CNSNews.com likes to pretend it's a "news" organization, but it's really a conservative talking-points enforcer with occasional stabs at "balance" to keep up the pretense of balance. We can show this with an example of both that add up to a textbook example of bad journalism. First, we have a Dec. 13 bit of stenography from Susan Jones, to the point where she just copied-and-pasted part of a direct transcript:
Democrats have put a $1.75 trillion price tag on their "Build Back Better Act," which they insist is "fully paid for."
No, it's not, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told "Fox News Sunday." He pointed to a Congressional Budget Office estimate that says the entitlement programs established in the bill, if they run for ten years instead of just two or three, would cost close to $5 trillion:
Democrats, to bring down the cost of their social agenda bill, gave some of the entitlement programs a short shelf life, fully anticipating that once established, they will never go away.
"President Biden said the bill was fully -- fully paid for," Graham said on Sunday:
Vice President Harris said it was paid for. Schumer, Pelosi, Secretary of Treasury Yellen. The CBO says it's not paid for. It's $3 trillion of deficit spending. It's not $1.75 trillion over 10 years, it's $4.9 trillion.
What does this mean? The House should re-vote. The vote in the House was based on a fraud. This bill doesn't cost $1.75 trillion, it costs almost $5 trillion. It doesn't add $300 billion to the deficit, it adds $3 trillion.
There is not a plan to pay for it. If there is, I missed it. So, give it to me. Give it to the American people. Before we vote in the Senate, show me how you pay for this bill.
And you know why I wrote a letter to CBO, because Joe Manchin came to me and he said, I think this bill is full of gimmicks, that these programs won't go away, Lindsey, and if you score them for 10 years, I think the bill will double. Well, it didn't double, it was almost 2.5 times.
So, I hope that this will be a showstopper for Build Back Better.
Since this was stenography, Jones made no effort to fact-check anything Graham said.
More than 11 hours later, CNS published an article by Melanie Arter -- again stenography, but stenography that blows up Jones' article:
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called the CBO score for President Biden’s Build Back Better Act “fake,” because it’s based on a modified version of the bill ordered by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that shows how much it will cost over a period of 10 years if its provisions were made permanent.
“The president says that Build Back Better won't add a penny to the deficit. The CBO has this new score where they assume social programs are going to be made permanent, and in that case, it would add $3 trillion. Does that mean that President Biden will commit that these programs won't be made permanent?” Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy asked.
“What we’re talking about here is a fake CBO score that is not based on the actual bill that anybody is voting on. This was a ask request by Senator Graham to score a bill that is not currently being debated,” the press secretary said.
“That is his prerogative to do, but what our focus is on is on the existing bill that will lower the deficit, that will also over an additional 10 years pay for the $2 trillion tax cuts that Republicans didn’t pay for. They’re welcome for that,” Psaki said.
“So I would say, Peter, to your question, the president has conveyed very clearly, multiple times publicly that he would like programs if they’re extended to be paid for,” she said.
<“That remains his commitment, but it’s important to understand that when you-- when anybody raises a question about this new CBO score. It is a fake score about a bill that doesn't exist, and we should really focus on the actual bill everybody’s going to vote on and considering in Congress right now,” Psaki added.
Jones deliberately obfuscated about what Graham did, potraying his CBO estimate as legitimate when it's not (and even obscuring the fact that Graham had sought that estimate). And for all of Arter's stenography, she didn't link to or even reference her colleague's article in which she uncritically repeats Graham's deceptive attack on the bill.
This is bad journalism -- pro-Repubican stenography is unchallenged, and Arter's window-dressing stenography doesn't exactly undo it. But then, if it wasn't for bad jouranlism, there really wouldn't be any journalism at CNS.
Shoddy MRC Reserarchers Attack Work Of Another Media Researcher Topic: Media Research Center
It's something of a spectacle to see the Media Research Center -- home of some of the shoddies "media research" -- lash out at the allegedly shoddy media research of others. Taht's what Tim Graham did in a Dec. 4 post:
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote a column that was so slavishly pro-Biden that it was retweeted by Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain. The preposterous title was "The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof."
As often happens, liberals avoid actually reading articles. That's so old-fashioned, having an actual human read prose. Instead, they assign some cold computer algorithm to make their argument.
[...]
I cry "BS," a mountain of BS. You don't assign a computer to read for adjectives in 200,000 articles and claim media bias. There's no way we at NewsBusters would be able to read 200,000 articles in 15 minutes and say "Voila!" But who needs a human media analyst? Milbank's clown car is speeding down the information superhighway:
We've cried BS over the MRC's shoddy studies, whichwe'vedocumented as focusing on a small sliver of media (yet somehow never Fox News) to make dubious conclusions about "the media," denies the existence of "neutral" coverage, pretends that subjective concepts such as "spin" and "bias"can be identified objectively, and refusing to make the underlying data public so readers can judge for themselves.The MRC method of handcrafted research by biased researchers works no better -- and, arguably, much worse -- than Milbank's method.
Following Milbank's finding that "Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as — and for a time worse than — the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020," Graham unironically accused Milbank of being biased:
Naturally, Milbank thinks the "mainstream" media should have a dramatic bias in Biden's favor, since that's in favor of "democracy." Their arrogance in dismissing the entire Republican half of America is perennially breathtaking.
Then again, Graham thinks that all media should have a dramatic bias in favor of Donald Trump and all other Republicans.
Bill D'Agostino followed up with a Dec. 5 post similarly attacking Milbank:
On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, CNN host Brian Stelter entertained the laughable notion that the media have been harder on President Biden than they were on his predecessor, President Trump.
Stelter got this ridiculous idea from a piece by Dana Milbank, who claimed to have analyzed the “tone” of hundreds of thousands of news articles with artificial intelligence. And supposedly, this analysis found that yes, the media were in fact being tougher on Biden:
[...]
Let’s leave aside the notion that harsh coverage of Biden amounts to “the murder of democracy,” and instead talk about Milbank’s conclusion that Biden has been treated at least as harshly as Trump was. To a reasonable person, findings this transparently at odds with reality would suggest there was a problem with either the methodology or the AI the researchers used. As they say in statistics, “garbage in, garbage out.”
