NEW ARTICLE: Crasser With Crowder
Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center supports right-wing "comedian" Steven Crowder's vicious homophobia and hate-filled attacks because they tend to get him suspended from social media, which gives the MRC a chance to further its "victim" narrative. Read more >>

CNS Mildly Fearmongers Over Door-To-Door Vaccines
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com's coverage of the Biden administration's efforts to offer COVID vaccines door-to-door didn't reach the fearmongering heights of WorldNetDaily, but it had its moments of unfairness and a twinge of fear. Susan Jones set the mildly ominous tone in a July 8 article:

Two days ago, President Joe Biden announced that his administration's vaccination push may come right to your front door:

“Now we need to go community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftimes door-to-door, literally knocking on doors to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” the president said.

The door-to-door plan is getting pushback from some Americans, who see door-knocking as intrusive and none of the government's business. Oh yes it is our business, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told CNN on Thursday morning[.]

Later that day, Melanie Arter surprisingly gave White House press secretary Jen Psaki to shoot down right-wing fearmongering by pointing out that "the people who are going door-to-door to encourage people to get vaccinated are not federal government employees, but are community volunteers and clergy members" and that "the federal government does not have a database showing who has been vaccinated and who has not, and it has no plans to do so in the future." The next day, Arter gave even more uncritical space to Psaki, this time to shoot down fearmongering South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who was ranting about "government vaccination teams showing up unannounced or unrequested at the door of ‘targeted’ homeowners or on their property":

When asked Friday to respond to McMaster and explain what is being done in the vaccination outreach, Psaki said, “Let me first say that the failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including the people of South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that.

[...]

>“It’s something that’s been going on since April, and it’s something where we’ve seen an impact in states where there are lower vaccination rates, so it is something that we will continue to work with local groups to do, and it’s a disservice to the country and to the people who may lose their lives, who may lose family members to provide inaccurate disinformation at a moment when we’re still fighting a pandemic,” Psaki added.

CNS then turned its attention to Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, whose state had seen low vaccination rates and an increasing COVID caseload. Two articles showed who was serious about health and who just wanted to fearmonger: Jones' article hyped Hutchinson blaming the government for "conservative" skepticism over vaccines, while Arter's article focused on Hutchinson claiming that the state already has "community organizations and churches going into people’s homes to make sure that those who are 'bedridden' have access to the vaccine."

CNS, however, couldn't stay away from McMaster's fearmongering -- despite already having given Psaki a chance to respond to it -- so a July 12 article by Julia Johnson hyped it again. Johnson waited until the 10th paragraph of her article to mention Psaki's criticism, then followed it up with McMaster's partisan response.

This was followed up with a July 14 column by Tony Perkins, who was in fiull fearmongering mode:

Most people were shocked when the president wanted to go door-to-door with his vaccine campaign -- but that's only the half of it. According to a Pentagon spokesman, the White House is also planning to go barracks to barracks -- requiring the men and women of our voluntary military to involuntarily surrender their freedom and take an unproven shot some of them don't want.

Actually, miilitary members are already mandated to have numerous vaccines. And Perkins' insistence that the COVID vaccine is "unproven" clashes with a rant later in his column, in which he whined about "2020's Democrats, who spent months sowing doubts about the shots, just because they were created while Donald Trump was president. At one point, Biden openly questioned whether a vaccine approved by Trump's agencies would be safe. They are the ones who stoked fears and undermined the scientific progress. Now, suddenly, they want to flip a switch, undo that damage, and blame all of the hesitancy on conservatives. You can't have it both ways. It was their politicking that put people's lives at risk. And now, their heavy-handedness threatens to do the same -- to our freedoms."

Perkins can't have it both ways either. The vaccine can't have been perfectly fine when Trump was promising it as a re-election ploy but suddenly "unproven" when the political party in the White House switched.

MRC Tries To Smear Texas Dems As 'Superspreaders' Because Of COVID Cases
Topic: Media Research Center

Here's more evidence that the Media Research Center stopped being about "media research" -- if it ever was -- and is all about pushing right-wing narratives no matter how false. We've already noted how the MRC's Curtis Houck promoted the Republican-approved talking point -- as ably regurgitated by Fox News' Peter Doocy -- that Texas Democrats making a trip to Washington, D.C., to break quorum in the state legislature to stop a a voting-restriction bill was a "superspreader event" because six of the 60 legislators -- who had all been vaccinated against coronavirus -- had tested positive for COVID. But Houck wasn't the only MRC writer to push this GOP-approved narrative.

