to manifest as special privileges not afforded to Christians, have been empowered. Thanks to the expanded immigration, the U.S. Muslim population has exploded to 3.3 million, the number of mosques has grown exponentially and the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR is now a force to be reckoned with despite its ties to extremist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, Haney said.
“There’s this concept of the observant Muslim base, it’s a global observant base, and that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood has done here in America since the 1960s is build up that observant Muslim base,” Haney said.
[...]
Haney said the three trigger points will affect three different areas: The Israel policy will affect the political arena, the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist declaration will affect law enforcement, and the immigration issue will affect the fabric of American society, halting the process of Islamization and civilization jihad that has been steadily occurring for the last 35 years and which was placed into overdrive under Barack Obama.
“It’s not about Trump. It’s about America,” Haney said. “America has had the audacity to pick someone different from what the world wanted, which was someone who would not be submissive to the global Islamic movement. So America is now going to become the focus of this backlash.”
WND should stop obsessing about the "fake news" of others and deal with the fake news it pays people like Hohmann to create.
We'veestablished that CNSNews.com is little more than a stenographer for the Trump administration. It was Trump's obedient servant again this week for President Trump's claim that the media isn't covering reports of terrorist attacks.
Melanie Arter (nee Hunter) led the stenography brigade with her loyal transcription of how Trump said "'the very, very dishonest press' doesn’t want to report on the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists determined to strike the homeland." CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman followed up with an article copying-and-pasting the "list of 78 terrorist attacks" the Trump White House says were underreported.
CNS won't report, however, what a mess that list is (the typos that CNS faithfully reproduced, wuch as the repeated misspellings of "attack," are the least of it). Actual reporters at the Washington Post point out that many of the attacks listed did not result in fatalities, the list omits non-Western victims, it includes attacks such as the San Bernardino and Orlando nightclub attacks that indisputably not underreported, and appears to list one attack that was a workplace dispute and not terrorism.
Note to CNS: Serving as a stenographer doesn't fulfill your self-proclaimed mission statement to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story."
More WND Fake News: Author Exaggerates Bio in WND-Published Book Topic: WorldNetDaily
When we first wrote about WorldNetDaily's favorite Donald Trump fanfiction writer Ted Malloch, we noted his propensity for pumping up his resume. WND insisted on presenting him as Theodore Roosevelt Malloch in honor of his claimed lineage to the former president, but we could find no proof of it. And in a May WND column, Malloch described himself this way to sell himself as a VP pick for Trump:
THEODORE ROOSEVELT MALLOCH, Republican extraordinaire, Oxford professor, Ph.D., best-selling author, earliest Trump supporter (see: WND archive), international political economist of some renown, accomplished corporate strategist, served on dozens of boards, held ambassadorial position for President Reagan in the U.N., worked in the State Department and in the U.S. Senate. No skeletons, great namesake and very good-looking.
Turns out Malloch has gone way overboard in his self-aggrandizement -- to the point that it's not true at all.
Upon Trump's appointment of Malloch as U.S. ambassador to the European Union (which WND is absolutely giddy about), The Financial Times looked into Malloch's WND-published book "Davos, Aspen & Yale: My Life Behind the Elite Curtain as a Global Sherpa" and fond that several things Malloch writes about himself "are misleading or are contradicted by available evidence." Among them:
He claimed that a documentary he made "was nominated for an Emmy Award"; in fact, it was for a regional Emmy in the Lower Great Lakes.
He claimed that Margaret Thatcher described him as a "genius" and "global sherpa" in a 1992 speech; in fact, those words weren't said specifically about him.
He claimed he was "knighted in the Sovereign Order of St John by the Queen, Elizabeth II herself" and that "to my family and closest friends, I am therefore known as Sir Ted"; in fact, the honor is several ranks below knighthood and carries no right to a title like "Sir."
He claimed he was "made a laird by Lord Lyon of Scotland and given a personal coat of arms with a fancy Latin inscription"; in fact, the Lord Lyon does not have the power to make anyone a laird.
