CNS' Capitol Riot Coverage: Briefly Shocked Into Balance Topic: CNSNews.com
Yesterday, we looked at how CNSNews.com fed into President Trump's bogus narrative that the election was stolen in the days before the Jan. 6 armed riot at the Capitol. Now, let's examine CNS' coverage of the riot and its aftermath.
Like its colleagues at the Media Research Center, CNS was briefly shocked into balance by the right-wing-driven riot. An early, anonymously written article on the riot was mostly straight, and an article by Melanie Arter quoted a Republican congressman denouncing it.Another Arter article noted that "Hours before protesters marched to the U.S. Capitol and stormed the U.S. Capitol building, President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., mocked Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters who looted and rioted in nationwide protests last year, comparing Trump supporters to them at the Save America Rally in Washington, D.C. This was followed by an article highlighting that "a pipe bomb was found outside the headquarters of the Republican National Committee," burying that "A suspicious package was also discovered at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee."
After that, Susan Jones penned articles on both Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell denouncing the riot, followed by an article on Fox News' Tucker Carlson denouncing the riot while also seeming to justify it: "As long as people sincerely believe they can change things by voting, they stay calm." There was no mention of Trump's false claims of election fraud that instigated it.
CNS then did a surprising number of items denouncing the riots and its aftermath and identifying Trump's key role in them, even noting the Trump administration officials who resigned over the riot:
Arter served up more stenography, uncritically repeating White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany's denouncing of the riot and Trump's later denouncing of the riot and empty pledge of "a smooth, orderly and seamless transition" without comment or any mention of Trump's key role in instigating the insurrection.
But CNS also delivered some of the nitpicky things they're known for (while not explicitly defending Trump or the riots). Rob Shimshock complained that some random former "Jeopardy!" champion refused to mourn the death of Ashli Babbitt, a protester who was killed in the riot. Shimshock sympathetically described her as a "14-year veteran of the Air Force" but failed to note that she was also a QAnon conspiracy theorist.
An article by Jones on former Republican Colin Powell denouncing the riots and the police response to it framed it as "a 'bash Trump' interview with CNN," further complaining that Powell was "invited by CNN's Wolf Blitzer to view the Capitol police response through a racial lens" and parenthetically adding, "Notably, President-elect Joe Biden is among the Democrats -- many in the media -- insisting that the Capitol police response would have been more violent if the mob storming the Capitol had been mostly black." Jones repetitively hammered home that point again later in the article: "Host Wolf Blitzer brought up the race card, as Biden and many liberals have done as well."
Managing editor Michael W. Chapman grumbled that comedian Kathy Griffin issued "a tweet re-posting her infamous 2017 photo in which she posed while holding up an image of the president’s 'severed head.'" And Bannister returned to tout how "A video montage posted Thursday shows MSNBC and CNN hosts and guests excusing, denying and defending leftwing violence in 2020."
MRC Hurls Bogus Narratives At Twitter For Banning Trump Topic: Media Research Center
After the Capitol riot, the Media Research Center was quick to play victim, ridiculously portraying President Trump's initial suspension from Twitter as coming as he called for "peace," even though he clearly used the plaform to help incite the riot. Alexander Hall kept up that dishonest framing as Facebook suspended Trump:
Even as President Donald Trump called for peace, social media companies purged posts and his video and restricted his accounts, with at least two platforms removing his presence indefinitely.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared in a Facebook post that the block on Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram would be extended indefinitely, as “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.” Zuckerberg specified: “[W]e are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”
This indefinite purge of Trump follows multiple Big Tech platforms cracking down on Trump’s call for peace amid the D.C. chaos, which saw rioters storm the U.S. Capitol building.
[...]
Rioters stormed the capital on Jan. 6 and Trump responded with a short videoposted to Twitter that called for peace and an end to the protest. He assured his supporters, “I know your pain. I know your hurt,” but he told them, “you have to go home now. We have to have peace.” President Trump also assured his supporters that he agrees the election was “fraudulent,” but warned: “we can’t play into the hands of these people.” The tweet was promptly labeled with a warning: “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence.”
The “risk of violence” claim was especially bizarre since Trump made it clear he was calling for “peace” and urging the protesters go home.
As we've noted, Hall is again censoring that Trump also told the rioters in thart video, "We love you. You're very special." And as became clear in subsequent reporter, Trump did nothing while the riot was actually going on, preferring to watch it unfold on TV, and the riot was nearly over by the time Trump released that video.
As other social media outlets shut Trump down, Hall persisted in lying about Trump and "peace":
The internet’s most powerful platforms appear to have blamed President Donald Trump for riots that occurred at the U.S. Capitol building, even as he called for an end to civil unrest.
Many of the internet’s biggest tech platforms launched varied but simultaneous attacks on the sitting president. Twitter locked Trump’s account for 12 hours and “included the removal of three tweets and a warning that Trump could be subject to a permanent suspension” if he continues to contest the election's legitimacy, The Washington Post reported. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared in a Facebook post that the block on Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram would be extended indefinitely. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” he said. Zuckerberg specified: “[W]e are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” Other tech platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok and even Shopify have followed suit in blaming the sitting president for the actions of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, even as he made a call for “peace.”
[...]
This multi-pronged deplatforming of Trump occurred as high ranking Democrats and former First Lady Michelle Obama called for a crackdown on the president and his supporters. “They bear major responsibility for ignoring repeated red flags and demands for fixes,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) according to the Washington Post, Blumenthal condemned Big Tech companies for refusing to crack down “until well after there was blood and glass in the halls of the Capitol.”
It speaks volumes that Michelle Obama, like many others, has specifically singled out Big Tech as the institution of choice to crush conservative dissent.
Hall apparently believes inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol is acceptable "conservative dissent."
At this point, it became time for the MRC to add the whataboutism card to the "peace" mix. A Jan. 8 post by Kayla Sargent declared:
Twitter doesn’t hold foreign government accounts to the same standard as President Donald Trump, but the platform has reached a new low.
Twitter patted itself on the back after suspending Trump for 12 hours for posting a video in which he called for “peace” amid the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building. But it has ignored blatant pro-genocide propaganda from the communist Chinese government.
This came despite her boss, MRC executive Tim Graham, denouncing the playing of whataboutism regarding the riots. Needless to say, the MRC will never give Twitter credit for all the leftist and communist regime-related accounts it does suspend.
When Twitter chose to ban Trump permanently, Hall pushed both lame narratives along with a healthy dose of the victim card:
Twitter has finally lost it. The social media site purged President Donald Trump, going against its own rules. This from a site that has allowed foreign dictators and even pro-genocide propaganda. But it won’t allow a sitting U.S. president to post.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter announced on Jan. 8. Twitter Safety explained that “we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action,” but did not elaborate on the offending tweet(s).
