MRC Unsurprisingly Hated Biden's Speech Topic: Media Research Center
Like WorldNetDaily and its "news" division CNSNews.com, the Media Research Center did not like President Biden's speech calling out their fellow right-wingers as the threats to democracy they are. In a pre-speech post, Nicholas Fondacaro set up the right-wing narrative of Biden (and not thte highly divisive Donald Trump) as the real divider, and whine about CNN as well:
In another example of his open defiance of new CNN boss Chris Licht’s order to be less egregious in their partisanship, Don Lemon spent part of his eponymous show on Wednesday arguing with Republican Scott Jennings and absurdly claiming that President Biden was “unifying” the country by calling Republicans fascists. He even suggested it was “the truth about what is happening in the country” and asked, “where’s the lie?”
Jennings noted that Biden had abandoned his message of unity from his 2020 campaign and inaugural address. “Yes. But a lot has happened between now and his inaugural address,” Lemon scoffed at the objection.
After the speech, the pro-Republican Bill D'Agostino started the whinefest by complaining that people outside his right-wing bubble liked it:
President Biden’s Thursday night speech was a big hit on the pro-Democrat TV networks. CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News Now all carried the event and heaped effusive praise on their favorite president’s rhetoric.
CNN and MSNBC were rife with the usual Democrat cheerleading that viewers have come to expect from left-wing cable. Panelists praised the speech as “fascinating,” “optimistic,” and “very, very patriotic.”
Curtis Houck insisted it was "GROSS" (as he stated in all-caps in his headline) for Biden to call right-wing extremists what they are:
The “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC eagerly reported Friday morning how President Biden spent Thursday evening declaring former President Trump and his 74-million-plus voters not only dangerous but threats to national security (despite Biden’s attempts to walk it back).
Instead of offering pushback or noting how the speech was an official White House event in Philadelphia with Marines flanking him, the morning news shows trumpeted his “blistering,” “charged,” and “fiery...speech” leveling of the GOP.
Don Lemon responded to President Biden’s Thursday partisan screed by accusing GOP critics of playing word games, because in his mind there is a big difference between allegations that Biden called Republicans fascists and the fact that he called MAGA a semi-fascist ideology. Lemon further alleged that anybody who doesn’t appreciate this difference is suffering from hearing loss.
Arguing with Republican strategist Alice Stewart, Lemon claimed, “So, Alice, we have been -- since he made that speech, we have been going, you know, back and forth about exactly what was happening, who is he calling. You know, the -- I think it was the semi-fascism. He made a clear distinction tonight.”
[...]
Stewart is correct, for all Lemon’s talk about MAGA Republicans and fascism versus semi-fascism, Biden also vilified pro-lifers and fear-mongered about contraception. That sounds like he was talking about more than 20 percent of the population.
Scott Whitlock huffed: "Doing the dirty work of Joe Biden, MSNBC vilified half the country on three separate shows, comparing the Democrat to Abraham Lincoln’s fight to save the union or Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetorical fight in 1940 against fascism. "
P.J. Gladnick tried to establish an alternate narrative, claiming that "As a reflection of just how poorly Joe Biden's dark speech in Philadelphia on Thursday about what he labeled as MAGA extremism was received, even a number of liberals criticized it." But he named only one person, a Washington Post columnist whom he did not prove was a "liberal." Tim Graham's podcast predictably stuck to the narrative:
President Biden gave a nasty primetime speech on Thursday night on how 'MAGA Republicans' are a threat to American democracy, and the media celebrated it as "reclaiming patriotism." He explicitly called out the entire Republican Party as threatening the future of democracy in America.
CNN’s S.E. Cupp traveled over to CNN International’s Amanpour and Company on Friday, which is broadcast in the United States on PBS, to discuss President Biden’s “semi-fascist” remarks. The allegedly conservative Cupp proclaimed the label to be “correctly” applied and it was “courageous” of Biden to do so.
Guest host Sara Sidner played a clip of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy condemning Biden for the remarks, which she saw as hypocritical, “Now, we certainly didn't hear McCarty saying anything like that for some of the comments that Donald Trump has made.”
Under that logic no Democratic can criticize Republicans without also denouncing Biden, but double run rampant at CNN and PBS. Stil, Sidner wondered, “is he correct that he -- that when Biden used this language, that he, basically, accused all Republicans with a similar brush, or do you think that he actually hit the right tone?”
Cupp responded by declaring that he did, “I think he correctly identified a strain within MAGA—MAGA— world. I mean, it -- there are very few words to describe what Republicans are doing.”
[...]
There is nothing less courageous than a Democrat calling a Republican a fascist given they know the media will defend them.
Not even a conservative like Christy smearing Democrats because his paycheck depends on it?
NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham discussed President Biden's primetime speech decrying 'MAGA Republicans' endangering democracy on Friday's Fox News at Night. Fox host Kevin Corke noted The Washington Post editorial board criticized the speech as more partisan than patriotic.
Graham slammed Biden for suggesting the entire Republican Party was a threat to democracy: "Good for The Washington Post editorial board for saying it was a nasty partisan speech. It doesn't actually accomplish what he thinks it was supposed to accomplish."
Mark Finkelstein complained about MSNBC guest host Tiffany Cross and guest Roland Martin endorsing Biden's speech, adding: "And note that Martin wasn't singling out ultra-MAGA Republicans as "evil." In inviting Martin to comment, Cross explicitly said that Trump's followers are 'mainstream, establishment Republicans [who] are echoing these calls for violence. All but threatening it.'"
CNN’s John Avlon approached Tuesday’s so-called reality check on New Day claiming to be a man of data as he defended President Biden’s recent speech denouncing “MAGA Republicans.” Yet, as Avlon lamented the “gnashing of teeth” from Republicans in response, Avlon again claimed Republicans are more extreme than Democrats.
[...]
After citing another poll, this one showing that only 33 percent of Americans want Donald Trump to run again, Avlon shifted to Biden’s speech, “But somehow despite all of this, the outrage du jourwas directed at President Biden’s speech on defending democracy in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Now, there was gnashing of teeth around the bizarre lighting and the presence of marines in the background, but the main GOP objection was that Biden was demonizing, quote, ‘half of America.’ Now, here’s what the president actually said.”
The clip showed Biden claiming that “not even a majority of Republicans are MAGA Republicans,” but Avlon naturally omitted the part of Biden’s speech were he also went after generic GOP policy, such as being pro-life. He also declined to call out his colleagues who have defended Biden by also seeking to expand the definition of extremist Republican to cover basic conservative policy.
It's worth noting that none of these MRC writers attempted a factual rebuttal of anything Biden had to sauy in his speech. And just because Christy doesn't think "basic conservative policy" is extreme doesn't mean it isn't.
UPDATE: Jeffrey Lord whined about the speech as well in his Sept. 3 column:
Without the slightest sense of self-awareness, President Biden’s highly political speech in Philadelphia was delivered in front of two US Marines, sending the decidedly ironic message that the U.S. military was quietly behind Biden.
Recall when then-President Trump marched out of the White House to stand in front of the partially burned-in-a-riot St. John’s Episcopal Church across Lafayette Park from the White House — and was accompanied by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley? The media blew a gasket.
Lord went on to accuse supporters of the speech of engaging in "projection" -- while he's involved in his own projection by pretending that Trump never did anything "divisive."
