For unexplained reasons (but probably having something to do with the lack of a student intern), CNSNews.com published no Mark Levin stenography for just over a month, from Aug. 14 to Sept. 16. But with an election coming up (and a new fall intern in the building), CNS didn't want to ignore Levin's right-wing rants any longer. Let's look at the Levin stenography CNS published in September and October:
Despite the late start, that's 15 articles over the two-month period. That makes for a total of 76 articles in 2020, a little off the pace of the past three years, when it devoted at least 96 articles annually to Levin.
CNS also gave Levin space to whine on Oct. 5 that Facebook had restricted the visibility of"constitutional scholar, best selling author, and conservative talk-radio host" Levin over his promotion of fake news. Interestingly, the article by Lucy Collins doesn't explain exactly what the content was that got his page restricted. A couple days later, Craig Bannister followed up by repeating Levin's assertion that Facebook "backed down on censorship of his page."
Jones was very busy on Nov. 9. First, she complained that Joe Biden has "been declared the winner by major news outlets," then gave Republican Sen. Roy Blunt space to refuse to acknowledge Biden won and huff that "the media doesn't get to decide who the winner is. There is a canvassing process."
Of course, Jones couldn't admit Biden won either. She demonstrated that denial in another article that day transcribing President Trump taking credit for the first announcement of a coronavirus vaccine, which she wrote "comes six days after the election that Democrats insist Joe Biden won, despite the continuing vote count and legal challenges in a few swing states."
After that, Jones indulged in pushing the right-wing (and CNS) narrative that Biden getting a record number of votes doesn't really matter because Trump got nearly as many: "Democrat Joe Biden won more than 75 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate; but President Donald Trump won 70 million votes, the second highest total in history."
Jones continued to promote pro-Trump narratives over the next few days, with minimal pushback if any, regarding the president's increasingly desperate challenges to vote counts across the country:
It wasn't until Nov. 19 that she wrote her first article on the reality of Trump's failing election challenges, under the headline "Georgia Secretary of State: 'We Have Not Seen Any Widespread Voter Fraud'." But even then she wasn't willing to competely give up the conspiracy theories, complaining that "partisan host Jake Tapper" pointed out that speculation about election software allows certain people to change vote tallies is "frankly crazy stuff, tin foil hat stuff."
Hate-Filled CNS Editor Smears Biden As 'Evil,' His Supporters As Lazy, Godless Heathens Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey's hatred of Joe Biden is so unhinged that not only did he petulantly rant about a Biden speech interrupting a football game, he vented his anger at Catholic bishops who dared to congratulate only the second Catholic in history to be elected president. It turns out Jeffrey's irrational anger extends to anyone who voted for Biden as well, spending his Nov. 11 column smearing Biden voters as lazy, godless heathens, since an exit poll shows more people who don't work full time, aren't married and don't attend church voted for Biden:
Based on these polls — and looked at purely from a political perspective — there are certain cultural trends in the United States that would be good for Republicans and bad for Democrats (and vice versa).
If more people decided to work full time to earn a living, that would be bad for Democrats — and good for Republicans. If more people decided not to work full time to earn a living, that would be bad for Republicans — and good for Democrats.
If more people got married and stayed married, that would be bad for Democrats — and good for Republicans.
If more people started going to church or religious services, that would be bad for Democrats — and good for Republicans.
Indeed, in a nation where every voter went to church or attended a religious service at least once every four weeks, Trump would have won. Such an America would have been too religious for Biden to carry.
[...]
The ideal electorate from the Democratic political point of view would be dominated by unmarried people in their twenties and thirties who do not work full time and never go to church.
From the Republican point of view, it would be dominated by people who had experienced at least another 20 years in life, gotten married, found a permanent job and joined a church that they regularly attend.
Which electorate do you think would do a better job of keeping this country prosperous and free?
Jeffrey wasn't done with the smears. In his Nov. 18 column, he painted Biden as "evil" for supporting abortion rights and transgender rights in listing "five things candidate Biden promised to do as president can fairly be described as evil," and he's especially outraged (and hate-filled) by the transgender stuff:
The fourth evil act Biden has planned is to force public schools to treat biological males as females and biological females as males.