“The suspension amounts to a ban: Trump can no longer access his account and his tweets and profile picture have been deleted. Trump had 88.7 million followers prior to his suspension,” CNBC reported.
Many of the internet’s biggest tech platforms launched simultaneous attacks on the president. Twitter had initially locked Trump’s account for 12 hours and “included the removal of three tweets and a warning that Trump could be subject to a permanent suspension” if he continues to contest the election's legitimacy, The Washington Post reported.
[...]
Other tech platforms including Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok and even Shopify followed suit in blaming the sitting president for the actions of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, even as he made a call for “peace.”
It's so cute how Hall is playing dumb here, pretending he doesn't know that Trump consistentely violates Twitter's terms of service as he complains that Twitter "did not elaborate on the offending tweet(s)" that led to his ban.
As expected, neither Hall nor Sargent explain why Twitter must publish whetever Trump says even though, as a private business, it has rights to free association and terms of service that it enforces on other people.
Even though Trump and other right-wingers promoting false narratives that the election was stolen was the driving force behind the Capitol riot, Hall got mad that Twitter would clamp down on distribution of such claims:
Twitter unveiled an updated Civic Integrity Policy in January, clarifying the platform’s ironfisted policy against questioning elections.
Twitter has been one of Big Tech’s most infamous innovators when it comes to censoring genuine concerns about elections. “The public conversation occurring on Twitter is never more important than during elections and other civic events,” Twitter declared in a January policy update. Twitter claimed: “Any attempts to undermine the integrity of our service is antithetical to our fundamental rights and undermines the core tenets of freedom of expression,” suggesting absurdly that freedom of expression is “the value upon which our company is based.”
That's right -- Hall claimed that spreading lies about the eleciton was just an expression of "genuine concerns."
Joseph Vazquez, meanwile, gloated over Twitter losing $5 billion in market value since the riots and bizarrely framed trying to shut down incitements to riot as being "woke":
Go woke, or go broke? Orwellian platform Twitter has now experienced the effects of that principle for the draconian anti-free speech measures it has wielded lately.
Yahoo! News reported that Twitter shares dive-bombed more “than 10% on Monday” following its decision to ban President Donald Trump from its site after the Capitol Hill riot Jan. 6. Specifically, the liberal outlet noted that “Shortly after market open Monday, the stock dropped as much as 12.3% to reach as low as $45.17 per share.”
Business Insider reported the real kicker: Twitter’s stock price loss erased a jaw-dropping “$5 billion from its market capitalization.” Ouch. [Emphasis added.]
Sargent returned to lash out at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's defense of banning Trump from his website, complaining that he was taking "his self-assumed position as the arbiter of truth on the platform" -- as if a company's CEO has no voice in the company he runs -- and lamented: Trump is still able to circumvent the Twitter ban to some extent, at least for now, by using the @whitehouse and @POTUS accounts. As long as he doesn’t write anything Twitter doesn’t like."
Like, you know, fomenting insurrection against the government because he falsely claims to have really won the election. But Sargent and Hall probably believe him.
UPDATE: Curtis Houck reinforced the victim narrative -- and his raging case of CNN Derangement Syndrome -- by whining on Jan. 8 "Mark it down, NewsBusters readers: January 8, 2021 will go down as one of the greatest days in the lives of more than a few CNN charlatans due to the massive, unprecedented crackdown on American free speech, including Twitter’s permanent banning of President Trump."
Let's go back to WND editor Joseph Farah's Jan. 8 column in which he dissed his daughter, former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah, for regaining a sense of reality of President Trump's real legacy and declining to attend the pre-riot pro-Trump rally with her father and his wife.
Yes, he and wife Elizabeth Farah -- who made her own strangevideos portraying Trump as ordained by God -- were there. As he gushed: "We were proud to be there. There was no place we'd rather have been than showing our support for the greatest president of our lifetimes – perhaps the greatest ever!" They apparently didn't participate in the riot and insurrection -- or the "side trip," as Farah described it:
Though we did not include the side trip [to] the Capitol building, we watched the sad proceedings on television at the nearby haven of the Willard Hotel. We saw many people returning from the Capitol – women with children, elderly men and women so frail, but determined to make their voices heard.
After rehashing numerous bogus claims about election fraud that he insisted "would have received a thorough investigation in the weeks between Nov. 3 and Dec. 16 – that is, any election that did not have Donald J. Trump as the aggrieved candidate," Farah decided to minimize and play whataboutism, expressing sadness about the deaths but cheering the idea that politicians are "fearful" or far-right activists like himself:
It's very sad that a woman was killed by police fire in the Capitol Wednesday, that a policeman died of his injuries and that three others died during the event. It's a tragedy. But it lasted one day. It was not the kind of tragedy we witnessed as a country when our urban streets were set ablaze, $2 billion in damage done and 30 people killed over months of riots while Biden remained silent, Harris and other Democrats egged the rioters on and even went to the outrageous length of bailing out the violent perpetrators. The hypocrisy is almost too much to bear.
While the Washington establishment may be very eager to be rid of Donald J. Trump, tens of millions of Americans are not eager at all for his departure. They are fearful about the change that has taken place inside America. They see right being called wrong, winners being declared losers and tyranny being called freedom.
Where do we go from here? We continue the fight for truth, liberty and the restoration of our republic. What else can we do? We're Americans, after all.
As we all know, Farah cares nothing about the truth; otherwise, he would -- just to cite one example -- let WND report on Fox News' seven-figure settlement with Seth Rich's family, or mention that a key WND source on Rich, Matt Couch, retracted and deleted all his Seth Rich-related conspiracy claims, or have an honest conversation about the Seth Rich conspiracy theories WND haspublished.
And Farah is doing it again by regurgitating Trump's bogus claims of election fraud. Did he learn nothing from having to sheepishly settle a defamation lawsuit a few years back?
CNSNews.com led into the Jan. 6 Electoral College vote the way it had in the weeks previously: uncriticallypromoting President Trump's bogus claims of election fraud. First, it put a pro-Trump frame in an anonymously written article on his call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger trying to coerce the official to overturn the election in that state that "'based on what' Trump had 'heard'—ballots from November’s presidential election were being shredded in Georgia. Another article, by Susan Jones, carried the uncritical headline "Trump Claims at Georgia Rally of 2016 and 2020 Elections: 'I Won Both of Them'."
Craig Bannister even trotted out right-wing actor Jon Voight to rant, "We all know how this election was false. We all know. But, is anyone standing up for the truths? Is anyone?"