D'Agostino, being a loyal MRCer, went on to cite his employer's so-called "research" as if they were legitimate:
As it happens, the Media Research Center has done its own research comparing coverage of Presidents Biden and Trump. Back in April, analysts took an exhaustive look at all evening news coverage from the top three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and found that during the first three months of each President’s term, the coverage of Biden was 59% positive, while for Trump it was 89% negative.
While Milbank references this three-month “honeymoon” for Biden in his analysis, he does not seem aware that relative to the rest of Trump's presidency, those first three months were also something of a honeymoon for him. Between 2017 and 2021, the coverage of Trump averaged between 90% and 92% negative. Is Milbank suggesting that the current numbers are just as bad for Biden?
Note that the study from last April made no evaluation of right-wing media outlets for comparison purposes, which makes one wonder what the MRC is afraid of. Similarly, the summary of studies purporting to examine "the media" only examined the three networks' evening news -- not a representataive sample of "the media" -- pretended "negative" coverage was determined objectively, again excluded any analysis of Fox News, and refused to release the raw data.
Despite the utter lack of credibility of the MRC's "media research," D'Agostino concluded by pretending otherwise and insisting one didn't need actual research to see the purported bias: "We could go one like this, but there’s no point. Granted, the above research focused on television coverage, but it's not as though the print media were drastically softer on Trump. Milbank’s findings are as much a reflection of reality as a scientific paper concluding that goldfish are more intelligent than dolphins — and that’s obvious to almost everyone. Except to Stelter and [guest Eric] Boehlert, that is."
The MRC wasn't done beating up on Milbank for coming to forbidden conclusions. When a New York Times article referenced Milbank's work, Clay Waters sniped in response in a Dec. 11 post: "Actual humans know Trump’s coverage was far more negative than Biden’s has been, no matter how a computer algorithm may parse coverage." He linked to Graham's post as purported evidence of that.
Graham returned on Dec. 16 to bash Milbank some more:
From the Department of I Told You So: Washington Examiner media reporter Becket Adams discovered that Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank's "study" comparing Trump coverage to Biden coverage using a computer turned out to be hot garbage, despite being quoted and celebrated on CNN and MSNBC.
Or as Adams put it, "after some additional digging, most notably by Don’t Walk, Run! Productions, which did the lion’s share of assessing FiscalNote’s data, it turns out Milbank’s theory is even flimsier than initially suspected."
What Graham left unmentioned: At least Milbank released the raw data of his study -- something Graham's MRC has never done on any of its "media research."
WND's Cashill Unironically Cites RFK Jr. to Prove That COVID 'Crackpots' Were Right Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill's Dec. 8 WorldNetDaily column begins as the kind of right-wing screed you'd expect from a WND columnist:
Although I will put my COVID-skeptic credentials up against anyone's – I tried to organize a public protest on day one of the lockdown – I confess to having seen Big Health's actions as merely misguided. I was wrong.
The "crackpots" were right. The Big Health involvement did not progress along the Eric Hoffer spectrum from a good cause to a movement with benefits to a racket. It started as a racket, a massive racket that may go down as a Mao-worthy crime against humanity.
But then it quickly goes south bevcause of who he cites to defend this view:
As the princeling of America's reigning Democratic dynasty, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has his blind spots, but his dissection of Big Health's war, not on COVID, but on those who are actually warring with COVID, is this century's must-read book.
Most of the rest of Cashill's column was advocacy for ivermectin focused around a conversation between two researchers:
Rather than summarize Kennedy's "The Real Anthony Fauci," allow me to excerpt one particular conversation that speaks to the enormity of the debacle. The conversation, recorded on Zoom, involves two scientists. One is Dr. Tess Lawrie, a world-renowned data researcher from the U.K. with an international reputation for integrity. The other is World Health Organization researcher Dr. Andrew Hill, a senior visiting research fellow at Liverpool University.
Lawrie and 20 of the world's leading experts had recently performed a meta-analysis of the research done on ivermectin (IVM), and the data overwhelmingly supported its value in treating COVID-19.
Lawrie is a rabid advocate for ivermectin and an anti-vaxxer. The meta-analysis to which Cashill is apparently referring was published last year by the American Journal of Therapeutics. Contrary to Cashill's claim that "20 of the world's leading experts" wrote it, it carries the names of only seven authors, including Lawrie; PolitiFact reported that all of these co-authors are affiliated with a pro-ivermectin group. By contrast, a different meta-analysis released around the same time concluded that ivermectin was not a "viable option" for treating COVID.
From there, it was Cashill conspiracy time, as he attacked Hill for supposedly suspiciously changing his mindabout ivermectin:
Like Lawrie, Hill had been a major IVM proponent before making a very suspicious about-face. As a WHO gatekeeper and adviser to both Bill Gates and the Clinton Foundation, Hill's opinion mattered. His hasty counter-thesis blocked a worldwide ivermectin rollout.
"How can you do this?" Lawrie asks him. "You are causing irreparable harm."
Hill explained that he was in a "tricky position" because his sponsors were pressuring him, the most important of which was Unitaid. Chairing the executive committee of Unitaid, an international quasi-governmental consortium, was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation representative. Apparently, a $150 million donation buys the best seat at the table.
[...]
One can understand how an apparatchik could buckle before a Stalin or a Hitler, but a Bill Gates? Dante would need a special Circle to accommodate bureaucrats as easily intimidated as Hill.
Cashill didn't mention a more logical and less conspiratorial reason why Hill might have changed his mind: His investigation of research on ivermectin found that many of the papers on the subject appeared to be flawed or biased, and his own meta-analysis of ivermectin found little benefit. Nevertheless, Cashill keeps up the conspiracy-mongering:
Lawrie does not shy from telling Hill what he refuses to see: "All other countries are getting ivermectin except the U.K. and the USA and Europe are owned by the vaccine lobby." Lawrie concludes by telling Hill, "I don't understand how you sleep at night, honestly."
As Kennedy documents, the racket runs deep. When I googled Lawrie's name the first item to show up was a BBC article headlined, "Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid 'miracle' drug."