Scott Whitlock made sure to put "SUPER SPREADER" in all caps in the headline of a July 19 post while complaining that non-right-wing media didn't cover this story to his satisfaction: "On Sunday night, the CBS Weekend News DIDN’T cover the super spreader Democrats. Instead, they touted the Texas voting rights legislation separately with NO mention of the Covid spike amongst the Democrats."

Houck made the RNC proud on July 21 when he repeated the narrative:

World News Tonight felt the need to defend the Lone Star State lawmakers by omitting them in a segment about the other D.C. cases.

Sensationalist anchor David Muir teased that the newscast would cover “fully vaccinated staffers from the White House to Nancy Pelosi's office, testing positive,” but when it came to conducting basic journalism, Muir and White House correspondent Rachel Scott didn’t see a need for that.

Muir later added in the lead-in to Scott: “And one more note on the virus tonight. In Washington tonight, some fully vaccinated staffers from the White House to Speaker Pelosi's office have now tested positive.”

Instead of spend the whole segment on why the superspreader happened, Scott never gave an explanation for how a Pelosi aide and White House official contracted the virus[.]

Houck again failed to mention the fact that the Texas legislators were fully vaccinated at as well.

The same day, Clay Waters whined about the New York Times pointing out how Republicans are more vaccine-hesitant than Democrats, huffing in reference to the Texas legislators that "a Democratic super-spreader event wasn’t identified as such."

Kathleen Krumhansl referred to  "Super-Spreading Texas Democrats" in a July 22 post attacking Spanish-language media for not smearing them the way she is:

Now that the publicity stunt by Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled to Washington, D.C. to boycott that state's election security laws backfired, with six of them testing positive for COVID-19, the Latino nets are doing their best to erase them.

After the news of the fiasco broke through, the previously heralded heroes and saviors of voting integrity and justice for both Univision and Telemundo somehow morphed into anonymous aides, officials and advisors to be referred to indirectly and in passing.

Watch as anchors and reporters from both networks save face for the reckless super-spreaders - –they exposed members of the Congress and the White House staff with the virus- who appear to be saved from any guilt by being “fully vaccinated”, as if that would make things any different[.]

The MRC is utterly hypocritical about this, of course. When it came to an actual superspreader event -- last September's Rose Garden introduction of Supreme Court judicial nominee Amy Comey Barrett by then-President Trump, where most attendees were unmasked (pre-vaccine) and after which several attendees, incuding Trump himself, came down with COVID -- the MRC didn't want to talk about it:

• Houck complained at the time that it was a "narrative" to point out the indisputable fact that few people wore masks, adding in an attempt at whataboutism: "While it’s admirable to stress masking-wearing and social distancing, CNN and the left writ large lost the chance to credibly lecture anyone on public health after having shown little to no issue with packed, should-to-shoulder Black Lives Matter marches and protests."
• Kristine Marsh also tried to downplay it by being outraged at a host on "The View" calling it the "Rose Garden massacre," insisting that just "a handful of people out of 150 present have tested positive for coronavirus," omitting the fact that among that "handful" were the president of the United States, his wife, aides and other politicians. She added: "Neither host seemed to understand that contracting a virus which the majority of people have recovered from, isn’t a death sentence."
• John Shannon groused that "in what felt like a strange combination of ESPN and murder-mystery, Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski constructed an in-depth play-by-play of events at the nomination ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett at the White House, the “super-spreader” event that many in the media consider to be ground zero for many positive cases, including that of the President.
• Clay Waters unironically ranted that "The New York Times efficiently channeled the hypocritical left-wing rage over President Trump’s late-September Garden ceremony introducing his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, which may have helped spread coronavirus among White House staff and others who have since tested positive."

In other words, just as hypocritical as the MRC's right-wing rage over the Texas legislators.

What Does This Article Even Mean?
Topic: CNSNews.com

An anonymously written July 16 CNSNews.com article states:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) held a press conference in Los Angeles on Thursday to celebrate the first payments of the Biden Child Tax Credit and twice during that press conference, according to the transcript Pelosi published of the event, she declared: “Oh, my God.”

“The Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan provides the largest Child Tax Credit ever and historic relief to the most working families ever--and as of July 15th, most families are automatically receiving monthly payments of $250 or $300 per child without having to take any action,”explained a statement on the White House website.

At the event, Pelosi mentioned the Paycheck Protection Program and Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.) efforts in promoting it.

[...]

Pelosi also said “Oh, my God” in response to a question a reporter asked her about the spike in drug overdose deaths over the past year.

We're having trouble figuring out why this article exists. Is it an attack on Pelosi? If so, it's a bizarre one. "Oh, my God" is a common enough expression that it shouldn't be particularly offensive to anyone, even the uber-Catholics who run CNS and have deemed Pelosi insufficiently Catholic because she's not anti-abortion.

