WND Parrots COVID Vaccine Misinformer
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily's Art Moore -- already a master of promoting fearmongering and misinformation about COVID and its vaccines -- pushed more of the same in a Sept. 21 article:

An employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has presented video recordings to Project Veritas of colleagues privately voicing alarm about the safety of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines, alleging a cover-up of "evil at the highest level."

Jodi O'Malley, a registered nurse at the HHS-run Phoenix Indian Medical Center in Arizona, told Project Veritas CEO James O'Keefe in a video featuring the recordings that she's seen dozens of people with adverse reactions to the vaccines come to the facility, but the cases are not being reported.

"You have the FDA, you have the CDC, that are both supposed to be protecting us, but they are under the government, and everything that we've done so far is unscientific," she said.

[...]

O'Malley recorded another nurse on hidden camera saying most incidents aren't being reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS, because physicians complain it takes too much time.

She also recorded emergency room physician Dr. Maria Gonzales wondering aloud why HHS won't take into account the natural immunity that comes from infection.

"The problem in here is that they are not doing the studies," Gonzales said to O'Malley. "People that had [COVID-19] and the people that have been vaccinated – they're not doing any antibody testing. Everybody is quiet with that. Why?"

[...]

O'Malley's whistleblowing also addressed the blocking of off-label COVID treatments that many physicians around the world have found to be effective, particularly hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

A pharmacist confirmed to O'Malley that that she's barred from prescribing ivermectin, even though it's use for COVID-19 is supported by more than 100 studies and the testimonies of governments such as the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Because Moore doesn't bother to fact-check anything that aligns with his anti-vaxxer views, it was up to an actual news organization to look into O'Malley's claims:

Claims that no reports are being made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System are misleading. The system, which currently contains more than 720,000 reports, was set up for early warning purposes and may contain “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable” information. Through the system, health regulators such as the CDC and the FDA analyze data to identify serious vaccine-related adverse effects, such as the rare occurrence of myocarditis.

The video also includes claims promoting ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug touted by anti-vaccine communities as an effective treatment against Covid-19. Neither the FDA nor the WHO recommends the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19.

That organization also hinted at O'Malley's possible motivation -- a cash grab to justify pushing her fringe beliefs:

A crowdfunding page for O’Malley appeared on GiveSendGo, a Christian fundraising site, and has since raised over $417,000. “Now that she has boldly stepped into the limelight and exposed corruption in our Federal Healthcare system she is facing an uncertain future,” reads the call to donate.

Moore's claim that a study in Uttar Pradesh proved the effectiveness of ivermectin as a COVID treatment isn't true either. As an actual medical fact-checker pointed out:

Likewise, the Ivermectin recommendation didn’t necessarily cause the current drop in COVID-19 cases in Uttar Pradesh, which can be due to other factors. In an article for The Conversation, epidemiologist Rajib Dasgupta explained that the sharp decline in COVID-19 cases in June 2021 might be due to the high proportion of previously infected individuals, combined with COVID-19 vaccination and increased testing.

Indeed, the fourth nationwide seroprevalence study conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in June and July 2021 showed that 67.6% of the population over the age of six had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 as a result of either vaccination or previous infection. This figure is much higher than in the previous three national serosurveys (0.7% in May-June 2020, 7.1% in August-September 2020, and 24.1% in December 2020-January 2021).

[...]

The claim that Uttar Pradesh is now COVID-19 free due to the use of Ivermectin is inaccurate and unsupported by scientific evidence. Uttar Pradesh isn’t entirely free of COVID-19, and comparisons with other states are challenging due to differences in testing capacity. Furthermore, many factors other than Ivermectin use could have influenced the course of the second COVID-19 wave in Uttar Pradesh, including restrictions and immunity from previous infection and vaccination.

In addition, the quality of evidence supporting Ivermectin use in COVID-19 patients is very low. For this reason, public health authorities don’t recommend the use of Ivermectin for preventing or treating COVID-19 outside of clinical trials. Given all these uncertainties, we can’t determine whether Ivermectin played any role at all in the decline of COVID-19 cases in Uttar Pradesh.

But that doesn't fit WND's preferred narrative, so it's Moore's job to censor it.

There's A Gay NFL Player, And The MRC Is Not Happy
Topic: Media Research Center

When professional football player Carl Nassib came out as gay, the notoriously anti-gay Media Research Center was on hand to complain about it. After his announcement in June, Alexa Moutevelis whined and played whataboutism:

Get ready for the NFL and woke sports media to become even more unbearable. If you thought they were bad before, just wait until you see how they’re reacting to the first active NFL player in history to come out as gay.

[...]

Remember, this is the same media that glorified Michael Sam for being the first openly gay player to be drafted (he never played an NFL game) and Colin Kaepernick for being openly anti-police and anti-America, while hating on Tim Tebow for being openly Christian. 

As for the NFL itself, the official twitter account (complete with rainbow NFL logo) tweeted Nassib’s video with the message, “The NFL family is proud of you, Carl.”

[...]

The NFL has apparently learned nothing from the hemorrhaging of viewers in the wake of their embrace of Black Lives Matter social justice activism and has decided to double down with LGBTQ promotion. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em.

Moutevelis' alleged proof that  the NFL is "hemorrhaging" viewers beause of "social justice activism" is a post from last December by the MRC's mysterious (and hateful) sports blogger, Jay Maxson, making that correlation-equals-causation claim without evidence to support it.

Speaking of Maxson, he (or she -- we don't actually know for sure) is pretty homophobic, so he (or she) felt compelled to weigh in on Nassib's story. A couple days after Moutevelis' post, Maxson seemed to take glee in the fact that Nassib is a Republican:

Carl Nassib went from hero to zero in record time. Hailed earlier this week by the Left for being the courageous first active homosexual player in the NFL, Nassib is now getting canceled by the Twitter mob because he is a registered Republican who voted for Donald Trump. Oh, the agony of it!

Twitter is afire with the unthinkable news. Snopes already declared the rumors true: Nassib is indeed a registered Republican.

Yes, the MRC suddenly likes Snopes again because it confirmed a fact that conforms to right-wing narratives. On the other hand, despite claim that "Twitter is afire" with the story, Maxson cited no major non-conservative on Twitter bemoaning this fact.

Maxson kept up his (or her) homophobic whining, melting down over the NFL making a play for LGBT fans in part to capitalize on Nassib:

At long last, football has shed its macho identity of steel curtains and doomsday defenses, not to mention toxic masculinity. Football came prancing out of the closet Monday with a new identity: “gay,” “lesbian,” transgender” and “queer.” As well as "beautiful."

The NFL’s marketing department has demonstrated the fine art of virtue signaling on performance-enhancing drugs with this startling Youtube video.:

"Football is lesbian. Football is beautiful. Football is queer. Football is life. Football is exciting. Football is culture. Football is transgender. Football is queer. Football is heart. Football is power. Football is tough. Football is bisexual. Football is strong. Football is freedom. Football is American. Football is accepting. Football is everything. Football is for everyone." 

The video follows’ last week’s revelation that Las Vegas’s Carl Nassib is the first active NFL player to emerge from the closet. It also gives the NFL a big virtue-signaling send-off to the LGBT’s annual June pride month. 

