CNS Reporter Keeps Up Stenography for WH Press Secretary Topic: CNSNews.com
We've documented how CNSNews.com reporter Melanie Arter devoted a whopping 26 articles in September and October to whatever White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to say. Well, it's time for another count.
In November and December, Arter added another 10 articles to that total:
The lower count can be blamed on more holidays during the month, plus the fact that Arter as been off work since Dec. 15 -- menaing that the total is actually for just a month and a half.
It also means a stenographical story from Arter every three days or so. Which is not really journalism at all.
NEW ARTICLE: Fake News At WND, Zombies and Trolls Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily keeps zombie lies alive long after they've been discredited. It also fell for a Russian troll pro-Trump Twitter account and profiled a pro-Trump merchandiser who doesn't appear to actually exist. Read more >>
MRC's Persistent Fox News-Shaped Blind Spot on Sexual Harassment Topic: Media Research Center
We've repeatedlyhighlighted the Media Research Center's Fox News-shaped blind spot on the issue of sexual harassment -- harping on allegations everywhere else but ignoring the ones at the MRC's favorite TV channel. And they keep piling up.
Tim Graham and Brent Bozell's Dec. 20 column highlights the "stunning announcements and admissions about the serious alleged sexual misbehavior of Harvey Weinstein and others." "Others" is the closest Graham and Bozell get to referencing the scandals at Fox News.
Graham and Bozell spend the rest of their column parsing the definition of sexual harassment. At first, it seems incongruous that they're giving something of a pass to certain allegations against hated enemies like Chris Matthews ("he's a pig, not a harasser") and Matt Lauer (regarding a woman who had an affair with Lauer she now says was an abuse of power (italics theirs): "You were a 24-year-old woman. Act your age. If he's a scoundrel, so are you").
The reason becomes clear later in their column: They're trying to set up a defense against allegations made against Donald Trump. Here's how they attack one Trump accuser:
Speaking of makeup artists, Jill Harth filed a sexual harassment suit against Donald Trump in 1997 and renewed her allegations in the fall of 2016. John Solomon at The Hill reports that she repeatedly sent Trump gushing emails during his presidential campaign offering to do his makeup and even testify about how wonderfully he treated women. "I also want to put it out there that I would be willing to say at a rally or somewhere how DJT helped me with my self-confidence and all positive things about how he is with women to counter any potential negativity that may come out at some point in the campaign," she wrote.
(We're not watching CNN rushing to the president's defense.)
Then there's the old notion of cashing in on allegations. Solomon added that Harth's lawyer, Lisa Bloom, "eventually started a GoFundMe.com fundraising effort to help Harth and located a donor that paid off Harth's mortgage on her Queens apartment in New York City."
Imagine that.
Yes, imagine that. It's as if Graham and Bozell hae forgotten that Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey also tried to crowdfund paying off her mortgage. And for all we know, Willey may have found a donor to actually do so: Donald Trump.
The blind spot was even more obvious in Jeffrey Lord's Dec. 23 NewsBusters column, in which he served up a lengthy list of how "across the media landscape one player after another fell" by, among other things, "having let loose their private sexual demons on unsuspecting colleagues or others." Curiously missing from that list: anyone from Fox News.
That Fox News-shaped blind spot hasn't shrunk a bit.
WND Silent On Its Author/Candidate's White Supremacist/Anti-Semitic Bent Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've detailed how WorldNetDaily has heavily promoted Paul Nehlen's campaign to run against Paul Ryan in the 2018 Republican primary in Wisconsin -- so enthusiastically, in fact, that it just might violate campaign law. After all, WND did publish Nehlen's anti-"globalist" book "Wage the Battle" in July and is selling his anti-Muslim film "Hirjah" in its online store.
But WND hasn't done a lot of promotion of Nehlen lately. Near as we can tell, the last time Nehlen got an article to himself on WND was Sept. 14, in which Paul Bremmer touted Nehlen's declaration that "America demands a wall. You cannot effectively deport a criminal without a wall."
As much as we'd like to think that it suddenly expressed concern about election law after our first piece was published, the truth may be a little more inconvenient: Nehlen has been descending into white nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Nehlen has been caught unironically using triple parentheses around a Jewish name -- a trope that white nationalists use to harass Jews on Twitter -- and he has strongly suggested his critics are being paid by Jews to attack him.He has also embraced other white nationalist memes. It's so bad that Breitbart, which has been an even more enthusiastic booster of Nehlen than WND, has reportedly dropped its support of him (or maybe not).