WND Loses It Over Biden Speech Topic: WorldNetDaily
President Biden's Sept. 1 speech calling out right-wing extremists who threaten democracy didn't go over well at WorldNetDaily, which hurled all the invective it could find or invent to attack it. Bob Unruh was up first to parrot the response of right-wing evangelist Franklin Graham, who called the speech an attack on "freedom-loving Americans," followed by attacks from more of Unruh's fellow right-wingers. Unruh followed that by quoting the response of Donald Trump, who is the lead instigator in threatening democracy, and insert his own non-journalistic bias:
President Donald Trump, known for his blunt and often insulting social media comments while in office, was on familiar ground responding to Joe Biden's Philadelphia speech, in which the Democrat blamed patriotic Republicans for trying to kill democracy.
Trump suggested Biden is "insane, or suffering from late stage dementia."
[...]
Biden's speech, highly partisan while he stood in front of a blood-red backdrop and was flanked by U.S. Marines, essentially tried to make the entire 2022 midterm elections about President Trump.
That would divert the public's attention from Biden's own southern border crisis, rampant inflation that has hit America's low- and middle-income families extremely hard, food prices up by double digits, gasoline in the $6 range although it has edged back a bit in recent weeks, massive spending on "green" projects through the misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" and more.
Then came the hyperbolic reactions from WND's columnists. Here's a sampling:
That speech given by Biden was intended to incite civil war in America. Biden and his communist comrades want violence and a badly divided nation. They're daring us to start a civil war.
You know – exactly like all the BLM and antifa events of 2020.
They want us to do exactly what they already did. Riots, looting, torching, robbing, murder, attacks on police, billions in damage, thousands of businesses destroyed – but with the media's protection, it was all forgotten.
They want conservative patriots to do the same – except this time, their business partners in the media will make us into "America's Most Wanted." They'll call us Nazis, fascists, extremists, traitors, domestic terrorists and insurrectionists. Oh, wait: Biden already called us all of that in his speech – before we've ever done a thing. Can you imagine what they'd say if we actually committed violence?
After hearing the president criticize the people who do not agree with him politically, I was left with a feeling of disgust. It seems to me that the man who is in the office of president of my country, declared the winner of the prior election, and considered the leader of the free world, would have more decency than to accuse his political opponent and his supporters of undermining democracy.
It was a cheap shot, and there was much more. He said that free elections are in danger, that our very democracy is at stake, and he warned of political violence, saying that those opponents are fanning those political flames.
All this – and the event was paid for by taxpayers. Great! Americans – Democrats and Republicans – were paying for their president to slam and insult them.
This guy is totally sick, depraved, a hater like no other elected American president in our lifetime, perhaps besides Woodrow Wilson.
We can talk about the influence of Biden's "handlers" – Barack Obama, Susan Rice, Marc Elias, the law firm of Perkins Coie, Ronald Klain. This sounded more like straight on George Soros with a tinge of Adolf Hitler.
[...]
From the standpoint of optics, it was a cross between what you would see from the Antichrist and Molech – only darker and more threatening.
And this was a speech about "the soul of the nation." Uh-uh. Rather, this was a reflection of Biden's soul.
In front of a creepy dark red backdrop, with men in military uniforms standing several feet behind him that has since been compared to a scene from George Orwell's dystopian "1984," Biden accused "the extreme MAGA ideology" of engaging in an "ongoing attack on democracy."
[L]et me discuss his Philadelphia debacle. It couldn't have been more crude and disgusting if Hillary Clinton, Stacy Abrams and the Obama woman dressed in two-piece string bikinis and lip-syncing the Dixie Chicks had replaced the Marine Corps Band.
However, I did agree with Biden 100% when he opined: "Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal."
It's not normal in America to force men and women to have deadly toxins injected into them to maintain their employment or careers. That's blackmail and extortion promoted and codified by the federal government.
[...]
I've been around and involved in a lot of elections; I've never witnessed an election in America where a sitting president or presidential candidate who was as close to a guaranteed winner as could be, had millions of votes taken away in the literal middle of the night. This was third-world banana republic fraud.
Recently, Biden came out of hibernation, and his handlers put him on stage in an ominous, almost Nazi-like setting with a blood-red backdrop, flanked by military guards (never done before in America) as his staff prepped him to project a "tough guy"-Clint Eastwood image, declaring with clenched fists that he was "defending our democracy in the battle for the soul of our nation!"
In this nationally televised address coinciding with the previous day's speech (when he called out traditional conservatives as "semi-fascists"), G.I. Joe issued a red alert regarding the barbarians at the gate as he harangued against patriotic supporters of former President Trump and labeled them as scoundrels who are "extremists … angry … promoting violence … anti-Constitution … taking away contraceptives … stealing our freedoms … undermining our democracy."
[...]
Biden believes he is historically a "messianic" figure like Lincoln during the Civil War and FDR in World War II. I personally pray for him daily but believe he is cognitively deficient, living in a state of denial and devoid of a moral compass to protect human life in the womb, on the border or in war-torn Afghanistan where multitudes were callously left behind as the Taliban reconstitutes, enslaves masses and puts women back into slavery. Where is the outcry from the women of the world?
Like Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden is an accidental president. Carter was given the prize because of Nixon's resignation, Watergate and a weak Jerry Ford. Biden got the job because of COVID, collusion lies (launched by Hillary) and a biased media relentlessly trashing Trump while ignoring the scandal of Biden and his son along with Hillary Clinton's destruction of her 30,000 emails with no FBI investigation of her home.
To anyone not living in Joe Biden's Bizarro World it is clear that the Americans who do care about limited constitutional government and the rule of the law are the nation's conservative, those and a few stray friends.
How did such a twisted and demonic speech come out of the mouth of an American president? I speculate here, but I suspect that Biden's unholy ghost may have been Satan himself.
President Joe Biden's disastrous speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia last Thursday made headlines, not only for the backdrop of blood-red lighting (which made the building's decorative molding behind Biden look eerily reminiscent of the stiff-winged eagle used by the Social Democratic Party of Nazi Germany), but even more for the deceitful and inflammatory accusations Biden leveled at half the country.
[...]
But this was no mere speech-writing misfire; the panic-pimping is deliberate.
And dangerous.
[...]
It is Biden and the far-left Democrats who pose the real threat to the American system and our way of life. It is not enough to criticize Biden for his false and vicious attacks on Americans. He and his political cronies must be punished by removing them from positions of power for good.
Could OBiden's Nazi-themed speech of Sept. 1 have been subtle psychological preparation of the American people for imminent war with Russia and a not-so subtle taunt and mockery of Vladimir Putin's pledge to de-Nazify Ukraine (and the West)?
Nope, they didn't take it very well at all, and they're projecting -- pretending that their beloved Trmp was never polarizing or hateful toward his political opponents.
MRC Whines That Yelp Accurately Describes What 'Crisis Pregnancy Centers' Do Topic: Media Research Center
How much of an anti-abortionextremist is the Media Research Center? It gets mad when you accurately describe what anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" do. Matt Philbin whined in an Aug. 23 post:
For the abortion-worshipping left, every live baby is a missed opportunity. For every unterminated pregnancy there’s a woman who can no longer have a big powerful career, carefree autonomy and meaningless casual sex. It’s a feminist nightmare.
So it helps to have tech companies like Yelp on their side. And make no mistake: Yelp has definitely chosen a side. It was an early entrant to the Moloch List, corporations who made a public show of offering to pick up abortion (and “gender affirming”) travel costs for employees who live in less bloodthirsty states.
Now, as reported by Axios, Yelp is putting warnings on listings for crisis pregnancy centers, lest babies slip through the abortion net.