[...]

This ain’t your father’s NFL anymore, not by a long shot. It’s not the league of Dick Butkus, Mike Ditka or Pittsburgh’s famed Steel Curtain. The NFL had already turned off many fans, on both sides of the political aisle. The latest bull-rush of pride mania may just be the last straw for another wave of fans who’ve had enough of the social justice, virtue signaling and political grandstanding.

Maxson didn't explain why it was a bad thing for the NFL to try to expand its audience beyond homophobes like him (or her).Nevertheless, Maxson whined further about sports taking part in LGBT Pride Month in June, grumbling that "Carl Nassib, an NFL player for the Las Vegas Raiders, sprinted out of the closet to worldwide fanfare."

When Nassib made the cut to play for the Raiders this season, Maxson huffed in a Sept. 1 post:

The most strident LGBT voices in sports are crowing about Carl Nassib becoming the first openly, active out football player in NFL history. At the same time, SB Nation Outsports is griping and moaning that – yet again – there will be no out men’s tennis players competing in the U.S. Open.

Carl Nassib thrilled the Left when he came out of the closet in June. “(I)t was the biggest story in sports for a few days,” Jim Buzinski crowed on the Outsports blog Tuesday. Yes, to a gay sportswriter it was. The rest of the world, not so much.

In announcing their 53-man roster for 2021, the Las Vegas Raiders on Tuesday assured the LGBT world that Nassib made the final cut. He’s going to be the first openly homosexual player in NFL history when the Raiders host Baltimore Sept. 13. Yabba dabba do.

[...]

It’s a good bet that Nassib will be the toast of the NFL to the Left, so starved for the homosexuals, lesbians, transgenders and non-binary types who make their crazy world go round.

The MRC's latest addition to LGBT-averse sports bloggers, John Simmons, served up his own take on the situation in a Sept. 14 post after Nassib became the first openly gay NFL player to have played in a game:

Week 1 of the 2021-2022 NFL season concluded with a thrilling duel between the hosting Las Vegas Raiders escaping with a win in overtime over the Baltimore Ravens 33-27.But apparently, the really important storyline was that the first openly gay NFL player participated in a game.

[...]

When Nassib first made his “coming out”announcement via Instagram, NFL Commissioner Rodger Goodell and countless other people on social media hailed him as a hero. Unfortunately, that narrative will probably only gain more traction as the season progresses.

And that is not a good thing. The media and the NFL have routinely supported the left-leaning causes taking root within the sport, which will likely grow in the following weeks thanks to the recent developments regarding Nassib.

As is the case with most causes the NFL supports, they will jam that propaganda down your throat until it becomes at least normalized that this is the way football will operate, if not outright accepted.

[...]

It is abundantly clear that the NFL does not support faith-based, American-loving, conservative values, but favors social justice and gay pride.

The days of watching football for the sake of the pure enjoyment of the sport are over. It has become an indoctrination camp for millions of viewers in the hopes of making them liberal sympathizers.

Yes, Simmons really does believe that the mere existence of Nassib on a football field is an affront to right-wing snowflakes who think football is made for them and only them.

Scott Lively Anti-LGBT Meltdown Watch, 'ReQruitment' Edition
Topic: WorldNetDaily

If you thought "Gay Pride Month" (formerly known as June) was bad, brace yourself for another annual "Gay History Month" in public schools throughout October, including "Coming Out Day" on the 11th. June was for planting the seeds of sexual anarchy in the hearts and minds of the children and teens. October is the harvest, when countless American parents discover that the "Q for Questioning" in LGBTQ actually stands for ReQruitment of their children (which is why conservatives should never add Q to the acronym).

The cutting edge of the LGBT agenda is now transsexualism, but the catch-all idea of "gayness" remains the "gateway drug" to childhood self-identification with perversion. All of the "out and proud" LGBT-based identities begin in the mind, often spawned by LGBT propaganda-driven enticement to sexual experimentation and rebellion (highly alluring to all-too-many hormone-inflamed pubescents).

Gay History Month (in the controlled social-engineering environment of today's public schools) is designed both to sell the false narrative of LGBT political activism as "a noble and historic movement for social justice," and to define a young person's personal pursuit of "sexual liberation" through "gayness" as an act of moral courage. This explains the delusional zealotry of "woke" youth since the "gay" 1990s (which for many lasts well into adulthood as a life cause).

-- Scott Lively, Sept. 13 WorldNetDaily column

(Lively loves to fearmonger about gays "recruiting" people.)

CNS Columnist Is A Catholic Priest, But He Sounds Like A Right-Wing Activist
Topic: CNSNews.com

We've noted one instance in which CNSNews.com columnist Rev. Michael P. Orsi comes off as a right-wing polemicist instead of the Catholic priest he is supposed to be. There are more, such as a July 15 column headlined "Jesus Was Canceled too":

Our society is coming to resemble the world through which Jesus walked in many uncomfortable ways. We have an intellectual elite, including educators, media, and literary types, whose “correct thinking” and “settled science” are every bit as rigid as how the Scribes and Pharisees interpreted the Torah.

We have our masters of industry and technology who are as singularly focused on protecting their business interests as the Priests and Levites guarded the prerogatives of the Temple.

We have politicians and their operatives who are as obsessed with enlarging their sphere of control and protecting their power as were the Roman occupiers of biblical Palestine.

We even have our equivalents to the Zealots in today’s various radical groups. Their devotion to transforming society is every bit as fanatical as that of those biblical revolutionaries.

Of course, he sees "cancel culture" as coming from the "progressive left," not from his fellow right-wingers.

In a July 23 column, Orsi managed to portraying critical race theory and questions of gender identity -- and, effectively merely not beoing heterosexual -- as thte work of Marxism:

The primary way in which Marxism operates is by co-opting, in a distorted manner, Judeo-Christian religious/political precepts. So, for instance, social justice is interpreted in the communist worldview not as human dignity, freedom, and equality before the law, but as redistribution of wealth, class warfare, and ongoing conflict between races and ethnic groups (as in critical race theory). These days, any aberrant forms of gender identity and sexual expression also seem to fall under the social justice label.

The religious root of this Marxist worldview is the assumption that humanity has nothing to do with the image and likeness of God, but rather is merely part of the material world. Therefore human beings can be reshaped in any way that suits current desires, attitudes, or expectations.

Orsi's Aug. 19 column appeased anti-vaxxer sentiments, arguing a right and duty to reject a COVID-19 vaccne because "It’s your body, and you have the right to refuse accepting any chemical substance to which you object morally, or which you fear might injure or even kill you," adding tyhat "I have come to believe that there would be grounds for a faith challenge to an employer mandate." He went on to argue that "if the demands are reasonable, then they are appropriate, if only to ease any discomfort which others might feel at being in close proximity to an unvaccinated person," but then declared: "If you should find yourself under pressure to be vaccinated, I would suggest you contact the Pacific Justice Institute. Based in Sacramento, Calif. with other offices around the country, PJI could provide legal guidance and assistance in securing a religious exemption."

Orsi spent his Sept. 1 column trying to turn a right-wing rant about the less-than=smooth withdrawal into a call for "conversion":

Finally, what is the American Way at this point in our history? Surely not this.