But some anonymous someone at CNS was apparently so offended by Pelosi's use of this common expression that he or she even made screenshots of the transcript of Pelosi's presser with the words "Oh, my God" highlighted. Yet that person was not so offended that he or she couldn't be bothered to explain to readers exactly why. It's lashing out for no good or obvious reason -- which may serve as a demonstration of how much CNS hates Pelosi than of any actual news value.

Consider this a very strange entry in CNS' multi-pronged war against Pelosi.

Newsmax's Black Actually Thinks Trump Can Be Calm And Moderate
Topic: Newsmax

The political scene is evolving so quickly that I presume to offer some advice to President Trump: He can now win in 2024 by being the potential candidate of calm and moderation.

The Democrats have become a Babel of contending extremists, suddenly and implausibly blaming the Republicans for defunding police forces and miraculously discovering the virtues of voter identification, after having denounced it for six months as the resurrection of Jim Crow.

[...]

Thus far, the one great accomplishment of the Biden administration, apart from a rising stock market, has been the reduced decibel level of the Biden White House — something gratefully appreciated by many Americans.

The constant tumult of the Trump years grated on almost everyone, although Trump’s assailants often were equally, if not chiefly, responsible for the clangorous quality of those years.

But the increasing concern about the human wave of illegal immigration across the southern border, about sharply rising rates of violent crime and inflation, will soon attract the interest of even the most slavishly anti-Trump media, however tepidly. And Democrats already are showing their nervousness over those and other foreboding prospects.

[...]

While the Democrats’ pseudo-legal harassment of Trump — the Russia collusion fraud, the two spurious impeachments, the hysterical COVID-19 smears (replete with early charges that no vaccine developed under Trump’s auspices could be trusted), the accusations of him instigating an organized, heavily armed insurrection by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — continues.

It has spiraled down to Speaker Pelosi's pathetic commission with Rep. Cheney as a sorceress’s apprentice. They will make a last political stand to try turning the hooliganism at the Capitol into something on the scale of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, as suggested by many in politics and the media.

The fact that the former president has come through all of this is a great personal victory and a true wonder of political staying power.

Now, as time passes, the public irritation with Trump’s bombastic behavior, of his being in the nation’s face day and night for four years, will recede and gradually be replaced by the spectacle of a comatose Biden administration, floundering and dissembling, fecklessly struggling with the various crises it has created.

There will be, soon enough, nostalgia for Trump instead — and if he is wise, he can become a winning figure of comparative Olympian serenity.

-- Conrad Black, July 19 Newsmax column

(Black has never actually observed Trump, has he?)

WND Fearmongers, Misinforms About Door-To-Door COVID Vaccine Effort
Topic: WorldNetDaily

If there's one thing WorldNetDaily is good at -- aside from publishing falsehoods and misinformation -- it's fearmongering, and the Biden administration's attempt to increase the number of Americans vaccinated against coronavirus by having health workers go door-to-door provided another opportunity to do that.

A July 6 article by Art Moore introduced the idea in a surprisingly fair manner -- but then he called on notable COVID misinfomers to shoot it down. He repeated Peter McCullough's wildly wrong claim that "The Delta variant is the mildest one we've seen so far" with a "very low mortality," followed by Harvey Risch's utterly disproven assertion that "This is a very mild variant, and the cases are going to go up ... whereas at the same time the mortality is flat, near zero."

Bob Unruh ramped up the fearmongering in a July 9 article:

When President Biden's latest extreme COVID move – a door-to-door visit to Americans to promote the vaccines – was announced, one of the reactions was from South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, who said those decisions are "personal" for his residents to make.

"Enticing, coercing, intimidating, mandating, or pressuring anyone to take the vaccine is a bad policy which will deteriorate the public’s trust and confidence in the state’s vaccination efforts," he said.

One member of Congress openly suggested while the door knocks this year may concern COVID vaccinations, those next year might be about collecting Americans' guns.

But a a report from Press California explains Oregon already is considering ways to implement Biden's agenda, and "one tactic could be to send out the National Guard to neighborhoods."

The state actually has some 70% of is residents vaccinated, but "that’s not enough, according to zealous public health bureaucrats," the report said.

Surprisingly, Unruh did balance out his artile withh a view from the other side -- albeit in the very last paragraph -- auoting White House vaccine coordinator Jeffrey Zeints as saying that "organizations that are feeding misinformation and trying to mischaracterize this type of trusted messenger work" are "doing a disservice to the country and to the doctors, the faith leaders, the community leaders and others who are working to get people vaccinated, to save lives and help to end this pandemic."

A July 12 article by Unruh tried to portray instructions to the door-to-door workers as somehow sinister and Nazi-esque:

It's not taking long for President Biden's plan to dispatch federal representatives to your front door to ask you about your COVID vaccine to become reality.