Meanwhile, it's been crickets from WND. While it hasn't promoted him since mid-September, it also hasn't said a peep about the controversies surrounding him. You'd think that as the publisher of Nehlen's book and seller of his Muslim-bashing film, it would have something to say.
Then again, WND is weirdly proud that it can keep its racism relatively covert, at least to the point that Google doesn't threaten to pull its advertising over race-baiting.
This is the second WND-linked writer in trouble for racially charged rhetoric in recent months. We've already noted how WND-promoted contrarian investor Marc Faber got caught saying that he thanked God that "white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the U.S. would look like Zimbabwe."
UPDATE: It appears Breitbart now has definitively cut ties with Nehlen after he tweeted about he was enjoying an anti-Semitic book. We've contacted WND Books for a statement about its relationship with Nehlen; we'll let you know if we hear back.
CNS Reporter Serves Up Pro-Trump Rant As 'News' Story Topic: CNSNews.com
The general decline of standards at CNSNews.com over the past year or so, plus its determination to be a pro-Trump stenographer, has led to embarassing things no real "news" operation would ever publish -- like a Dec. 15 "news" article that's more political rant than news. Jones huffs:
Impatient to get President Trump out of the office to which the American people elected him a year ago, media liberals on Monday re-introduced some of the women who have accused Trump of harassing them sexually years ago.
The women first spoke to Megyn Kelly on her cable show, then they held a news conference organized by a group called Brave New Films, which produces liberal propaganda on issues such as "justice," "inequality" and "gun violence."
The re-emergence of Trump's female accusers fits neatly into the script written by Democrats, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who said after the complainants' news conference that President Trump simply must resign.
We don't recall anyone at CNS or its Media Research Center parent similarly portraying the emergence of the women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment and worse as stunts to drive the Republican political agenda. Indeed, MRC chief Brent Bozell and Tim Graham used them to deflect from Trump's offenses when they first surfaced before the 2016 election.
So, apparently, it's OK for only one side to exploit sexual harassment charges for political purposes as far as Jones and Bozell are concerned.
Still, Jones continued to whine, grumbling on the Trump White House's behalf that "Trump's female accusers were among the topics at the White House press briefing on Friday, as spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders fielded questions she's answered before." She concludes that the story is being pushed by reporters "biased against trump" for the sole purpose of trying to get Trump on something since the Russia scandal purportedly isn't panning out:
One biased-against-Trump reporter insisted that Sanders answer her question about Trump's accusers, "because this is spinning and it's focused on him now and--"
Sanders interrupted, noting that Trump has already addressed the issue directly with the American people.
The reporter persisted: "But will he -- it's coming up new and afresh and more people are now speaking out. Will...the president address the nation on this? This is a huge issue, Sarah," the reporter insisted.
As Trump himself noted, that other huge issue -- the special counsel's investigation into the Trump campaign's possible coordination with Russia -- so far has produced no clear evidence implicating the president, which seems to be the point of the investigation.
So cue the Trump accusers...
Again, the complete opposite of the way CNS and the MRC has portrayed Clinton's accusers, which it has never accused of being political pawns though they were certainly no less so than CNS and the MRC accuse Trump's accusers of being.
Being a CNS reporter, it seems, means never having to be held to journalistic standards.
WND Ambushes Donna Brazile With Conspiracy Theories About Seth Rich Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily reporter Alicia Powe begins her Dec. 17 article this way: "Former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile appeared incoherent and agitated when WND approached her at a Tuesday book signing to ask her questions about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich."
Unmentioned by Powe: That is likely a logical reaction to a writer for a fringe-right-wing website invading a book signing to pester her with conspiracy theories over Rich's death.
Indeed, that's exactly what Powe did, trying to pin Brazile down on arcane details on her book regarding Rich, which Powe framed as "conflicting statements about Rich's murder." She then mocks Brazile -- and demonstrates the malicious intent of her ambushh of her -- by whining that Brazile "appeared lost for words and made bizarre and rambling statements."
Powe included Brazile's answer, which doesn't sound rambling at all. Perhaps Powe found it bizarre when Brazile called out soulless conspiracy theorists like herself: "I don’t practice the conspiracy theories that people have used to scar Seth’s memory, to hurt his family. I have been to Omaha. I have been to his synagogue. I have cried because of him. I love that boy."