As expected from such a pro-Trump outlet, none of the articles admitted the fact that no solid, credible evidence exists of massive fraud on the level that might overturn election results. But, surprisingly, CNS did a couple articles to offer a modicum of perceived balance:
And on the morning of Jan. 6, Melanie Arter served as stenographer for Trump's speech of incitement at the rally outside the Capitol:
President Donald Trump on Wednesday claimed that the 2020 presidential election was “pure theft,” alleging that voter fraud changed the election results to favor Joe Biden.
Speaking at the Save America rally in Washington, D.C. ,Trump called on supporters to get their elected Republican officials to fight, “and if they don’t fight, we have to primary the hell out of the ones that don’t fight.”
“You primary them. We are going to let you know who they are. I can already tell you frankly, but this year, using the pretext of the China virus and the scam of mail-in ballots, Democrats attempted the most brazen and outrageous election theft, and there has never been anything like this. It’s a pure theft in American history. Everybody knows it,” he said.
“That election, our election was over at 10:00 in the evening. We are leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia by hundreds of thousands of votes, and then late in the evening or early in the morning, boom. These explosions of bullshit, and all of a sudden it started to happen,” the president said.
[...]
The president called out the mainstream media, saying they have become “the enemy of the people.”
“We don't have a free and fair press. Our media is not free. It’s not fair. It suppresses thought. It suppresses speech, and it’s become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It's the biggest problem we have in this country. No third world countries would even attempt to do what we caught them doing, and you’ll hear about that in just a few minutes,” he said.
[...]
“Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy, and after this, we are going to walk down, and I will be there with you. We are going to walk down. We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, walk down to the capital, and we are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness,” the president added.
“You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been unlawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections, but whether or not they stand strong for our country, our country. Our country has been under siege for a long time,” he said.
No mention, of course, of the fact that none of Trump's election fraud claims have been proven.
And then the riots began.
How did CNS cover them? We'll examine that in an upcoming post.
The Media Research Center's Lindsey Kornick wrote in a Jan. 10 post:
Republicans and Democrats can both agree that the events on the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday were disgraceful at best. Unfortunately, leftists have the terrible habit of dividing people even in the worst circumstances. Case in point, former GOP governator turned leftist celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger compares the events to Kristallnacht, calling Trump the “worst president ever.”
On January 10, Schwarzenegger took to Twitter to post a seven-minute video commenting on the storming of the U.S. Capitol. While he of course condemned the actions on January 6, he went even further to the point of comparing the event to Germany and Austria’s Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass.
[...]
While the actions on Wednesday were horrible, they do not represent a rising Nazi force. Unlike both Kristallnacht or even the BLM riots for that matter, these actions were widely condemned without any racial or Semitic targets. Considering Schwarzenegger references his father being present during Kristallnacht, one should think he would be more tactful in comparing them.
Kornick will not take this same indignant tone with her boss, even though he not only did the same exact thing but tripled down on it, as described in a Jan. 11 article at his own media outlet, CNSNews.com:
“Stalin censored speech. So did Mao. So did Hitler. It’s what tyrants do,” Media Research Pres. Center Brent Bozell says, reacting to recent censorship tactics employed by social media giants like Amazon and Twitter.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and his “power-mad Marxist employees have lost their minds,” Bozell tweeted Friday after the social media platform permanently banned the president of the United States:
“.@Jack and the rest of his power-mad Marxist employees have lost their minds. They insanely think they are more important than the President. Instead of hurting Trump, they are reminding everyone that Big Tech needs to be crushed.”
[...]
“Big tech is doing what we were all told was a crazy conspiracy [theory], canceling conservatives. Now they’re after @parler_app. Don’t let them win! Join me there @brentbozell,” Bozell tweeted, adding that Big Tech is using the same tactics employed by infamous dictators:
“Stalin censored speech. So did Mao. So did Hitler. It’s what tyrants do.”
Actually, Bozell's demand that all media outlets must publish anything Trump or any conservative says no matter how offensive -- and those outlets are then forbidden to hold them responsible for their words -- is much closer to what Mao, Hitler and tyrants do.
So Bozell gets to go Godwin without consequences, while those Bozell and the MRC consider their enemies are attacked for doing the same exact thing. Indeed, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro ridiculously huffed that businesses who exercise their right to free associaiton -- in the form of ceasing to do business with right-wing website Parler because its users help plan last week's Capitol riot and issued death threats against numerous people -- is just like Kristallnacht ... and the MRC said nothing.
This is the second time this has happened in recent months: the MRC denounces someone making a Nazi reference while Bozell goes Godwin. That double standard never dies, it seems.
NEW ARTICLE -- Slanties 2021: Hy-Slantie-Chloroquine Topic: The ConWeb
It's awards season, so it's time to honor, as it were, the worst ConWeb reporting and craziest ConWeb opinions of the year. Read more >>
Fake News: WND Can't Be Bothered To Fact-Check White House Election Fraud Claims Topic: WorldNetDaily
Art Moore dutifully reported in a Dec. 17 WorldNetDaily article:
The Bush v. Gore election dispute in 2000, centering on some 500 votes in one state and "hanging chads," was easy for the American people to digest.
But the Trump campaign's hotly disputed challenge to the outcome of the 2020 campaign is based on evidence of many kinds of fraud compiled from numerous lengthy hearings in six battleground states and thousands of sworn affidavits.
It's why White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has compiled a comprehensive report to back the Trump campaign's claim of "theft by a thousand cuts."
Titled "The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities," it employs charts and other graphics to summarize the evidence from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Navarro charges Democrats carried out a "coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket," the National Pulse reported.
He concludes that "the weight of evidence and patterns of irregularities uncovered in this report are such that it is irresponsible for anyone – especially the mainstream media – to claim that there is 'no evidence' of fraud or irregularities."
Moore is strictly in stenography mode here -- he doesn't bother to fact-check anything in Navarro's report. If he had, not only would he have provided something of added value to the nascent WND News Center that might make some other website actually want to publish it, he would have learned that pretty much the entire report is bogus.Meanwhile, an actual news outlet did the fact-check that Moore wouldn't:
He also repeated obvious mistakes that have been pointed out by judges and national media outlets, such as mixing up Michigan and Minnesota.
But Navarro’s “Immaculate Deception” report is, by its own admission, just a re-hashing of lawsuits and press conference fodder that judges across the country have laughed out of court.
Discussing the impact of “fake ballot manufacturing,” for example, Navarro said one of the most “disturbing” instances of the practice came from a contract truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service, who claimed to have transported thousands of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania in October.
Left unmentioned: the same man moonlights as a ghost hunter and has a lengthy criminal record, and the suit in which his claims were cited was summarily rejected because it was filed more than a month after Election Day.