Can we ever get back to some understanding of our country as place where there’s a commitment to the rule of law and the biblical principles on which it was founded, as well as loyalty to those who have sacrificed on our behalf, and (at the very least) an intention to treat people fairly?

Will we ever again be a land Superman would have recognized?

It would take a lot. We’ve got quite a bit of lost ground to recover. Two small indicators: a recent commentary in The New York Times proclaiming "a more secular America” and a newly appointed chief chaplain of Harvard University who is a self-identified atheist.

Think of it. Our secular nation with a Harvard atheist chief chaplain has just experienced one of the most shameful failures in its history.

What is left for us to do?

Well, we can do what we’ve always done in moments of crisis. We can pray. And that’s no small thing. It’s brought us through conflict and national self-doubt before.

Pray for those we’ve left behind. Pray for the tortured people of Afghanistan, who are now reliving the nightmare from which they thought they had awakened.

Pray for repentance and conversion — for our own personal sins, for the sins of our leaders, for the sins of the nation. In fact, declaring a national day of repentance and conversion might be a timely idea.

Shades of Joseph Farah! Orsi doesn't say if he will ask for repentence for his eagerness to use his religious pulpit as a political soapbox.

Orsi started a Sept. 14 column reflecting on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, but eventually turned it into a rant that vaccine mandates are satanic:

In his recent address, Biden insisted that forcing people into vaccination “is not about freedom or personal choice. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.”

But this is not true. The issue is precisely about personal freedom and choice, the freedom to choose what we will accept into our bodies, a freedom protected by the Constitution, a freedom acknowledged and defended by the Church.

The government does not own our bodies. They are given us by God to use in glorifying him. We are not to be coerced or pressured into compromising them.

Biden’s forced vaccine initiative contradicts this truth. As such, it’s a violation of human dignity. And no amount of syrupy, guilt-laden appeals to conscience, to protecting “people you love,” can mask the fact that it, too, is deception.

Such things are the work of the Father of Lies, the Prince of Darkness.

Yeah, he went there. How many people will die of COVID because of Orsi's extreme rhetoric?

MRC's Houck Spews Insults At Joy Reid For The Offense Of Defending Biden
Topic: Media Research Center

In the right-wing bubble in which the Media Research Center resides, people on TV are simply not allowed to say anything nice about people who are not right-wingers -- even the president if he is a Democrat. Combine that with MRC writer Curtis Houck's particular enmity for MSNBC host Joy Reid -- which rivals that for Jim Acosta and Jen Psaki -- and Houck had a meltdown in August when Reid dared to defend President Biden amid the Afghanistan pullout. nHouck ranted in an Aug. 18 screed in which viciously called Reid "Kabul Karen":

All week, MSNBC’s The ReidOut host Joy Reid has shilled for the Biden administration amidst the embarrassing and deadly collapse of Afghanistan that’s trapped thousands of Americans and Afghan allies. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Reid’s spin ranged from arguing this was what the American people wanted to blaming Donald Trump for the calamity to denouncing Afghans and the U.S. military.

And to further beclown herself, Reid’s fellow quislings included cartoonish hacks such as David Corn, Tom Nichols, Ben Rhodes, and Jennifer Rubin.

That's right -- not following right-winganti-Biden talking points makes you a "quisling" -- that is, a traitor. Because that's how Houc and his ilk see anyone who doesn't agree with them.

The next day, Houck was spewing hate at Reid again, this time smearing her as "Jalalabad Joy":

Jockeying with MSNBC colleagues to be the Biden administration’s Baghdad Bob on Afghanistan, ReidOut host Joy Reid spent Thursday’s show bolstering her resume by chastising the media for having a “gaze...fixed on Afghanistan” and being “pissed off” that the deadly and chaotic withdraw hadn’t “go[ne] smoothly” instead of spending more time focusing on the January 6 riot or Thursday’s bomb threat.

Reid bolstered her mental gymnastics by arguing the press have remained unhappy about what’s happened despite the “remarkable” sight of “daily press conferences and demands for oversight and constant information.” And if that wasn’t enough, Reid vocalized what she tweeted on Sunday, that the American right was on equal footing with the Taliban.

[...]

In the next block, Reid expanded on her colossal strawman about the right as opposed to Afghans coming to the U.S., calling it a “bewildering” and “growing Republican backlash” to “welcoming them with open arms for putting their lives in danger to help keep us safe at home.”

That conveniently left out at least eight Republican governors, a primetime Fox News host, multiple Fox News contributors, a Trump White House communications director, and the co-founder of The Federalist to name a few.

QWho doesn't it leave out? Numerous Republican politicians and activists, not to mention Houck's co-workers at the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, which has been touting all that fearmongering about Afghan refugees.

By8 Aug. 25, Houck was apparently running out of Afghan cities he was familiar with, so he was reduced to insulting Reid with the much less alliterative name "Khandahar Joy":

After having ignored Afghanistan on Monday’s show, MSNBC’s ReidOut host Joy Reid circled back to being a Biden flunkie by insisting all is going well for the Biden administration on Afghanistan, saying they’ve done “a thorough job” in Kabul despite a lack of ldquo;burden-sharing”< on the part of NATO allies.

Reid also made sure to level bad-faith attacks on Team Biden (with some help from MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance), saying the only way critics would be satisfied with what’s transpired in Afghanistan would be Biden “promis[ing] to leave troops in there for another 20 years.”

It's quite funny to hear someone who has nothing less than a Trump flunkie for the past four years accuse someone else of being a "Biden flunkie."

WND's Root Ramps Up The COVID Misinformation and Lies
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Serial COVID misinformer Wayne Allyn Root strikes again in his Sept. 6 WorldNetDaily column, beginning with unironically insisting that everyone else is lying but him:

It's been quite a week. I've been in the media business for decades and I've never before witnessed such lies, exaggeration and outright fraud. All with the intent to force everyone to be vaccinated. The question is why?

Let's start with the vaccine itself. The results in Israel prove what a sham, charade and fraud this all is. The U.S. government and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argue that the vaccine is our only chance to survive. And that people are hospitalized and dying with COVID-19 because they are unvaccinated.

Both arguments are pure fraud.

[...]

Worst of all, the media have blacked out the developing disaster in Israel. Israel is the most vaccinated country in the world. They all got the Pfizer vaccine. At first, deaths and hospitalizations went to almost zero. Israel declared victory over COVID-19.

But everything changed. Today a massive COVID-19 outbreak has engulfed vaccinated Israel. Hospitals are full. People are dying. At this moment, Israel, the most vaccinated nation in the world, has more COVID-19 infections per capita than any country in the world.

At this moment, 0.2% of the entire population of Israel is catching COVID-19 each day.

This past week was the worst week for COVID-19 in Israel EVER. Israel is setting records for vaccinated people in the hospital. Deaths are skyrocketing.

Root offers no source for his claim that "0.2% of the entire population of Israel is catching COVID-19 each day" -- we could find no evidence to back it up -- which is a major tell that he's probably lying. but actual data from Israel tell a far different story:

But early data from the Health Ministry aired by Channel 12 news Sunday evening appears to show that those who have received a third vaccine dose are highly protected against the disease. According to the data, just 0.2% of the first 1.1 million Israelis who got their booster dose have been diagnosed with COVID-19 after at least seven days passed since the shot.