Of course, Powe and WND only love Seth Rich to the extent that they can cynically exploit his death to further their near-pathological hatred of Hillary Clinton. Powe has never been to Omaha, where Rich is from, nor has she been to his synagogue. Rich is not a person to anyone at WND -- just a tool.
Powe's article also includes the requisite reference to WND's dishonest crowdfunding effort to investigate (read: perpetuate conspiracy theories about) Rich's death. That effort continues to be a failure, having raised only $4,630 after nearly seven months.
MRC Wrongly Calls Wash. Post Reporter 'Liberal' Topic: Media Research Center
Ex-Media Research Center researcher Brad Wilmouth huffs in a Dec. 15 NewsBusters post:
Some liberal journalists just can't get the notion out of their minds that George Wallace was a Republican, even though the former segregationist governor of Alabama was a lifelong Democrat. On Friday's Washington Week on PBS, host Robert Costa -- also a Washington Postreporter -- suggested that Wallace was a part of the Republican party's "past" as he recalled that some black voters in Alabama are worried about the direction the GOP is taking. Costa:
I spoke to a lot of African-American voters when I was down there, Jeff, and they said that they're worried that the Republican Party -- broadly speaking -- is turning back to its past. They cited the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, a segregationist, and they say, in Roy Moore -- sometimes even in President Trump -- they hear echoes of a past that makes them uncomfortable.
Not one of the four panel members jumped in to correct the suggestion that Wallace was ever a Republican as CNN's Jeff Zeleny, CBS's Nancy Cordes, NBC's Kristen Welker, and Vice News's Shawna Thomas got their turns to speak.
In fact, Costa is not a "liberal journalist." He came to the Washington Post from National Review, and the MRC regarded his work so well at the time that a 2013 NewsBusters post celebrated Costa's hiring by crediting Post owner Jeff Bezos for "encouraging his staff to think outside the box" by hiring someone from "a right-leaning publication."
How quickly the MRC forgets that Costa was once their guy.
Further, Wilmouth's freaking out about the mere suggestion that Wallace was a Republican seems rather silly given that both Wallace and Trump share certain traits in exploiting peope's fears and promoting racially tinged populism.
Newsmax Columnist: Trump's No Hitler, Obama Is! Topic: Newsmax
Right-wing radio host Chuck Morse has been preoccupied with portraying President Obama as a Hitler-like figure. While writing a column and serving as a source for WorldNetDaily, Morse regularlypushed this meme. Morse is over at Newsmax now, and he's still doing the same thing.
In his Dec. 11 Newsmax column, Morse does some mind-reading by taking a vague allusion from an Obama speech and turning it into a specific allegation that Obama likened President Trump to Hitler:
Echoing a meme that has become a worldwide article of faith for the authoritarian-oriented, Trump-hating left, former President Barack Obama has compared his successor, President Donald J. Trump, to Hitler.
Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago, Obama noted that the U.S. has survived tough times before and will again, offering as an example of tough times the days of communist fighter Joseph McCarthy.
“The danger is grow[ing] complacent,” Obama said. “We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly.”
“That's what happened in Germany in the 1930s,” Obama opined. “Sixty million people died. So, you've got to pay attention. And vote.”
In a major case of projection, Obama deflected from the unprecedented economic success of President Trump’s first year in office, hardly tough times for working people, while he avoided the stark contrast between Trump’s tremendous first year and his lackluster and economically torpid previous eight years. Obama’s reference to Senator McCarthy, juxtaposed with his comparing Trump to Hitler, is ironic given the fact that the main work of Senator McCarthy was to investigate the real agents of Hitler, secret communists working within the FDR Administration who were pro-Nazi during the Hitler-Stalin Pact years, 1939-1941, the first 2 years of World War II.
Morse doesn't provide any support for that latter claim, let alone explain how one could be both communist and pro-Nazi, given that Hitler declared war on the communist Soviet Union. But then, he's back on his old smear that Obama -- and, really, any liberal -- is the real Hitler:
We should recall that it was Barack Obama who, in 2008, developed a cult of personality that was unprecedented in American history.