When I googled Dr. Andrew Hill, the first article Google served up was this gem from the Guardian, "How my ivermectin research led to Twitter death threats."
If it takes a crackpot to think that Big Pharma, Big Health, Big Tech, Big Media and Bill Gates would engage in a conspiracy so vast and so lethal, well then color me a "crackpot."
Note that Cashill doesn't rebut any of the claims Hill makes in those articles -- he has found his fellow crackpots, and he has a new conspiracy to flog.
NEW ARTICLE -- The MRC's War on Jen Psaki (And Man-Crush On Peter Doocy): November/ December 2021 Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck seemed to be getting bored with his job, as his Psaki-bashing and Doocy-gasming became more sporadic as the year came to a close. Read more >>
The unemployment rate keeps going lower, so CNSNews.com changed tactics a few months ago to attack President Biden: reviving its Obama-era attack of cherry-picking the labor force participation rate. Susan Jones did that once again in her article on December's employment numbers:
The Labor Department's final employment report of 2021, released on Friday morning, shows steady improvement since January a year ago.
But labor force participation remains a concern, as does the number of Americans counted as not in the labor force -- not working and not looking for work, for whatever reason. Those are just two of the Labor Department measures of economic health that have not rebounded to their pre-pandemic levels.
And notably, today's report does not fully account for the recent holiday omicron surge.
As she has throughout the past year of reporting on unemployment numbers, Jones made sure to give shout-outs, both explicit and implicit, to how great things were under Donald Trump before the pandemic started:
Last month’s 3.9 percent unemployment rate is the lowest it's been since the 3.5 percent in February 2020.
[...]
The labor force participation rate reached a seven-year high of 63.4 percent in January 2020, the final year of Trump's presidency and just before the onset of COVID.
CNS didn't serve up its usual sidebars on government or Hispanic unemployment this time. Instead, it focused on promoting other attacks on the numbers. An article by Craig Bannister hyped Fox Business host Stuart Varney claiming that "December’s numbers actually underestimate the weakness of the nation’s job growth, because the harmful effect of the Omicron virus in the second half of the month is not factored in." Bannister followed that by writing what began as a press release for the Republican National Committee:
On Friday, while RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel declared December’s Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) jobs report the worse of Joe Biden’s presidency, Biden touted the positive records set during the full year of 2021.
Following Friday’s release of the latest monthly BLS report, McDaniel issued a statement noting the disappointing level of job creation in December – and warning that the Biden Administration’s ongoing efforts to force small businesses to fire unvaccinated employees will hurt employment:
Bannister copied-and-pasted several paragraphs from the RNC press release trashing Biden over the employment numbers, though he also repeated tweets from Biden and conceded that "there is, indeed, both good news and bad news in the latest employment picture."
Meanwhile, Melanie Arter went into stenographer mode to report that "President Joe Biden painted a rosy picture of Friday’s jobs reports, calling it a 'historic day' for the economic recovery, despite adding less than half the number of jobs in December that analysts expected."
How Has The MRC's War Against Facebook Been Failing Lately? (Part 2) Topic: Media Research Center
It's time to play more catch-up on the Media Ressarch Center's flailing efforts to bash Facebook, now advancing into September and October.
A Sept. 23 post by Alexander Hall complained that Facebook wanted to improve the quality of its news feed:
Facebook openly announced its plans it uses to demote content, but at least it’s attempting to be transparent about the process. Right, Facebook?
The release said it was “to share more detail on how content is distributed on Facebook.” But, in reality, it was about how content is not distributed on Facebook. All for the Facebook offense of being “problematic” or of “low quality.”
Facebook — not users — decides what content is important or high quality in its News Feed.
Hall went on to complain that "Facebook has interfered with user News Feeds before, especially around elections," going on to cite its well-worn complaint about it disabling links to the New York Post's dubious October surprise over Hunter Biden before the 2020 election. Nor did he explain why a private business did not have a right to improve the product it offers to its customers.
Autumn Johnson offered a similarly themed complaint in an Oct. 13 post:
According to The Intercept, Facebook has a secret blacklist of “dangerous individuals and organizations.”
The article explainedthe list was created to bar “users from speaking freely about people and groups it says promote violence.”
Again, Johnson didn't explain why this was a bad thing.
Hall returned on Oct. 18 to huff that Facebook cracking down on "so-called hate speech" was also a bad thing:
Facebook has run right back to censorship gaslighting after having taken a metaphorical beating in the liberal press and from the Hill in recent weeks. The platform has let the world know that it has cracked down on so-called “hate speech” with extreme prejudice.
Facebook released a devastating report about censorship on its platform — a bad omen for those who care about freedom of speech. “Our technology is having a big impact on reducing how much hate speech people see on Facebook,” Facebook VP of Integrity Guy Rosen explained in an Oct. 17 report. “According to our latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, its prevalence is about 0.05% of content viewed, or about 5 views per every 10,000, down by almost 50% in the last three quarters.”
Hall then tried to explain why this was somehow a bad thing by attempting to potray the MRC as a victim:
Facebook’s history with content moderation is problematic at best. The platform has allowed its leftist-funded International Fact-Checking Network appointed fact-checkers to penalize conservative content that is demonstrably true.
For example, PolitiFact came after the Media Research Center (MRC) for citing a graphic first released by the CDC. PolitiFact tried to combine three fact-check categories into one. It failed to note its issue as one of context, and chose to instead label the entire graphic as “FALSE,” but called it “partly false information” on Facebook.
But as we documented, the CDC data was incomplete and, thus, did not support the partisan (and, in retrospect, false and dangerous) point it was trying to claim, that the Delta variant of COVID was nothing to worry about.Facebook was correct to flag the MRC's bogus graphic.
Hall devoted an Oct. 25 post to touting a Wall Street Journal article attacking Facebook:
Facebook management have reportedly been locking horns with their radical far-left workers over how far they can go to censor conservative speech online.