In absolute terms, the number of virus carriers who received their third dose is 2,790. Of them, just 187 (0.01%) were hospitalized and 88 (0.008%) developed serious symptoms. Fewer than 15 of them have died, with the report offering no exact number.

Root went on to selectively rant abaout the reason why:

The vaccine isn't just failing, it's a spectacular fail. It wore off. It no longer works. And just as my holistic doctor friends predicted, it makes the next wave far worse. These doctors say vaccinated people are far more contagious; they carry heavier viral loads and are far more susceptible to getting severe illness than someone with "natural immunity."

This experiment with an "experimental, emergency-use-only" vaccine is a great big failure. A dangerous and deadly failure.

Actually there are numerous vaccines that require a regular booster shot, and we don't recall Root ever calling them a  "great big failure." Root also conveniently ignores the fact that the Delta variant is much more transmissible than the original COVID-19 virus -- and that vaccination does, in fact, tend to make on less susceptible to catching COVID and from being severely affected by if if one does catch it.

But Root has fear to peddle, so he resorted to an old bogeyman:

Separate from all that, the VAERS vaccine reporting system reports the vaccine itself is causing tremendous rates of death and crippling injuries. So, vaccinated Americans are dying and becoming severely sick from the vaccine, in addition to dying and becoming severely sick from COVID-19 after getting the vaccine.

And none of this is featured in the news. It's a total media blackout.

That's because Root is lying about VAERS -- again. As we pointed out the last time he spread this lie, reports of adverse effects to VAERS are not verified and are not designed to be comprehensive, and the VAERS database itself clearly states that "the inclusion of events in VAERS data does not imply causality."

Root served uyp ome more rant: "Worse yet, the same government, CDC and media are trying desperately to denigrate and slander the drug that is most successful in treating COVID-19. It's called ivermectin. In my next column, I'll show you conclusive proof from around the world that ivermectin is miraculously effective versus COVID-19." Root won't tell you that many of those studies he want to cite are far from authoritative and have shady origins, which is why few legitimate medical authorities recommend ivermectin.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Florida Men Strike Again
Topic: Media Research Center
When Florida -- led by potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis -- suffered yet another massive pandemic outbreak due in part to his lax efforts to contain it, the Media Research Center felt compelled to rush to his defense once more. Read more >>

CNS Fearmongers About Afghan Refugees
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com has never been terribly friendly to the idea of refugees coming to the U.S., especially if those refugees aren't Christian. With the prospect of thousands of Afghan refugees coming to the U.S. after the U.S. withdrawal from there, CNS is sounding the alarm bells again.

An Aug. 17 syndicated column by Michelle Malkin kicked off the fearmongering, complaining that "Open Borders Inc. advocates" have been helping Afghan refugees settle in the U.S. for years, where they are purportedly "straining schools, hospitals, and affordable housing." She went on to sneer: "How do we prevent the refugee resettlement racket from pressuring American politicians to keep importing endless numbers of people from countries that hate our guts?"

The same day, James Carstensen penned an article hyping how the European Union "must prevent a migration crisis at home and focus on supporting Afghanistan’s neighbors to take in those fleeing Taliban control," going on to complain that "European leaders had been concerned about the possibility the situation in Afghanistan could lead to another wave of migration toward Europe, as occurred in 2015-16 when over a million migrants, mostly from Syria and Iraq, entered Europe amid the peak of the Syrian civil war."

On Aug. 24, Patrick Goodenough -- who has driven much of the anti-refugee sentiment at CNS -- seemed bothered that "An independent statutory religious freedom watchdog called on the Biden administration Monday to broaden the priority designation for Afghan refugee admissions to explicitly cover religious minorities 'at extreme risk of persecution by the Taliban.'" He tried to focus on Christians though there are relatively few left in the country, but he did admit:

Many non-Muslim Afghans fled during the civil war or after the Taliban seized control of most of Afghanistan in the 1990s, and 99.7 percent of the population today is estimated to be Muslim.

Most are Sunnis, although 10-15 percent are Shi’a, including Ismailis. During the Taliban’s previous rule, members of the Shi’a Hazara minority were labeled heretics and persecuted.

There are also small, low-profile pockets of Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, Buddhists, Ahmadiyya, Zoroastrians, and Christians.

The same day, Melanie Arter wrote that "White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that the United States has 'a stringent vetting process' when it comes to welcoming refugees from Afghanistan, although she said she could not speak directly to a report that at least one Afghan who was evacuated from the region had suspected ties to ISIS."

Goodenough repeated his fretting over the possible impact of Afghan refugees on the EU in an Aug. 31 article, highlighting that "The European Union has resolved to protect its borders and increase security to prevent a recurrence of 2015’s mass migration crisis and address fears of a resurgence in terrorism following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan."

From there, it was intern-pestering time: CNS fall intern Megan Williams was sent out to ask senators the bias, fearmongering question: "Are you confident the Biden administration has sufficiently identified and vetted all the Afghans it has brought to the U.S. and that none will pose a threat here?" The answer were predictably partisan, which was the point:

• Sen. Cruz: ‘Not Remotely’ Confident That Afgan Refugees Don’t Pose a Threat in U.S.
• Sen. Lummis: ‘I Am Not Confident' That Some Afghan Refugees Don’t Pose a Threat in U.S.
• Sen. Blumenthal: Biden Doing ‘As Good a Job as Can Be Done' Vetting Afghan Refugees
• Sen. Joni Ernst: ‘I Am Not Confident’ About Biden’s Vetting of Afghan Refugees

Only one of those four -- Blumenthal -- was a Democrat, making the overall response even more skewed and partisan, which perhaps was also the point.

Editor Terry Jeffrey served as stenographer for a Republican congressman in a Sept. 15 article, touting how "Rep. Chris Smith (R.-N.J.) said while questioning Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday that 'reliable information' was not available to 'conduct a meaningful background check' on 'some, perhaps many' of the Afghan evacuees who were granted parole to come into the United States." (UPDATE: Jeffrey made his interview with Smith the basis for his Sept. 22 column under the fearmongering headline "Is Biden Bringing Terrorists From Afghanistan to America?")

CNS deceptively suggested it was taking a stab at offering balanced coverage of the issue with a Sept. 21 article by Susan Jones under the headline "DHS Secretary: 'We Do Have a Robust Screening and Vetting Process' for Afghan Evacuees" -- but it featured only Republican questioning of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the refugee issue. Jones made sure to tout that one GOP senator "expressed frustration that of the 60,000 evacuees brought to this country so far, about 6,500 (11 percent ) are American citizens; about 3,500 (just under 6 percent) are lawful permanent residents; and about 3,000 (5.5 percent) are people with visas, including SIVs [special immigrant visas]."

Jones turned up the fearmongering again in a Sept. 23 article:

Spokesman John Kirby says the Defense Department, including Secretary Lloyd Austin, is "certainly aware" of problems, including sexual harassment and assault, at various military bases where tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees are staying until they are vetted (if they can be fully vetted).