He claimed he completed his "entire doctoral program in an unprecedented less than three years"; in fact, he completed it in four years.
The Scotsman newspaper adds that Malloch wrote in his book that he was "president of the Ancient Scottish Universities Trust"; in fact, there is no such institution by that name.
Meanwhile, WND has published a new insta-book by Malloch, in which he takes his Trump-fluffing skills to new heights by writing about Trump's election win and puporting to explain how, "as the twenty-first century Theodore Roosevelt, Trump is a strong and authentic leader who will fix America, defend America, and make it great again."
We're guessing WND fact-checked that one about as well as his first one. Then again, WND did republish so-called historian David Barton's book on Thomas Jefferson that was considered so fact-deficient that its original publisher withdrew it from the marketplace, and the WND edition includes added falsehoods about the critics who forced the withdrawal of the book in the first place.
NEW ARTICLE: Russia's New ConWeb Comrades, Part 2 Topic: Accuracy in Media
CNSNews.com and Accuracy in Media joined WorldNetDaily in defending Donald Trump -- and, thus, Vladimir Putin -- over allegations that the Russians meddled in the U.S. presidential election. Read more >>
Another Fake-News Fail From WND, George Soros Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
An anonymous writer asserts in a Feb. 5 WorldNetDaily article under the clickbait-y headline "12 top Republicans backed by Soros in 2016":
WASHINGTON – Everyone knows about the tens of millions of dollars various George Soros front groups poured into Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential efforts in 2016, but the Republicans he supported – from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and his predecessor, John Boehner, have received less attention.
Republican presidential candidate John Kasich was also a big recipient of Soros largesse – to the tune at least $202,700. That makes Soros one of the Kasich presidential campaign’s top funders.
While the Soros Fund Management, just one of the Hungarian billionaire’s political tentacles, spent $224,300 on Democratic Party congressional campaigns in 2016, it also spent $31,400 on Republicans, including $10,800 on Ryan – the most of any member of the GOP, the same as it invested in Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, a Democrat.
Other GOP congressional recipients of Soros contributions include Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ($2,500); Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. ($2,700); Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev. ($2,700); Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio ($2,600); Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif. ($2,500); Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla. ($1,000); Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa ($1,000); Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. ($1,000); Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. ($1,000); and Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y. ($300).
Except that's not what happened at all. As Mediaite points out, those donations were from employees who happen to work at Soros Fund Management, not from Soros personally as the anonymous WND reporter is claiming.
That anonymous reporter curiously failed to state where his or her information came from, but it was obviously the Center for Responsive Politics; the article includes a donation chart that was lifted from the CMP. But WND missed the bold, colored type below that chart at CMP: "The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families."
This story was published two days after WND complained about another media outlet publishing a "fake news" story.
MRC Writer Sloppily Labels Berkeley Protest As Both 'Liberal' And 'Left-Wing' Topic: Media Research Center
As much as the Media Research Center likes to whine about precision of political labeling -- witness its complaint about usage of "anti-abortion" versus "pro-life" -- the MRC's Kristine Marsh is extremely sloppy about it in a Feb. 2 post:
Last night the ultra liberal campus of U.C. Berkeley erupted in violence after an estimated 1,000 students came out to protest Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who was invited to speak by the school’s College Republicans. The crowd quickly turned into a mob when they began setting fires, throwing smoke bombs, breaking windows and punching Trump supporters while chanting against Trump and Yiannopoulos. But instead of accurately identifying the crowd as a liberal, left-wing mob, ABC, NBC, and CBS went out of their way to avoid using any harsh labels or political ideology to describe the crowd. All three networks refused to describe the crowd as liberal, saving the “conservative” and “controversial” labels for Yiannopoulos.
Marsh seems to think that "liberal," "left-wing" and "ultra liberal" are interchangable. They're not, and she offers no evidence otherwise. How can a "mob" be both "liberal" and "left-wing"? What makes it so? How did Marsh determine that the violent elements were either, or both? She doesn't explain.