Reminiscent of the cult that developed around such socialist leaders as Hitler, Fidel Castro, V.I. Lenin, and Mao tse Tung, Obama, in a subtler context made palatable to an American audience, was worshipped by the liberal establishment, by the press, academia, and various cultural institutions. I recall, for example, a second grader that I knew informing me that her teacher had the students keep a diary of each day of Obama’s presidency starting on the first day. Women were reported to have fainted at his rallies.
Obama’s style of speaking, as illustrated by these recent remarks to the Economic Club of Chicago, is classic demagoguery, what French historian and former communist Alain Besancon described as “the language of ideology…the official language.” Obama speaks with indirection, innuendo, double-speak, and sophistry. His style is almost a form of code for the liberal establishment. His dishonest attempt to manipulate emotions without naming the target of his ire is a classic form of socialist agit-prop. Indeed, an English translation of a Hitler speech is filled with such innuendo and if the word “Jew” in one of those vile speeches were to be replaced with a word like “corporate interest” the speech would almost resemble the type that might be delivered by the likes of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Has Morse never noticed the cult of personality around Trump? Apparently not, since he seems to be a full-fledged member. Writing like a full-fledged sycophant, Morse then unironically writes:
President Donald Trump, in contrast, speaks plainly, perhaps a bit too plainly at times, and honestly. Trump’s speeches contain no guile or hidden agendas. He says it like he sees it, warts and all. It may not always be pretty, like the suave Obama, and it may make us cringe from time to time, but Trump is honest and he is who he is. And that is, unlike Obama and his ilk, a man who supports and who seeks to advance genuine American ideals and principles. Trump, unlike the socialist demagogues of history like Hitler, speaks plainly because he has nothing to hide.
Trump has nothing to hide? Two words for Morse: tax returns.
At CNS, Winning Trumps Conservative Beliefs Topic: CNSNews.com
Surprisingly, the Trump stenographers at CNSNews.com found something to dislike about the Republican tax bill: it lowers the maximum age a child is eligible to be counted for the child tax credit from 18 to 17. CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey laid this out in an overly dramatic way in a Dec. 17 article, using language and a headline -- "Republican Tax Bill Says Your 16-Year-Old Won’t Be Your Child Next Year" to bizarrely suggest that the government was going to actually take custody of your children:
The final version of the Republican tax bill released by a congressional conference committee on Friday holds that your 16-year-old child who is living in your home this year and attending high school will no longer be your child next year—even if they continue living in your home and attending high school.
That is because they will turn 17--the age at which the Republican congressional leadership has decided American parents should no longer be able to claim a child tax credit for their child.
This is in contrast to the version of the bill that passed the Senate, which, through 2024 at least, would have allowed parents to claim the child tax credit for their children until they turned 18.
Your newborn, who will be eligible under the final Republican bill for an increased “child” tax credit next year, will no longer be eligible for that increased credit when he or she is 9 years old--because the increased credit will disappear after 2025.
Jeffrey's concern over this provision didn't stop CNS from enthusiastically promoting the tax bill -- as Trump stenographers, they are highly invested in helping Trump score a legislative victory. It touted a (unsubstantiated) claim that the bill had bipartisan input, gave Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin a platform to promote the bill, and promoted a Republican congressman's promotion of the bill, as well as Paul Ryan's shilling for it.
Interestingly, none of those articles mentioned Jeffrey's concern about the child tax credit change, even though they were all written after Jeffrey's article was published.
When the tax bill did pass, Jeffrey's article on it curiously failed to mention his own previous concerns about the child tax credit, instead cheering about how the bill "kills that individual mandate to buy health insurance" under the Affordable Care Act. So much for principled outrage.
And after the bill fully passed Congress, Susan Jones gushed about the "vintage Trump press conference" held afterward, with a headline that summed things up: "Trump: 'It's Always a Lot of Fun When You Win'." She also didn't mention the child tax credit her boss was worked up about just a few days earlier.
Winning is all that matters, apparently, and Jeffrey and CNS ultimately care more about making sure Trump wins than holding to any conservative convictions they may have claimed to have.
Roy Moore Dead-Enders Hang On At WND Topic: WorldNetDaily
The pro-Roy Moore dead-enders at WorldNetDaily are clinging to their failed candidate.
We've already noted how WND columnist Mychal Massie baselessly claimed that "credible accusations of voter fraud" exist in the election that Moore lost, but he's far from the only one desperately trying to de-legitimize the election because Democrat Doug Jones won.