It’s Facebook’s worst nightmare as the platform’s internal debates over purging conservative outlets and the sinister tools to censor them were exposed in a recent Wall Street Journal report. The Journal reportedly revealed one scandalous internal conversation calling for Breitbart News to be removed from the News Tab on the platform: “Get Breitbart out of News Tab,” said an employee. The conversation condemned multiple straightforward headlines from Breitbart about rioting for allegedly “[painting] Black Americans and Black-led movements in a very negative way,” with many Facebook workers reportedly agreeing.
An employee working on the Facebook Audience Network also reportedly rationalized censorship as an ethical responsibility. “My argument is that allowing Breitbart to monetize through us is, in fact, a political statement,” said the employee, according to The Journal. “It’s an acceptance of extreme, hateful and often false news used to propagate fear, racism and bigotry.”
At no point did Hall dispute the Facebook employee's alleged description of Breitbart as peddling "fear, racism and bigotry," which means he's portraying that as mainstream conservative content. And he censored the fact that the Journal report also stated that "The documents reviewed by the Journal didn’t render a verdict on whether bias influences its decisions overall," and that it also found that Facebook employees were "alleging that Facebook is giving the right-wing publishers a pass to avoid PR blowback." Instead, Hall pushed a claim elsewhere in the article that Facebook managment feared that cracking down on far-right content would be seen as, in Hall's words, "verified proof of anti-conservative sentiment or censorship within the company."
Nevertheless, the MRC loved the Journal story so much that its "Editor's Pick" that day was a writeup of the article at right-wing website RedState.
CNS Runs A GOP Press Release Disguised As A 'News' Article Topic: CNSNews.com
Susan Jones has long been a highly biased reporter for CNSNews.com. She took it to another level in a Dec. 14 article, in which she effectively wrote a press release for the Republican Party:
The Democrats' multi-trillion "Build Back Better Act" (BBB) includes a one-year extension of the Child Tax Credit program, which pays families up to $3,000 for every child ages 6-17 and $3,600 for every child under age 6.
Families get the money, depending on their income level and regardless of whether anyone in the family actually works and pays taxes.
BBB is currently stuck in the Senate, and unless it passes by year-end, the final Child Tax Credit payment will go out tomorrow, December 15.
Democrats are using the tax-credit expiration as an urgent reason to pass BBB, which includes most of their leftist agenda.
But Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee say don't be fooled -- the child tax credit "has been turned into the largest welfare-without-work program in existence by President Biden and Congressional Democrats."
"Good jobs and rising paychecks do more to lift Americans out of poverty than dependence on never-ending government checks," Ways and Means Republicans said in a news release dated Dec. 13. "There are a number of factors contributing to poverty. Rewarding work and helping the poor become self-sufficient is the surest path out of poverty."
JOnes even directly copied-and-pasted several parapgraphs of those purported "myths and facts" from that GOP press release. To paraphrase Tim Graham of CNS' parent, the Media Research Center: CNS story? GOP press release? Who can tell?
Jones made a point of highlighting that "Committee Republicans note it was the GOP who doubled the Child Tax Credit to $2,000 in the Tax Cut & Jobs Act of 2017, a move that Democrats opposed at the time," but she buried the fact that it was lumped into a tax cut bill, and it was that, not the Child Tax Credit specifically, that Democrats opposed. She also didn't explain why the GOP effort to increase the Child Tax Credit wasn't also "welfare."
Any alternate viewpoint was buried in the final four paragraphs of Jones' 27-paragraph article, which quoted White House press secretary Jen Psaki discussing prospects for Democrats to pass a child tax credit. Jones allowed nobody to directly rebut the GOP attacks -- she's effectively an employee of the Republican Party, after all.
Newsmax's Trump-Pardoned Columnist Keeps Up The Trump-Fluffing Topic: Newsmax
Trump pardon beneficiary Conrad Black continued his embrace of Trump's Big Lie about the election in his Dec. 17 column. First, though, he took shots at "pompous, insubordinate hypocrite Gen. Mark Milley" at "the woke Fifth Column inserted by President Barack Obama" into the military, then moved to complaining that everything was great under Ronald Reagan until George H.W. Bush succeeded him, than "allowed the political charlatan Ross Perot to steal 20 million mainly Republican votes and bring on the Clintons." When Black transition to huffing about "the monstrous falsehood that Trump had wrongfully connived with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election," it was clearly time for more Trump hagiography and whitewashing:
Hillary Clinton, in her book about the election, stated that "Trump's treason" was one of the principal reasons for her defeat and former National Intelligence Director James Clapper publicly stated his belief that Trump was "a Russian intelligence asset." Former CIA Director John Brennan repeatedly accused Trump of treasonable activity.
By their hysterical claims that Trump was threatening democracy, they understandably incited Trump and his vast army of followers to believe that the political establishment that Trump had previously thought of as only incompetent, was, in fact, the real threat to democracy.
[...]
Meanwhile, a number of swing states altered their voting and vote counting rules, supposedly to facilitate voting during the pandemic, with the chief consequence of producing more than 40 million ballots that were not cast by the voters identified with them in a process called "ballot harvesting" that is impossible to verify.
In these circumstances there was plenty of room to question the validity of the election result as a flip of only about 53,000 votes spread between Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, would have given the election to Trump.
Trump again disserved himself by a somewhat helter-skelter series of legal challenges over individual complaints. But the media effectively suppressed the fact that all 19 challenges to the legality of the alteration of the voting and vote counting rules (because they violated the constitutional disposition of that authority to the state legislatures and failed in the duty to assure fair elections) were rejected on process grounds.
[...]
Both sides felt confirmed in their views by the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6. To Trump's enemies, he had attempted an "insurrection." To Trump and his followers, his enemies had failed to listen to warnings that hooligans would attach themselves to the Trump meeting on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, and attack the Capitol.
Legislators assumed a posture indicative of their courage and hid under their desks wearing ridiculous gas masks when the warning was sounded, and have responded with this new malicious fiction of "insurrection." Of course, the "insurrection" is utter nonsense, and even after detaining hundreds of the trespassers and sweating them in the usual abuse of the plea bargain system, extorting false inculpatory testimony with dire threats and interrogation but a promise of immunity from perjury charges if the "evidence" extorted is useful, no hint of insurrection has emerged.