In fact, the protest against Yiannopoulos was peaceful until a group of "black bloc" anarchists -- who are likely not even students at Berkeley -- showed up.
Marsh's outrage that Yiannopoulos was accurately labeled as "conservative" and "controversial" is hilarious. Is she denying that those words apply to him? It would appear so, because she continues to rant about it (boldface is hers):
On CBS, correspondent John Blackstone called Yiannopoulos a “ultra conservative” known for his “outrageous comments and articles.”
ABC referred to him as “right-wing” twice, while NBC’s Almaguer described him as “a leading member of the Alt-Right movement” from the “far right.” NBC’s Hoda Kotb also called Yiannopoulos as the “controversial” editor of “right-leaning” Breitbart News.
On top of that,instead of focusing the criticism on the ones causing violence, all three networks took the opportunity to bash Yiannopoulos instead, calling him out for past controversial statements in an apparent effort to legitimize the violent riot.
NBC’s Miguel Almaguer called out Yiannopoulos in his report for his “racist and misogynistic views,” “inciting harassing tweets” and being accused of being a part of “the growing group of white nationalists.” CBS anchor Gayle King also delved into Yiannopoulos’ “racist and misogynistic” online comments.
Marsh does not dispute any of this -- she can't because it's indisputably true -- only huffs that it's being said about him.
If only Marsh would learn to be as precise about labeling people she hates as she is about people she agrees with.
WND Still Serving As Operation Rescue's PR Spinmeisters Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've writtenbefore about how Operation Rescue has enlisted WorldNetDaily to whitewash its connection to anti-abortion violence -- specifically, the murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, and how litigious it is about trying to enforce that whitewash. (Disclosure: We've received a cease-and-desist letter from them through WND, since it published a book, "Abortion Free," by president Troy Newman and assistant Cheryl Sullenger, over an earlier post we wrote on them. We explained that we reported on the group in a fair and balanced way and that we did nothing that WND itself hasn't done; we never heard from them again.)
Now, Operation Rescue is back at it again, with WND's help. A Jan. 10 article by Bob Unruh tells us the group is outraged that U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal described Operation Rescue "as a group that advocates execution of abortion providers," and uncritically serves up the group's defense (repeated in a Jan. 29 article by Unruh describing how Operation Rescue president Troy Newman and his lawyer "visited Blumenthal’s office to deliver" a letter "seeking a retraction and apology"):
Operation Rescue also was previously attacked by Terri Butler of the Australian parliament by using out-of-context statements from a book about the Old Testament’s practices for dealing with the death of an innocent person.
“In that book, which was a theological study of the biblical doctrine of bloodguilt, Newman and Sullenger discuss the Old Testament principle that required those who commit murder should be sentenced to death by a court of justice. They surmised that if indeed abortion is murder, then it would be acceptable, based on the Old Testament teachings, for governments to treat it as it does any other murder with those convicted through a court of law subject to the same punishments other murderers would face, including capital punishment.”
But the explanation notes Butler refused to mention “later chapters in that now out of print book referenced the New Testament concept that mercy is preferable to judgment, and that repentance and restoration is available through Jesus Christ to all men who seek it.”
“There is a distinct difference between saying that the Bible gives the authority to governments to execute justice, as we explained in the book, and advocating that individuals commit murder of abortion providers, as Ms. Butler erroneously has accused Mr. Newman of doing,” Operation Rescue’s Cheryl Sullenger wrote in a letter Australian officials at the time.
In fact, in the book in question -- "Their Blood Cries Out," a title Unruh curiously fails to provide to his readers -- Newman is indeed advocating for the execution of abortion providers. As we've previously noted, Newman's claiming that abortion doctors should go through the legal system before being executed is still advocacy for execution, no matter how much he tries to deny it; what he actually writes in "Their Blood Cries Out" does not differentiate between abortion doctors doing their job legally and those who aren't. Thus, Blumenthal's statement that Operation Rescue "advocates execution of abortion providers" is factually accurate.