"By creating the human being man and woman, God gives personal dignity equally to the one and the other," says the Catholic Catechism. "Each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity."
Rather than accept the God-given "sexual identity" of human beings, Biden plans to advance something he calls "gender identity."
"Biden believes every transgender or non-binary person should have the option of changing their gender marker to 'M,' 'F,' or 'X' on government identifications, passports, and other documentation," says his website.
He will also guarantee that "transgender students have access to facilities based on their gender identity."
"On his first day in office," says Biden's campaign website, "Biden will reinstate the Obama-Biden guidance revoked by the Trump-Pence administration, which will restore transgender students' access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity."
Under Biden's plan, an 18-year-old boy who says he is a girl can play on the girls' field hockey team and use the girls' locker room.
The fifth evil item on Biden's agenda is what he would force insurance companies and health care providers to do to such a boy.
CNS maliciously -- and falsely -- portrayed Biden as suffering from "cognitive decline," and the editor who greenlighted that unfair and highly biased coverage wrote the above hate-filled screeds.
CNS' Stenography of Lindsey Graham Doesn't Hold Up Topic: CNSNews.com
Stenography done by a "news" operation tends not to age well. But that didn't stop Melanie Arter, CNSNews.com's chief pro-Trump stenographer, for uncritically transcribing a Fox Business appearance by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in a Nov. 10 article:
When asked to react to the media declaring former Vice President Joe Biden the next president, Graham said, “Well number one, this is a contested election. The media doesn't decide who becomes president. If they did you'd never have a Republican president forever, so we're discounting them.
“So, what happened? The Trump team has canvassed all early voters and absentee mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, and they've found over 100 people they think were dead, but 15 people that we verified that have been dead who voted, but here’s the one that gets me. Six people registered after they died and voted. In Pennsylvania, I guess you're never out of it," he said.
But as others have pointedout, that 15, even if proven to be fraud, falls far less than the thousands of votes that Trump was behind in the state. And it turns out that at least one case was not fraud: one woman listed as having voted but died before the election had filled out a mail-in ballot two days before her death, according to her daughter. And who did she vote for? Trump.
Arter went on to transcribe:
Host Maria Bartiromo asked Graham about a postal worker who has a sworn affidavit saying that supervisors were back-dating ballots.
[...]
Graham sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray saying that he received the affidavit from Richard Hopkins, the postal worker in Erie, Pa.
It turns out that after the Graham interview, Hopkins disavowed the affidavit, which he says was written by Project Veritas, the discredited right-wing activist group. Project Veritas then claimed that Hopkins recanted his recantation claiming he was coerced by Postal Service investigators, but the released audio doesn't demonstrate that.
Needless to say, neither Arter nor anyone else at CNS has reported on these developments, leaving Graham's discredited claim to stand uncorrected and not updated. It's just another piece of CNS' highly biased pro-Trump coverage after the election.
CNS Is Angry Catholic Bishops Congratulated Catholic Biden Topic: CNSNews.com
Catholic officials are acknowledging that Joe Biden, a Catholic, won the presidential election, and the pro-Trump CNSNews.com is not having it.
When the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops congratulated Biden, CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey went on a lengthy Nov. 9 diatribe under the needlessly long headline "Top Catholic Bishop Acknowledges Pro-Abort, Pro-Gay-Marriage Biden as Second ‘President to Profess Catholic Faith’":
Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles, who currently serves as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has issued a statement describing Joe Biden—who supports legalized abortion, taxpayer funding of abortion, same-sex marriage, and allowing biological males to play on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ locker rooms—as “the second United States president to profess the Catholic faith.”
“We thank God for the blessings of liberty. The American people have spoken in this election,” said Archbishop Gomez in his statement--which is posted on the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“Now is the time for our leaders to come together in a spirit of national unity and to commit themselves to dialogue and compromise for the common good,” said Gomez.