Starting today, Yelp will add a consumer notice to both faith-based and non-faith-based crisis pregnancy centers noting that they "provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
Sure enough, if you look up such establishments on Yelp, the tag of shame is there.
As Axios explains, “Crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services but promote themselves to people seeking abortions and then typically counsel the patients to go through with their pregnancies.” This, to the delicately attuned moral sensibilities of abortion enthusiasts, is unconscionable.
"Tag of shame"? We thought the MRC was proud of how CPCs deceived women and coerced them into not having an abortion (though it has lied in the past by denying that they do any such thing, despite copious evidence to the contrary). If Philbin is happy with what CPCs do, he should have no problem whatsoever with those services being accurately labeled -- after all, he made no effort to dispute the accuracy of that description.
(Oh, and the "Moloch List" is what the MRC maliciously calls its list of companies that will provide resources for employees who choose to have an abortion.)
But because Ohilbin lives in a hateful alternate reality, telling the truth is a threat to him:
Axios helpfully stressed that “Just noting that crisis pregnancy centers provide limited medical services doesn't address all the criticisms around such facilities.”
No, because most of the criticisms are window dressing on the pro-abortion gang’s hatred of women in crisis choosing to bring their babies to term. You have to wonder if the libertine left deep down realizes that those women who don’t kill their babies for convenience stand as a silent rebuke to the rest.
Philbin clearly doesn't believe women should have free will when it comes to the decision to carry a child to term, so he loves that CPCs deceive and coerce women -- and he would rather the world not know that inconvenient fact. So much for the notion that anyone at the MRC cares about telling thet truth.
CNS Targets Republicans Who Support Gay Marriage Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com -- in particular, homophobicmanagingeditor Michael W. Chapman -- does not like the idea of gay marriage, and it likes even less that its fellow right-wing ideologues are refusing to hate gay marriage as much as it does. (Reduced right-wing anti-LGBT hate is something it has previously complained about). So when gay marriage became an issue again this summer when right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that the Obergefell ruling that legalized gay marriage should be overturned as well, CNS was shocked to find that Republicans were not rushing to embrace that view. An anonymously written July 20 article, under the headline "47 Republicans Vote to Enshrine Homosexual Marriage in Federal Law," felt the need to name the names of the Republicans who deviated from right-wing ideology:
Forty-seven Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives joined 220 Democrats on Tuesday in voting to enshrine homosexual marriage into federal law.
The “Respect for Marriage Act” was passed 267-157 by the House with 7 members not voting.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, is designed to be a backstop if the Supreme Court someday issues a decision overturning Obergefell vs. Hodges, the 2015 opinion in which the court declared that the 14th Amendment had created a right for two people of the same sex to marry each other.
[...]
The 47 Republicans who voted to enshrine same-sex marriage in federal law included Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming; Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York; Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota; Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska; Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida; Rep. Ken Calvert of California; Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York; and Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida.
Yes, the anonymous writer insisted on using "homosexual marriage," even though it's a term that no normal human uses in real life.
Two days later, an article by summer intern Janey Olohan tried to corner Republican Sen. John Cornyn with a gotcha question noting the House passage of the bill: "Do you believe that a baby has a right to a mother? Or are two fathers just as good as a mother and a father?” Cornyn apparently disappointed CNS by answering that “It’s already the law of the land. I think it’s a contrived issue because the Supreme Court decided the issue, so I don’t see any reason for the Congress to act," which may explain why no other member of Congress was asked the same question.
When more Republicans came out in favor of gay marriage, Chapman was so outraged that he wrote two articles about it that basically said the same thing. In a Sept. 12 article, Chapman groused:
More than 400 former and current GOP officials have signed a letter backing the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation that would repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act and legally recognize gay marriage as valid under state law. The Supreme Court already ruled (in 2015) that same-sex marriage is legal and this bill would essentially codify that ruling into federal law.
The Democrat-dominant House passed the Respect for Marriage Act on July 19. The legislation is now in the Senate, which is split 50-50 Democrat-Republican. Democrats need at least 10 Republicans to sign onto the bill to attain the 60 votes needed to surpass a filibuster.
GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Me.) and Rob Portman (Ohio) are co-sponsors of the bill. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) supports the legislation, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has indicated she backs gay marriage.
The new letter signed by GOP officials in support of the Respect for Marriage Act was produced by Centerline Action and Conservatives Against Discrimination.
For reasons that are unclear, Chapman felt the need to write this article again two days later. This time, though, he made sure to put "gay marriage" in scare quotes and added more names:
More than 400 prominent Republicans have signed on to a letter in support of "gay marriage" and the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect such couplings in federal law and repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
News of the letter surfaced on Monday, Sept. 12, and the list of names was released today by Centerline Action, a new organization that describes itself as being "focused on forging consensus to advance centrist policy solutions capable of defending core constitutional freedoms and liberties, preserving a free market economy, and limiting the role of government in Americans’ everyday lives."
[...]
Some of the 400-plus names of prominent Republicans who support "gay marriage" include,
Bob Packwood, former U.S. senator for Oregon
John Danforth, former U.S. senator for Missouri
Christopher Cox, former U.S. representative for California and chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Barbara Bush, daughter of former President George w. Bush
Mary Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney
Barbara Comstock, former U.S. representative for Virginia
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office
Mary Matalin, former assistant to President George W. Bush
Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy under President George W. Bush
Margaret Tutwiler, spokesperson for the U.S. State Department under President George W. Bush
Olympia Snowe, former U.S. senator for Maine
Christopher Shays, former U.S. representative for Connecticut
Mehmet Oz, current GOP nominee for U.S. senate for Pennsylvania
Tom Ridge, former assistant to the president for Homeland Security
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, former U.S. representative for Florida
Karen Rove
Rick Lazio, former U.S. representative for New York
Tony Fabrizio, Republican pollster
S.E. Cupp, columnist and political commentator
Other signers of the letter are listed below.
Chapman seems to be putting his hatred of LGBT people ahead of fair and efficient journalism.
MRC Still PR Agent For Trump's Social Media Site -- And Censoring Its Growing Problems Topic: Media Research Center
Truth Social, the social media operation to which Donald Trump has lent his alleged prestige and encouraged his cult following to join, has been making news lately -- but for the wrong reasons:
It has reportedly been banning users who posted about the House hearings on the Capitol riot -- so much for it being the "free speech" platform conservatives say they want to to counter the likes of Twitter.
A man who tried to attack an FBI field office and then led police on a chase and was subsequently killed in a shootout was a prolific user of Truth Social, where he avdiy posted about his desire to kill FBI agents with no apparent intervention from content moderators.
Truth Social is falling behind on its bills and its stock price is plunging -- in no small part because it's so inextricably tied to a mentally unstable former president -- the board of directors can't get enough votes to secure an extension to merge the company into a shell company, and the shell company has changed its mailing address to a box at a UPS Store.
But the Media Research Center doesn't want to talk about that. It's a Trump shill, which means it's also been an even biggershill for Truth Social. It will only act as a PR agent, not be an honest reporter of facts. Autumn Johnson was in full press-release mode in an Aug. 23 post touting a new partnership:
On Tuesday, the Donald Trump-backed site Truth Social made a big splash when they announced that they will Rumble’s first publisher.
The video streaming platform released a statement detailing the partnership as the first of its kind.
"We are excited to have Truth Social as our very first publisher on the Rumble Ad platform," said Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski. "A significant part of the internet is now served through the Rumble ecosystem, which gives advertisers a new place to target customers aligned with our mission to fight back against cancel culture. We look forward to proving the incredible size and performance of this market."
