WND Columnist Rants Against Early Voting
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Brent Smith devotes his May 29 WorldNetDaily column to a tirade against early voting:

Still, the early-voting craze did not catch fire until the contentious presidential race of 2000, between George W. Bush and Earth’s best friend, Al Gore. Democrats from Gore down to the state and district level in Florida did their best to steal the election, but they just couldn’t pull it off.

It was said by some on left that the 2000 election was proof that Election Day-only voting was just too chaotic. It would wiser to allow for early voting. As liberal Paul Gronke, a professor of political science at equally liberal Reed College and founder and director of the completely partisan Early Voting Information Center said, early voting would reduce “the pressures on election officials on Election Day” and “the likelihood of long lines or polling place problems.” It was after that when states began to enact laws to allow for early cheating, uh, I mean, voting.

In 2016, 37 states and the District of Columbia allowed early voting, and over 36 percent of voters (and others) took advantage. In some cases votes were cast almost a month ahead of time. As we just witnessed in Montana – a lot can happen in that month’s time, leading some voters to regret the decision to vote early.

We constitutionalists have never been fans of early voting. It promotes opportunities to cheat and otherwise game the system, which is why Democrats are all for it. My personal view is that you have two years, minimum, to plan to vote on Election Day. Most polls open at 7 a.m. and stay open until 8 p.m. If you can’t find the time to stumble into a polling place on that day, frankly, you don’t deserve to vote.

Strangely, thouygh Smith insists that early voting is "cheating" and "promotes opportunities to cheat and otherwise game the system," he provides no actual evidence that any cheating or system-gaming has ever happened because of it.

Instead, he offers up only "that's the way we've always done it" and potential "regret." Those similarly empty claims are merely proof that Smith doesn't have an actual argument to make.

MRC -- Which Gave Limbaugh's Vulgar Slurs A Pass -- Attacks Reza Aslan
Topic: Media Research Center

In 2012, when conservative darling Rush Limbaugh spsent three days hurling every denigrating, sleazy insult he could think of at Sandra Fluke for committing the alleged offense of advocating for birth control in public -- including "slut" and "prostitute" -- the Media Research Center gave him a pass, insisting that we should just accept Limbaugh's meager, self-serving apology and just move on. The MRC even rewarded Limbaugh's foul-mouthed tirade of misogyny by building an "I Stand With Rush" website, even as Brent Bozell's employees were doing their best (or worst) Limbaugh imitation by tossing their own slurs at Fluke.

All of which makes the MRC's current jihad against CNN host Reza Aslan -- part of its revenge campaign to cover up the fact that others do much better media campaigns that it does -- utterly cynical and hollow.

The MRC is upset that Aslan tweeted -- not said on CNN's air, tweeted -- that President Trump is a "piece of shit" for exploiting the weekend's terror attack in London to push his travel ban. The MRC post by P.J. Gladnick on Aslan's tweet left out that context, instead bizarrely attacking Aslan for purportedly lacking "the slightest hint of sympathy for the victims of the June 3 terror attacks in London."

The MRC was then off and running, with Bozell issuing his jihad against Aslan:

It’s up to CNN President Jeff Zucker to cut ties with Mr. Aslan and ensure he will no longer have a show on CNN, which still lists him as a host on its website. We will call on him to do so and report back to the public what CNN’s formal position is. Certainly, Mr. Zucker would sever ties if a CNN host had said the same thing about President Obama. The Media Research Center continues to put all media personalities on notice: we will publicly call out your media outlets -- and the decision makers at those outlets – in the event of any personal, character assassination attacks.

Remember: Bozell had no problem with Limbaugh's personal, character assassination attacks on Fluke. He merely lamented that Limbaugh "crossed a line," and he did not call for Limbaugh to be fired. To the contrary: He insisted the real issue wasn't Limbaugh's words but, rather, "about roaring hypocrisy and about censorship."

Indeed. Bozell's rant can't be heard of the roar of his hypocrisy. And it's painfully clear that the MRC wants to censor Aslan for the offense of criticizing Trump. It's not about vulgarity because he found nothing wrong with Limbaugh's.

(Bozell, by the way, has no problem with the vulgarity that spews forth from his own mouth; he did, after all, liken President Obama to a "skinny ghetto crackhead.")