The Washington Times reported on Wednesday that two Afghan men have been indicted on assault and sexual assault charges at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.

Jeffrey returned on Sept. 27 with another GOP complaint from the same congressman whose fearmongering he had promoted a couple weeks earlier:

Rep. Chris Smith (R.-N.J.), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been raising questions about the vetting of Afghan evacuees brought into the United States.

Thousands of these evacuees have been housed at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (JB-MDL) in Smith’s home state of New Jersey. On Sept. 2, Smith along with other members of the New Jersey congressional delegation and Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy visited that base.

In a Sept. 20 interview with CNSNews.com, Smith discussed his concerns about the handling of the evacuees who had been brought to JB-MDL and to other facilities in the United States.

“I saw the military doing a magnificent job to make people feel at home, to make sure they had accommodations,” Smith told CNSNews.com. “But I was extraordinarily worried and continue to be about the vetting process before they get there.

CNS has made no similar effort to interview a Democratic member of Congress about the issue, even though he noted that at least one Democrat was a member of the visiting party.

Jones followed up by fretting in an Oct. 1 article:

Around 53,000 Afghan evacuees are currently living on eight military bases in the United States as part of the Biden Administration's Operation Allies Welcome, General Glen VanHerck, the Commander of US Northern Command, told a Pentagon briefing on Thursday.

Another 14,000 Afghans will be arriving soon, once the evacuation flights resume in various foreign countries. Those flights were suspended several weeks ago because of a measles outbreak among the evacuees.

Jones made sure to plug her employer's own fearmongering: "But as CNSNews.com has reported, some lawmakers are very concerned about the ability of U.S. agencies to properly vet Afghans about whom we know nothing."

MRC Remains Weirdly Obsessed With Leana Wen's Former Job
Topic: Media Research Center

We noted last year how the Media Research Center has had a weird obsession with Dr. Leana Wen appearing on TV to discuss the coronavirus, raging that she wasn't being identified as the former president of Planned Parenthood -- despite that having no relevance to discussions of coronavirus and despite the fact that she held the position for only nine months. That never really stopped.

In April 2020, Curtis Houck did a follow-up on an earlier post ranting about the lack of mention ofWen's onetime affiliation with Planned Parenthood:

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, CNN has shown perhaps the strongest inability to shy away from framing the pandemic through the lens of attacking President Trump and implicitly placing blame at his feet for the deaths of Americans.

Another tic has been their continued refusal to be honest with viewers about how frequent guest Dr. Leana Wen was a former president of Planned Parenthood. Since our first post the Media Research Center kept tabs on Wen’s appearances and calculated her total airtime from March 2-April 2 as 150 minutes and 27 seconds across 44 appearances as a guest or soundbite.

[...]

CNN instead stuck to its usual script identifying Wen as either an “emergency room physician,” “former Health Commissioner for the City of Baltimore.” It was an intriguing choice of words for someone who also led an organization (albeit briefly) that aborted over 345,000 unborn children in fiscal year 2018.

As before, Houck didn't explain the relevance of identifying Wen as a former Planned Parenthood official when it has nothing to do with the subject of her TV appearances, despite asserting that CNN was exhibiting "no ethics" in not doing so.

But it didn't stop there:

• A June 2020 post by Houck huffed that CNN "brought back Dr. Leana Wen for more fear-mongering and, as NewsBusters has previously documented, he refused to note her former post running Planned Parenthood."
• In July 2020, Houck groused that CNN had on "former Planned Parenthood president Dr. Leana Wen (which, again, they didn’t disclose)."
• An October 2020 roundup by Houck of "CNN’s WORST Moments Immediately After Trump’s COVID Diagnosis" made a point of highlighting "Former Planned Parenthood president Dr. Leana Wen" though, again, that identity was irrelevant to what she was discussing.
• Posts by Duncan Schroeder on Oct. 23,  Jan. 22 and Feb. 15 all made sure to reference "former Planned Parenthood president Dr. Leana Wen" even though that identification was irrelevant to her appearances and apparently she was never identified as such on the air.
• A July 17 post by Alex Christy did the same, but left out the word "former," thus falsely portraying her as the current Planned Parenthood president.

Tim Graham devoted an entire July 30 post to whining that Wen promoting her new book  didn't bring it up:

CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen had a short and stormy tenure at top of Planned Parenthood, but CNN avoids mentioning it like the plague. They are not alone. Wen is now selling a new memoir called Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health, and the book information on Amazon doesn't include it.

On Tuesday, NPR's talk show Fresh Air interviewed Dr. Wen for 36 minutes (more than 6,300 words in the transcript, according to the Nexis data-retrieval system). Nowhere in there was the slightest whisper of her presidency of Planned Parenthood. NPR host Terry Gross read her bio four times, but it never came up.

Lydia Switzer turned a Sept. 16 post into an anti-Wen screed, ranting that she was a baby-killer who wants to keep children safe from COVID:

On Wednesday, CNN actually had the audacity to bring on the former president of Planned Parenthood to demand that public officials "protect our children" by backing draconian COVID regulations being pushed by the Biden administration. In the 1:00 p.m. ET hour, Newsroom host Ana Cabrera referenced the total COVID death count, noting that 1 in 500 Americans have died from COVID. She then brought on Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Jeremy Faust to discuss.

Dr. Wen, who Cabrera introduced as “CNN medical analyst and former Baltimore health commissioner,” was the president/CEO of Planned Parenthood from October 2018 through July 2019. During the 2018-2019 business year, according to their own annual report, Planned Parenthood facilitated 354,871 “abortion procedures,” or, to be less euphemistic, killed 354,871 babies.

[...]

The irony of a former leader of Planned Parenthood, America’s leading baby-killing regime, claiming to stand up for the health and well-being of children, is apparently lost on CNN. In fact, Wen’s position at CNN as a medical analyst is disturbing, given her track record of violating the Hippocratic Oath. She has done inconceivable harm to hundreds of thousands of babies, along with their mothers – but CNN is perfectly fine with letting her accuse schools and viewers of not taking sufficient care of their own children.

So how does Switzer justify being anti-abortion while opposing any efforts to make them safe from COVID? She doesn't say -- that irony is apparently lost on her.

WND Tries Desperately To Burnish Robert E. Lee's Reputation
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Nicholas Waddy's Sept. 10 column is actually headlined, "You are no better, or worse, than Robert E. Lee" -- which, of course is a lie.We didn't lead a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people in an attempt to preserve the institution of slavery, so we are immediately better than Lee.

After praising "President Trump" (despite the fact that he's no longer president) for issuing a moving defense of Lee upon the removal of his statue from Monument Avenue in Richmond -- while omitting the fact that Trump called Lee "the greatest strategist of them all," a ridiculous and counterfactual  claim to make about someone who lost a war -- Waddy made his case for Lee because anti-racists are against him:

More importantly, though, we should reject the latest campaign against Robert E. Lee and Southern pride for the simple reason that it is inspired by the same neo-Marxist ideology that underlies Critical Race Theory, which is currently warping the minds of America's schoolchildren.