Jeffrey further ranted that "During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden staked out a number of positions that directly contradict Catholic moral teachings laid out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church," such as supporting gay marriage when "The Catholic Catechism, by contrast, holds that marriage is between a man and a women and that homosexual acts are “acts of grave depravity” that “are contrary to the natural law.”, and that "Biden also supports letting biological males who are “transgender” claim to be females on government identity documents—and to play on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms" when "The Catholic Catechism cites Genesis 5:2 in stating: “Male and female he created them.”
The same day, an anonymously written article complained that the Vatican News website "has posted a headline today that says: US Bishops welcome Biden: ‘It’s time for unity,’” adding that "In his campaign—as noted by materials posted on his campaign website—former Vice President Biden supported legalized abortion, taxpayer funding of abortion and same-sex marriage. These things all violate Catholic moral teachings."
On Nov. 10, managing editor Michael W. Chapman gave space for an anti-abortion group to go on a hateful tirade against the bishops for the sin of congratulating Biden:
In response to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issuing a statement that congratulates Joe Biden and claims he is the second U.S. "president to profess the Catholic faith," leaders at the American Life League said this proves that the organization is "a feckless, spineless, conglomerate of dead souls."
[...]
Joe Biden is a Catholic who supports abortion, gay "marriage," gay adoption, and allowing biological males (transgender "women") to play on real women's sports teams and use their locker rooms, all of which is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.
American Life League President Judie Brown said, "The USCCB has affirmed what many of us have suspected for many years, and that is that most Catholic bishops have no problem with a Catholic politician spitting at the face of Christ by supporting the vile murder of the preborn."
"Joe Biden is such a man; he claims to be Catholic, yet he gives 100 percent support for abortion every day of the week and in every manner of brutality against the innocent," said Brown. "The Catholic bishops have erred, and as a Catholic, I am ashamed of them."
ALL Executive Vice President Hugh Brown said, "The reality of the USCCB issuing a statement of congratulations to Joe Biden should not be a surprise to anyone. The USCCB is a feckless spineless conglomerate of dead souls. They are not the descendants of the Apostles."
Chapman and Jeffrey never explained why the simple, polite act of congratulating a newly elected president must be retaliated against with such ridiculous partisan venom.
CNSNews' Susan Jones does her best to put a positive pro-Trump spin on last month's employment numbers under the headline "Post-Election Gains":
October marked the sixth straight month of post-pandemic employment gains, as the economy added 638,000 jobs and the nation's unemployment rate dropped to 6.9 percent, a point below September's 7.9 percent and far lower than the record-shattering, COVID-induced 14.7 percent in April.
The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 149,806,000 people as employed in October, which is 2,243,000 more than September's number, but 8,997,000 below the record 158,803,000 people employed in December 2019, just before the pandemic erupted.
Interesting that Jones is touting December 2019 as the relevantpre-pandemic high, given that the pandemic didn't affect employment numbers until March.
Jones also noted the low laboe force participation rate, but was quick to explain it away, something she rarely did when Barack Obama was president: "BLS notes that this "not in the labor force" number has been steadily increasing in recent years as more baby boomers retire, and certainly the COVID-related business closures have accelerated the increase as more people drop out of the workforce."
CNS also served up the usual sidebars. Craig Bannister tried for pro-Trump rah-rah by claiming that "The unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos improved for the sixth consecutive month in October as the nation’s businesses continued reopening from the coronavirus-prompted shutdown." Government-hating CNS editor Terry Jeffrey, meanwhile, gloated that "The number of people working for government in the United States declined by 268,000 in October even as overall employment in nation increased," then had to admit, "The decline of government workers occurred as temporary Census workers were let go and employment dropped in government schools."
At the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, CNSNews.com asked the speaker, “In 2000, Democrat Al Gore was allowed to press his legal challenge against George W. Bush for 37 days, do you think the same type of patience should be afforded to President Trump in his legal challenges?”
Pelosi said, “In 2000, the delayed ascertainment caused many difficulties, the Bush Administration was outspoken about what was happening in the country. And, as [Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)] said, this is a completely different situation, we are talking about one state.”