One county in Illinois already has posted instructions for those interrogators on how to act when they confront you, including for them to ignore "No soliciting" signs.

No mention, however, of whether they're supposed to ignore "No trespassing" directives.

"We went from 15 days to slow the spread, to Biden's gestapo knocking door-to-door to see your papers," wrote Jenna Ellis. "Who did Nazi that one coming?"

[...]

There's no mention of possible conflicts with HIPAA, the federal medical information privacy requirements which are supposed to prevent an individual's medical details from being released to members of the general public, like a door-knocker.

In fact, it is not a HIPAA violation to ask whether a person has received the COVID vaccine.

On July 14 Unruh touted how "A new national poll has found Americans giving a thumbs down to Joe Biden's agenda to send strike forces 'door-to-door' across America to convince people to take the COVID vaccinations." Unruh didn't explain why he called health workers giving vaccinations "strike forces." Later that day, Unruh rampted up the fear and hateful rhetoric:

The newest version of Joe Biden's "Big Brother" agenda, which already features strike forces going door-to-door asking people about their COVID vaccinations, now has members of a coalition knocking on doors and giving shots on the spot.

A report from PJMedia explains, "Joe Biden wasn’t kidding. When his spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the Biden administration would send people door-to-door to convince people to get the COVID shot, there was a chill sent down the spines of freedom-loving Americans everywhere. Many people took it as a threat.

"Now those door-to-door COVID-shot salespeople are here and they've brought back-up: injectors," the report said.

It was not explained why health workers offering vaccinations would not have the vaccines with them when doing so, or why that is a "threat."

Unruh devoted a July 16 article to invoking Karl Rove to manufacture a sinister political motive to the plan:

But now longtime political analyst Karl Rove is suggesting that there is an unwelcome political influencer making the decisions on what campaign is being done where.

"If you’re in the White House and you’re attempting to solve this problem, do you really want to pollute it with a big draw-up of highly partisan and ideological groups rather than focusing on the mission at hand? Are these people around in, let’s say, Nebraska? Are these people around in let’s say Rhode Island?" he said.

"In fact, the list I’ve seen is virtually only states that are swing states, close states from the 2020 election. Somebody in the White House and somebody at the Department of Health and Human Services has to be held to account. Who’s making these decisions? Who’s allowing politics to enter into something that ought to be as far away from politics as possible?"

A commentary at The Gateway Pundit was blunt: "Are Joe Biden's vaccine teams going door-to-door in swing states doing more than promoting vaccines? Americans need to know."

Of course, all this scaremongering from Unruh -- complete with Nazi references -- is just parroting right-wing narratives designed to keep their followers afraid of the government, not to report truthfully on what is actually happening.

Unruh really needs to go back to Zeints' criticism of fearmongerers like himself and ask whether the fearmongering and misinforming he's doing is actually doing a disservice to the country and its health workers -- and whether that's worth doing for a website that's on the precipice of failure.

MRC Hurls Hate At Another Interview of Psaki
Topic: Media Research Center

Part of the Media Research Center's unhinged hatred of White House press secretary Jen Psaki is that any interviewer who won't trash her the MRC demands must also be trashed. We saw this with CNN's Brian Stelter, and Nicholas Fondacaro ramped up the childish insults and condescension in a June 24 post on another Psaki interview under the deliberately hateful headline "SPIT SHINE: MSNBC’s Wallace Tries to Beat CNN in Licking Psaki’s Boots":

MSNBC Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace apparently saw Brian Stelter’s bootlicking interview with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and thought ‘challenge accepted.’

And during a Thursday interview with Psaki, Wallace rhetorically told Stelter to hold her beer as she gushed about how the mostly liberal press pool gave her “high marks,” including “some of the President's detachers” who give her “grudging respect.”

Wallace began the doting interview by opining about how she’s spoken to “folks on the frontline of trying to protect not just voting rights but avoid voter nullification which a lot of people feel is the most ominous and haunting parts of these voter suppression bills.”

[...]

The grossest praise for Psaki came when Wallace tried to relate to her. “Jen, I've walked in similar shoes to the ones you walk in together probably 23 and half hours a day. I’m guessing. How do you feel like it's going,” she wondered, speaking with the cadence of a ditzy high school girl.

Wallace seemed to up the ante from Stelter’s request to have Psaki knock around the press a bit by just telling the Press Secretary how great she was, and suggested even the opposition bowed to her grace:

[...]

At different points in the interview, Wallace expanded her bootlicking to President Biden. “He is very popular not just in the Democratic Party but, I know he and you all point out, with Republicans in the country who supported the COVID relief package overwhelmingly, whose support likely contributed to Republicans coming to the table on infrastructure,” she gushed.