Leftists believe that history is nothing more than a pantheon of heroes and villains, chosen by them, to drive home the more fundamental lesson that all of us are defined by our racial, ethnic, religious and gender-based identities, which in turn cast us as either victims or oppressors, as good or evil, for all time, regardless of any actions we take as individuals in our own lifetimes. In other words, we study history for one reason only: to remind ourselves how right "progressives" are when they castigate us for our "whiteness," our Christianity, or our Y-chromosomes, or when they praise us for our BIPOC heritage, our secular humanism, or our status as "transgender."

Elements of history that portray any kind of ambiguity, on the other hand – like Robert E. Lee, who was both a traitor and a patriot, a slaveowner and a champion of liberty – are to be erased, or demonized, because they confuse the issue. And "the issue," in case any one is in further doubt, is the ongoing moral imperative, as the left sees it, to take up arms against the forces of "white supremacy," Christian fundamentalism, patriarchy and homophobia/transphobia, which, we're constantly assured, still dominate every aspect of American and Western culture. Yeah, right!

Actually, there's no ambiguous dichotomy at all: Because Lee was a traitor, he cannot be a patriot, and because he was a slaveowner, he cannot be a "champion of liberty" -- after all, Lee, unlike other Founding Fathers who were slaveholders, took up arms against his own country. Waddy continued:

Robert E. Lee is a historical luminary beloved especially of Southern whites, and we all know which side of history's moral ledger these reprobates belong on, as far as the left is concerned. Southern whites have no right to feel pride or self-respect, as the progressives see it, because their history and current social standing are permanently stained by the sins of slavery and racism.

Of course, one could say exactly the same thing about the Democratic Party, which stood for generations for both slavery and segregation, but if there is one thing the left believes in almost as fervently as its binary/Manichean interpretation of history's moral lessons, it is double standards. Thus – presto! – the Democrats get a pass. The South emphatically does not.

Waddy didn't mention that the Democratic Party stopped supporting segregation more than 50 years ago, and that Republicans have since become the political party that's hostile to minorities. Waddy then tried to sell his "we're all Robert E. Lee" argument:

There is, however, a deeper truth in American and Western history, and it is one that the left is laboring mightily to obscure. It is the simple fact that all of us, in terms of our national, racial, religious, gender-based, or familial history, have ample reason to feel both pride and shame. There is no Southerner alive, of any race, who is ignorant of the horrors and injustices that some of his ancestors committed. Likewise, we – all of us – can point with pride to forebears who exemplified some species of excellence, or virtue, or wisdom, or courage, and we are entitled to do so. We take the good with the bad, in other words.

The left's latest victory – against a mute, impassive, utterly defenseless statue – should not deflate us. They won this battle, yes, but they will not, they cannot, win the wider war they are waging against the human condition itself.

They might wish to imprison half of America eternally in the chains of shame, based on identity politics alone, but the basic truth of our individual and collective moral complexity will always set us free.

Simply put, we are all oppressors, and we are all victims. We are all good, and we are all bad. We are mere mortals, so how could it be otherwise?

Robert E. Lee was a great man partly because he never believed that he was or could be anything but a poor sinner. It's that humility that Lee's modern detractors entirely lack. And for that reason we are right to oppose their arrogant dictates and demands with every fiber of our beings.

We are equally right to pity them, however, for, in denying the agency and humanity of their enemies, they also inevitably deny it to themselves. How sad.

Again: We are not Robert E. Lee because we did not fight a civil war for an odious cause, and for that reason alone he was not a great man. And conservatives like Waddy regularly deny the humanity of the liberals they despise, which gets him and his ilk a lot closer to Lee than us.

MRC Psaki-Bashing, Doocy-Fluffing Watch, Doocy-Gasm Edition
Topic: Media Research Center
It was Doocy-gasm time for Media Research Center writer Curtis HOuck again, as he once more got off on Peter Doocy asking biased questions of Jen Psaki. On Sept. 9, Houck gushed hard under the headline "Doocy Goes HARD After Team Biden on Covid Origins, Praising the Taliban":

Ahead of President Biden’s early Thursday evening speech calling for more forced vaccinations and touting masks, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki took to the Briefing Room podium and faced fire from Fox’s Peter Doocy and Real Clear Politics’s Philip Wegmann on Afghanistan and also CBS’s Weijia Jiang and ABC’s Rachel Scott about the sudden change of heart on vaccine mandates.

[...]

After a quick follow-up about Fauci’s job safety, Doocy wanted to know “why the White House in a statement is calling the Taliban businesslike and professional.”

Psaki replied that the statement was meant to commemorate the first flight and acknowledge that “the Taliban was cooperative in facilitating the departure of these American citizens and legal permanent residents from HKIA.”

The next day, Houck proclaimed "Doocy Bomb" in his headline:

On Friday’s episode of The Psaki Show, Fox’s Peter Doocy capped off a busy week with newsy questions about President Biden’s Thursday call with Chinese President Xi Jinping and why is it that millions of Americans are being subjected to President Biden’s rash of Covid vaccine mandates but not illegal immigrants.

Doocy chose to lead with China and Biden’s call and whether Biden “press[ed] [Xi] like he said he was going to” when he said two weeks ago in a statement that China was still hiding “critical information” about the origins of Covid.

Psaki wouldn’t commit to “going...into lists of every topic covered,” but said the virus was one of many “transnational issues” discussed. Doocy twice tried to get a definitive answer, but Psaki said what matters was that they’ve previously “conveyed” the need for more information, so China “know[s]” where they stand.

But the question of the briefing came next when Doocy launched this humdinger: “[W]hy is it that you are trying to record anybody with a job or anybody who goes to school to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but you're not requiring that of migrants that continue walking across the southern border into the country?”

Psaki ignored the question other than saying “our objective is to get as many people vaccinated across the country as humanly possible” “more people are vaccinated” within our borders.

From here, we skip to Sept. 16 for Houck's next skewed review, in which he cheered that non-right-wing reporters were advancing the right-wing Biden-is-frail narrative:

Thursday’s episode of The Psaki Show featured two welcome surprises as NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell and then ABC’s Karen Travers asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki about President Biden’s health in light of the fact that Biden repeatedly had to battle a cough to get through his remarks an hour prior about the economy. The questions came after the liberal media spent years insisting President Trump showed severe cognitive and physical declines.

Following some solid questions about Afghanistan, O’Donnell switched gears: “Many of us were in the East Room watching the President. We’ve seen him on many occasions where he has a repeated cough. What is the situation with that cough and is that a concern?”

Psaki immediately shot back that “we have a doctor who travels with him — obviously, who checks in if — if it is ever warranted and, certainly that continues to be the case, as it has been since the beginning of his presidency.”

O’Donnell wasn’t taking that for an answer, so she followed up: “Is there an explanation for why he coughs so frequently in situations like that? I'm sure you saw it.”

[...]

Skip ahead about 30 minutes and Travers asked about it in context of when Biden will get a physical: “Following up on one of the questions from Kelly. Do you have an update on when the President will get a physical?”

Psaki provided an answer that sure wouldn’t slide under Trump, calling it “an understandable question,” though “I don’t have an update.”

“He will get one soon. And when he does, we will make sure you all are aware of it and get the information,” she added.