Trump Media and Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes said with the partnership, both companies are "poised" to beat out major Big Tech platforms as a leading venue to interact with millions of people.
No bad news here, just a barely disguised press release.
Since the MRC loves it when its fellow right-wingers can play victim, Gabriela Pariseau afforded Truth Social that opportunity in an Aug. 30 post:
Google is barring Truth Social from the Google Play Store, meaning a reported 44 percent of Americans can’t access the pro-free speech application.
“Google is canceling conservatives ahead of an election. They’re not even hiding their efforts to sway elections anymore,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell.
Axios reported that Google has not yet approved Truth Social’s Android app for distribution on the Google Play Store. CEO of Truth Social Devin Nunes said “when” former President Donald Trump’s social media app will be available on Android is “up to the Google Play Store.”
When reached for comment, a Google spokesperson told MRC Free Speech America:
On August 19 we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play. Last week Truth Social wrote back acknowledging our feedback and saying that they are working on addressing these issues.
You will not be surprised to learn that Pariseau did not mention the incident with the wannabe FBI murder that perfectly illustrates Truth Social's issues with content moderation. She also provided no evidence to back up her boss' claim that the rejection of the app is all about "canceling conservatives" -- which means that this post is a complete partisan fraud. Indeed, Pariseau spent the rest of the post attacking Google for purportedly "censoring information that goes against the left’s narrative on a wide array of topics" -- an allegation for which she also doesn't provide evidence.
The MRC will not tell you the truth about Truth Social -- it's too invested in the right-wing narratives it feels it must perpetuate.
Newsmax Still Airing Trump Rallies, Claiming It Has Better Ratings Than Fox News Topic: Newsmax
On top of touting Donald Trump's election picks and defending him from the Mar-a-Lago raid, Newsmax is still obsessively covering his weekend rallies -- and gloating that it gets better ratings than Fox News when it does so. For Trump's rally in Pennsylvania over Labor Day weekend, Newsmax did so again.
First came a couple preview pieces from Sandy Fitzgerald; the first repeated whatever rant Trump posted to his Truth Social pagt the previous night, while the second parroted Trump's unironic attack on the Democratic candidates in the state as "insurrectionists and lunatics." Needless to say, Fitzgerald didn't point out that Trump could very easily have been talking about himself, but she make sure to note that "Newsmax is airing Trump's rally live." Eric Mack followed up with an article detailing Trump's latest Truth Social insult-spewing; he furthered the Trump conspiracy narrative by claiming that the Mar-a-Lago raid was done "under the guise of retrieving documents for the National Archives," though he offered no evidence anything nefarious had been done by anyone but Trump.
Then came the usual raft of articles of various Trump statements by Mack, even though a single article would have sufficed:
Mack didn't fact-check anything he reported Trump saying, but he did do his corporate duty by pointing out that the rally "aired live on Newsmax."
The next day, Mack served corporate purposes again by touting a Trump post on Truth Social "saying the conservative network is opening the door for competition by turning to share the 'Democrat agenda.'" Mack added that "Previously, Trump has said 'Newsmax has been really good' while claiming that Fox News coverage cost him the 2020 election." That was joined by two more articles of Trump stenography from Mack:
Finally, after all this servile stenography, it was time to gloat. Jack Gornell did the job in a Sept. 6 article:
Newsmax's live coverage of former President Donald Trump's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, rally on Saturday beat Fox News in key ratings, according to Nielsen.
Newsmax was the third most watched cable network during the Trump rally speech, with an audience so large it even surpassed the combined ratings of CNN and MSNBC, pulling in more than 21% of both networks.
Nielsen also reported that Newsmax had a total audience of 1.7 million viewers for Trump's speech, with its overall coverage drawing over 1.9 million viewers.
[...]
The Newsmax ratings were even more impressive considering the network is carried in 20 million fewer homes than Fox News, but still outpaced the cable giant.
Newsmax continues to find that fawning, uncritical coverage of Trump has an audience -- though nobody's going to call it journalism.
WND Misleads About Another Dubious Study Promoting Ivermectin To Treat COVID Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily's chief COVID misinformer and ivermectin cheerleader, Art Moore, found a new study to mislead about in an Aug. 31 article:
A large study on the impact of using ivermectin as a prophylaxis for COVID-19 found that regular users of the drug experienced up to a 92% reduction in mortality compared to those who did not.
Brazilian research scientist Dr. Flavio A. Cadegiani said via Twitter that his study in his home country showed a "dose-response effect," meaning that "the more you used, the more protection you had."
He observed that people who use ivermectin regularly every 15 days for at least six to eight weeks had up to a 92% reduction in mortality.
Cadegiani conducted a previous study of drug that evaluated whether its use could impact COVID-19 infection and mortality rates.
But as fact-checkers at actual news organization Reuters pointed out, the study is obsservational, not direct research, meaning that it "cannot prove that ivermectin is the reason for apparent reductions in risk of death from any cause or from COVID-19 specifically. And that's just the start of the study's issues:
First, in addition to being unable to confirm whether ivermectin users actually took all the medication they received from the program, the authors acknowledge but do not factor-in the possibility that people identified as non-users or irregular users could have acquired the drug outside the city’s program and taken it on their own.
Dr. Stuart Ray, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told Reuters via email that “the accuracy of inferred ivermectin use seems to be low based on reports from the local health authorities in Brazil that many people took ivermectin who were not prescribed, and many who were prescribed ivermectin did not take it.”
Second, the study doesn’t account for other possible differences between the groups that could introduce bias in the calculations.
“The main shortcoming here is that the program was optional – and we know well from decades of literature, that those who choose to seek healthcare and take medicines are inherently different from those who do not,” Dr. Mark Siedner, an infectious disease clinician and clinical epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Reuters via email.
“There are also a number of additional shortcomings that have to do with missing data,” Seidner said. Referring to the 71,548 “moderate” users of ivermectin excluded from the analysis entirely, as well as the calculations based on small matched subsets of 283 people, he noted, “for example, almost half the sample appears to have been excluded and nearly 99% was excluded in their analysis that included age and health problems, and there is no good way of accounting for infection rates in people who were never tested.”
The study authors do acknowledge that they could have missed some hospitalizations, deaths, and COVID-19 infections that were not reported in the datasets they used.
In short: it's a low-quality study that ultimately can't definitively rove what it claims. Reuters summed up:
Observational studies like the one from Brazil help generate new ideas but do not provide the evidence required to make clinical or public health recommendations, Seidner said. “In light of so much better data showing ivermectin is not helpful, even in the early stages of COVID-19, the findings of this study should not be used for much more than to potentially encourage a better study to be done to explore its safety and benefit as a prevention agent.”
Moore won't tell you any of this, of course; instead, he spent the rest of his article rehashing oldgrievances about how legitimate medical authorities have repeatedly pointed out how legitimate medical research has shown that ivermectin really doesn't work against COVID, invoking shady COVID misinformers and fellow ivermectin enthusiasts like Pierre Kory and Harvey Risch.