Foreigner Trevor Loudon complained that "A coalition of Muslim and Marxist-led groups won the Dec. 12, 2017, Alabama U.S. Senate election for Doug Jones." He's also very unhappy that people whose politics he doesn't agree with are allowed to vote (not that he has a say in the matter, being a resident of New Zealand):
The real lesson is that the left is pouring big resources into registering hundreds of thousands of black and Latino voters in Southern states – especially North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona. They have already flipped Colorado and Virginia; if they can push over two or three more Southern dominoes, the Republicans will be in deep trouble.
If Alabama’s Muslim and Marxist communities had not rallied thousands of black, Latino and Muslim voters behind Doug Jones, President Trump would be sitting on a safer Senate majority today.
Alan Keyes, meanwhile, asserted that the Washington Post story on Moore's history of perving on teenage girls was "deceitfully contrived" (though he identifies no factual error in it) and lashed out (albeit floridly, as usual) at fellow right-winger Michael Savage for getting it right for once by pointing out that Alabama voters saw Moore as a hypocrite:
But Christ, to the contrary, repeatedly and harshly condemns as hypocrites the Scribes and Pharisees who rejected and condemned him despite the contrary evidence of his actions. As for the truthfulness of witnesses, Christ did not say his followers should trust in their words alone, however plausible they may appear. He directed us to look for their fruits. In the case of the witnesses against Roy Moore, the plainly intended fruit of their testimony was to discredit someone who has borne self-sacrificial witness to God’s written and Incarnate Word, in order to prefer to a position of authority in government someone who insists that the force of law should be abused to enforce acceptance of actions the Bible repeatedly makes clear that God hates.
[...]
So, unlike Mr. Savage, I cannot pretend that a deceit-corrupted election, bearing fruit that God abhors and condemns, must be taken as a true sign of anything at all about the quality of Christian faith in Alabama. But if the irrational conclusions Mr. Savage draws from that fallacious election are any indication, I am willing, as one Doctor to another who claims that title, to question whether, in his judgment about the late election, he is speaking as a Doctor, or as one who, in departing from the path of rational knowledge that title implies, acts without benefit of the learning that substantiates its worth.
Keyes concluded that "The people who engineered the deceitful election in Alabama induced an outcome that exactly corresponds to such mob rule." Apparently, Keyes thinks it's"mob rule" whenever a conservative loses an election.
MRC Indignant NY Times Reporter Keeps Job Despite Harassment Claims, Silent On Fox Host Doing The Same Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck waxes indignant in a Dec. 20 post:
The New York Times decided that it would not fire Glenn Thrush following an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, citing “dozens of interviews with people both inside and outside the newsroom” and that Thrush will seek workplace “training” to supplement his “counseling and substance abuse rehabilitation.”
The befuddling decision by executive editor Dean Baquet came exactly one month after Vox.com detailed disturbing claims of sexual misbehavior by Thrush from his tenure at Politico. The paper suspended Thrush that same day while MSNBC took him off the airwaves (where he’s a political analyst).
Baquet announced in a memo that Thrush will remain at The Times despite losing his title as one of the paper’s White House correspondents and moved to “a new beat upon his return.” In other words, Al Franken should consider sending his resume over when he leaves the Senate on January 2. Who knows, maybe Charlie Rose should do that too.
This is a good time to remind people that, as we've noted, the MRC has been completely silent about someone else who still has a job despite being accused of sexual harassment: Charles Payne, a host on Fox Business and a commentator on Fox News. Like Thrush, Payne was suspended after the allegations surfaced and, like Thrush, was allowed to return to his job a couple months later -- though, unlike Thrush, he appears to have suffered no penalty in the process.
Also unlike Thrush, Payne is currently being sued over allegations of sexual assault and defamation by Scottie Nell Hughes, a female former Fox News commentator who says he coerced her into having sexual relationship with him and that her appearances on Fox News were drastically curtailed after the relationship ended.
A search of NewsBusters' archive shows that MRC chief Brent Bozell has appeared as a guest on Payne-hosted shows on Fox Business five times since the beginning of 2016, while the MRC's Rich Noyes has appeared once. We've also noted that the last mention of Hughes at NewsBusters was back in December 2016, which seems to back up Hughes' stated inability to make a living as a pundit after being blackballed from Fox.