Gore had challenged to [sic] vote count in Florida and the case was eventually decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
That's an overly simplistic distillation of what happened in 2000, but that's not the issue here. The issue is what appears after that statement: an image of a Washington Times front page proclaiming, "PRESIDENT GORE," described as a screenshot from YouTube. Here's a screenshot of the fake image as it appears in the article:
Just one problem: That image is afake, and it's unclear where the image originated. As the newspaper itself tweeted, "Those photos have been doctored. The Washington Times never ran a 'President Gore' headline."
It's been nearly a week, and CNS has let that image stand uncorrected and without context. That's not how "news" organizations -- which CNS claims to be -- establish credibility.
We noted how CNSNews.com's Craig Bannister referenced a discredited case in which it was alleged that ballots in Maricopa County, Ariz. (which Bannister wrongly claimed was in Florida) were rejected because votes were marked with a Sharpie pen. But CNS also devoted a full article to this nonsense.
Pro-Trump stenographer Melanie Arter devoted a Nov. 6 article to rehashing right-wing claims in the case:
A lawsuit in Arizona claims 80 percent of voters at a polling location in Maricopa County, Ariz., had their ballots rejected because of a Sharpie issue.
[...]
Election law attorney Christian Adams, who serves as president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and once served as general counsel and former DOJ voting section attorney under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is representing the plaintiffs in the case.
“This is a case to get somebody's right to vote vindicated. Mrs. Aguilera attempted to vote, and she watched this happen. She watched her ballot rejected because of the Sharpie. I know a lot of people want to try to debunk the Sharpie issue. These are sworn affidavits. People say there's no evidence of this, Maria. These are affidavits of an election official,” Adams told Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo” on Friday.
Arter was so busy transcribing the Fox Business segment that she censored the fact there's another side to this story. As an actual news outlet reported:
Rumors began to spread on social media Wednesday that voters in the battleground state of Arizona who used Sharpie pens on their ballots wouldn't have their votes counted. That confusion prompted state officials, election monitors and a top Trump administration official to push back on "#SharpieGate" rumors.
"Don't promote disinfo! Stop spreading #SharpieGate claims," tweeted Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs on Thursday morning, reminding people that election jurisdictions allow voters to mark ballots with a variety of writing instruments, including Sharpies.
Maricopa County officials said poll workers were trained to require voters to use Sharpies at voting sites because the ink doesn't smudge as ballots are counted. An informational video was posted in a Maricopa County Elections Department tweet that said, "New offset columns on the ballots means bleed through won't impact your vote!"
So, yes, Sharpies are actually encouraged for voting in Arizaona. But Arter isn't going to tell you this -- despite the fact that this debunking was published the day before her own article was published -- because she has a pro-Trump narrative to push. And neither Arter nor anyone else at CNS has bothered to update the story.
That's not the only election-related issue Arter misled about to Trump's benefit. A Nov. 5 article featured how "Election officials are forcing poll watchers to stand 30 feet away to observe ballot counting in Philadelphia, citing concerns about the coronavirus, Corey Lewandowski, senior advisor to the Trump campaign, told Fox Business on Wednesday." Arter was too busy quoting Lewandowski to make it clear that Democratic poll watchers were no closer.
CNS Melts Down Over Pope Declining To Hate Gay People Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's uber-Catholic editors hate gay people, and it also hates Pope Francis for failing to be a right-wing pope like Benedict XVI. So when Pope Francis effectively endorsed civil unions for gays because "they’re children of God and have a right to a family," CNS went into a highly predictable meltdown mode with its usual arrogance of lecturing the pope about Catholicism.
Patrick Goodenough wrote that the pope's pronouncement "shock waves around the Catholic world," followed by reminders of how much the pope and all Catholics are apparently supposed to hate gay people:
Catholics on both sides of the divide over the sanctity of marriage and same-sex rights acknowledged that the pontiff’s comments do not constitute a change in church teaching on homosexuality. The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares unequivocally that homosexual acts are “contrary to natural law,” noting that the Bible “presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity.”
A June 2003 from the Vatican’s Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – signed by the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI less than two years later – states that, “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions.”