NEW ARTICLE: A Month Of Rage Against Pride Topic: Media Research Center
Led by sports blogger John Simmons, the Media Research Center used the occasion of Pride Month to repeatedly spew hate and contempt at the LGBT community (and drag queens). Read more >>
MRC vs. A Dead Woman (Again): Anti-Sanger Post Filled With Lies And A Fake Photo Topic: Media Research Center
It says something about the Media Research Center's credibility that even though it has been repeatedly busted for spreading lies about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, it still feels it can lie about her with impunity -- as in this Sept. 26 post by Catherine Salgado. The first thing that's most visible is the image that accompanies it, as highlighted in a Sept. 30 tweet promoting it at the MRC's Free Speech America Twitter feed:
That photo is fake. As Snopes documents, Sanger was dishonestly added to a photo of a Ku Klux Klan rally. As of this writing -- more than a week after Salgado's item was posted -- the fake photo remains attached to it.
As for the post itself, Salgado started by writing:
Facebook and Instagram censored the Media Research Center, slapping an outdated fact-check on an MRC post of a quote criticizing Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s racist views.
The censorship came just one week after MRC Free Speech America published an exclusive in which Brownstone Institute founder and President Jeffrey Tucker accused Facebook of collaborating with government and choosing sides against Trump.
Media Research Center (MRC) posted a quote from former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson on Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta. Carson pointed out the racist roots of abortion giant Planned Parenthood.
“Planned Parenthood was started by Margaret Sanger who was a eugenicist,” he said. “She wanted to limit the numbers of black people and Hispanic people. That’s why the clinics are predominantly found in minority communities.”
Facebook and Instagram applied a PolitiFact fact-check to censor MRC and claim the post was “missing context.” The fact-check applied to the MRC post was from 2015, and was supposedly correcting an entirely different Ben Carson quote! Carson said in 2015 that Sanger “believed that people like me should be eliminated.”
Media Research Center president and founder Brent Bozell commented, “Planned Parenthood's founder was a vile racist who wanted to abort black babies. No fact check can change that.”
In fact, Sanger expressed explicitly racist views on eugenics and reportedly had ties both to Nazis and to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
So much to unpack here. As we documented the last time the MRC went on a lying spree against Sanger, she was very much a eugenicist -- as were many prominent people in her era -- but there's little evidence she was the "vile racist" Bozell wants his followers to believe she is. We also documented that it's not true that, as Carson claimed, Planned Parenthood clinics are "predominantly found in minority communities"; in fact, the majority of abortion clinices are found in white neighborhoods, and activists like Carson pushing that claim are invoking a dishonest study that portrayed any clinic within two miles of a black or Latino community to be close enough for consideration.
Salgado's evidence that Sanger held "explicitly racist views on eugenics" was a link to a 2020 CNSNews.com column by dishonest Catholic Bill Donohue, who quotes exactly one statement from Sanger that could be seen as racist if taken out of context (we'll get to that later).Salgado's link to prove that Sanger "had ties .. to Nazis" is a 2017 Breitbart article by notorious fabulist Dinesh D'Souza in which he identifies no direct "ties" to Naziism; in fact, as we've documented, Sanger was a member of an anti-Nazi committee and claimed her books were burned in Nazi Germany. Salgado furtherquoted D'Souza:
Sanger published an article by the chief architect of the Nazi sterilization program, and, in 1938, urged America to imitate Hitler’s program, according to Breitbart News. Breitbart wrote that two close Sanger associates praised Nazi eugenics programs.
Again, Sanger herself pointed out that “I was one of the few Americans who joined the Anti-Nazi Committee and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.” She added that “my three books were destroyed [burned] and have not been allowed to circulate in Germany.”
Salgado's link to prove that Sanger "had ties .. to the Ku Klux Klan" is a highly biased article at the anti-abortion activist site LifeNews that noted she once spoke at a gathering of a "women's branch" of the KKK.
Salgado continued her dishonesty:
Sanger also reportedly started the “ Negro Project” to limit the black population. She also declared that “minorities (including most of America’s immigrants) are inferior in the human race, as are the physically and mentally handicapped,” NewsBusters reported.
Discussing the “Negro Project,” Sanger wrote, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” according to a CNSNews.com commentary by Catholic League CEO Bill Donohue. According to a LifeNews report and another CNSNews.com commentary by Grove City College professor Dr. Paul Kengor, Sanger spoke at a 1926 KKK rally, which she boasted led to multiple other speaking invitations from white supremacist groups.
Again, Salgado cites highly biased sources to support the dishonest claim about the Negro Project -- D'Souza and Donohue.In fact, as the Washigton Post, a legitimate news organzation, detailed, the Negro Project was about birth control, not an attempt to eliminate black people, and the "exterminate the Negro population" quote, the post noted, "is frequently taken out of context to suggest Sanger was seeking to exterminate blacks," and actually came from a desire to recruit black leaders for the effort to allay suspicions blacks might have had about whites like Sanger being involved.
That 2017 CNS column by Kengor about Sanger speaking to a KKK women's group was actually a response to a Huffington Post article in which we called out Kengor for an earlier complain malicioiusly portraying the speech as evidence of her support for the KKK's mission. Kengor was ignoring the context that in 1926, when Sanger gave that speech, the KKK was something of a mainstream group with millions of members, and Sanger was seeking to get out her message of birth control to any audience that would have her. Kengor omitted that Sanger called the speech "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing." As we pointed out at the time, at the end of his CNS column, Kengor started backpedaling and conceded Sanger really wasn’t the rabid racist he has been suggesting the KKK speech made her, yet still tried to parse words anyway: "She was a racial eugenicist. Was she a racist-eugenicist? Be careful."
Still, Salgado whined:
Yet PolitiFact’s 2015 fact-check misrepresented that Planned Parenthood had not targeted black unborn babies in its early days and that eugenics is about “improv[ing] the human race by having people be more healthy through exercise, recreation in parks, marriage to someone free from sexually transmitted diseases, well-baby clinics, immunizations, clean food and water, proper nutrition, non-smoking and drinking.”
Maybe PolitiFact should do a little basic research on Sanger and her associates.
On the other hand, all the evidence Salgado has provided that Sanger had "targeted black unborn babies in its early days" is biased and/or fraudulent.Maybe Salgado is the one who needs to do "a little basic research"-- research that doesn't involve biased sources and mindless repeition of malicious lies
WND's Root Serves Up Even More COVID Misinformation Topic: WorldNetDaily
Wayne Allyn Root is a such prolificCOVIDmisinformer that he's utterly untrustworthy on the subject. So we have no reason to believe him when he devoted his Aug. 20 WorldNetDaily column to telling the story of a "credible doctor" who " wants to remain anonymous, for fear of losing his/her medical license for telling the truth about vaccine injuries." This alleged doctor -- who Root may or may not be making up in order to add credibilty to his own litany of misinformation -- is making claims like "Many of his patients were in cancer remission, but suddenly post-vaccine the cancer has come roaring back – except now it's spread everywhere in their bodies. He used to see skin cancer once or twice a month; now he sees it several times a week. Thyroid cancer has skyrocketed – and he reports that it's always diagnosed after the victims get the booster jab," and that the doctor's patienbts "older patients have aged horribly, literally overnight – since being vaccinated."
Conveniently, there's no documentation provided to back up any of this. But it allowed Root to get ranty:
No one gets it. It's as if everyone is brain-dead, clueless, delusional or brainwashed. The signs are everywhere. How many of you know someone who was vaccinated and died or suffered a bad illness soon thereafter?
We all do.
Wake up, America. I believe this COVID-19 vaccine is the worst medical experiment and health care disaster in history.
And here's the really frightening part: This is just the beginning. The vaccines only became widely available about 18 months ago. It surely is only going to get much worse.
Delusional and brainwashed? Root sounds like he's talking about himself and his easily disproven or unsupported conspiracies.