The last thing Trump wanted was any illegalities at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and the only person who died violently in the incident was an unarmed Trump supporter, mysteriously shot dead by Capitol Police.
The anger of Trump and his 75 million followers was, in the circumstances, understandable. Approximately half the country thought the election was stolen, and the other half believes that it was fairly decided and that the losers attempted to overturn the result by assaulting the Capitol.
The House of Representatives' investigation, in which the Republican side is composed of nothing but anti-Trump zealots probably on their way out of politics as the Republicans nominated by the House minority leader were cavalierly rejected by the speaker — is clearly another rabidly partisan anti-Trump assassination squad.
Black concluded by asserting, "Political conditions are more dangerous than at any time since the bottom of the Great Depression 90 years ago, and there is no FDR at hand." He will never admit Trump's central role in ratcheting up the danger by spreading lies about the election.
Superspreader: WND's Root Brags About Hiding His Active Case Of COVID Topic: WorldNetDaily
Wayne Allyn Root had a lot of news to tell in his Dec. 6 WorldNetDaily column:
Yes, it's true. I beat COVID-19 in 48 hours with ivermectin. Before I get to that story, I have more news guaranteed to make liberals' heads explode.
I was married last week. That has to enrage liberals. The left hates marriage. But they really hate it when a man who knows he's a man marries a feminine woman who knows she's a woman. I married the stunning, beautiful, sexy, Cindy Parker.
This was truly a Republican wedding.
My new wife is on the board of directors of many Republican organizations in Nevada. We had a large wedding with 200 guests from all over the USA – almost all Republicans, conservatives and patriots. I remarked to the crowd, "There are so many Republican politicians in this room, we could hold a Republican National Committee meeting right here."
I opened the wedding by asking all the military veterans and law enforcement in the room to stand up. My guests gave them a standing ovation.
There were no masks. I'm guessing most of the crowd was unvaccinated. We were guarded by former Navy SEALs from the finest security firm in Las Vegas.
If liberals' heads haven't exploded just yet, here's the clincher. The highlight of our wedding was former Fox News host and bestselling author Rita Cosby reading a personal, handwritten letter from former President Donald Trump celebrating our wedding.
Nobody's head was exploding over Root turning his wedding into a virtue-signaling superspreader event. Note that he didn't say how many of his guests came down with COVID after the wedding. Anyway, on to the other news:
Want to watch liberals' heads triple explode? Here's the best story yet. I was healthy and strong at my wedding because of ivermectin.
I caught COVID-19 for the first time a few weeks ago.
I beat COVID-19 in 48 hours with ivermectin and massive doses of vitamins – including intravenous vitamin C.
But ivermectin is truly a miracle drug. I had COVID-19 for a day when I decided to take ivermectin. From that point on, COVID-19 was gone in 24 hours. Yes, ivermectin and vitamins turned the dangerous, deadly, run-for-your-life, lock-down-the-economy, mask-up-for-life, vaccinate-or-die COVID-19 into a minor common cold. And then it was gone in 24 hours.
Ivermectin made my COVID-19 bout so mild, I never missed a day of work. Yes, I hosted my three-hour national radio show every day, with COVID-19 – and no one noticed.
Does it get better? Root wants you to think it does:
Wait, it gets better. My book, "The Great Patriot Protest & Boycott Book," is out, and I was on a book tour promoting the book. I was a guest (over the phone) on over 20 radio shows that week, with COVID-19 – and no one noticed.
And I appeared on multiple national television shows (via Zoom or Skype) that week to promote my book, with COVID-19 – and no one noticed.
Ivermectin and megadoses of vitamins turned deadly COVID-19 into a minor cold that never slowed me one bit. No one could even tell I was sick.
But lest you think I got a mild case: not true. On the first day of COVID-19, I had fever, chills, a bad cough, mucus filling my lungs, awful pain in every muscle of my body, terrible exhaustion, and I lost my sense of taste. Sound familiar? It's every symptom of COVID-19. I took two COVID-19 tests just to be certain. I tested positive twice.
One day of ivermectin and it was gone. No one ever knew. Until now.
In other words, Root had an active case of COVID, during which time he was likely contagious -- and he told nobody. That's highly irresponsible, and it put other poeple's lives in danger. Root is self-absorbed enough to think it was a wonderful thing that he hid from people that he had an active case of COVID -- the protocol for which is that you quarantine for several days, giving that a with an active COVID infection can still spread it even if they're asymptomatic. How many of those people around him on those TV shows and his book tour caught COVID from Root? He's not going to tell us. He has graduated from being a COVID misinformer to a COVID superspreader.
Root went on to sing the praises of ivermectin, finally declaring: "Hey, liberals, are you listening? Have your heads exploded yet?" Only at your selfish irresponsibility, Wayne.
MRC's Graham Can't Stop Lashing Out At Fact-Checks He Doesn't Like Topic: Media Research Center
The fact-check fails are piling up again for Media Research Center executive Tim Graham. He played whataboutism in a Nov. 22 post:
On November 15, Rep. Cori Bush (radical D-Mo.) tweeted that “When we marched in Ferguson, white supremacists would hide behind a hill near where Michael Brown Jr. was murdered and shoot at us.” Where were the “Fact Checkers”? FactCheck.Org? No. The Washington Post? No. PolitiFact ignored it, although they posted two “False” ratings on Kevin McCarthy on November 19.
Graham didn't dispute the accuracy of the "false" ratings on McCarthy. Instead, he complained that other fact-checkers wouldn't declare Bush's claim to be false, only "unproven" -- even though there were reports at the time of shots being fired at protesters andlocal officials would not explicitly denied any such incident took place. Graham then insisted that if it had happened, we would have heard about it: "Ferguson was one of the biggest stories of 2014 and 2015, similar to the Kyle Rittenhouse controversy. If some white nationalists were shooting at black activists, that would have hardly gone ignored by liberal reporters, like the one who wrote a book with the inflammatory title They Can't Kill Us All."