And in a 2010 letter the pope himself, the then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, called the push to legalize same-sex marriage in Argentina "a 'move' of the father of lies who wishes to confuse and deceive the children of God."
This was followed by an article from managing editor Michael W. Chapman denouncing the pope's "heretical remarks" and featuring how his favorite right-wing evangelical, Franklin Graham, "rebuked the pontiff's blasphemy." Chapman waited until the eighth paragraph to remind readers that Graham is a Protestant, not a Catholic. He also rehashed a Catholic document declaring that any legal recognition of same-sex relationships "would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity."
CNS then devoted an anonymously written article to rehashing how "The Roman Catholic Church says that homosexual acts 'are contrary to natural law' and 'under no circumstances can they be approved' ... says paragraph 2357 of the Catholic Catechism as posted online by the Vatican." This was followed by another anonymous article recounting that "Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, authored a pastoral letter on the care of homosexual persons that was distributed to the bishops of the Catholic Church in 1986 that noted that St. Paul had listed 'those who behave in a homosexual fashion among those who shall not enter the kingdom of God.'" Strangely, no mention was made of the pope's pronouncement in either of these articles, which would have provided the context for their existence.
Finally, Chapman trotted out one of CNS' favorite right-wing Catholics, Raymond Burke, to declare that "no Catholic is bound to support the recent statements by Pope Francis in support of gay civil unions and gay families. Catholics are instead obligated to oppose such abominations, said Burke, because they are contrary to Church teaching and they are the private opinions of Francis as a man, not as the Supreme Pontiff."
CNS also gave a column to another right-wing Catholic, Rev. Michael Orsi, to assert that "Francis’ remark about civil unions didn’t rise to the status of an infallible pronouncement. They didn’t even come close. In fact, they hold no theological weight at all." Orsi went on to huff that the pope's statements "are questionable and highly problematic. They seem to give approval to sinful behavior. They create the false impression that the Church now says homosexual relationships are acceptable, even equivalent to the love between a man and a woman" and that "his words actually undermine marriage." He concluded that "Pope Francis might want to be a bit more prudent in sharing his private thoughts."
Outside of Goodenough's original article that quoted some supporters of the pope's statement, CNS declined to give non-right-wing Catholics a voice in discussing this issue.
UPDATE: CNS also published a column by John Horvat II declaring that "God is offended" by the pope's statement because "no pastor can express approval for an intrinsically evil sexual relationship that will drag its participants to Hell unless they repent," and that "the faithful have the right and duty to resist his errors."
CNS Writer Touts Trump's Record Total, Doesn't Want To Talk About The Guy Who Got More Topic: CNSNews.com
In CNSNews.com's election coverage, there may be no bigger pro-Trump suck-up than Craig Bannister. Case in point: He wrote not one but two articles touting Trump's vote count despite the increasingly apparent fact that he lost re-election. He gushed in a Nov. 5 article:
President Donald Trump, often portrayed by liberal media as a racist, has reportedly attracted the highest share of minority voters of any Republican presidential candidate since 1960, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon.
Citing data obtained from Edison Research, The Daily Mail reports that Trump’s minority support at the ballot box increased among Blacks, Latinos, and nonwhites as a whole:
[...]
Even former Obama Administration official and current CNN Commentator Van Jones admitted Wednesday Trump that Trump’s outreach to minorities was surprisingly effective in this election cycle.
According to a chart posted on Twitter by Republican Strategist Adrian Gray, Nixon received 32% of the nonwhite vote in his 1960 loss to Kennedy.
The next day, Bannister gushed even harder under the headline "Trump’s Popular Vote Tops Obama’s Record-Setting Performance in 2008":
President Donald Trump has now garnered a higher popular vote total than President Barack Obama did when he set the record in 2008.
In 2008, Obama won 69,498,516 votes, according the Federal Election Commission.
As of Thursday morning, Trump had already exceeded that number, racking up 69,538,777 votes, Newsweek reported Friday, noting that Democrat Joe Biden appears to have won even more votes than Trump:
One hgas to go to the second paragraph of the Newsweek excerpt that followed -- the fifth paragraph of the article -- for mention of the highly relevant fact that Joe Biden had received nearly 4 million more votes than Trump.