Root had even more COVID misinformation to share in his Aug. 26 column:
Have you ever heard of seven doctors dead in a 14-day period (from July 13 through July 28)? How about five dead doctors in a few days, in one city (Toronto)? How about 14 dead doctors in the past nine months? And these dead doctors were mostly YOUNG.
Do these headlines catch your attention? Because they're all true. Confirmed. Fact. It all just happened in Canada, a small country of 30 million (one-tenth the size of America).
In Canada they're obsessed with the COVID-19 vaccine. The government is ruthless to the point of appearing criminally insane. If you don't get vaccinated, it's difficult to live a normal life. And you absolutely can't practice medicine anywhere in Canada.
The anonymously written blog post Root linked to referenced that among this number included "three physicians at Trillium Health Partners had died in a matter of days." In fact, two of the doctors died of cancer and the third had been a doctor for nearly 40 years and was seriously ill before his death.That anonymous blogger admitted he (or she) had no proof the other two doctors had recently received vaccines or boosters -- which means that his narrative is a lie.
Root continued to fearmonger -- and to complain that his conspiracy was discredited by actual journalists:
Back to all these dead doctors – mostly young dead doctors. Have you ever heard of anything like this? Of course not, because it's never happened in my lifetime. I'm guessing it's never happened in history. Perhaps it happened during the plague in the Middle Ages (known as "the Black Death").
Maybe we should start calling the COVID-19 jab "the Black Death II."
Did you know about any of these dead doctors? Of course you didn't. It's been a total media blackout. Why would five dead doctors in one city be worthy of media coverage? Or seven dead doctors in 14 days in one small country? Nothing to see here. Just move along.
Canadians are freaking out. The shrieking noise on social media got so hot and heavy that a Canadian newspaper was forced to publish a story. A Toronto hospital was forced to admit in that newspaper story that five young doctors had in fact died. But they warned readers not to jump to conclusions. The vaccine had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Of course the vaccine had nothing to do with it. And former President Bill Clinton never had sexual relations with that woman.
[...]
Something is very wrong. It's apparent the vaccine is killing, crippling and disabling thousands per week. Deaths in the United States are skyrocketing higher than ever seen in history. So many of these victims are dropping dead "suddenly" and "unexpectedly." Those are the words in almost every obituary nowadays.
They've even developed a name for it: SADS (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome). One day they're perfectly healthy, but the next day they have died in their sleep, died in the middle of a business meeting, died while swimming, died while driving or died while playing sports.
Heck, last week a Saudi ambassador dropped dead in the middle of a speech, right in front of the TV cameras.
And then there's the dramatic explosion of cancer. Rare cancers. Fast-growing cancers. Stage 4 cancers. And these victims all just happen to be vaccinated (most of them with the booster).
As we pointed out when his WND colleagues pushed the conspiracy, SADS isn't a thing, and there's no evidence that the mid-speech death of the Saudi businessman -- not an ambassador, which Root would know if he had actually read the article he linked to about it -- had anything to do with COVID. Also, there'snoevidence that COVID vaccines cause cancer.
Root concluded by declaring, "Seven dead doctors in 14 days don't lie." But it's clear that Root does.
Newsmax's Hirsen Still Pushing Morality On Hollywood, -- But Won't Apologize For Election Lies Topic: Newsmax
James Hirsen has been positioning himself as an avatar of morality, even though it's clear he'll never apologize to his Newsmax readers for irresponsibly spreading false claims about the 2020 election being stolen -- even though that would be the moral thing to do. Instead, he's been trying to lecture Hollywood about moral issues (again, despite his own moral violations), and he continued to do that through the summer.
Hirsen's June 28 column cheered the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and bashed Hollywood types for criticizing the ruling:
Following the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, to return to the states the power to determine the legality of abortion, Americans now find themselves in a post-Roe v. Wade world.
What’s it like? In a word, awesome. But not for everyone.
Folks are still in disagreement with one another, perhaps more intensely than ever before.
We can’t even seem to come to terms with the premise that — there is no constitutional right to abortion but there is a fundamental right to life. So demonstrably obvious and yet so seemingly elusive.
Alongside the tragedy of abortion itself is the fact that we have fallen woefully short in bridging this divide.
Hollywood isn’t helping.
Celebrities of the pro-choice persuasion are using over-the-top language while simultaneously attempting to virtue-signal to the max. It’s occurring largely through social media.
As if Hirsen isn't also engaging in virtue-signaling by serving up rote attacks on Hollywood type for not being a right-winger like him. Indeed, he went on to praise right-wingers in Hollywood:
On a positive note, there are still a sizable number of prominent and influential Hollywood stars, who have fought the good fight in defense of our babies and their right to live.
Included in this brave bunch are Patricia Heaton, Kelsey Grammer, Mel Gibson, James Caviezel, Chuck Norris, Celine Dion, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Kirk Cameron, Candace Cameron Bure, Kanye West and Justin Bieber.
Hirsen spent his July 18 column complaining about the show "Stranger Things" touching on dark subjects (despite that's what you would expect from a show about the supernatural), grousing in particular that it's "a show about children and is highly attractive to children" (as if adolescents in real life have never had to deal with some very adult things):
Unfortunately, Season 4 of “Stranger Things” has descended to a base level of darkness that has parents, grandparents and guardians of the innocent casting the program out of homes, schools, etc., and questioning whether the show has the proper rating attached to it.
In addition to gruesome imagery and intensely aggressive behavior, Season 4 of the streaming series contains inappropriate sexual scenes and unnecessary profanity.
A reasonable explanation for the increasing coarseness of programming content is hard to come by.
Writers could have maintained the Steven Spielberg-influenced style and technique of the early episodes, which made Season 1 so appealing to viewers.
Instead the show altered its approach and is using enhanced computer graphics to peddle emotionally-laden themes, which feature graphic torture scenes, some involving child victims.
Hirsen went on to parrot complaints from the right-wing Parents Television Council that the show has too many swear words in it for at TV-14 show (CNSNews.com wrote up that very same PTC press release). Hirsen then admitted how much he was buying into the PTC press release: "
Where there’s awareness there’s hope. So as word about this issue gets out, the public just may get a ratings system that is once again accurate and reliable. After all, stranger things have happened."
Hirsen's Aug. 23 column hyped the new Christian film "Lifemark," starring the above-mentioned Kirk Cameron, proclaiming it "a movie that deals with some of the most central and poignant themes of our times — relationships, forgiveness, and the film’s primary focus: adoption." Hirsen provided a platform for Cameron and the film's makers to trash Hollywood andpiously promote their film's allegedly positive values. By contrast, a Christian reviewer found the movie boring and lacking conflict: "'Lifemark' portrays a healthy and wholesome family as one that never fights, where the teenage son never struggles with deep anger against God when bad things happen, where the parents are flawless and unquestionably wise and where trite Christianisms resolve all internal anguish. That’s not a healthy family. That’s a family that doesn’t exist anywhere, Christian or not."
Hirsen devoted his Aug.30 column to gushing over actor Shia LeBeouf for allegedly having undergobne a religious conversion to Cathoolicism while playing the title role in a film about Padre Pio, a Catholic priest who has recently been elevated to sainthood. Hirsen oddly soft-pedaled LeBeouf's pre-conversion behavior,stating only that "back in 2020 his former girlfriend had sued him, accusing him of sexual assault," which he called "debilitating" -- for LeBoeuf. In fact, the ex, musician FKA Twigs, accused LeBoeuf of not only that but much, much more, like knowingly passing an STD to her, and that her attorney also noted his history of abuse with women. And in an attempt at an apology to the ex in an podcast interview a few days before Hirsen's column was published, LeBeouf couldn't even say Twigs' name, referring to her only as "that woman."