In a Dec. 13 post, Graham got mad that his fellow right-wingers got fact-checked for taking an apparent gaffe from President Biden out of context:
Over and over again, we find "independent fact checkers" come rushing to President Biden's defense when he says something that sounds wacky. Spencer Brown at Townhall complained Friday in an article titled "The White House Sicced Fact Checkers on Townhall...for Quoting Biden."
Not-so-independent PolitiFact quickly followed (and quoted) Team Biden in crying "missing context" on Biden saying they would make sure Americans are "paying their fair share for gas." What does that mean? He meant a fair price. But he bumbled it, mixed his liberal metaphors.
Conservatives had fun with the gaffe, and that is apparently not allowed. A half hour later, White House Rapid Response Director Mike Gwin accused Townhall of "lazy, deceptive editing."
The "lazy, deceptive editing" would be anyone who ignored that Townhall's video clip BEGAN with Biden "noting falling gas prices." Gwin should be fact-checked, not Townhall.
Graham ignored that the "falling gas prices" statement does not appear in the text of the Townhall tweet -- that part was indeed taken out of context. Graham also didn't fact-check the Townhall writer's claim that the Biden White House "sicced" fact-checkers on it; he merely complained that a "PolitiFact hack" also called out Townhall. He then went on another one of his rants about context that he does when his fellow right-wingers get called out on it:
PolitiFact wants to edit all conservative tweets for "context" that they can approve as "true" -- as in Biden doesn't look bad. Social-media sites then scream "Missing Context" on conservative posts.
There is no "Truth-O-Meter" rating on this, so Townhall was not "Mostly False" or something. But PolitiFact's knee-jerk Biden defending is still obvious.
The next day, Graham had another made-up fact-check outrage, this time over Biden's completely legal use of tax avoidance schemes:
In Sunday's Washington Post, "fact checker" Glenn Kessler took up Joe and Jill Biden's tax avoidance during the Trump years by channeling funds through an "S corporation." There were no "Pinocchios" awarded. It simply seemed like Kessler wanted to establish that the Bidens were totally okay to use tax loopholes that President Obama tried to close.
[...]
The target in this case was Rep. Jim Banks: "In recent weeks, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) has touted a study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) that he says shows “multimillionaire Joe Biden’s use of corporate loopholes to avoid paying taxes.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the story “has been debunked.” A reader asked us to sort this out, so let’s take a look."
Kessler noted at least Biden released 23 years of tax returns, unlike Donald Trump.
Graham, of course, offered no criticism of Trump for using tax-avoidance schemes. Instead, he uniroinically whined: "Somehow, this became a 'hypocrisy check,' not a fact check. And even then, Kessler proclaimed the matter was 'in the eye of the beholder.'"
Ah, but there is hypocrisy. The MRC, Graham included, never criticized Trump for refusing to release his tax returns during his presidency, and bashing Biden for his tax returns is the height of hypocrisy. Graham is simply too much of a partisan -- and too much in need of more than a little willful blindness -- to see it.
WND Columnist: Trump's A Brilliant, Misunderstood Comedian Topic: WorldNetDaily
In her Dec. 6 WorldNetDaily column, Rachel Alexander seemingly wants to blame Saul Alinsky for the state of Donald Trump's political fortunes:
The left has mastered many clever tactics to defeat the right in recent years, not based on substantive arguments but rather on tricking people. One is straight out of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," and the right is falling into the trap.
Rule No. 5 states, "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." It basically consists of using fourth-grader insults to coerce people into a herd attack mentality. They mastered it with former President Donald Trump, "orange man bad."
Alexander then complained that nobody understands what a great comedian Trump is, and that his alleged jokes were taken out of context to disparage him:
Trump wasn't much different than Reagan in terms of policy. But by pouncing on his sarcastic tweets and off-the-cuff remarks, his opponents were able to create this faux impression of him. The reality is Trump has a gifted sense of humor. In another life, he could have been a comedian. Now imagine holding comedians up to everything they say on stage – which ironically is what the left is starting to do to them, especially Dave Chappelle.
Everyone knew Trump was joking when he made his insults. They were over the top and made you laugh. But the left pretended they were serious. The left mastered taking his remarks out of context. They took it to a whole other level when they tried to claim his remarks called for violence on Jan. 6, resulting in criminal investigations.
A hundred years ago, Trump could have been a funny leader and no one would have batted an eye. But in this politically correct era of snowflakes where everyone pretends to be constantly offended, the left can make traction against someone like that. Think of how many people on the right you know who bought into it; people who ranted about Trump's mouth and don't want him to run again in 2024.
Trump had the same mouth – if not worse – before he got into politics and was wildly popular. "The Celebrity Apprentice" lasted for eight seasons, excellent for a reality TV show. At its debut, viewership rivaled "Survivor" and "American Idol" at their heights. And by its last season under Trump, it performed better than "Shark Tank" and "Dancing With the Stars." It has since bombed under Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Trump accomplished as much as Reagan, if not more. The inroads he made into picking up minority votes alone were incredible for a Republican president in the modern era – especially considering how the left's main criticism of the right today is that we're racist. But this new era of judging politicians by how politically correct they are will never allow him to be considered one of the great presidents. They've disqualified him based on his clever sarcastic wit.
Alexander lamented that other conservatives are being destroyed for taking the same approach:
Any other conservatives at the top fond of saying provocative things are also gradually being destroyed. In Congress, the biggest targets are Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz. Can you remember anything they've said that was over the top? Probably not, because taken within the entire context of how they were saying it – sarcasm, metaphor not literally, merely a coincidence, etc. – the comments weren't particularly remarkable. Only if you distort their statements and believe that they really want to do things like murder fellow Americans could you take them seriously. Never mind that The Squad has said far more provocative things.
We're not seeing where "context" or "sarcasm" would make things like, for example, Boebert's smearing Ilhan Omar as a terrorist or Greene calling for a "Second Amendment solution" to launch a civil war any less offensive. But we apparently are not brilliant comedians like Trump and Alexander.
It seems like the lesson here is that Trump and the others shouldn't say provocative (or obviously mean-spirited) things that can be easily taken out of context. That, of course, is not the lesson Alexander is taking. She insists that her fellow right-wingers support these folks anyway: "You may not personally like the flamboyant style of some of these outspoken leaders on the right and prefer that more well-spoken conservatives run for office. But even if that happens, the left is going to come after them eventually for minor statements."