Navarro went on to cite security camera footage of elections workers moving around boxes of ballots in Atlanta, which pro-Trump theorists claimed was actually a “smoking gun” of fraud… somehow. The video clip made it to Fox News and the President’s legal team’s court filings, despite showing the normal processing of votes.
Navarro acknowledged that Republican elections officials have insisted the video shows nothing unusual, but then pivoted back to “just-asking-questions” mode: The video tape itself, he wrote, “has contributed to the current climate of skepticism surrounding the fairness and integrity of the election.”
Elsewhere, Navarro played a shell game to hide the fact that there was no evidence to support his claims.
The burden of proof here lies with Trump and Navarro, the ones claiming fraudulent activity for which they have presented no credible evidence. The key word there is “credible,” of course — they’ve presented lots of evidence that is the electoral equivalent of shadowy photos of the Loch Ness monster. Navarro’s report is the functional equivalent of one of those shows where ghost-hunters bring various homemade electronic devices into abandoned townhouses before declaring authoritatively that the photo they took of a dust mite is, in actuality, a poltergeist.
Despite the fact that Navarro's report was discredited almost immediately, WND continued to tout upates Navarro issued. A Dec. 22 article by Bob Unruh touted an update claiming that it was "insisting that a full review is required of 2020 election misbehavior." Unruh didn't note that the original report was debunked, though he did admit (though not until the 13th paragraph of his article) that the Washingotn Examiner found that "Navarro's conclusions clash with claims from state and local officials that there may have been problems due to clerical errors but not vote fraud."
On Jan. 5, Unruh gushed that Navarro "has released chapter 2" of his "comprehensive report' claiming election fraud, iuncritically repeating Navarro's assertion that "Volumes 1 and 2 of the Navarro Report — The Immaculate Deception and The Art of the Steal — together make the strong case for a full investigation of the election irregularities and strategic gaming of our political process that in all likelihood have led to a stolen presidential election." Unruh, like Moore, was in stenography mode; he didn't tell readers that since the first report was discredited, this one likely would be too.
WND wasn't making any money trying to attract readers to its own website to read this kind of stuff. It's hard to imagine anyone else wanting to publish it.
MRC Defends Parler Anew, Still Censoring Its Conflict Of Interest Topic: Media Research Center
We'vedocumented how the Media Research Center has repeatedly promoted right-wing "free speech" website Parler without disclosing its main funder, Rebekah Mercer, is also a major funder of the MRC and sits on the MRC's board. The Parler promotion had slowed down in recent weeks: A November post by P.J. Gladnick complained that one commentator "castigated the Twitter alternative, Parler, for their lack of censorship," and it also touted right-wing radio host Mark Levin's repeatedly self-proclaimed move to Parler (on Twitter, of course, while not actually making no effort to do so until the end of the year), both of which censored the Mercer link. Meanwhile, Parler was turning into more of a cesspool than it already was, as poronography became prominent on the site; the normally porn-hating MRC was silent about that too.
But the fallout of last week's right-wing riots at the Capitol revealed that it was planned in part on Parler and that Parler users made explicit threats of violence beforehand. And when Parler was held accountable, the MRC rushed to defense mode once again. Alexander Hall huffed in a Jan. 8 post hyperbolically headlined "TRUMPED! Google PURGES Parler App; Apple Threatens to Remove It":
Big Tech’s crusade against conservatives continued furiously Friday night. Google removed the Parler app from its store and Apple threatened to do the same.
Free market advocates repeatedly told conservatives the solution to Big Tech censorship was building their own platform. Now Google has removed a free speech platform from its store, blocking millions from accessing the app.
[...]
Popular conservative podcast and YouTube host Dan Bongino partnered with Parler and took an ownership stake in Parler.
The next day, Hall whined that "The “Amazon Employees For Climate Justice” group published a shrill demand that the company’s leadership do whatever it can to get Parler wiped off the internet," rehashing his earlier lament: "Free market advocates repeatedly told conservatives the solution to Big Tech censorship was building their own platform. Now Google has removed the free speech platform Parler from its store, blocking millions from accessing the app. Amazon appears to be taking it a step further by undermining the ability of the website to even operate online."
Hall also touted how "Conservative stars Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Lou Dobbs left Twitter in disgust after it purged sitting President Donald Trump" and were moving to Parler. In all of these instances, Hall censored both the Mercer connection and the riot planning and incitement to violence that appeared on Parler.
The tech tyrants came after Parler with a vengeance. Apple and Google have refused to carry the platform as a downloadable app, and Amazon has gone one step further by denying the fledgling platform access to its servers.
“Amazon on Saturday kicked Parler off its Web hosting services.” Buzzfeed reported Jan. 9.
“Amazon's suspension of Parler's account means that unless it can find another host, once the ban takes effect on Sunday Parler will go offline,” the article explained further.
Again. Hall censored the Mercer connection and the riot planning and incitement to violence.
Meanwhile, P.J. Gladnick huffed: "One thing that could be said for Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller. Although he was a monopolist, he never openly gloated nor mocked the competitors that he suppressed or destroyed. The same cannot be said of the twenty-first century blatant monopolist, Jack Dorsey of Twitter. Not content to act in tandem with other social media monopolists in order to attempt to destroy his competitor, Parler, he rubbed salt in the wound he helped create by gloating about it with a mocking tweet." Of course, Rockefeller was much worse to his competitors than Twitter's Dorsey ever has been.
On Jan. 11, Hall highlighted how "Free speech platform Gab said it archived a hoard of 'disgusting' tweets replying to President Donald Trump’s account before it was banned." Hall would only admit that Gab was "controversial," but was on censorship patrol here too: as we've documented, it's an even worse cesspool of far-right hate and conspiracy theories than Parler is. In addition to the usual information he was hiding, Hall omitted a couple other things: Gab and Parler were feuding before Parler got pulled off Amazon's web-hosting service, and Parler was so poorly built that people were able to download Parler messages that included geolocation data, meaning that it would be quite easy to identify Parler users who took place in the Capitol riot.
Kayla Sargent joined in with a post headlined "Fighting Back":
The left is trying hard to shut down free speech-oriented social media platforms like Parler and Rumble. Now, these companies are fighting back.
Parler and Rumble have filed suit against Amazon and Google respectively, in an apparent effort to fight Big Tech censorship.
Apple and Google purged Parler from their app stores, then Amazon took things a step further. It totally removed the app from its servers. Parler decided to return fire against Amazon, and in a lawsuit filed on Jan. 11, accused Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS) of “violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act” and “breaching [its] contract with Parler.”
Like her MRC compatriots, Sargent censored both the riot incitement that occurred on Parler and the Mercer conflict of interest.