Hirsen also hyped that "A transformational event in Shia’s personal journey was experiencing the Catholic Mass in its traditional Latin form." But he didn't mention who was apparently responsible for this embrace of right-wing, anti-Vatican II Catholicism: Mel Gibson. That's right -- Hirsen's far-right Catholic buddy and business partner whose relationship with him he kept secret for years while promotoing his film "The Passion of the Christ" and defending him after he was caught spewing anti-Semitic hate following a drunk-driving arrest.
Hirsen does have a bad habit of unethically hiding his Gibson connection; late last year, Hirsen hyped the film "Father Stu," another religious-themed project co-starring Gibson, without disclosing that it was directed by Gibson's girlfriend, Rosalind Ross.
CNSNews.com loves giving a platform to the musings of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz -- who just happens to employ the daughter of CNS editor Terry Jeffrey, making it seem there's a quid pro quo of some kind happening. Let's count up all the CNS articles promoting Cruz it has published in the past three months, shall we?
That's 19 articles touting Cruz in the third quarter, and a total of 54 so far this year. None of these articles fact-checked Cruz's claims, none disclosed that Cruz employs Jeffrey's daughter, and no explanatio has been forthcoming as to why CNS finds Cruz so overly newsworthy.
MRC Complains That Gorbachev Got Credit For Ending Cold War Topic: Media Research Center
When Mikhail Gorbachev died in late August, the Reagan worshipppers at the Media Research Center went on a whine-fest that he was being given credit for his role in ending the Cold War. Rich Noyes set the narrative in an Aug. 30 post by rehashing 30-year-old grievances:
The late talk radio star Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase “Gorbasm” for the ecstasy that many reporters felt when covering Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at age 91 on Tuesday. It’s true that Gorbachev was obviously less brutal than previous communist rulers. But his Soviet Union was hardly an enlightened, peace-loving democracy. While Gorbachev relaxed the repression of previous years, he did not shut down the Gulag, allow a free press, or permit the free expression of religion.
When the Baltic republics pushed for sovereignty in early 1991, Moscow’s Brezhnev-esque response was to use tanks to suppress pro-democracy forces in Lithuania and Latvia, killing eighteen.
Yet journalists elevated Gorbachev far above the freedom fighters, dissidents and democratic, anti-communist leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; indeed, the media assigned the Soviet party boss nearly all of the credit for ending the Cold War. Time magazine thought it insufficient to name him merely the “Man of the Year,” so in 1990 Gorbachev became their “Man of the Decade.”
Few, if any, democratic politicians have ever received the plaudits that were flung by journalists towards the last dictator of the Soviet Union.
With the breaking news that former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev was finally being a good communist on Tuesday, the broadcast networks collectively mourned for the man who violently cracked down on peaceful demonstrations in Lithuania and Latvia. Both CBS Evening Newsand NBC Nightly News took part in dangerous revisionist history as they “credited” Gorbachev with “lifting the Iron Curtain.”
NBC was by far the most obscene in their mourning for yet another communist dictator. Anchor Lester Holt led into the segment claiming Gorbachev had single-handedly “oversaw the end of the Cold War.”
And, of course, no praise for a communist dictator would be complete without chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who has a very long and public history of getting smitten with communist dictators. “Mikhail Gorbachev, the communist leader whose brief six-year reign transformed the map of Europe and the world,” she said.
Contrasting leaders from the time, Mitchell lauded Gorbachev for his “a larger vision for his country” and willingness to meet with President Ronald Reagan, who she framed as unreasonable for calling the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”
“Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who changed the world but could not save his own country from falling apart,” she went on to lament.
Fondacaro didn't explain how he decided that Mitchell was "lamenting" this. Can he read her mind? Or is he just imposing his right-wing bias on her?
Scott Whitlock similarly whined in an Aug. 31 post:
In order to build up the “acclaimed” Mikhail Gorbachev’s “monumental” role in ending the Cold War, the networks on Wednesday dismissed Ronald Reagan. On CBS Mornings, foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer huffed, “In the end, the East Germans tore down the wall for themselves, but Gorbachev didn't stop them.”
Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos cheered, “Now to the death of one of the most monumental figures of our time, Mikhail Gorbachev. Tributes poured in for the last leader of the Soviet Union who presided over the end of the Cold War and steered his country towards democracy.”
Stephanopoulos described Gorbachev as “acclaimed by the world, but disliked and soon ousted at home, forced to resign in 1991.”
Over on CBS Mornings, Palmer heaped on the praise: “Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev set out to reform the Soviet Union, and he ended up changing the world.” She then dismissed the role Reagan, pretending as if the end of the Cold War simply happened on its own:
Fondacaro complained further, bizarrely and hatefully claiming that Gorbachev "was finally acting like a good communist" by dying:
In the immediate wake of the world learning that former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev was finally acting like a good communist, CNN’s immediate reaction was to air glowing eulogies for a man who led one of the most evil empires in human history. In back-to-back hours on Tuesday, CNN showed “intense sadness” and took part in revisionist history claiming Gorbachev was the one responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and ending the Cold War.
[...]
Fill-in anchor Pamela Brown then looked to senior international correspondent Frederik Pleitgen to find out “just how monumental is Gorbachev's legacy?”
[A]bsolutely gigantic,” Pleitgen proclaimed. “And it's certainly something that really transcends not just obviously, Russia, the former Soviet Union, but then all of Europe and basically the entire world.” He too took part in revisionist history, dismissing President Ronald Reagan and asserting “Mikhail Gorbachev obviously, is credited with being pivotal in bringing down the Iron Curtain and bringing together unity in Europe.”
Tim Graham spent his Aug. 31 podcast whining about this:
When they announced the death of the last dictator of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, the liberal media elite broke out the valentines, giving Gorbachev all the credit for tearing down the Iron Curtain of communism. Ronald Reagan dared Gorbachev to tear down the wall, and Gorbachev is painted as a “towering international hero” for just letting it happen. Media liberals can't give Reagan any credit.
CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell said Gorbachev "took down the Iron Curtain." CNN reporter Phil Black called it an "iconic achievement" for Gorbachev. If all the Soviet leader faced were Carters and Mondales, would this story have ended differently? Because the liberals and their media allies thought of the Soviet Union as a permanent entity, more permanent than the United States. Reagan aspired to ending an evil empire, and it happened.
NBC's Andrea Mitchell reminded viewers that Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990...and Reagan never did. "Americans were charmed" by Gorbachev, Mitchell claimed, and apparently Reagan never charmed Americans. Because the liberal media thinks of Americans as having all the same opinions that they do. Obama and Jimmy Carter and Al Gore all won the Nobel, but "warmongers" on the right wing aren't going to win.
Clay Waters served up his own New York Times-related whine in a Sept. 1 post:
The New York Times continued to overpraise the Soviet Union’s last ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, upon his death in Moscow at 91, with an 8,000-word front-page tribute from obituary writer Marilyn Berger. The print edition front-page banner headline read “Visionary Soviet Leader Who Lifted the Iron Curtain” over a photo of Russia’s last dictator.
[...]
As usual in these Cold War retellings, the vision and foresight and accomplishments of actual opponents of Communism, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were given short shrift[.]