WND's Massie Kills Larry Sinclair, And Pretty Much The Entire Idea of Truth Topic: WorldNetDaily
Mychal Massie is turning into a parody of himself. We always knew he was a depraved liar with an unusually large thesaurus, but he managed to outdo himself in his Dec. 18 WorldNetDaily column in slinging discredited, conspiratorial claims.
He starts off by noting "credible accusations of voter fraud" in the Alabama Senate race (not so much) and the "fallacious “allegations” of sexual impropriety" made against Roy Moore (even the Moore defenders at Breitbart now concede they were credible).He then quickly moved onto the claim that Bill Clinton "fathered an out-of-wedlock son with an illiterate black woman. That accusation haunts him today as 31-year-old Danny Williams continues his fight to force Clinton to take a DNA test for purposes of proving he is his father." Actually, Williams is more a victim of opportunistic right-wing charlatans like Joel Gilbert, who are disturbingly eager to feed Williams conspiracy theories and exploit him to try and sate their own lingering Clinton Derangement Syndrome. (Oh, yeah, there was a DNA test conducted by a tabloid back in the 1990s; not a match.)
Since Massie is just throwing whatever at the wall despite the fact that none of ever stuck before, he moves on to discredited attacks on Barack Obama:
Or perhaps it would have been better if Judge Moore had been an Obama. The allegations that Obama had frequented homosexual bathhouses in Chicago persist until today. Larry Sinclair wrote an expose on Obama titled, “Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies.” The book was published in 2009, and approaching Obama’s bid for re-election in 2012 a description at Google Books read: “The allegations Larry Sinclair makes in this book about our current president should be sending shock-waves through our national media. Consider that on Nov. 6.”
A description at Amazon noted: “The biggest untold story of the 2008 U.S. presidential election … Finally, the no-holds-barred, 100 percent true story of Barack Obama’s use and sale of cocaine; his homosexual affairs and the Dec. 23, 2007, murder of Barack Obama’s former lover and choir director of Obama’s Chicago church of 20 years, Donald Young, just days before the 2008 Iowa Caucus. This searing, candid story begins with Barack Obama meeting Larry Sinclair in November 1999, and subsequently procuring and selling cocaine, and then engaging in consensual, homosexual sex with Sinclair on Nov. 6 and again on Nov. 7, 1999.
“You’ll read in riveting detail how Sinclair, in 2007, repeatedly contacted and requested that the Obama campaign simply come clean about their candidate’s 1999 drug use and sales. You learn how the Obama campaign, David Axelrod and Barack Obama used Donald Young (the homosexual lover of Barack Obama) to contact and seek out information from Sinclair about who he had told of Obama’s crimes and actions. You’ll read how the Obama campaign used Internet porn king Dan Parisi and Ph.D. fraud Edward I. Gelb to conduct a rigged polygraph exam in an attempt to make the Sinclair story go away.
[...]
Larry Sinclair was killed in what no few concluded was a very suspicious car accident in November 2011. His allegations of interracial homosexual sex and cocaine abuse involving Obama went uninvestigated by the mainstream media.
Two: Larry Sinclair died in a 2011 car accident? We were unable to find any credible reference to such an incident. Had it actually happened, WND would have undoubtedly tried to exploit the hell out of it as the basis of its own "Obama death list" in order to blame Obama himself for orchestrating it. But that never happened.
Indeed, one of the people who would be most surprised to learn that Larry Sinclair died in 2011 is, um, Larry Sinclair. In a May 2017 column -- just seven months ago -- WND's Jack Cashill complained about how he and other fringe Obama-haters weren't contacted for a new book on the president, pondering that "I thought for sure [author David Garrow] would have interviewed Larry Sinclair," given how he had "reportedly discussed Obama’s alleged bisexuality." Cashill added: "I reached out to Sinclair through Facebook. 'I just don’t know any David Garrow,' he told me, 'nor have I given any interviews in last couple of years as I have been restoring a neglected community.'"
This is how little regard Massie has for facts. But then, apparently nobody at WND ever told him he was limited to using facts in his column.
For CNS Managing Editor, It's Homophobia For the Holidays Topic: CNSNews.com
Michael W. Chapman, the rabidly anti-gay managing editor of CNSNews.com, has struck again. He devotes a Dec. 20 blog post to whining about a new book that "tells the story of a black Santa, his white husband, and their life in the North Pole," complaining that it arrives "just in time to further sexualize (and homosexualize) children."