Again: For the MRC, the victimization narrative means everything. The truth means nothing.
WND's Election Conspiracy-Mongering, Part 6 Topic: WorldNetDaily
Mr. President, your time is now. There is no tomorrow. Winning again in 2024 is not going to happen. You have to win now – for you, for your legacy, for the 74 million voters you love, for America, for American exceptionalism, for capitalism. There is no tomorrow. If you don't win now, there is no chance for you in 2024, for two reasons:
First, because Democrats cheated and stole this election, without punishment (so far). If they get away with rigging and stealing this election, it's all over for Republicans forevermore. They stole the election with you in charge. Who's going to stop them when they're in charge? That's like letting the wolf guard the hen house. It's only going to get worse.
Second, the 2024 election will not matter, simply because America won't exist in 2024 – not the America we know now. Democrats will destroy that America. Trust me, this will be a foreign country by 2024.
Democrats remain confident that they have pulled off a heist, which continues for the upcoming special election in Georgia on Jan. 5. Yesterday an Obama-appointed federal judge blocked a cleaning of the election rolls of improper voters prior to that election of new senators.
Georgia officials have sent warning letters to thousands of people who have improperly obtained mail-in ballots despite not residing in Georgia. The letters are destined for the trash can, as Republicans almost never really prosecute anyone for election fraud, particularly out-of-staters.
In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of votes should be disqualified due to fraudulent representations of confinement. A quarter-million people in Wisconsin were registered under a claim of indefinite confinement, not all of which were valid.
Lame duck Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., was reelected in 2016 on the coattails of Donald Trump, who garnered more votes than Toomey there. Toomey announced at age only 58 that he will leave the Senate for undisclosed, probably lucrative opportunities rather than fight to hold his GOP seat, while continuing to be ungrateful to Trump.
Like a bank president who looks the other way while his bank processes unverified signatures on checks, some Republican senators deny awareness of election fraud. But under the 12th Amendment, such weak-kneed senators do not certify the votes.
Senate President Pence alone has the constitutional authority to recognize Electoral College votes. Pence should decline to recognize the Biden votes from the states tainted by fraud and having rival slates.
The execution and aftermath of the 2020 election are nothing short of shameful. At this writing – nearly two months after the election on Nov. 3 – the public still does not have satisfactory answers about what took place during the counting of ballots on election night and the days immediately following. We clearly do not really know why counting suddenly stopped or paused in multiple battleground states on election night (unprecedented in the history of the country), or why the excuses that were offered at the time (for example, that a pipe had burst at the State Farm Center in Atlanta) were subsequently proven false.
Hundreds of witnesses have given sworn statements and testimony under oath, and the public has seen videos of behavior that is suspicious, to say the least. There are statistical anomalies – some say impossibilities – for example, that 100% of the votes that magically appeared in the middle of the night in Michigan and Wisconsin, after official vote counting had allegedly stopped, went for Joe Biden. Or how Biden managed to get more than 81 million votes despite losing Florida, Texas and Ohio, and taking only 527 of 3,113 counties, while former President Barack Obama won Florida and Ohio and took 875 counties.
Biden could concede the election, claim he was doing it for the good of the nation (which would be true), because he had no idea of how dirty the election was (likely untrue). If Biden has already conceded, and Trump has that in his pocket, I would expect that Biden worked out a deal with prosecutors to help take down some really big, smelly fish in government and the corporate world. Who better to know the swamp than someone who has been swimming in it his entire career?
If the Biden concession were announced on Jan. 6, that would free Trump politically to invoke the Insurrection Act against the states that have acted in concert with foreign entities like the Chicoms (and many others). Such a roundup would mean the arrests of many corrupt state and financial actors in or connected to these battleground states. It would also include whatever actors Biden fingered as part of escaping a prison sentence.
A dirty election is a dirty election; a coordinated dirty election across multiple states with or without foreign assistance is an insurrection, subject to the use of military force against the plotters, without the permission of the states involved. I would also expect massive asset seizures against the plotters and financiers (read Executive Order 13848).
[...]
If President Trump were to invoke Article II, Section 4, he could certainly remove the existing state governments, set up a temporary government and schedule new elections in the fraud-prone, COVID-obsessed states. In some ways, I like this option better.
Regardless of the political landscape at nightfall on Jan. 6, America's second revolution begins now, as the MAGA tribes begin their journey to Washington, D.C., at the request of our own Gen. George Washington, Donald J. Trump. While we faithful MAGA millions still have hope for a last minute turnaround in the Marxists self-driven "tide of history," the revolution does not depend upon that outcome. WE THE PEOPLE – the real Americans – are "mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore." Whether we are privileged to physically gather together with our peers on the National Mall or are forced by circumstances to be there only in spirit, we are united in patriotic zeal at a level not seen since the emperor of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
We've suffered our own Pearl Harbor – an attack on our constitution and liberty that has unfolded in slow motion over the past four years, culminating in the Great Cockroach Reveal of the 2020 Election, when the tenacity and resolve of our president to prevent this nation from being stolen by Communist China and its captured elite stooges here at home switched on a spotlight exposing the full extent of their duplicity and corruption. Politically speaking, the sheep have been divided from the goats, the wheat from the tares, and the righteous from the wicked.
[...]
There is no peaceful resolution of this crisis. There is no short-term "return to normal." There is only a season of warfare of some kind – perhaps bloody, hopefully not – and then the restructuring of our government and culture through the active purging of the losing side from the seats of power – again, perhaps bloody, hopefully not.
If the Biden Theft of the Presidency is consummated, it is undoubtedly the left's intentions to see that WE THE PEOPLE be purged, and the long history of similar Marxist takeovers suggests it will be a very bloody campaign.
Back in the day, Richie may have been the greatest and most prolific horse-race fixer in history. He fixed over 1,000 horse races in 11 years at every racetrack in California, bribing over 100 jockeys. Eventually, he was convicted and served time in prison.
That was 25 years ago. Today, Richie is one of the good guys and a respected member of his community, as well as a noted philanthropist. But Richie still has his street smarts – something no one in Washington, D.C., has. For over 50 years, he witnessed the smartest and sharpest scammers and cheaters in the gambling world. No one can spot a scam like Richie. My buddy has a Ph.D. in the Art of the Steal.
Richie watched and studied the 2020 presidential election. He calls it "the greatest scam and steal in world history." He says anyone who denies this election was stolen is a criminal who was in on the scam, a bribed politician or bureaucrat who benefits from the scam, or a completely naive moron.