The MRC is so desperate to hurl anything it can at Aslan that it's rooting around his Twitter account for other tweets it deems offensive. It complained that Aslan once tweeted that right-wing author Dinesh D'Souza is an "adulterous piece of sh*t felon." Of course, it's indisputable that D'Souza is an adulterer and a felon -- from which one can easily and reasonably deduce Aslan's final descriptor.

The MRC is not disputing the accuracy of anything Aslan tweeted. It's pretending to be outraged that he said them, and it badly wants to shut him up.

WND's Lame Attacks on Former CIA Director
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily is still trying to distract from Russia's meddling in the U.S. presidential election. The latest example is a rather lame atttempt to discredit former CIA director John Brennan, whose testimony about Trump and Russia has Bob Unruh so upset that, as is clear from his May 23 article, he would rather talk about anything else:

Former CIA Director John Brennan told a U.S. House committee Tuesday that Russia was “brazen” in its attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election in the United States, and while he was unable to determine whether there was “collusion” between the Russians and members of the Trump presidential campaign, he was “aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign.”

He was convinced, he explained to members of Congress, those indicators were “worthy” of a formal investigation.

However, neither Brennan nor the House Intelligence committee discussed accusations that he, himself, had colluded with Russia on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Nor was his admission to having voted for a Communist Party candidate in the 1976 election ever mentioned.

Nor was his refusal to use a Bible, as tradition prescribes, when he was sworn into office.

Nor was his graduate thesis in which he denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and said government censorship of speech was an appropriate management tool.

Nor was his insistence that people not use the word “jihadist” to describe terrorists.

Nor was his lying to Congress.

Unruh doesn't seem to understand that those things were not discussed becasuse they had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump and Russia.

Indeed, the rest of the article is dedicated to attacking Brennan for all of these purported offenses and completely ignores the actual news of Trump and Russia.

At the same time, WND is twisting the Brennan testimony that Unruh couldn't be bothered to report on to claim there's no evidence of "collusion" between Trump and Russia -- which is apparently where the right-wing media have moved the goalposts to.

In a May 24 article, WND's Garth Kant ranted about "Democrats pushing the bizarre notion there was a cover-up, even if there was no crime," citing as evidence how Brennan "testified before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday that he did not know of any evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between Trump and the Russian government."

Kant conveniently ignores the fact that Brennan stepped down as CIA director in January and, presumably, is not privy to anything that has happened with any CIA investigation since his departure.

Unruh manages to combine both contradictory memes -- Brennan's an untrustworthy liar, but he also said there's no evidence of collusion so we'll take him at his word -- in a May 31 article:

Did the Democrats’ orchestrated attempt to catch the Trump administration in a major scandal with Russia just blow up?

The Washington Times reported it was President Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who prompted the investigation into claims the Trump campaign had inappropriate contacts with the Russian government.

But that’s the same John Brennan who, like other top Democrats, has stated he has seen no evidence of collusion with the Russians, and the same John Brennan who, among the other indiscretions, was caught lying to Congress.

But if Brennan is the irredeemable liar Unruh says he is, why should we trust his statement that he saw no collusion (even though, again, he probably doesn't know what has happened in the investigation since he left the CIA)?

Unruh never explains; instead, he just copies-and-pastes his previous attacks on Brennan. Lame!

Shocker: CNS Leads With Bad News About Unemployment Under Trump
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com has finally found some bad economic numbers that it ss couldn't bury.

As we've documented, CNS' relentlessly negative tone about jobless numbers under the Obama administration became aggressively positive once President Trump took office. But the one cherry-picked statistic CNS obsessed about during the Obama years -- the labor force participation rate -- was bad enough that even CNS reporter  and Trump stenograph Susan Jones couldn't spin it.

Not that she didn't try, though. Still, the tone of her June 2 article is a bit resigned:

A disappointing report from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday: The economy added 138,000 jobs in May, fewer than analysts were expecting; and after setting three straight monthly records, the number of unemployed Americans dropped by 233,000 to 152,923,000.

The unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a point to 4.3 percent, near historic lows.

But the number of Americans not in the labor force – meaning they are neither working nor looking for work – increased by 608,000 to 94,983,000 in May, close to the record high of 95,102,000 in December 2016.  The not-in-the-labor-force number includes retirees, students, homemakers, the disabled, and others who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason.

The nation’s labor force participation rate – the percentage of the 16-and-older civilian non-institutionalized population that is either employed or actively seeking work – dropped two-tenths of a point to 62.7 percent in May.