Adding: Would he play a similar role in bringing Republicans to the White House to work on a bipartisan compromise on voting rights?”

This isn't "media research" -- it's partisan bile, pure and simple. It seems as if there is a contest inside MRC headquarters regarding who can hurl the most immature insults at its political enemies and the non-right-wing media. It's unprofessional and embarasssing, and if Fondacaro was capable of the emotion, he should be ashamed.

The sin of not trashing Psaki extended to a July 1 post by Geoffrey Dickens complaining that "lefty journos" committed the offense of having "sucked up to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki with the likes of CNN’s Brian Stelter asking her 'what do we [journalists] get wrong?' and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace gushing, 'You get such high marks from the vast majority of the people in the [press] room.'"

If the MRC had ever complained about suck-up interviews at Fox News to the likes of Kayleigh McEnany, it might have a point.

Newsmax's Hirsen Fluffs Ex-'Superman' Actor, Censors How Ignorant His Captain America Criticism Was
Topic: Newsmax

James Hirsen began his July 12 Newsmax column by sucking up to Dean Cain:

Dean Cain gained a whole lot of fame when he starred in the hit 1990s television series “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.”

Cain played the dual role of the understated Clark Kent and his alter-ego Superman, with actress Teri Hatcher co-starring as Lois Lane.

At the height of its popularity, “Lois and Clark” brought in roughly 15 million viewers per show. Its influence spawned a series of novels, trading cards, and a comic book, which all worked to solidify Cain's brand as a major player in the “Superman” legacy.

Not only does Cain have the looks to take on the Man of Steel role, he’s got the athletic cred under his belt to make the media magic believable.

All this sucking up, though, was an attempt to build credibility for the actor to justify his right-wing attacks on the new Captain America comic series. Hirsen obliquely introduced this section by stating that "Cain recently became the subject of a Twitter trend, due to some statements that he made about a new Captain America comic book series." Hirsen didn't note, of course, that the reason Cain became a Twitter trend was beause he never read the comic he was criticizing -- and, thus, probably didn't understand much about Superman, the character he played on TV for a few years, around which Hirsen was trying to build his critical cred. It appears Hirsen has not only not read the comic as well -- he only quotes the one line that his drawn right-wing ire but omitting the entirety of what Captain America actually said on the subject -- his own research into Cain was factually deficient, crediting a Hollywood Reporter story on Cain's remarks when, in fact, the Reporter was detailing was said on Fox News:

The new sub-patriotic comic book character states that the American Dream is really “…two dreams. And one lie,” adding that for some, it “isn’t real.”

Cain has a sense that the change of direction for the title character is anti-American in nature and appears to be shoehorned into the content of the comic book.

Quoted in the Hollywood Reporter Cain says, “I love the concept of Captain America, but I am so tired of this wokeness and anti-Americanism.”

“In my opinion, America is the greatest country in history. It’s not perfect. We are constantly striving for a more perfect union, but I believe she’s the most fair, equitable country anyone’s ever seen, and that’s why people are clamoring to get here from all over the globe,” he adds.

Cain wonders aloud about whether today's U.S. critics realize what life is like in other countries around the world.

“Do these people ever travel outside of America?” he asks. “Do they go to other countries where they have to deal with governments who aren’t anywhere near as fair as the United States? I don’t think they do. I do it all the time, and I kiss the soil when I get back.”

But as the Twitter folks who demolished Cain's remarks pointed out, superheroes tend to be woke creatures, with Superman in canon helping the disadvantaged and repeatedly taking down the empires of evil capitalist Lex Luthor. Also, Captain America fought Nazis.

It managed to be even more stupid than the Media Research Center's meltdown over Captain America. Maybethat's why Hirsen concluded his column with more Cain-fluffing, laughably insisting that "he has generally been private about his religious convictions" despite most of his recent film projects he listed being made with an explicit right-ring and/or religious.

NEW ARTICLE: WND And The 'Charlottesville Lie' Lie
Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily has repeatedly defended Donald Trump over his comment that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville violence -- but censors one important fact that undermines it. Read more >>

CNS Unemployment Coverage Distortion Watch
Topic: CNSNews.com

As with the previous month, July's employment numbers were too good for CNSNews.com to attack. That meant Susan Jones had to really struggle to find a negative spin to embrace:

Amid the recent emergence and rapid spread of the delta variant in the United States, and with expanded unemployment benefits and monthly child tax credits (stimulus) payments flowing to millions of Americans, the Labor Department on Friday nevertheless issued an encouraging report on the U.S. employment situation.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says nonfarm payroll employment rose by a strong 943,000 in July, following increases of +938,000 (revised) in June and +614,000 (revised) in May. (Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal were expecting nonfarm payroll to increase by 845,000 jobs in July.)