Days later, Jeffrey Lord kept the complaints going in a Sept. 10 column, grumbling that the Times obituary on Gorbachev "very little focus on the fact that Gorbachev was the Soviet leader in the first place because he had spent an adult lifetime nodding along to the massive, global violence of Soviet Communism. "
Donohue Whines That Pa. Candidate Exposed Catholic Priest Sex Abuse Topic: CNSNews.com
Bill Donohue went on a huge whine-fest in his Sept. 6 CNSNews.com column:
On the website of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro it boasts that when he was Attorney General of the state he “exposed the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover up of child sexual abuse, identifying over 300 predator priests and thousands of victims and spurring investigation across the United States.”
This is a distorted account of Shapiro’s shameful grand jury investigation of Catholic priests. (For more on this subject see my book, The Truth About Clergy Sexual Abuse.)
Shapiro convinced the media that he found evidence of 301 priests who abused more than 1,000 children over a period of 70 years. This is thrice false (1) not all the alleged offenders were priests (2) most of the alleged victims were adolescents, not children, and (3) the report was not evidentiary—it was investigative—meaning that the accused priests were never given the opportunity to rebut the charges.
Importantly, nothing could be done about most of those who were actually guilty. Almost all the accused were either dead or had been thrown out of the priesthood. No wonder Shapiro was able to prosecute only two priests. He knew this from the get-go, but he used the report to push for a suspension of the statute of limitations.
Shapiro misused the grand jury for political purposes, and now he is at it again.
As befits the dishonest Catholic he is, Donohue loves to parse the difference between children and adolescents to downplay the Catholic abuse scandals. As Wonkette pointed out, much of adolescence takes place during childhood. Further, as Wonkette also pointed out, "It’s not Shapiro’s fault that the Catholic Church managed the coverup for so long that victims were denied legal recourse or true justice."
Donohue then proclaimed how how his Catholic League fought to keep secret "the names of 11 priests who claimed that doing so would violate their reputational rights as guaranteed by the state constitution," insisting that the grand jury empaneled by Shapiro couldn't be trusted because "grand jury reports are not factual." He provided no evidence that anything in the grand jury report is "not factual."
Donohue continued his distraction gambit:
What is particularly galling about Shapiro is his total disinterest in prosecuting sexual molesters in the public schools. That’s where this problem has been the most serious.
Yet he has never once shown any interest in holding teachers and administrators accountable for their delinquency. This kind of bias—one standard of justice for priests and another for educators—is despicable.
Donohue offered no proof that the state of Pennsylvania is not prosecuting sexual abuse cases involving public schools, nor did he offer any evidence that public schools are hiding sexual abuse to the extent that the Catholic Church did. As Wonkette further noted: "It’s usually good politics to prosecute child molesters wherever you find them, but admitting to students that queer people exist is not child abuse. If Donohue is confused on what constitutes actual child abuse, he can read Shapiro’s grand jury report."
MRC Still Trying To Falsely Portray Politico's Right-Wing Owner As 'Woke' Liberal Topic: Media Research Center
Last year, the Media Research Center's Joseph Vazquez laughably tried to portray the new owner of Politico, the German conglomerate Axel Springer, as relentlessly left-wing -- despite the fadt that the company is actually very much right-leaning. Jeffrey Clark gave that false narrative another shot in a Sept. 6 post:
Politico owner and billionaire Mathias Döpfnerb [sic] reportedly told The Washington Post that he supports “nonpartisan” journalism, despite multiple attacks on former President Donald Trump in just the last few years.
Döpfner’s media company, Axel Springer, bought out Politico for a massive $1 billion back in 2021. Ever since then, the Media Research Center has documented multiple instances of Politico’s far-left bias.
The outlet defended Biden’s disastrous economic record, scolded Republicans as “pouty” and even labeled Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling a “Death Eater” for her opinions on “trans rights.”
But that didn’t stop The Washington Post from presenting Döpfner as a champion of “nonpartisan” journalism in a Sep. 6 profile of the billionaire’s dreams for Politico’s future.
The German billionaire is reportedly “concerned” that “legacy” media outlets like The New York Times and even The Washington Post have been “drifting to the left.” But Döpfner also slammed “conservative media” as “under the sway of Trumpian” influence, according to the same Post story.
This is the same Döpfner who once claimed that “Trump speaks the language of the mafia,” in a 2017 column.
He also blamed the former president for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in a 2021 op-ed, arguing that Trump had called “a coup against democratic institutions.”. “What does Trump have to do in order to be perceived by a sufficiently large number of Republicans as a democracy threat and thus no longer acceptable,” Döpfner whined.
What about those statements are “nonpartisan,” Washington Post?
But Clark doesn't prove those claims are "nonpartisan." As we've noted, nujmerous people have pointed out that Trump does, on fact, "speaks the language of the mafia," making that an objective statement. It's also undeniable that Trump incited the Capitol riot, and Clark doesn't even bother to deny it. Instead, Clark tried to pile on:
Döpfner even told The Washington Post that he is in contact with a “circle of people that hate Donald Trump.”
But somehow, The Post seemingly could not make sense of Döpfner’s public disdain of Trump, calling the billionaire’s politics’ “something of a mystery.” What’s more of a mystery is how The Post can’t at least get a hunch as to the political leanings of a man who attended a lewd, leftist “LGBTQI+” parade in July.
Yes, merely not hating LGBT people is evidence of being irredeemably liberal. More importantly, Clark censored the fact that the Post profile also noted that Döpfner sent out an email to company executivesthe day of the 2020 election stating, “Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?”Which would seem to indicate he doesn't hate Trump as much as Clark wants you to believe.
Clark went on to whine: "The irony of a publicly anti-Trump billionaire inserting himself into American politics and prattling on about neutrality was apparently lost on Döpfner." Clark, meanwhile, apparetnly has no problem with pro-Trump billionaire Rupert Murdoch inserting himself into American politics and prattling on about neutrality.
Clark also claimed that "The Post explained that Axel Springer staff in Germany are “required to sign” a woke ideological pledge to work at the company. But that pledge also includes "support for a united Europe, Israeli statehood and a free-market economy." The Post article also noted that Döpfner "ordered the Israeli flag be flown in solidarity at company headquarters for a week after several antisemitic outbursts at demonstrations in Germany."
When did support for Israel and a free-market economy become "woke" values to the MRC? That logical inconsistency and ignorance of facts is what happens when you put peddling narratives ahead of telling the truth.
Like WorldNetDaily and its "news" division CNSNews.com, the Media Research Center did not like President Biden's speech calling out their fellow right-wingers as the threats to democracy they are. In a pre-speech post, Nicholas Fondacaro set up the right-wing narrative of Biden (and not thte highly divisive Donald Trump) as the real divider, and whine about CNN as well:
President Biden's Sept. 1 speech calling out right-wing extremists who threaten democracy didn't go over well at WorldNetDaily, which hurled all the invective it could find or invent to attack it. Bob Unruh was 
How much of an 
CNSNews.com -- in particular, 
Truth Social, the social media operation to which Donald Trump has lent his alleged prestige and encouraged his cult following to join, has been making news lately -- but for the wrong reasons:
On top of 
WorldNetDaily's 
Wayne Allyn Root is a such 
James Hirsen has been positioning himself as an avatar of morality, even though 
CNSNews.com loves 
When Mikhail Gorbachev died in late August, the Reagan worshipppers at the Media Research Center went on a whine-fest that he was being given credit for his role in ending the Cold War. Rich Noyes set the narrative in an Aug. 30 
Bill Donohue went on a huge whine-fest in his Sept. 6 CNSNews.com 
Last year, the Media Research Center's Joseph Vazquez 