That explanation of who isn't working, like retirees and students, rarely placed so high, if at all, in a Jones jobless rate story under Obama.

Jones' article was joined by the usual sidebar from Terry Jeffrey complaining there are more jobs in government than in manufacturing. Missing again are Obama-era sidebars about the "real unemployment rate" and how black unemployement is higher than white unemployment. It's almost as if CNS did those sidebars for the sole purpose of making Obama look bad and doesn't want to highlight that those numbers look pretty much thte same under Trump.

CNS tried to do some after-the-fact spinning of all this by publishing a June 5 op-ed by the Heritage Foundation's Timothy Doescher, who delcared that to fix these numbers, "We need fundamental tax reform, the repeal of Obamacare—which continues to make hiring difficult for small businesses—and a serious reform of our welfare system, which rewards able-bodied people for not working and swelled to historic levels under the Obama administration."

WND Columnist Tries to Blame Manchester Bombing on CIA
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Is there anything WorldNetDaily won't trying to build a conspiracy theory around?

William Murray -- who's better known for blaming a train crash on homosexuality than for any foreign policy expertise -- tries to spin one on the Manchester suicide bombing in a May 26 WND column:

The Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, accompanied his father and older brothers to Libya at the age of 16 for “jihad” against the secular-leaning government of Moammar Gadhafi during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s grand plan to hand the Middle East over to the Muslim Brotherhood to “end extremism.” The CIA and Pentagon armed and trained various jihadist groups, including the Tripoli Brigade. The actual salaries of the fighters were paid for by the “Gulf States,” which translates into Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Salman, his brothers and their father, Ramadan Abedi, fought in a unit of the Tripoli Brigade that eventually secured Tripoli from the Libyan armed forces. Ramadan Abedi was an experienced military man, having served as an officer in Gadhafi’s internal security service until the 1990s. He returned with his sons to fight in the NATO-supported overthrow of the Libyan government.

[...]

To sum up: The CIA trained and armed a group of Libyan fighters to wage war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When they returned to Libya to fight against Gadhafi, the CIA turned against them and sided with the regime. Later, under Obama/Clinton leadership, the CIA helped empty the Libyan prisons of jihadists so they could fight against the same regime the CIA had once protected. Many of those senior jihadists became the leaders of the Tripoli Brigade that the Abedi family of the Manchester bomber fought with against the Gadhafi government.

Yeah, he's effectively blaming the bombing on the CIA. As WND does.

MRC's Double Standard on Humanizing People
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Clay Waters whines in a May 17 post:

The liberal media will never forgive Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon for momentarily treating Donald Trump like a normal guest when the then-presidential candidate appeared on the show last September.

In a long profile of Fallon set for the front of next Sunday's Arts page, New York Times Dave Itzkoff returned to the subject, with particular focus on the crime of Fallon playfully mussing Trump’s hair as a harmful humanization of the man, and implying that fateful incident caused Fallon’s show to be overtaken in the ratings by more left-wing ideological competition like the vulgar Stephen Colbert.

By contrast, the MRC has never forgiven the media for treating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama like a normal human being.

Under the headline "Nets Embrace 'Did You Plug the Hole Yet, Daddy?' Anecdote to Humanize Obama," Rich Noyes grumbled in 2010 that "The White House press corps just loved President Obama's press conference anecdote meant to prove the pressure he's under and responsibility he's taking ("When I woke up this morning, and I'm shaving and Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says: 'Did you plug the hole yet, daddy?'")."

And in September 2016, Tim Graham ranted about media outlets making "desperate attempts to keep trying to portray her as warm and human....just as they tried to convince Americans that in private that cold fish Al Gore and John Kerry were warm in private. " So convinced is Graham that Clinton is subhuman that he even grumbled about one commentator who referred to Hillary as "a funny, personable human being."

So it seems it's perfectly fine at the MRC to treat liberals as less than human.

WND Still Misleading about Confederacy, Monuments
Topic: WorldNetDaily

It seems WorldNetDaily is not done misunderstanding why monuments to the Confederacy are being removed. Brent Smith first uses his May 22 column to throw out the distraction of Robert Byrd:

When I heard that these and many other monuments were being taken down for the same reason, the first thing that came to mind was the late Democrat icon Robert “Sheets” Byrd (hat tip Rush). He was, of course, a long time U.S. senator from West Virginia, but also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And not just any member – he was a recruiter, a Kleagle.