The unemployment rate declined by half a percentage point to 5.4 percent from 5.9 percent last month. That is the best showing since the 4.4 percent unemployment rate in March 2020, just as COVID began causing massive economic dislocation.

Still, Jones did bring in a right-wing activist to at least allude to negativity:

Alfredo Ortiz, President and CEO of the Job Creators Network, a small business advocacy group, noted on Friday that job growth is following vaccination growth.

"Even in the midst of a vaccine-induced recovery, only 10 percent of small businesses say they’ve fully recovered from the pandemic, according to the latest JCN Foundation Monthly Monitor Poll of small businesses, and that's only a 1 percent increase from the previous month.

"Even these gains are in danger," Ortiz warned, as blue state governors and mayors impose new mandates...on small businesses that are already experiencing staffing shortages."

The only sidebar this time was the usual complaint by editor Terry Jeffrey that governments added jobs, as if they don't count as real jobs or that the people who hold them don't do real work.

MRC's Double Standard On Outing Political Donations
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Abigail Streeman was oputraged in a June 21 post:

Here's a "coming out story" the media won't be hyping for Pride month. Scott Cawthon, creator of the popular video game franchise “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” (FNAF) has just come out as a Christian conservative after the left-wing cancel mob decided to look up his name on opensecrets.org. The famous video game designer has donated to several Republican candidates over the years, including Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. 

Cawthon has also donated to Tulsi Gabbard, but that is of little importance to the rage monsters who find enjoyment in attacking people who don’t hold mainstream left-wing views. Members of his ‘fanbase’ have even said that Gabbard “is specifically targeting gay and transgender people with her policies.” 

A group of fans reportedly took to social media platforms after discovering the game designers' donation records to whine about how Cawthon was spending his well earned money. Cawthon has never openly expressed his political views, but that didn’t stop wing nuts  from coming after him. The entitled gamers were so upset that Cawthon and FNAF were trending on Twitter for multiple days in a row. How dare he donate his money to a cause that he supports! 

[...]

The entrepreneur released his most popular game in 2014. His politics weren't an issue until somebody went looking for his political donations.

So looking up political donations is something that only a "left-wing cancel mob" does, and you shouldn't be shamed for donating to a cause you support? A person's political donations shouldn't be made an issue by anyone "looking for" them? Somebody tell that to the MRC. Joseph Vazquez, a writer for MRC Business, has regularly rooted OpenSecrets for donations with which he could attack people with. For instance:

• Shhh: Twitter Donations to Dems Now Exceed 99 Percent
• George Soros Gave $1M to Big Tech-Funded Super PAC Effort to Oust Trump
• Michael Bloomberg Gave $4,000,000 to Planned Parenthood Votes 
• Bulwark Publisher Defending GOP Impeachment Effort Is Biden Donor 
• George Soros Super PAC Gave $2,545,454 to Planned Parenthood Votes
• Dems Trying to Censor Fox, OAN, Newsmax Got Donations from Cable, Dish and Big Tech
• BUSTED: Incoming Amazon Web Services CEO Donated to Joe Biden’s Campaign
• Liberal Swiss Billionaire Hansjörg Wyss Becomes Influential ‘Dark Money’ Force for Left

CNS Thinks Cuomo's Daughter's Sex Life Is Your Business
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com is weirdly concerned with the sex lives of children of liberal politicians. Back in 2018, it made a big deal out of the daughter of Sen. Chuck Schumer -- whom CNS has repeatedly bashed for his support for LGBT issues -- "entering into a lesbian marriage," and later did an article on how Schumer was with "my daughter Alison and her new wife" when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

In that tradition, we have a July 7 article by Elizabeth Nieshalla:

Twenty-three-year-old Michaela Kennedy Cuomo, daughter of Kerry Kennedy and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (divorced in 2005), has labeled herself as “demisexual” but has also said that “trying to label ourselves only limits us.”

In an Instagram Live conversation with author and speaker Donato Tramuto, Michaela said,“When I was in elementary school, I feared that I was lesbian. When I was in middle school, I came out to my family and close friends as bisexual. When I was in high school, I discovered pansexuality and thought, ‘That’s the flag for me.’”

She added, “I’ve recently learned more about demisexuality and have believed that that identity resonates with me most.”

The term “demisexual,” according to the PFLAG National Glossary of Terms, is: “Used to describe an individual who experiences sexual attraction only after forming an emotional connection.”