Further, Operation Rescue's dismissal of Newman's words by claiming the book is "out of print" is belied by the fact that the book is available for purchase through the Operation Rescue website (a screenshot of which is above). So Newman clearly has not renounced the book and its contents, contrary to what he and his lawyers are suggesting.
(Neither has Sullenger; her co-authorship of "Their Blood Cries Out" is touted in her WND Books bio and repeated in WNDarticles promoting "Abortion Free.")
Unruh, in both articles, also uncritically repeats Operation Rescue's denial of involvement in the murder of Tiller: "All accusations, implications, or inferences that there was any involvement by Operation Rescue in the death of George Tiller is completely false. Operation Rescue and its staff were not involved in any way. Operation Rescue explicitly denounces violence in any form as a means of ending abortion."
But as we've documented, Operation Rescue had contact with Tiller's murderer, Scott Roeder: not only did he have Sullenger's phone number on a note in his car when he was arrested, Roeder has claimed that Newman said it 'wouldnʼt upset' him if Tiller were murdered, as well as Roeder's claim that he was an active and regular participant in Operation Rescue events with "donation receipts, event T-shirts and a signed copy of Newman’s 2001 book, Their Blood Cries Out, to prove it." Further, given that Newman and Sullenger moved Operation Rescue's headquarters to Wichita for the specific purpose of targeting Tiller, it is logical to assume that even if Roeder had no connection to Operation Rescue (which he did no matter how much Newman has tried to deny it), the provocation of moving the headquarters and continued aggressive targeting of Tiller helped create an atmosphere that resulted in Tiller's murder by Roeder, whether or not Newman and Sullenger actually intended that outcome.
Further undermining the claim that "Operation Rescue explicitly denounces violence in any form as a means of ending abortion" is a newsrelease (h/t Media Matters) Operation Rescue under Newman and Sullenger issued a defending Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor in Florida in 1994, by denouncing a court decision not to let Hill use as a defense in his trial the ability to call his murder a "justifiable defensive action" -- thereby effectively suggesting that the murder of an abortion doctor was justifiable. Newman and Sullenger called Hill's execution for the doctor's murder "nothing less than murder of a political prisoner." (Operation Rescue has since claimed that this seemingly self-evident interpretation is a "gross distortion," insisting that "Newman deplored the fact that Hill had murdered two people, but felt the need to express disappointment that the court refused to allow Hill to use the defense of his choosing, especially since conviction meant facing the possible death penalty.")
Operation Rescue must feel lucky to have such a pliant "news" organization like WND doing its PR work -- and being litigious -- for them.
MRC Digs Up A Zombie Lie to Defend Trump Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Kyle Drennen, in a Jan. 30 post, predictably parroted the Trump administration in the matter of acting attorney general Sally Yates, pronouncing her "insubordinate" and touting how President Trump "lawfully fir[ed]" her "after she refused to do her job and enforce his executive order on immigration." But Drennen also dredges up a zombie lie in the process:
The media double standard on Justice Department staffing changes has been well-documented by the Media Research Center. In 2007, the networks hounded then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for firing eight U.S. attorneys and replacing them with appointees selected by the Bush administration, treating the common practice as if it were a scandal. However, in 1993, the press didn’t bat at eye at then-President Clinton firing 93 U.S. attorneys to make room for his political appointees.
As we documented way back in 2007 when the MRC first pushed this claim, what Clinton did -- calling for the resignations of U.S. attorneys is traditional at the start of every new administration -- was much different from what Gonzales did, which took place well into President George W. Bush's second term, and were appointed by Bush in the first place, amid speculation the attorneys were too tough on Republicans and not tough enough on Democrats, as well as newly passed legislation that allowed U.S. attorneys to be replaced on an interim basis without Senate or district court approval.
If the MRC is dredging up old Bush talking points to defend Trump, it will be a long next few years.