What does the world's greatest horse-race fixer believe happened on election night? Richie says it's clear that President Donald Trump won in a landslide in key battleground states, so big that Democrats had to move quickly to plan B and bring in reinforcements – vans, U.S. Postal Service trucks, even planes filled with fake ballots, in the wee hours of the morning, with no GOP witnesses watching.
The millions of fake ballots reportedly cast for Joe Biden weren't enough. Democratic scammers had to call a timeout and obviously brought in millions of additional fake ballots to erase Trump's massive lead.
In a coordinated conspiracy so easy to see – Richie calls it "amateur hour" – five states clearly agreed at the same time to pause or stop counting votes, thereby buying themselves time to have millions of additional fake ballots filled out, trucked in or, in some cases, flown into nearby airports.
In the case of Georgia, there are accusations of scammers faking that a pipe burst and caused a flood, during which they rolled out suitcases filled with ballots, all of which was caught on video.
Any idiot who isn't blind can see what happened, says Richie. It was as if a brazen gang of 50 carrying AK-47s and not wearing face coverings robbed five banks at the exact same time, showed their IDs on the way out the door and then got a blind eye turned by every FBI agent and every judge. Maybe people are in denial. Maybe the D.C. swamp got to them. Maybe they're in on the scam. A lot of respectable people in power must be getting filthy rich on this scam, says Richie.
The suggestion by a few Republican House members that they should stand down and allow certification of a fraudulent election would be an abdication of their duty under the Constitution. It would be wrong to embrace and allow wrongdoing by a handful of state officials, who violated the election laws enacted by their legislatures.
In Georgia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there was no signature verification of millions of mailed-in ballots as required by laws there. If the laws had been applied as written, then President Trump won those states and enough elsewhere to prevail in the Electoral College.
[...]
The House, voting by state, should make its own determination that the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional in diluting the authority of the House. The Constitution is clear: The House selects the next president when there is election failure.
In our constitutional republic, our elected representatives can and should vote to protect the integrity of the selection of our next president. That will establish a necessary precedent that fraud never be allowed to steal a presidential election.
CNS Still Pushing Only Polls That Make Trump Look Good Topic: CNSNews.com
Throughout the Trump presidency, CNSNews.com has focused on reporting only on polls that make Trump look good and his critics and opponents look bad. That's continuing to happen after the election as well. Managing editor Michael W. Chapman gushed in a Dec. 29 article:
In Gallup's 2020 poll on the most admired man, President Donald J. Trump came out on top. For most admired woman, Michelle Obama placed first and first lady Melania Trump placed third.
In the survey, Gallup asked, "What man that you have heard or read about, living today in any part of the world, do you admire most?"
In response, 18% of Americans named Trump, the highest percentage. In second place was Barack Obama with 15%.
Chapman did eventually concede that Gallup also noted "The incumbent president is usually top of mind when Gallup asks Americans to name, without prompting, which man living anywhere in the world they admire most."
Craig Bannister went the Biden-bashing route in a Jan. 7 article citing CNS' favorite pro-Trump pollster, Rasmussen:
Far more Americans expect crime to increase, rather than decline, with former Vice President Joe Biden as president, and a strong majority oppose defunding the police, a new national survey of American adults by Rasmussen Reports finds.
[...]
Differences among parties are stark, with only 20% of Democrats expecting crime to rise, compared to 69% of Republicans and 39% of “other” political affiliations who fear crime will increase.
By race, 44% of Whites, 28% of Blacks and 41% of other races expect crime to get worse with a Biden administration. Forty-six percent (46%) of both married adults and those with children at home predict an increase in crime.
While the poll was taken before last week's right-wing riot at the Capitol, Bannister's article was posted afterwards, so it looks highly ironic that crime appears to be increasing under Trump (which Bannister didn't note).
Riots Shock MRC's Graham Into Reasonableness -- Briefly Topic: Media Research Center
Last week's riot at the Capitol seems to have shocked the Media Research Center's Tim Graham into reasonableness, if his Jan. 8 column is any indication:
Critics of liberal-media bias are often accused of whataboutism. We're accused of diverting everyone's attention from some conservative or Republican scandal or offense by changing the subject to the media's performance.
After a pro-Trump crowd breached the Capitol, forcing lawmakers to flee, my friend and former colleague Dan Isett tweeted: "Yeah, the media covered for left-wing riots last year. So what? We aren't children and we don't use misbehavior by those we disagree with to excuse the misbehaviors of those we do. Personal responsibility is a hallmark of our philosophy."
Amen. If we were raised right, our parents told us two wrongs don't make a right. This is not a time for calling out double standards. This is a time for standards. Respecting the home of our Congress is the lowest possible standard for American civilization. You don't Make America Great Again by shoving cops and breaking glass on Capitol Hill.
It's not hard to find prominent voices on the left who are suddenly finding lawlessness inexcusable after having suggested it was excusable if it forwarded their agenda. They used words like "rebellion" to glamorize unrest. But this is not rioting at an Apple store. This is where our democracy lives.
That's a big change in tone from his boss, Brent Bozell, who justified the violence while claiming to denounce it, and also fretting that said violence would hurt the conservative movement Graham's disavowal of whataboutism is also interesting, since whataboutism iswhattheMRCrunson (and Graham too).
Graham went on:
The "told you so's" from liberals weren't half as depressing as the "protests" from so-called "born-again Americans" themselves. And at this sad hour, I'm not invested in driving the notion that a vast left-wing conspiracy somehow overtook a peaceful Trump rally. In this moment, it feels like another unproven claim, like the Trump landslide.
Graham seems to have ignored that his boss is still clinging to his bogus election-fraud conspiracy theories -- and that the MRC has not only published posts promoting the idea that the election remains in dispute, it has complained that right-wing tweets disputing the election were flagged by Facebook.
More interestingly, Graham wrote this:
Adding salt to the wounds of video showing "conservatives" ramming through police barricades were pictures of "conservatives" destroying media equipment. If you're stomping on someone's camera, you're no friend of America. Just because journalists might seem to wear hats that say America has never been great doesn't excuse your destruction of property. They have a right to report — even a right to distort — and we have the right to call out distortions. That's the First Amendment, too.
That sort of expressed respect for journalists is almost unheard of at the MRC, which effectively rooted for Trump supporters to attack them and mocked their concerns about their safety in covering Trump. The MRC's hatred for journalists and journalism is so vicious that it sells shirts saying, "Believe In America, Not The Media."
But Graham apparently got that fit of conscience out of his system, and he quickly revered to form. His Twitter account since then has wrote a post sneering at CNN as "the MMMBop of news" and wrote a post mocking CNN's Anderson Cooper as nothing more than the "son of the famous and uber-wealthy fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt" and calling him "Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper" even though that's not his actual middle name.
So, it appears Graham really didn't mean anything he wrote in his column.