Um, so? What business is it of CNS to do a story on this person's sex life? It has nothing to do with her father, who has his own issues. Being the daughter of a politician doesn't make her newsworthy in and of itself. There's no news value in Cuomo's sex life. There's no reason for this article to exist other than to feed into a right-wing anti-LGBT agenda that CNS is obligated to push as an ideological entity.

We would ask if CNS should bea better "news" organization than that, but we know it's not.

WND Brings Back Longtime Misinformer To Misinform About COVID Deaths
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Leo Hohmann was one of the most dishonest reporters WorldNetDaily has ever employed (and that's saying something given the motley crew of writers it has had over the years. He's best known for being an Islamophobe and for forcing WND to stealth-edit articles he wrote to remove claims in which he falsely accused yogurt maker Chobani of importing Muslim immigrants to work at a manufacturing plant in Idaho.

Despite this spotty history, WND has welcomed Hohmann back as a writer -- or, more accurately, republishing articles that first appeared on his own website.But it's clear that Hohmann has not changed his ways. He wrote in a July 20 article:

Attorney Thomas Renz filed a lawsuit in federal court in Alabama on July 19 that alleges a massive government cover-up of vaccination-related U.S. deaths that number “at least 45,000.”

The suit, filed on behalf of America’s Frontline Doctors in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, is based on a sworn statement by a government insider under federal whistleblower protection.

Speaking at the Re-awaken Tour event held July 17-18 in Anaheim, California, Renz made the bombshell announcement he says is based on a whistleblower with access to government computers and can prove that “at least 45,000” Americans have already been killed by the three COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use by the FDA.

[...]

The CDC’s own reporting system, called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, provides numbers of people, updated weekly on Fridays, who have been reported as having died or been injured by vaccines in the U.S.

The COVID vaccine deaths reported to VAERS stood at just under 11,000 as of last Friday, July 16. This represents more deaths reported from all other vaccines combined since the VAERS system was established in 1990.

Hohmann didn't bother to fact-check anything, of course. But an actual fact-checker did and found that it's yet another deliberate misunderstanding of how the VAERS reporting system works, and that reports of adverse effects and deaths are not verified and cannot be used to establish a definitive link between vaccines and those alleged adverse effects:

The number tracks back to a woman who did not reveal her method for calculating the figure and who has not been publicly identified. She based her calculations on reports of deaths in VAERS, according to a lawsuit. But the number does not align with data contained in VAERS — and even the reports of death entered into that system do not prove that those people died as a result of receiving a vaccine. VAERS is an open system that contains reports that can be submitted by anyone and are not verified.

Finally, the claim was part of a lawsuit by America’s Frontline Doctors, a group that has peddled many false and conspiratorial claims about COVID-19 and vaccines.

We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

Hohmann went on to uincritically quote more misinformation from Renz:

The injections from Pfizer have an 80% failure rate in Israel, Renz said.

“They don’t work. The absolute risk reduction of these vaccines is 1 percent,” he said.

Renz was referring to the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials, which showed the absolute risk reduction for those getting the vaccine was 1% less of getting a severe case of the virus compared to those who got a placebo.

In fact, the Israel data lacks context and is being used in a misleading manner:

Misleading posts on social media are now twisting data from Israel to falsely claim the country’s vaccination program is a failure due to the number of breakthrough cases of COVID-19 among the vaccinated.Medical professionals say Israel’s vaccine program is making remarkable progress against the virus.

[...]

Experts say the country’s high vaccination rates are keeping case numbers down and reducing hospitalization and deaths even as the delta variant is provoking an uptick in infections. Data from Johns Hopkins University shows Israel documented 1,118 new cases on July 21 -- which is less than a tenth of the 11,934 new cases the country had at its peak on Jan. 27, before vaccines were widespread.

“It doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work,” Dr. Robert Cyril Bollinger, Johns Hopkins University professor of infectious diseases, said about Israel’s data. “They have very low rates after vaccination versus where they were before vaccination.”

Others, meanwhile, have pointed out that the Israel numbers are outliers that are based on a small numbwr of cases, which raises question about their accuracy.

Spreading lies does not seem like a good use of the money WND just raised to keep itself alive. Apparently, WND believes its audience wants to be lied to and misled.

MRC Psaki-Bashing, Doocy-Fluffing Watch
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck loves it when reporters are as hostile and biased as Fox News' Peter Doocy -- but only if they, like Doocy, advance right-wing talking points. So he was pretty darn happy when writing about the July 20 White House press briefing:

Tuesday’s White House Press Briefing was a welcome reprieve as Fox News’s Peter Doocy found himself with more than a few colleagues willing to join him in grilling Press Secretary Jen Psaki as ten reporters (including Doocy) lobbed one question after another about Texas Democrats fleeing Austin for Washington D.C. and triggering a superspreader of coronavirus cases.