Of course, all of those NewsBusters posts about Trump that Houck higlighted attacked the people fowarding the idea -- somehing Houck is clearly loath to do regarding similar allegations against Biden. But doesn't the fact that Trump has spent the past several months in abject denial insisting he won an election  he clearly lost and attempt to foment a coup against the government to overturn the outcome, evidence enough that he is suffering for some type of mental instability -- not to mention prove those questioners NewsBusters denoucned correct? Houck will never answer that question.

Houck went on to cheer another right-wing reporter, Newsmax's Emerald Robinson, advancing the conspiracy theory that Biden was deliberately limiting shipments of monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID to "red states."

Then it was back to Doocy-gasm mode on Sept. 20, under the headline "Doocy HAMMERS Psaki":

It was a tale of two approaches during Monday’s White House press briefing as Fox’s Peter Doocy and select reporters (including even CNN’s Jeremy Diamond) chose to challenge Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Afghanistan, illegal immigration, travel bans, and U.S.–France relations while CNN analyst April Ryan led another group in standing up for Haitian illegal immigrants and spreading fake news about border officials using whips.

[...]

Doocy eventually got a turn and led with using Psaki’s own comments about America’s “over the horizon capacity” against her seeing as how “you guys didn't kill people who went after our troops” but instead droned to death “10 civilians, including seven children.”

A Psaki word salad and follow-up about bringing family members of those killed into the country, Doocy brought the heat with this inconvenient truth about the border: “Is somebody asking the foreign nationals who are walking into Del Rio, Texas and setting up camps on this side of the border for proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test?”

Psaki tried to wiggle out of it, but Doocy wasn’t having it: “[I]f somebody walks into the country, right across the river, does somebody ask them to see their vaccination card?”

The spokeswoman lobbed meaningless claims about health screenings and quarantines and even had the gall to claim that the tens of thousands at the border weren’t “intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time.”

With an incredulous look on his face, Doocy called this out, but Psaki shamelessly plugged along by talking about Title 42 being used to expel migrants (even though only single males are being deported with the others all being allowed to fan out across the U.S.).

Before ending on vaccine boosters, Doocy wondered about Vice President Harris: “Where’s the Vice President on any of this? Wasn’t she supposed to be addressing the root causes of migration?”

Psaki hilariously replied that Harris “has been addressing the root causes of migration by working with countries in the region” and “[w]e’ve actually seen a reduction in some of those numbers.”

Houck went on to note only that Doocy was "ending on vaccine boosters," hiding the fact that Doocy got owned by Psaki on that issue. As Mediaite noted, Psaki "made quick work of a 'quick' question from Fox News’ Peter Doocy by reading a key quote from President Joe Biden that Doocy did not include in his query on Covid boosters." But Houck absolutely refuses to make Doocy look bad -- that's not what the MRC is paying him to do -- so he completely censored the "Psaki bomb."

Houck clearly doesn't see how ridiciulous he looks in his Doocy-fluffing -- and, by extension, proving beyond a doubt that Doocy is a reporter who's more biased than anyone on the "liberal" ledger in that room, or who were in the room during the previous presidency questioning his beloved Kayleigh McEnany.Like McEnany, Houck is not a serious person, caring only about advancing polical narratives and scoring political points and nothing at all about genuinely informing people.

WND Keeps Bogus COVID Story That Original Source Deleted
Topic: WorldNetDaily

We've repeatedly busted WorldNetDaily and its columnists for depicting reports of vaccine side effects to the government's VAERS database as fact-based, verifiable and indisputable when no report has been verified and the VAERS database itself clearly states that "the inclusion of events in VAERS data does not imply causality." Still, WND apparently believes such fearmongering it too good to fact-check as long as it makes people click on its work. Thus, we have an anonymously written Sept. 13 article peddling the same bogus story:

The U.S. government database that keeps track of deaths from vaccine side effects has exploded by 10-fold since the advent of COVID-19, and the experimental vaccines that have been developed in response.

The Beltway Report revealed there are about 1,400 deaths reported to the system each year, among the thousands of reports of adverse events from vaccines.

The report explained the Vaccine Adverse Event Report System gets more than 60,000 reports each year, including 1,400 deaths that are documented on average.

But since COVID was unleashed on the world, "there have been 14,701 deaths reported," the report said.

"Many of those have come from within the last month and a half with around 3,300 deaths. That’s about 70 per day!" the report said.

The anonymous WND writer's source here is a website called the Beltway Report, which Media Bias/Fact Check identifies as a questionable source "due to extreme right wing bias, promotion of propaganda and the use of poor sources who consistently fail fact checks."

Also of note is that the story's link to the Beltway Report story redirects to the Beltway Report front page. That's because the story has been deleted. The original story was published on Sept. 13, the day of WND's regurgitation of it, written under the name of "Jack Crane," a bland enough name with a bland enough bio to be little else but a pseudonym. But according to the Internet Archive, it had been deleted by Sept. 22, and it has disappeared from "Crane's" story archive. No explanation could be found on the Beltway Report as to whe it was deleted.

Could it be that one of the most unreliable websites out there decided that a story was so egregiously bogus that it was shamed into deleting it? And why doesn't WND -- which is similarly unreliable -- feel the same way?

NEW ARTICLE: Mainstreaming Extremism At CNS: The Boebert Brigade
Topic: CNSNews.com
Just as it did with Marjorie Taylor Greene, CNSNews.com is promoting far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert while censoring her history of extremism and lies. Read more >>

Flip-Flop: MRC Suddenly Trusts Polls Again (Now That They Show Biden Down)
Topic: Media Research Center

Last year, the Media Research Center proclaimed its distrust of media polls, declaring that polls showing Donald Trump badly losing the election were "intentionally" wrong -- a serious claim for which it has never presented any evidence to support. (This seems like an opening for a pollster to sue the MRC for libel and defamation.) But with polls showing President Biden down from his initial high favorability rates, the MRC is suddently trusting polls again -- despite them coming from many of the "liberal media" sources it was trashing last year.

The flip-flop started last spring, when Nicholas Fondacaro hyped a poll showing "President Biden’s approval rating was supposedly sitting at an anemic 52 percent. And according to their methodology, the margin of error for the poll was 3.5 percent. Now given how that meant Biden could be below 50 percent, it was understandable that the cast of characters on ABC’s Good Morning America were floored by the results." The next day, Kyle Drennen kept up the hype job under the headline "Here’s the Bad Biden Polling News Networks Are Hiding."

Neither Fondacaro nor Drennen mentioned that most mainstream polls didn't show Trump above 50 percent at any point during his presidency, nor did they mention their employer's insistence that polls are rigged.

In July, Drennen had another poll to hype: "With COVID cases, violent crime, inflation, and illegal immigration all on the rise after the first six months of Joe Biden’s presidency, it’s no surprise that pessimism about the country’s future has surged in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday morning. However, rather than provide full coverage of this bad news for the Democrat in the White House, the liberal network only managed a paltry 91 seconds of air time divided among three broadcasts on Sunday and Monday." Again, it was not discussed why the MRC suddenly finds media polls credible again.