Newsmax Bashes Fox News' Carlson For Supporting Putin Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's little war on Fox News has even gone after the channel's current golden boy, Tucker Carlson, calling out his defense of Russia and leader Vladimir Putin for his aggressions toward Ukraine. Former NATO commander (and onetime Democratic presidential candidate!) Wesley Clark went after Carlson in a Dec. 13 column:
Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made the surprising claim that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was justified in mobilizing military forces to threaten Ukraine.
Carlson’s comments betrayed a growing fault line in the Republican Party and American democracy itself.
The host went on to say that the buildup on the Russian-Ukrainian border was really NATO's fault for "tormenting" Putin.
Carlson is not only wrong in his analysis, but his claims have no basis in fact or history.
[...]
There are many in the GOP who still see Putin, rightly, as a danger to America and our interests.
But there are a growing number, like Carlson, who are embracing Putin, despite his near dictatorial control of Russia and his brutish menacing of his neighbors.
Fox News’ lead host Tucker Carlson is behaving like the discredited appeasers of Adolf Hitler in the prelude to World War II.
The lesson of 1930s appeasement is that it does not work, does not gain peace, and leads to even greater tragedy.
Today, Carlson is making excuses for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and his increasing threats against Ukraine.
Carlson even makes the fantastical claim that NATO has “tormented” Putin. He implies the North Atlantic alliance bears responsibility for a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Morris reiterated this in a Dec. 15 appearance on Newsmax TV, in which he declared: "If Vladimir Putin is the new wave of Hitler gobbling up country after country and threatening everyone else, then Tucker Carlson is the new Neville Chamberlain, the appeaser who makes excuses for him and undermines the will of the democracy — which is to stand up against him."
Morris wrote another column bashing Carlson on Dec. 17, in which he did something he has rarely done in the past two decades, praised his former employer Bill Clinton:
I've been flooded with responses, almost all positive, since my recent column "Tucker Carlson's Putin Play Mirrors Hitler Appeasement."
It's indeed worrisome for many that Fox News’ lead host has become such an ardent defender of Vladimir Putin, criticizing the U.S. while defending the Russian dictator’s territorial ambitions by saying he "just wants to keep his western border secure."
[...]
When I advised President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, he always stressed that Ukraine was "the key" to stopping the emergence of a new Russian empire in Eastern Europe.
Clinton grasped that supporting a free Ukraine while admitting Poland and Hungary into NATO created a "land bridge" from Western Europe to the former Soviet empire.
Morris also repeated his Hitler comparison: "Like Putin, Hitler claimed repeatedly that his aggression was 'defensive' because of his need for secure borders. Amazingly, the Carlsons of the 1930s bought Hitler’s fantastical claims hook, line, and sinker, just as the Fox News host does today."
Newsmax TV host Grant Stinchfield took a, um, different approach, arguing that Carlson is "operating under duress" and suggesting that "the leftist leaders of this Trojan horse of a so called conservative network has compromised" him. Stinchfield offered no evidence that Fox News is run by "leftist leaders."
Like MRC Parent, CNS Rooted For Biden To Release Oil From Reserve -- Then Scoffed When He Did Topic: CNSNews.com
Like its Media Research Center parent, CNSNews.com pushed the idea that President Biden should release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help lower gas prices -- then dismissed its impact when he did. Let's look at how CNS pushed the idea:
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced the plan on Tuesday when asked about whether the president will tap the Strategic Oil Reserve if gas prices reach a certain price.
“On the economy, I don’t know if you saw The New York Times this morning about the cost of Thanksgiving could be some of the highest that we’ve seen in a long time. Obviously, you heard the president talk about gas prices at that CNN town hall. Would there be a price that gas would have to get that the president would say, okay, now’s the time to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?” a reporter asked.
The president has not yet said whether he will tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, although "he's certainly looking at that," Granholm said. She said it depends on the price forecast due out in a few days.
The White House on Tuesday said that it is “closely and directly monitoring” gas prices after a group of 11 Democrats sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to explore options like banning crude oil exports and tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices at the pump.
When Biden made the decision to release oil from the SPR, CNS quickly went into attack mode. We already noted how CNS published numerous false claims by Donald Trump about the SPR that went unchallenged, and how reporter Susan Jones scoffed that it "may lower fuel prices just a little for a short time."
Managing editor Michael W. Chapman similarly dismissed in a Nov. 23 article:
President Joe Biden's decision to release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices is "less than three days of U.S. oil consumption," and will have "no meaningful impact on gas prices," said Steve Milloy, a former Trump EPA transition member and the founder of JunkScience.com.
[...]
In a Nov. 23 tweet, Milloy wrote, "Joe Biden is going to release 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That is less than three days of US oil consumption (18 million barrels/day during the pandemic year of 2020). The release will have no meaningful impact on gas prices. Ridiculous."
Chapman censored the fact that the SPR release was coordinated with releases from other countries to have a greater impact on prices.
The next day, Jones returned to dismiss the SPR release anew as "an attempt to temporarily reduce gasoline prices by a few pennies," then mocked Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for not answering a question about how much oil the U.S. uses daily to her satisfaction.
Taht sort of lockstep movement between CNS and the MRC appears to show that the "news" organization has no editorial independence from its parent -- and is little more than a right-wing propaganda rag.
How Has The MRC's War Against Facebook Been Failing Lately? Topic: Media Research Center
It's been a while since we last checked in on the Media Research Center's failing waragainstFacebook -- a war that's failing because it clings to its discredited talking point that Facebook is exclusively "censoring" conservatives solely because they post things in the conservative mainstream. (That faulty narrative has forced the MRC to mainstreammany right-wing extremists as garden-variety conservatives.) We've shown how the MRC is lashingout at Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen for no real reason other than she's not an exreme right-winger like the "big tech" whistleblowers it has showered attention on in the past and that her criticisms have gotten more traction than anything the MRC has done. Let's go back to late July and August to see how that war has continued to fail.