From there, Bannister regurgitated claims of voter fraud:
In the battleground state of Florida, Maricopa County voters have filed a lawsuit alleging their ballots were rejected because of an issue with the Sharpie pens they were provided.
Constitutional scholar and nationally-syndicated radio host Mark Levin is arguing that in Pennsylvania, another battleground state, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, violated Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution by illegally changing the state’s election laws.
Meanwhile, Trump and his legal team are claiming that the president is a victim of voter fraud– and that they are prepared to take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Regarding the first claim, Maricopa County is in Arizona, not Florida, and the Sharpie claim is false. The Levin claim is taken from a CNS article about a Levin radio rant in which he is apparently arguing for Republican legislators in Pennsylvania to ignore the election results and vote to assign the state's Electoral College votes to Trump.
CNS Adheres To Pro-Trump Narratives After The Election Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com went into Election Day with its usual pro-Trump bias on top of the pro-Trump polls it was promoting: for example, one article by Melanie Arter hyped how "Stony Brook University political science professor Helmut Norpoth, whose election model correctly predicted the winner over the past 100 elections and correctly predicted President Donald Trump’s win in 2016, has predicted that Trump has a 91 percent chance of winning," and another Arter piece featured right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh arguing that "he thinks the majority of early voters and absentee voters are Trump supporters who are fed up with the way that President Donald Trump has been treated."
But -- in an apparently instance of hedging its bets -- CNS also set up a narrative in case Trump didn't win by publishing a Nov. 2 op-ed by the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky insisting that not only is election fraud a threat, denial of election fraud is too.
CNS' first post-election coverage came from Patrick Goodenough, who gushed that "President Trump’s chances were looking stronger than opinion polls had suggested." Since it was so close, it was time to aggressively push the narrative that the election was being stolen from Trump:
This was joined by a Nov. 5 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman in which John McLaughlin, CEO and Partner of the consulting firm McLaughlin & Associates, said that many of the presidential polling firms deliberately boosted their poll numbers to suggest that Democrat Joe Biden was ahead of Republican Donald Trump in many states, all in order to suppress the vote of Trump supporters." McLaughlin presented no evidence -- and Chapman apparently didn't ask for any -- that would prove his assertion, which dovetails nicely with a similar conspiracy theory forwarded by Chapman's boss, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell.
Curiously, Chapman waited until the very end of his 22-paragraph article to make a highly relevant disclosure: "McLaughlin & Associates is one of several firms doing polling for President Trump and the Trump-Pence campaign." Shouldn't that have been disclosed much earlier so that McLaughlin's bias could be taken into account? Chapman clearly didn't believe so.
(McLaughlin is also whom the MRC hired to manufacture a poll finding that the media stole the election for Biden, and the MRC has yet to tell its readers it hired Trump's pollster.)
Still, the news turned worse for Trump -- that is, it became more clear that Biden was winning. It grudgingly published a couplearticles noting how Nancy Pelosi was proclaiming Biden the winner; in the second, Susan Jones parenthetically huffed, "As she spoke, even media outlets had not yet called the election for Biden."
NEW ARTICLE: CNS Brings Its Bias To The Debates Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com covered the presidential debates the way you'd expect it to: a pro-Trump, anti-Biden slant with extra damage control after Trump failed to explicitly disavow white supremacists. Read more >>
CNS Kept Pushing Pro-Trump Poll Findings Before Election Topic: CNSNews.com
We documented how CNSNews.com was interested in reporting on pre-election polls only if they showed President Trump winning. It kept that pattern up all the way to Election Day.
Indeed, the day after we published our original report, an Oct. 19 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman gushed over another poll by the very Trump-leaning Trafalgar Group having "place[d] Trump slightly ahead of Joe Biden in Michigan and Florida, and gives Biden a slight lead in Pennsylvania." As before, Chapman added that Trafalgar was "the only group to foresee a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of the few groups to forecast a Trump win in Pennsylvania in 2016." Two days later, Chapman pushed more Trafalgar polling that "currently places Trump ahead of Joe Biden in Arizona and in Florida."