One of Newsmax's most prominent voices in promoting bogus election fraud conspiracy theories has been columnist Michael Dorstewitz. In a Nov. 16 column, for instance, he uncritically repeated Rudy Giuliani's claim that voting-tech company Dominion "actually is a company owned by two Venezuelans that's been in business for about 20 years and been disqualified in so many places it would make your head spin." That's not true, and it's one of the claims Newsmax had to walk back in an attempt to avoid getting sued for defamation by Dominion and another voting tech company, Smartmatic.
Dorstewitz touted in a Nov. 23 column: "Trump-Pence campaign lawyers claim they can prove election fraud and other acts of misconduct on a massive scale. Also, state courts, secretaries of state and election officials made eleventh hour changes to election procedures that constitutionally may only be made by state legislative bodies. Too many people just aren’t buying it."
In a Jan. 2 column -- promoted at one point as the top story on Newsmax's front page -- Dorstewitz wrote:
Each time a member of the big media reports on someone referring to acts of fraud or even irregularities in the Nov. 3 presidential election, they describe them as "baseless claims" or "unproven."
Such words are included in almost every wire story since election day published by the Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, and others.
Actually, there are many examples of vote fraud that took place during the 2020 election, and serious evidence of voting irregularities relating to the mail-in ballots.
Dorstewitz then cited a bunch of claims, scrupulously ignoring the evidence that most, if not all, of them have been discredited.
On Jan. 4 Dorstewitz touted the Republican attempt to deny Biden from being certified by the Electoral College:
Ever since Republican lawmakers announced they intend to mount an objection to the Electoral College vote when a joint session of Congress meets Wednesday, Democrats and mainstream media have denounced it as undemocratic.
But the caterwauling from the left brings to mind a line from Shakespeare’s "Hamlet," that "The lady doth protest too much," and thus loses all credibility. Are they really that afraid of the truth?
At least a dozen senators and 140 House members are expected to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory as the 46th president.
They’re calling for an electoral commission to go over the results in key states for 10 days before they’re certified.
In addition to evidence the 2020 election may have been rigged, it doesn’t pass the smell test. It doesn’t make sense that Biden, who hasn’t had an original thought in 78 years and 45 days, won the election, despite the fact that:
His party lost at least 11 House seats
He lost heavily in the bellwether states of Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa
He lost nearly every bellwether county in the country
He bested Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance in only a few cities
He offered no evidence to back up his "bellwether county" claim; his claim that Biden largely underperformed Hillary is a lie.
Dorstewitz's record of dishonesty and fraud doesn't bode well for Newsmax's attempt to frame itself as a reasonable alternative to Fox News (not to mention trying to keep from getting sued over publishing said falsehoods).
Family Feud: Joseph Farah's Daughter Renounces Election Conspiracies He's Spouting Topic: WorldNetDaily
Following the right-wing riots in the Capitol on Jan. 6, former White House communications director Alyssa Farah took to Twitter to send a message to the Trump supporters that instigated and encouraged the violence:
Dear MAGA- I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.
There were cases of fraud that should be investigated. But the legitimate margins of victory for Biden are far too wide to change the outcome. You need to know that. I’m proud of many policy accomplishments the Trump Admin had. But we must accept these results.
Which is all well and good -- admitting that the election is not stolen is a big step for a former Trump White House official to take publicly. But there's another issue involved here: Farah's father, WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, is still spouting those election conspiracy theories her daughter has renounced.
We looked at Joseph Farah's bogus claims last month, and -- being a guy who never met a right-wing conspiracy theory he didn't like -- he hasn't stopped. in his Dec. 29 column, he declared that a Gallup poll showing Trump being rated higher than Joe Biden on a list of most admired Americans is evidence that Trump "won in a landslide": "Donald J. Trump is the most admired man in America. We saw in the campaign that he had become the most LOVED man in America. Then how could he have lost an honest election?"
On Jan. 8 -- two days after the Capitol riots, Farah ranted, while also taking a minor shot at his daughter:
My wife, Elizabeth, and I traveled to Washington Wednesday for President Trump's "Save America Rally" – because we sincerely believed we needed to show our support for the president, since the will of the majority of the electorate had been overthrown.
There were, by my estimates, at least half a million gathered at the mall – dressing in red, white and blue and many sporting American flags. It was a sight to behold. At daybreak, they began showing up from every nook and cranny in the city.
We were proud to be there. There was no place we'd rather have been than showing our support for the greatest president of our lifetimes – perhaps the greatest ever!
[...]
I guess it's no surprise that we did not attend with my 31-year-old daughter, Alyssa, who resigned as director of communications for the White House in November, because she strongly disagreed with our president and with us. Alyssa is a grown adult, and despite the disappointment of the disagreement, we are not here to pick a public fight with her. We love ALL our kids – all five of our daughters!
But we want to go on the record as to why we agree with Trump that our nation has been the victim of a fraud of epic proportions and that Joe Biden is the first American pretender about to be elevated to the "throne" in 240 years!
Why do I say this?
The evidence is so overwhelming as to make me wonder where to begin. The particulars vary depending on the state. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada certified election results despite the illegal, unconstitutional or fraudulent actions taken to produce the results we were given.
[...]
The items I have listed above are only a taste, but will suffice to make the point: Any election exhibiting half these characteristics would have received a thorough investigation in the weeks between Nov. 3 and Dec. 16 – that is, any election that did not have Donald J. Trump as the aggrieved candidate.
So, yeah, there's a bit of a family feud going on there. Alyssa Farah has been trying to downplay her link to her father and his discredited website, having herself scrubbed from WND's archive of the articles she wrote for it while a college student (forgetting that the internet is forever).
Farah pere's refusal to accept reality seems to have caused a rift between him and his daughter. It's also something that -- despite belatedattempts to boost revenue and credibility -- it may also cost Farah his business.
MRC Keeps Falsely Smearing Harris Over Coronavirus Vaccine Topic: Media Research Center
Last fall, we documented how the Media Research Center tried to falsely paint Kamala Harris as an "anti-vaxxer" because she said she would take recommendations on a coronavirus from medical professionals but not President Trump, who was promising a vaccine as a re-election ploy. Now that there is an actual vaccine, the MRC is trying to rewrite history. Scott Whitlock huffed in a Dec. 11 post:
Oh, NOW CBS is concerned with vaccine skepticism? This Morning hosts and reporters on Friday fretted that Americans, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, might be resistant to taking the newly-approved COVID vaccine. Yet nowhere in the segment did Gayle King or reporter Adriana Diaz remind viewers that Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris indulged in anti-science, anti-vaccine propaganda during the campaign.