Alexander Hall devoted a July 28 post to complaining -- under the ridiculously alarmist headline "Free Speech Armageddon" -- that Facebook had added another fact-checker called Meedan to focus on health misinformation: "Censorship incoming? Facebook makes a massive partnership with a leftist-supported organization to assist its so-called fact-checking about COVID-19 vaccines." He went on to issue personal attacks on Meedan personnel, including one board member who he claims "is part of a group of leftwing activists who created a pretender Facebook Oversight Board urging far more stringent censorship for Facebook."
On Aug. 6, Hall took a pro-censorship viewpoint (since said censorship makes conservatives look somewhat better than they would otherwise): "Leftists are furious that Facebook disabled research accounts analyzing the 'spread of misinformation on the platform,' according to Cybersecurity for Democracy. The real furor is because the left uses 'misinformation' as a synonym for conservative content they are desperate to censor." Hall offered no evidence to back up his claim that that the data was used only by "the left" to "censor" conservatives.
Putting "misinformation" in scare quotes or dismissing it as "so-called" is another way the MRC pushes its victimization narrative. That theme continues in later posts.
Gabriela Pariseau used an Aug. 17 post to rant: "Members of Facebook’s Oversight Board revealed that the board prefers to operate under the guideposts of globalism and so-called consistency — not American values enumerated in the First Amendment." Why? Because "the Facebook Oversight Board’s priorities lie in alleged consistency and globalism rather than the American values of free speech and free expression." Pariseau declined to admit that the First Amendment offers no protection to misinformation and lies.
Autumn Johnson pushed a government-facebook conspiracy in an Aug. 19 post:
Facebook is taking action after pressure from the White House. The Biden administration blamed the platform for the majority of coronavirus “misinformation.”
The news comes after the White House blamed accounts on the platform for spreading misinformation.
"There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.
Johnson offered no evidence that any "pressure" from the White House directly led to Facebook taking the action, despite going on to claim that "Some argue pressure from the federal government should classify Big Tech social media platforms as 'state actors.'" That list of 12 people who spread COVID misinformation, by the way, came from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which the MRC impotently attacked a couple months later for putting it on a list of groups that misinform about climate change.
Facebook is reportedly creating an election commission to weigh in on political affairs across the globe, according The New York Times.
The commission is expected to be announced just in time for the 2022 midterm elections in the United States. It seems that Facebook wants to use the commission to make decisions about the content it chooses to allow on the platform in an effort to shield itself from criticism.
Facebook has been in the sights of both liberals and conservatives in recent weeks for its content moderation decisions.
Johnson went on to claim that "Facebook's alleged fear of looking bad to the left and its media allies shouldn't go unnoticed," ciring the infamous "poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, shows 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter." Johnson failed to disclose that McLaughlin was Trump's election pollster, throwing doubt on the poll's accuracy and impartiality.
An Aug. 31 post by Pariseau featured her boss, Brent Bozell, whining that Facebook's plan to "reduce political and news content in its News Feed" will “disproportionately” affect conservatives. Johnson went on to inadvertently debunk the MRC's narrative that conservatives are victimized and "censored" on Facebook:
Bozell’s criticisms are not unfounded. Facebook wrote a blog last year that showed which Facebook pages generated the most engagements on posts that included links during the week of Oct. 23 through Oct. 29, 2020. The blog post showed that three of the top five pages and six of the top 10 pages included prominent conservatives, news organizations and groups including: Dan Bongino, Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, USA Patriots for Donald Trump and Donald Trump for President. The Twitter account Facebook’s Top 10 shows that the weekly trend has similarly continued to the present.
CNS Finds Another Anti-Vaxxer Catholic Priest Topic: CNSNews.com
Michael P. Orsi isn't the only Catholic priest with right-wing anti-vaxxer leanings to which CNSNews.com has given a platform. Managing editor Michael W. Chapman wrote in a Nov. 30 article:
In his sermon on Sunday, Nov. 21, the day when the Catholic Church celebrates Jesus Christ as king of Heaven and Earth, Rev. Ed Meeks, apparently in reference to COVID vaccination mandates, said "no earthly king or president or public health official ... gets to dictate what we must put into our bodies."
If you seriously believe that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, given to you by God, then "no earthly king or president or public health official or billionaire technocrat gets to dictate what we must put into our bodies – into these temples of the Holy Spirit," said Rev. Meeks. "Because that’s between us and God."
Is Meeks saying that getting vaccinated against COVID is a violation of the idea that one's body is a "temple of the Holy Spirit" and, thus, disrespects God? That's a harmful thing for a Catholic priest to say. Even though he's not exolicitly portraying himself as an anti-vaxxer, he's leaning hard into it -- which would seem to violate Pope Francis' dictate that getting the COVID vaccine is a "moral obligation." The pope is Meeks' ultimate boss.
Chapman did not explain why Meeks is differing so drastically from the teachings of the head of his church -- or even tell readers that Meeks was, in fact, doing so. Indeed, the only times that CNS has referenced the pope's statement is in twoarticles around Easter complaining that President Biden had endorsed the statement.
CNSNews.com likes to pretend it's a "news" organization, but it's really a conservative talking-points enforcer with occasional stabs at "balance" to keep up the pretense of balance. We can show this with an example of both that add up to a textbook example of bad journalism. First, we have a Dec. 13 bit of stenography from Susan Jones, to the point where she just copied-and-pasted part of a direct transcript:
It's something of a spectacle to see the Media Research Center -- home of some of the shoddies "media research" -- lash out at the allegedly shoddy media research of others. Taht's what Tim Graham did in a Dec. 4 
Jack Cashill's Dec. 8 WorldNetDaily 
The unemployment rate keeps going lower, so CNSNews.com 
It's time to 
Susan Jones has long been a highly biased reporter for CNSNews.com. She took it to another level in a Dec. 14 
Trump pardon beneficiary Conrad Black continued 
Wayne Allyn Root had a lot of news to tell in his Dec. 6 WorldNetDaily 
The 
In her Dec. 6 WorldNetDaily 
Newsmax's 
Like its 
Michael P. Orsi