On Oct. 28, Chapman was Trafalgar's PR person again: "The Trafalagar [sic] Group polling firm, the only pollster to accurately foresee a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of the few groups to forecast a Trump win in Pennsylvania in 2016, currently places Trump ahead of Joe Biden North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania." And on Election Day, Chapman wrote as if he was drawing a check from Trafalgar:
The Trafalgar Group polling firm, which was the only group to accurately predict a Donald Trump win in Michigan in 2016, and one of only a few firms that predicted a Trump 2016 win in Pennsylvania, gives Trump a slight lead today -- Election Day -- over Democrat Joe Biden in Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
Trafalgar's chief pollster Robert Cahaly, who accurately predicted Donald Trump's 2016 win and his electoral vote total (306), believes that Trump will win the 2020 race with an electoral total in the "high 270s."
Of course, as it turned out, Trump appears to have lost at least four of those states, suggesting there was something wrong with their model, which weights its polling to account for the "social desiriability bias" of purportedly shy Trump voters. Chapman hasn't written a thing about Trafalgar since the election.
For all of this love toward a shiny new polling firm, CNS didn't completely forget its first love, the Trump-skewing Rasumussen. On Oct. 22, Craig Bannister touted how "Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll released Thursday shows that the percentage of U.S. likely voters approving of President Donald Trump’s job performance has risen above fifty percent for the first day this month," adding that "Black voters registered 37% approval."
On Oct. 27, Bannister served up another piece of Rasmussen's biased polling:
A majority of voters believe it’s likely that, while vice president, Joe Biden knew about and may have benefitted from his son Hunter’s controversial foreign business dealings, a new Rasmussen poll shows.
In a national survey of U.S. likely voters, conducted October 22 and 25, 2020, Rasmussen asked the following question:
“How likely is it that Joe Biden was consulted about and perhaps profited from his son Hunter's overseas business deals including at least one involving a company in mainland China?”
More than half (54%) of voters polled say it’s at least “somewhat likely” Biden knew and may have profited, with 44% calling it “very likely.”
Chapman even tried to frame a finding from normally reputable pollster Gallup as somehow pro-Trump:
As Election Day approaches on Tuesday, Nov. 3, it is interesting to note that, according to Gallup, at this time in their first terms Americans' job approval ratings of President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump were very close -- Obama, 50% and Trump, 46%.
[...]
For Trump, his job approval rating on day 1,376 in office is 46%. (Poll conducted Oct. 16-27, 2020)
For comparison, Obama, at 1,377 days in office, had a job approval of 50%. (Poll conducted Oct. 22-28, 2012.)
Gallup also reported that Obama's first-term average job approval rating was 48%. (Similar data for Trump have not been posted yet by Gallup.)
If job approval ratings are an indicator of election performance, it's clear that Gallup was much more correct than Rasmussen. Chapman and Bannister won't admit that, of course.
UPDATE: Chapman got in one more pre-election poll to fit his template, using a Nov. 2 article to tout how "a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows that Trump has pulled into the lead with a strong 48% support compared to Biden's 41% support."
Posted by Terry K.
at 12:35 AM EST
Updated: Wednesday, November 11, 2020 10:05 PM EST
CNS Published Op-Ed By Admitted Criminal Before Election Topic: CNSNews.com
How desperate was CNSNews.com to see President Trump get re-elected? It published an op-ed by an admitted criminal that it pulled from a far-right conspiracy site.
The Oct. 27 op-ed was by Michael Flynn, the onetime Trump national security adviser who admitted to lying to the FBI, though he has since been trying to retract that admission. CNS' parent, the Media Research Center, falsely claimed that Flynn was "exonerated" after the Trump Justice Department decided to stop pursuing the case. His rant is a pretty standard right-wing screed:
Never should our nation, our president, or any family or individual be so viciously targeted, maligned, smeared, and threatened as we have all felt for the past four years and counting. This unconscionable and seditious direct attack by ideologically driven elitists strikes at the will of the American people who ensure our very freedoms through their vote and daily selfless actions.