Yet Byrd has dozens upon dozens of hospitals, parks, office buildings, community centers, federal buildings, etc. that bear his name. No one says a word about that. Of course not. He was a good liberal.

When asked, Democrats merely state that the racist Byrd should be judged on the entirety of his career – his full body of work – not just his years in the Klan.

Smith conveniently omits that Byrd repeatedly apologized for his KKK affiliation, to the point that even the NAACP praised him for supporting a civil rights agenda. Smith offers no evidence that Lee, Beauregard, et al, ever apolgized for their Confederate affiliation.

After unfairly maligning Byrd, Smith then complains that Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was being unfairly maligned:

In fact Beauregard was not a racist. A native of New Orleans, he fought for the Confederacy because they were the home team, for want of a better term. It was well-known that he hated Confederate President Jefferson Davis – so much so that he refused to lead Davis’ funeral procession.

He was an equal-rights advocate and led the failed unification effort in New Orleans, bringing together both white and black leaders. He fought for voting rights for blacks, integrated schools, public places and public transportation, many decades before national talk of civil rights.

In a speech in 1873, Beauregard said: “I am persuaded that the natural relation between the white and colored people is that of friendship. I am persuaded that their interests are identical; that their destinies in this state, where the two races are equally divided, are linked together; and that there is no prosperity for Louisiana which must not be the result of their cooperation.”

But as the article Smith links to to support his claims about Beauregard admits, the statue of Beauregard that was taken down in New Orleans did not honor his post-Civil War work; it honored his stint as a Confederate general.

Meanwhile, Joseph Farah does what he does in his May 29 column: portray the removal of Confederate statues as some sort of liberal conspiracy:

First, you will notice that Democrats are nearly always at the forefront of this kind of activity.

Why would that be?

Could it be because they are embarrassed and ashamed of their party’s own history?

You see, Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, was a Democrat. In fact, for 50 years after the War Between the States, the white South was dominated almost entirely by the Democratic Party. White Democrats ran the South during the war, through the Jim Crow days of segregation and right up until the early 1960s.

Not a single Democrat in that era ever suggested destroying statues of Confederate heroes, taking down Confederate flags or toppling monuments memorializing the Confederacy.

What’s more, the Ku Klux Klan would have discouraged such demolition. And the Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party.

As we pointed out when Farah made a similar claim, the KKK was not the "military arm of the Democratic Party"; while many angry Southern whites during the 1860s and 1870s were Democrats and a smaller number of them joined the KKK, that doesn't make the KKK a Democratic creation.

This time around, though, Farah surprisingly concedes that today's Democratic Party is not the one of 150 years ago. Of course, that's a conspiracy too, he writes: "It was President Lyndon Baines Johnson who got the idea of the Democrat [sic] Party becoming the 'champion' of black Americans by enticing them into dependency through welfare-style programs."

Farah doesn't explain why no conservatives hike him are endorsing removal of Confederate monuments and, to the contrary, seem to be opposing it: As we've pointed out, the South has always been conservative; many Southerners started abandoning the Democratic Party starting in the 1960s after it supported integration and other equal-rights laws and shifted their allegiance over a generation from Democrats to Republicans.

Persistent Obama Derangement Syndrome, Newsmax Edition
Topic: Newsmax

And Michelle Obama decided to bully school kids. She thought forcing teenagers to subsist on the same fare enjoyed by Eastern mystics would cure America's obesity problem.

[...]

In the future kids wouldn't be hungry due to incompetent parents. They would be hungry as a result of Michelle's One-Size-Fits-All menu mandate.

Thank God Michelle didn't choose clothing for her legacy. Kids attending government schools would look like Red Guards.

Michelle might be able to keep the menus running on time in the White House where she has the Secret Service to back her up, but in Deplorable America teenagers are much more obstinate.

[...]

The University of Vermont conducted a study of her menu in action and found food waste increased by 56 percent. Michelle even managed to turn formerly law-abiding children into salt pushers as flavor advocates sold take-out packets to an eager client base.

Michelle even managed to make biscuits taste bad, but what would you expect from a woman that demands diners eat grits without butter or brown sugar?

This is why if you passed by any school gullible enough to adopt her school lunch program you could see Michelle's legacy being tossed from school cafeteria trash cans into the dumpster.