By the time Doocy spoke, he was the third reporter to inquire about how Texas Democrats have spread COVID on both Capitol Hill and in the White House. Doocy, however, went where his colleagues wouldn’t with the use of the word superspreader.

“More than 10 percent of the traveling party with these Texas Democrats now claim to have a breakthrough case. Is there any concern that this trip that was intended to advocate for voting rights is now a superspreader event in Washington,”he asked.

An abrasive Psaki griped “that’s not a characterization we’re making from here,” but rather insisted that these “breakthrough cases” among unvaccinated individuals was proof that vaccines work in preventing from “death,” “hospitalization,” or even “serious illness” (which is entirely correct).

Note that Houck couldn't simply admit that Psaki was right about something; he also had to smear her as "abrasive," something we're pretty sure he never said about Kayleigh McEnany. Also, calling the coronavirus cases among Texas Democrats leaving the state to slow down a voting-restriction bill a "superspreader event" comes straight from Republican leadership, so Houck may as well be congratulated for adhering so close to partisan messaging (as well as exposing himself as a blindly partisan hack).It's also not accurate; all the Democrats who caught the virus were fully vaccinated, which is actually a lesson about how transmissible the Delta variant iseven among vaccinated people.

On July 22, Houck cheered that "Thursday’s White House press briefing gave us another welcome surprise as Press Secretary Jen Psaki found herself under the gun from not just Fox’s Peter Doocy, but a variety of reporters on issues such as Covid cases inside the administration, Critical Race Theory, Hunter Biden’s artwork, and masking." And, as usual, Doocy got special attention -- and whitewashing how he got owned by Psaki:

Doocy came next and things didn’t get any easier for Psaki. First, he wanted to know whether the Education Department will ensure that a pro-critical race theory group isn’t included in school curriculums seeing as how they had claimed its inclusion in new guidance was a mistake.

Psaki tried to minimize it, saying it was one small footnote and insinuated Doocy was lacking the full context.

Here's how that exchange actually went down:

Doocy asked if the Biden administration “will follow up with school districts to make sure that the Abolitionist Teaching Network material is not in lesson plans.”

Psaki replied, “Just to be clear, for the context, because I know you love context of what you’re asking about here, what you’re referring to is a citation in a report of which there were a thousand citations, so I’m quite impressed with your researchers for finding one of a thousand citations.”

Psaki went on to say that “it was an error in a lengthy document to include this citation. The specific site does not represent the administration’s view and we don’t endorse the recommendations of this group and I believe it’s been removed or is in the process of being removed.”

Doocy’s network has been covering outrage over CRT and its tenets extensively.

Houck is not going to admit Psaki won that exchange, nor will he admit that Doocy was parroting his employer's agenda. He didn't even bury the transcript in the item -- he simply censored it. 

That's the bias -- and hostility to anyone not as right-wing as he is -- Houck brings to his so-called reviews of Psaki's press briefings.

CNS' Hot Pestering Intern Summer, Round 6
Topic: CNSNews.com

The sixth round of CNSNews.com interns' ambush questions to members of Congress were perfect gotcha questions -- they called for a yes-or-no answer on a complex issue, one where a yes-or-no answer benefits Repubican narratives, which is the entire point of this exercise. The subject this time was immigration with two questions:

• “Should illegal aliens be given a pathway to citizenship?”
• “And is our southwest border secure now?”

CNS hit up a lot of the usual suspects again:

• Ted Cruz (R)
• Chuck Grassley (R)
• Ron Johnson (R)
• John Hoeven (R)
• Elizabeth Warren (D)
• Dick Durbin (D)
• Mike Crapo (R)
• Dianne Feinstein (D)
• Joe Manchin (D)
• Tom Carper (D)
• Mike Braun (R)
• Joni Ernst (R)

One Democratic senator, however, called the gotcha nature of the questions, and that didn't do down well with the questioner:

Asked whether the U.S. southwest border is secure, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said, “We’re certainly making every effort to make sure that is it,” but refused to answer the question directly.

At the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, CNS News asked the senator, “Should illegal aliens be given a pathway to citizenship?”

Senator Peters said, “That’s part of comprehensive immigration reform. We’re gonna have to take a look at all that.”

In a follow-up question, CNS News asked, “And is our southwest border secure now?”

“Is it secure? We’re certainly making every effort to make sure that it is,” he said.

CNS News asked again, “And is it?”

Senator Peters said, “How do you define that? Yeah, I’m not going to play that game with you.”

But playing games is also part of this exercise as far as CNS is concerned -- to annoy Democrats by demanding yes-or-no answers on complex issues. For questioning the premise, Peters was given an unflattering stock photo illustrating his article.