We cannot allow the opposing leftist agenda to continue enabling the fleecing of America, peddling connected-influence for cash, exploiting American innovation for an elitist self-serving purpose, wielding official power and influence as a means to ensure personal gain while exercising mass control, and selling out our American ideals for ideologies to pursue what the leftists would like as “common and normal.”
These all diminish the power and purpose inherent in “we the people” who constitute our republic.
I ask that you stand with me today in renouncing this betrayal of trust that has burdened our nation and breached the foundation of our American ideals.
Needless to say, CNS made sure not to mention Flynn's criminality.
At the end of his op-ed, an editor's note stated, "A version of this article originally appeared on The Western Journal." That's the website that seems to be running WorldNetDaily these days,and it's a descendant of the right-wing nonprofit journalistic group that WND founder Joseph Farah created back in the 1990s. It was so into pushing right-wing conspiracies that it got blacklisted by social media, and it has been trying to act somewhat more legit under a slightly altered name.
CNS sullied what little journalistic reputation it has by publishing this, and Trump lost anyway.
CNS' Jeffrey Whines Biden's Victory Speech Interrupted A Football Game Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is a bit of a football fanatic -- so much so that, for some unexplained reason, today's CNS front page includes a link to a 2012 column by him gushing that the Princeton-Harvard game that year was "football as it was meant to be."
But that love -- on top of his apparent seething hatred for all things liberal -- led him to post what may already be the worst take on Joe Biden's defeat of President Trump. He actually felt the need to write an entire article to petulantly whining that Biden's victory speech interrupted a football game:
Former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris decided to give victory speeches in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday night, causing NBC to break away from its broadcast of the football game between No. 1 Clemson and No. 4 Notre Dame to cover the speeches.
The game was in the second quarter--and Biden could not even wait until halftime.
Did Biden believe it would increase his audience to interrupt the broadcast of a contest between the No. 1 and No. 4 college football teams in America?
Did Biden--a self-described devout Catholic--know that Notre Dame was playing Clemson?
Notre Dame and Clemson fans--and fans of college football wanting to watch the contest between two of the leading teams in the country--were forced to switch to a cable channel to continue watching the game as Harris and Biden interrupted it.
That's the caliber of "news" coverage we've sadly come to expect from CNS. Expect much more petulance as the Biden administration proceeds.
For unexplained reasons (but probably having something to do with the lack of a student intern), CNSNews.com published no Mark Levin stenography for just over a month, from Aug. 14 to Sept. 16. But with an election coming up (and a new fall intern in the building), CNS didn't want to ignore Levin's right-wing rants any longer. Let's look at the Levin stenography CNS published in September and October:
One of the leaders at CNSNews.com of 
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey's hatred of Joe Biden is so unhinged that not only did he petulantly rant about a Biden speech 
Stenography done by a "news" operation tends not to age well. But that didn't stop Melanie Arter, CNSNews.com's chief pro-Trump stenographer, for uncritically transcribing a Fox Business appearance by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham in a Nov. 10 
Catholic officials are acknowledging that Joe Biden, a Catholic, won the presidential election, and the pro-Trump CNSNews.com is not having it.
CNSNews' Susan Jones does her best to put a positive pro-Trump spin on last month's employment numbers under the headline "
We 
CNSNews.com's uber-Catholic editors 
In CNSNews.com's election coverage, there may be no bigger pro-Trump suck-up than Craig Bannister. Case in point: He wrote not one but two articles touting Trump's vote count despite the increasingly apparent fact that he lost re-election. He gushed in a Nov. 5 
CNSNews.com went into Election Day with its usual pro-Trump bias on top of the 
We 
How desperate was CNSNews.com to see President Trump get re-elected? It published an op-ed by an admitted criminal that it pulled from a far-right conspiracy site.
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey is a bit of a football fanatic -- so much so that, for some unexplained reason, today's CNS front page includes a link to a 2012 