But Whitlock buried what Biden actually said -- "I trust vaccines, I trust the scientists, but I don't trust Donald Trump" -- in the 11th paragraph of his article, and he completely censored what Harris said at the time: that she "would not trust Donald Trump" given his reputation for muzzling health officials who spoke publicly about inconvenient facts, and that she would require "a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability" of a vaccine.
Kristine Marsh complained the same day, "Democrats like [Rep. Katie] Porter and Kamala Harris led the media in putting politics about public safety in casting doubt about the safety of this vaccine before the election, and now they want to reverse course and avoid taking responsibility for their damaging actions." She too censored what Harris actually said. As proof of Porter allegedly "casting doubt about the safety of this vaccine before the election," she linked to an article in which she questioned that Trump put a former pharmaceutical executive in charge of the Operation Warp Speed vaccine initiative -- never mind that the MRC would likely have done the exact same thing if the president was a Democrat.
Now that there’s hope on the horizon with the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine being distributed here in this country, the morning networks have been singing a different tune about how safe this vaccine is. After spreading anti-vaccine quackery on Good Morning America leading up to the November election, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos urged Americans to “trust” Dr. Fauci that this vaccine is safe to take, on Tuesday’s GMA.
[...]
But GMA wasn't trying to convince Americans of the vaccine's safety leading up to the election. In September, ABC, along with the other networks, spread dangerous conspiracies about the vaccine...that came straight from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s mouths. George Stephanopoulos and Cecilia Vega in particular repeatedly questioned if Americans should take any vaccine developed while Trump was in office.
And those "dangerous conspiracies" were ... just pointing out that Trump's word can't be trusted, which is just common sense. She again censored what Biden and Harris actually said.
Marsh continued her dishonest attack the next day: "As we’ve documented at NewsBusters, Harris told Americans in September not to trust President Trump on the coronavirus vaccine. ABC used Harris and Biden’s own words to spread mistrust about a COVID vaccine, and now they have the audacity to question why there’s mistrust, and ask Harris how to combat that mistrust, when they themselves were part of the problem?"
On Dec. 22, Marsh again falsely accused Harris of "spreading anti-vaccine misinformation before the election, only to flip the script after she and Biden won."
It's important to note that at no point in any of these posts did MRC writers offer evidence to back up their implicit claim that Trump's word on a vaccine -- or anything else, for that matter -- should be trusted without question.
UPDATE: In a Dec. 30 post, Duncan Schroeder complained that CNN and MSNBC "demonstrated their role as sycophants for the Biden-Harris administration by gushing over Kamala Harris receiving her COVID vaccine, the nurse who was selected to administer it, and where Harris went to get it while downplaying her anti-vaccine position during the campaign (simply because of who's occupied the White House)." He too ignored that Trump was promising a vaccine before the election as a ploy to get votes.
The federal government spent a record $886,587,000,000 in the first two months of fiscal 2021 (October and November), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
At the same time, the federal government ran a deficit of $429,337,000,000, which is the second highest deficit the federal government has ever run in the first two months of a fiscal year.
The largest deficit the federal government has ever run in the first two months of a fiscal year came in fiscal 2009, when it ran a deficit of $491, 943,980,000 (in constant November 2020 dollars).
Also usual: Jeffrey did not note that this happened under a Republican president and a Republican-led Senate -- the words "Trump" and "Republican" are nowhere to be found -- and his article is illustrated by a picture of Trump with Nancy Pelosi, falsely implying Democrats hold equal blame for this.
But Jeffrey was officially silent as that same Republican president and a Republican Senate presided over the passage of a coronavirus relief bill and a related bill to keep the government funded. There were two anonymously written articles singling out obscure provisions, but it's unclear whether CNS backs or opposes them since they both reflect certain conservative principles:
The first notes that the bill "includes a passage on page 997 that sets aside $35 million to provide grants to groups that provide 'cation in…voluntarily refraining from non-marital sexual activity.'"
The second states that it "includes a passage on pages 415 and 416 that provides $250 million of 'enhanced border security' in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt Tunisia and Oman."
That was followed by a article by Craig Bannister noting that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham offered a "defense of the $10 million allocated to Pakistani 'gender programs.'"
Then, when Trump attacked the spending bill and called for even higher coronavirus relief payments to Americans, CNS played it straight. In a Dec. 23 article, Susan Jones uncritrically repeated Trump's framing of the bill having "plenty of money for foreign countries, lobbyists and special interests while sending the bare minimum to the American people who need it"; this was followed by an article from Bannister noting that "Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar says Congress should send President Donald Trump what he wants: a COVID-19 stimulus bill that contains nothing but direct $2,000 payments to the American people." There was also some stock whining from Rand Paul about all the spending in a Dec. 22 article by Jones, who proclaimed Paul as being "true to his fiscal conservatism."
While CNS published no article on Trump's eventual signing of the bills as passed by Congress, managing editor Michael W. Chapman uased a Dec. 28 article to highlight a report on government waste featuring "the creation of a $6.9 million 'smart toilet,' which operates with three cameras, one of which can identify a user's 'analprint.'"
CNS tried to return to form in a Jan. 6 article by Jones headlined "Biden: 'Free, Free, Free': Vaccinations, 'COVID Treatment,' $2,000 Checks..." But Jones failed to inform her readers that Trump not only supports the $2,000 stimulus payments as noted above, he also supports free COVID vaccinations and free COVID treatment.
Yesterday, we looked at how CNSNews.com fed into President Trump's bogus narrative that the election was stolen in the days before the Jan. 6 armed riot at the Capitol. Now, let's examine CNS' coverage of the riot and its aftermath.
After the Capitol riot, the Media Research Center was quick to play victim, 
Let's go back to WND editor Joseph Farah's Jan. 8 
CNSNews.com led into the Jan. 6 Electoral College vote the way it had in the weeks previously: 
If this sounds familiar,
Art Moore dutifully reported in a Dec. 17 WorldNetDaily 
We've
Mr. President, your time is now. There is no tomorrow. Winning again in 2024 is not going to happen. You have to win now – for you, for your legacy, for the 74 million voters you love, for America, for American exceptionalism, for capitalism. There is no tomorrow. If you don't win now, there is no chance for you in 2024, for two reasons:
Throughout the Trump presidency, CNSNews.com 
Last week's riot at the Capitol seems to have shocked the Media Research Center's Tim Graham into reasonableness, if his Jan. 8 
One of Newsmax's most prominent voices in promoting bogus election fraud conspiracy theories has been columnist Michael Dorstewitz. In a Nov. 16 
Following the right-wing riots in the Capitol on Jan. 6, former White House communications director Alyssa Farah 
Last fall, 
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey served up 