[...]

Michelle's real legacy is utter contempt for the average American. Personally, I can get along without the hectoring presence of the First Drill Sergeant. I know what I'm buying in the grocery store without consulting the USDA hotline.

If Michelle's cuisine control causes local school boards to question the role of the feds in education, then she will have left a legacy I can actually support.

-- Michael Shannon, May 26 Newsmax column

WND Slobbers Over Trump Pulling Out of Paris Climate Accord
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The servile slobbering over Donald Trump and his administration at WorldNetDaily is just getting embarrassing.

During President Trump's announcement that he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, WND was sending out fawning tweets that may as well have been sent from Trump's own Twitter account.

One reads, "Trump's pulling out of Paris Accord is a reminder what America First looks like!"

Another declares, "Steve Miller and Steve Bannon just wrote a heck of a speech for Trump. Awesome job!"

That's followed by a tweet asserting, "'I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.' Beautiful. Any American against this statement is a globalist."

The first two tweets added the #MAGA hashtag, another declaration of bias.

We bring this up because WND keeps insisting that it's "independent" and that it will hold government accountable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

CNS Summer Intern Has The Dishonest Right-Wing Reporting Basics Down
Topic: CNSNews.com

Gage Cohen is a summer intern for CNSNews.com, and already he's picking up CNS' dishonest ways.

Cohen writes in a May 31 article:

Planned Parenthood’s newly released " 2015-2016 Annual Report " says that the organization performed 328,348 abortions in the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2015, and received $554.6 million in "government health services reimbursements and grants"--money that came from U.S. taxpayers--in the year that on June 30, 2016.

Cohen conveniently -- and dishonestly -- omits the important fact that none of that "money that came from U.S. taxpayers" paid for any of those abortions because federal law prohibits it.

CNS revels in pushing that dishonesty.

Cohen similarly repeated right-wing talking points in a June 1 article, claiming that "The 2017 hurricane season begins today, June 1--a record 139 months after the last major hurricane made landfall in the continental United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

As we've pointed out, CNS narrowly defines this as a Category 3 hurricane that made landfall, which conveniently ignores Category 3 hurricanes that grazed the U.S. coast before weakening and making landfall as well as 2012's Superstorm Sandy, which still caused substantial damage despite not being a Category 3 hurricane at landfall.

It looks like Cohen is well on his way to becoming a highly biased right-wing reporter. Congratulations, or something.

Islamophobic WND Doesn't Quote Anti-Muslim Rhetoric of Portland Stabbing Suspect
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily's anonymously written May 29 article on Jeremy Christian's anti-Muslim stabbing rampage in Portland, leaving two dead, is an odd creature.

While the headline calls Christian an "murderous Muslim-hater" and the article itself noted that the incident began "when he began verbally assaulting a woman wearing a Muslim head covering, known as a hijab" using "what would be characterized as hate speech or bias language," the article curiously fails to quote any of that alleged language, instead playing up Christian's "felonious neo-Nazi" past.

One witness said that "He was saying that Muslims should die. That they've been killing Christians for years."Christian was also reported as shouting "Die Muslims" at a rally in April. On Facebook, Christian wrote that "If we're removing statues because of the Civil War, we should be removing mosques because of 9/11."

Christian's rhetoric isn't really all that more extreme that the Islamophobia WND has been peddling.

WND reporter Leo Hohmann has written an entire anti-Muslim book malliciously portraying Muslim refugees escaping war and poverty to come to the U.S. as engaging in "civilization jihad." Hohmann has endeavored to portray all Muslims as potential terrorists and ranted that Muslims "really don't value what we value," complete with shadowy images of armed Muslims. WND has told lies about a measles outbreak in a Somali-American community in Minnesota, falsely blaming it on the Quran instead of their fellow anti-vaxxers who spread their conspiracy theories among thte community, and invoked the vision of scary Muslim hordes in order to promote the right-wing candidate in the French presidential election. And WND has attacked Muslims for making use of the very same religious-freedom laws it has praised Christians for invoking.

It seems Christian was acting on the Muslim-hate WND has been expressing both implicitly and explicitly and putting those hints into action.

Even as Christian sounded even more WND-esque at his arraignment hearing -- where he ranted, "Free speech or die Portland. You've got no safe place. This is America. Get out if you don't like free speech ... Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom" -- has devoted no more original coverage to this story. We can probably guess why.