After quoting the book's author stating how its aim is to mock the "war on Christmas" meme promoted every year by conservatives, Chapman huffs: "Apparently, depicting two 'married' male Santas who presumably anally sodomize each other as pretend-love -- and deliver gifts to children! -- is in no way an attack on Christmas." Looks like someone isn't getting the joke. (And how does Chapman know that gay relationships are "pretend-love"? Has he ever talked to a gay person in his life?)
Chapman concludes his tirade by huffing, "Maybe next Christmas the publisher Harper Collins can gift the world with a transgender Santa." Given that such a book will most certainly set off humorless homophobes like Chapman into paroxysms of rage -- a perverse entertainment unto itself -- we wouldn't be surprised if that's in the works.
NEW ARTICLE: Another Year of Hating Anita Hill Topic: Media Research Center
A spate of sexual harassment allegations have given the Media Research Center one more opportunity to trash Hill and suggest her motivation for speaking out against Clarence Thomas was a book deal and a law-school job. Read more >>
Tim Graham, Hypocritical Media Concern Troll Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham spends a Dec. 10 post huffing about the use of anonymous sources by the news media, this time complaining about how, in his words, "The Washington Postenjoys playing the game “Heads We Win, Tails You Lose” when anonymous sources lead journalists into looking stupid" in defending CNN's use of anonymous sources in a story that later had to be corrected. Let the huffing begin (boldface is his):
But here’s the “heads we win” part: since the sources are still anonymous, there can be no “evidence” -- unless either the sources or the source-exploiters own up to their little secret racket. We are prevented from knowing these are “Democratic sources” – most likely, because they’re Democratic sources, and that would make the story look more -- to use the Post term -- “vocally partisan.”
The “tails you lose” part is when thePosthides all their conservative-hating sources’ identities and then boasts the motto “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Post surely believes reporters are never manipulated by “puppet masters.” They’re always the smartest people in the room. Until it becomes obvious they trusted someone to just read them an email without looking at it themselves. That’s not what smart people do.
As @JohnSalmon859 tweeted: “Either CNN ‘got played’ - or it was purposeful. Trump Jr's being charitable here.” But in CNN's excuse-making, absolutely everyone had the best intentions, their journalists and their sources. The spin is furious, but not convincing.
It will not surprise you to learn that Graham has a double standard on the subject of anonmous sources in news stories. As we've docutmented, just before the 2016 election, Fox News heavily pushed a story -- sourced only to "two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton e-mails and the Clinton Foundation" -- suggesting that an indictment of Hillary Clinton was imminent and that her email server had been hacked. The MRC hyped this story to the point that MRC chief Brent Bozell himself ranted about the "media cover-up" and declared, "We will report developments on this continuing cover-up every hour from here on out."
One of those developments, however, turned out to be that the story was bogus; Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who first reported the story, retracted his claims. Not only wasn't Graham concern-trolling about how poor Fox News got burned by anonymous sources, the MRC never bothered to correct the story it had been relentlessly hyping despite Bozell's promise to report developments "every hour."
So, Tim, spare us your fake concern. If you actually cared about journalism, you wouldn't be exempting Fox News from criticism for doing the same thing you've bashed others for doing.
We've documented how CNSNews.com reporter Melanie Arter devoted a whopping 26 articles in September and October to whatever White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to say. Well, it's time for another count.
We've 
We've 
The general decline of standards at CNSNews.com over the past year or so, plus its determination to be a pro-Trump stenographer, has led to embarassing things no real "news" operation would ever publish -- like a Dec. 15 "news" 
WorldNetDaily reporter Alicia Powe begins her Dec. 17 
Ex-Media Research Center researcher Brad Wilmouth huffs in a Dec. 15 NewsBusters 
Right-wing radio host Chuck Morse has been preoccupied with portraying President Obama as a Hitler-like figure. While writing a column and serving as a source for WorldNetDaily, Morse 
Surprisingly, the Trump stenographers at CNSNews.com found something to dislike about the Republican tax bill: it lowers the maximum age a child is eligible to be counted for the child tax credit from 18 to 17. CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey laid this out in an overly dramatic way in a Dec. 17 
The pro-Roy Moore dead-enders at WorldNetDaily are clinging to their failed candidate. 
The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck waxes indignant in a Dec. 20 
Mychal Massie is turning into a parody of himself. We always knew he was a 
Michael W. Chapman, the 
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham spends a Dec. 10 