When the Afghanistan withdrawal in August didn't go well, the MRC pounced on polls expressing disapproval -- and said nothing about why those polls are suddenly trustworthy. Fondacaro was happy with a poll gotcha from a despised "liberal media" reporter in an Aug. 22 post:

During another White House press conference where he tried to gaslight Americans about his poor decision-making and planning in Afghanistan, President Biden was confronted by CBS senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe with a network poll that shows the public was questioning his competence and ability to be president.

After asking a question about whether or not he trusted the Taliban, O’Keefe prefaced “a new poll out today shows Americans wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, but they disapprove of the way you've handled it.”

And given how harsh the poll was for the President, O’Keefe actually begged for Biden’s forgiveness: “The poll also found that based in part on what's transpired in the past week, a majority of Americans – forgive me, I'm just the messenger – no longer consider you to be competent, focused, or effective at the job.”

[...]

The poll definitely struck a nerve with Biden. When he got around to answering O’Keefe’s first question, he snapped at the journalist. “I don't trust anybody, including you. I love ya, but, you know, there's not a lot of people I trust,” he said.

Drennen whined the next day:

Despite Chuck Todd warning on Sunday’s Meet the Press that President Biden’s falling poll numbers amid the disaster in Afghanistan could signal a “forever stain” on his presidency, that evening’s Nightly News and Monday’s Today show completely ignored the negative findings in the network’s latest survey. While both broadcasts continued covering the Afghanistan debacle, reporters weren’t interested in talking about the American people giving Biden failing marks on his woeful mishandling of the crisis.

[...]

Despite having a full two hours, Monday’s Today show also lacked a single second on the poll – though it did manage to offer nearly three minutes on the ongoing search for a new Jeopardy host.

Tim Graham's Aug. 25 podcast similarly hyped bad polls: "On the latest NewsBusters Podcast, we discuss the media's temperamental use of polling results. They have a tendency to highlight polls that underline the narratives and candidates they like, but tend to bury poll results they don't like and don't match their talking points." We didn't listen to the podcast, but we're guessing that Graham didn't discuss his employer's flip-flop from denouncing polls last fall to demanding they be covered now.

Scott Whitlock picked up the hype baton in a Sept. 2 post:

Joe Biden hit record lows in two new polls on Thursday. Will the journalists at ABC, CBS and NBC bother to cover, or even notice, the cratering polling for the Democrat? They certainly enjoyed covering bad news for Donald Trump. In the new NPR/PBS survey, Biden’s approval has slipped to just 43 percent, a new low. In the new Rasmussen poll, the President has fallen to 42 percent, a tie for his record low.

[...]

The Biden White House is cratering in the polls. The Real Clear Politics average showed the approve/disapprove numbers intersect in late August as the Afghanistan disaster worsened.

Whitlock went on to complain about "the 'Republicans pounce'-esque tone" of an article that pointed out how Republicans are trying to exploit Biden's low poll numbers for political gain ... in an article in whcih the Republican Whitlock is pouncing on Biden's low poll numbers in order to exploit them for political gain.

What Whitlock didn't mention: Biden's numbers were still higher than Trump's at the same point in his presidency.

Whitlock pounced again the next day:

Another day, another record low poll for Joe Biden. But the media are still doing their best to hide the implosion of the Democrat’s presidency. ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday buried a survey the network did with The Washington Post finding Biden cratering to 44 percent. On Thursday, new polls showed Biden at 43 and 42 percent, also record lows. 

[...]

There’s no indication that Biden’s numbers show any hint of improving. But journalists will do their best to hide the bad news for Democrats.

Just like Whitlock is doing his best to hide the fact that his employer vehemently distrusted media polls just a few short months ago.

Fondacaro came back on Sept 5 in full pounce mode:

The deadly incompetence in Afghanistan, the summer of skyrocketing prices, and sluggish job growth all stemming from massive spending that’s driven up inflation had woke up Americans to the liberal media’s lies about President Biden being a world-class leader. With pollsters now showing Biden as a largely unpopular president, ABC was suddenly shocked during Sunday’s Good Morning America as they finally gave their polling some daylight and analysis.

ABC couldn’t even be honest about when the poll came out. According to co-anchor Dan Harris, the ABC News/Washington Post poll was “released overnight.” But in reality, the poll was released on September 3, Friday.

But, of course, ABC would lie about when their poll of released because this may have been the first time their viewers had really heard about it. As NewsBusters’ Scott Whitlock reported on Friday, that morning’s GMA only gave the findings 30 seconds=. The Sunday segment was just over two minutes (2:05).

Meanwhile, Fondacaro and the rest of the MRC have given zero seconds to explaining the MRC's polling flip-flop.

AIM Is Mad Media Bias Chart Doesn't Reflect Its Own Bias
Topic: Accuracy in Media

An anonymously written Sept. 14 Accuracy in Media article complains about the latest Ad Fontes media bias chart:

Despite claims by Ad Fontes Media that its analysts are some of the chart’s findings are dubious at best. For instance, it lists Reuters as a centrist, fact-reporting outlet. However, just this past summer, Reuters displayed a blatant double-standard about what types of protests were at risk of spreading Covid-19. Reuters claimed that Black Lives Matter protests would not lead to spikes in Covid-19 cases but that protests in favor of Cuban liberation risked exacerbating the Covid-19 spike. How is an outlet that acts as a lobbyist for the socialist dictatorship of Cuba a “centrist, fact-reporting” source?

In addition to Reuters, other outlets such as NowThis, Teen Vogue, and Vice are categorized as only “skews left” and are a mix of fact reporting and analysis when in reality, these outlets put out extremist content frequently. Just recently, NowThis put out climate propaganda on behalf of the Biden administration. Vice insisted that Marines were actually neo-nazis while also advocating for controversial vaccine passports and downplaying valid arguments against them.

Well, vaccine passports are a health issue, not a political issue. Similarly, climate change is also not a political issues much as AIM has been indoctrinated by its fellow right-wingers to portray it as one. And Ad Fontes likely didn't rush to a snap judgment on Reuters' alleged bias based on three cherry-picked articles out of the thousands it publishes each year, like AIM did. Indeed, as the anonymous AIM writer goes on to quote from the group's website, “Ad Fontes Media has a team of over 40 paid analysts who rate individual articles, episodes, and shows of news sources. They are politically balanced left, right, and center, and come from a range of personal and professional backgrounds.”

AIM wasn't done complaining:

When it comes to right-wing media sources, the chart plays fast and loose in terms of who they list as “extreme.” According to Ad Fontes Media, conservative outlets and personalities such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro and Fox News as a whole are all borderline propaganda sources that are nearly on par with Alex Jones of InfoWars. 

Unlike with the outlets it complained weren't placed left enough, AIM offered no evidence to support its claims that Carlson, Hannity, et al, aren't "borderline propaganda."

Based on these faulty complaints, the anonymous AIM writer concluded by whining:

The trouble with this is that the Media Bias Chart is taught in classrooms across the country. In fact, its website has an entire section dedicated to resources teachers can use for their curriculum.

[...]

How can a company that has so failed at identifying its own bias teach America’s youth about how to identify it themselves?

How can an organization like AIM credibly analyze "media bias" when it has trouble admitting there's any in right-wing media?