MRC, Bad At Its Job, Launches Revenge Campaign
Topic: Media Research Center

Apparently driven by envy at liberal groups like Media Matters for being effective in raising legitimate concerns about Fox News hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity in a way that caused advertisers to flee their shows, the Media Research Center is now lashing out at TV hosts it doesn't agree with.

In other words, a revenge campaign.

The MRC explains the plan in a name-calling May 31 post:

Media Research Center (MRC) President Brent Bozell today announced a new campaign  that will focus on informing the American public and corporate advertisers about leftist shows and on-air personalities who use their programs to spread vicious lies and hate.

“We are putting the radical left on notice that we are on to them. We know the inside-outside game that radical organizations are playing with their leftist allies in the "news" media. The radical left’s effort to silence conservative media  by targeting their advertisers with coordinated smear campaigns has gone unanswered, but today is the day the conservative movement fights back, but with a big difference: We'll tell the truth. And we'll take no prisoners.

“Every network and cable news channel is today on notice that the MRC will be closely monitoring their leftist opinion programs and informing their advertisers and the American public when these programs and hosts go beyond political commentary and engage in smear, hate and political extremism.  The difference between our effort and what the left is engaged in is that we will demonstrate to the advertisers of these programs how the hosts of these shows are not simply engaged in disagreeable political discussion but rather outright hate and personal character assassination.

"Today we are putting ten shows, and their major corporate sponsors on notice that we are watching their every move. Additionally, we will be publicly listing the advertisers of these programs and asking them to defend their decision to continue airing ads on these shows. Every time one of their on-air personalities go beyond political commentary and engage in smear and hate, we are going to unleash an army of activists to contact these advertisers by phone and through social media to ask them why they are advertising on programs that are so biased, repulsive and morally bankrupt."

But isn't this kind of monitoring what the MRC's job is supposed to have been for the past 30 years? Is the MRC admitting that it's terrible at its job?

The MRC also whines about "smear campaigns" against cpnoservative hosts, but it never explains how it is a "smear" to point out that O'Reilly paid millions of dollars to settle sexual harassment lawsuits, or that Hannity is peddling discredited conspiracy theories about a murder victim even after the victim's family begged him to stop.

The fact that the MRC can't even mention Seth Rich's name while defending Hannity tells us just how cynical and spiteful this campaign is. It knows Hannity is being as repulsive and morally bankrupt as it claims liberal hosts are, but it will never admit that in public because Bozell's buddies must be defended no matter how blatant the cynicism and hypocrisy in doing so.

Even the MRC's target list is lame. The first show on the list is Al Sharpton's MSNBC show, which got busted down from daily to weekly some time ago and the which MRC itself hasn't written about in two months.

Bozell kept up the dishonesty in a June 1 appearance on (where else) Hannity's Fox News show, where he touted his revenge campaign and once again complained about conservatives being smeared. Again, Bozell failed to explain how pointing out Hannity's malicious conspiracy-mongering is a "smear."

Unless Bozell and the MRC can resolve their hypocrisy in defending Hannity, this new revenge campaign will not be taken seriously -- like the rest of the MRC.

WND Raising Money To Push Seth Rich Conspiracy Theories, Dishonestly Suggests Rich Family Supports It
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily's latest round of Seth Rich conspiracy-mongering start with a pair of meaningless stories:

• An article by Alicia Powe complaining that Washington, D.C., hospitals wouldn't release any information about Rich -- an outcome she certainly knew would happen because federal law bars hospitals from publicly releasing data about any patient. Powe grudgingly admits this, even quoting the right-wing ambulance-chasers at Judicial Watch pointing out that hospitals must follow "strict patient privacy regulations."So there was no legitimate journalistic value whatsoever in this story -- it's just to pad out WND's story count on Seth Rich.
• Powe also reported on a completely unrelated gun-theft case, uncritically repeating the assertions of politically motivated lobbyist Jack Burkman, who surprisingly admits he has no information linking the case to Rich. Powe aldo quoted Burkman whining: “I don’t understand why they are withholding key information. We simply don’t know what their motives are. Is there a cover-up? Is there something they don’t want out? They seem to want this in the cold-case file. No new information has been released in this case since late October.” It could be because the police know Burkman is a political hack seeking to exploit Rich's death for his own partisan purposes.

Meanwhile, WND has reached the begging-for-money stage of the Rich story. Another article announced that WND has started a GoFundMe page "to raise support for rewards for new evidence that would lead to a conviction, for funding for a private investigator to uncover the truth and for more resources for investigative reporting."

But on that GoFundMe page, WND is dishonestly suggesting it has the blessing of Rich's family. It states (boldface in original):

We support the GoFundMe campaign of the Rich Family and commend anyone to donate to that cause. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron, is right when he writes: “One thing that no one tells you, and something we weren’t prepared to hear when we lost Seth, is that if a case isn’t solved immediately, it could take months or years before justice is served. Worse, to keep the investigation active, to seek leads and to follow up on investigations, to make sure that every possible angle is covered – it’s expensive.”

Like that campaign, we seek “to raise and maintain public awareness of Seth's unsolved murder.” Most of all, we want to see this case solved.

WND gives no indication it sought Aaron Rich's permission to quote him, let alone that the Rich family supports WND's efforts. In fact we can assume quite the opposite: The Rich family begged Sean Hannity to stop spreading conspiracy theories about Seth's death, so it's highly unlikely that the family has anything to do with WND, which has spread even more conspiracy theories about it and is simply exploiting the story to feed its lengthy history of anti-Clinton animus.

Further, WND's history in seeking money from the public is one of complete lack of transparency -- and WND offers no specifics about how much money it needs to accomplish what it claims to want to do -- so there's no reason to trust WND to be accountable.

Smart donors are much better off donating directly to the Rich family's GoFundMe campaign than giving any money to WND.

MRC's Graham Distracts From Confederate Statues By Whining About A Random Lenin Statue
Topic: Media Research Center

In the grand Media Research Center tradition of complaining about media coverage by pointing to some random, vaguely related thing, Tim Graham complains in a May 21 MRC post that Washington Post reports about the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans don't mention a statue of Lenin in Seattle:

Black Americans can obviously look at the history of slavery and Jim Crow and argue the Confederate generals represent oppressors. But what about other oppressors? A friend of mine named Wayne from Texas pointed out another monument The Washington Post could campaign against if they were all about cheering on the removal of men who embody oppression. Seattle has a large bronze statue honoring Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the mass-murdering Soviet regime installed in the Russian revolution of 1917. How does the Post strike a pose on that?

Graham misses the obvious point that the Lenin statue is in Seattle -- rescued from the scrap heap in Czechoslovakia -- as something of an art project, complete with the irony of being located in the midst of a capitalistic business district. It's also for sale and can be moved and/or melted down for the right price. The statue is simply tolerated; nobody stakes it seriously. Graham acknowledges this, whining that the statue as viewed from the lens of "ironic detatchment."

The Confederate statues, by contrast, were installed for the express purpose of celebrating a cause rejected by the rest of the country that was driven by the oppression and even slavery of an entire race.

Graham would be hard pressed to find anyone who will celebrate Lenin the man in Seattle, while racists and white nationalists are fighting -- unironically -- to keep Confederate statues.

If Graham wants to see the Lenin statue go, all he has to do is pay the family that owns it $250,000. But it seems he'd simply sit around and invent specious arguments.

MRC Declares Victory in Hannity Boycott Fight, Finally Mentions Why There Is A Boycott
Topic: Media Research Center

After days of attacking insurance company USAA for pulling its ads from Sean Hannity's Fox News show in response to an ad boycott over Hannity's insistence on pushing false, malicious conspiracy theories regarding the death of Seth Rich -- but without telling its readers the reason why the boycott existed -- USAA reversed its decision. Needless to say, the MRC was more than happy to declare victory.

A May 30 post by Curtis Houck repeated MRC chief Brent Bozell's smug declaration: “It goes without saying that USAA has not experienced this kind of customer outrage in its entire history.”

Houck went on to grumble that "USAA withdrew its advertisement spots on Thursday from Hannity’s FNC show after pressure from far-left organizations running a smear campaign in hopes of causing Hannity to lose his job." But curiously, Houck never explains how, exactly, Hannity was being "smeared."

It's only in an excerpt from that AP article farther down in his post that Houck inadvertently reveals the reason behind the boycott: As stated by the AP, Hannity was "reporting a discredited story involving the death of a Democratic National Committee staff member."

There. Now, was it that hard to tell the entire truth to your readers that you couldn't have mentioned it before now?