As a loyally biased right-wing media outlet, CNSNews.com typically adheres to the accepted narrative aggressively defending Israel -- witness its hearty embrace of a group of far-right, replacement theory-believing rabbis. But an odd (for right-wing media) thing has happened over the past few months: CNS has published articles critical of Israel and far-right Jewish extremists. And thje source is even more surprising: managing editor Michael W. Chapman. He has written the usual pro-Israel like these, particularly regarding the killing of American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was likely killed by Israeli soldiers:
But Chapman has written other articles surprisingly critical of far-right Jewish extremists. A July 25 article noted:
During his trip to Israel last week, President Joe Biden met with Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, who alerted him to "unprecedented attacks by Israeli radical groups" against Christians in the Holy City, which is all designed "to create an environment that repels Christians from their own city of Jerusalem," reported the office of the patriarch.
"Patriarch Theophilos III stressed the need for an active American intervention to protect the Christian heritage and presence in the Holy Land, especially in the city of Jerusalem, which is witnessing unprecedented attacks by Israeli radical groups, that conduct their offenses without accountability in order to create an environment that repels Christians from their own city of Jerusalem," stated the patriarch's office.
Chapman wrote an Aug. 4 article highlighting an attack on a non-Jewish woman by ultra-orthodox Jews:
Ultra-Orthodox Jews verbally and physically assaulted a gentile woman for sitting at the front of a public bus in Jerusalem on July 31, apparently in an attempt to enforce a modesty dress code that they follow in the Haredi community, reported Haaretz and Ynet, two major news outlets in Israel.
The woman told Ynet that she regularly rides the bus (Kavim company) between Jerusalem and the ultra-Orthodox city of Elad. "On the way home, a group of 20 guys got on the bus, and decided that it didn't suit them that I was sitting in the front,” she said.
She added that she gets nauseous and sometimes vomits if she sits in the back of the bus.
"When she declined to move, the men began verbally berating her, using a pejorative term for a gentile woman, and when she still refused to leave her seat began physically assaulting her," reported Haaretz.
[...]
According to Harretz, "such incidents are not uncommon, especially in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods."
In June, a 13-year-old girl was stopped from riding a bus in northern Israel "because of how she was dressed," said Haaretz.
In another case from 2020, a woman was awarded $44,000 "in damages after a bus driver refused to let her board at a bus stop in a religious West Bank settlement because she was wearing shorts."
A Sept. 30 article by Chapman noted Israel's lack of support for Ukraine following its invasion by Russia:
In a recent interview, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky complained that the Israeli government had given his country no real military aid, such as missile defense systems, in its ongoing battle against Russia.
“Israel gave us nothing. Nothing, zero,” Zelensky told France’s TV5Monde, as reported in The Times of Israel. “I understand they are in a difficult situation with Syria, with Russia.”
Israel has provided Ukraine with at least 2,000 helmets and 500 flak jackets, as well as tons of humanitarian aid, but has not provided defensive weapons.
Given that Israel is a Jewish state and Zelensky himself is Jewish, the Ukrainian president expressed surprise over the situation in the interview.
[...]
The refusal by Israel to provide weapons to Ukraine, according to The Times of Israel, "is seen as an attempt by Jerusalem to maintain working ties with Moscow, due to Russia’s control of Syrian air space, where Israel’s air force has carried out hundreds of sorties against alleged Iranian arms shipments and in order to keep groups backed by Tehran from establishing a foothold."
An Oct. 12 article by Chapman is the kind of article that gives people like Bill Donohue nightmares:
A new report out of Israel shows that the rate of sexual abuse is higher among students who attend schools in the national religious education system.
"Children who attend religious schools in Israel are more than twice as likely to experience sexual abuse, according to a stunning new report from a liberal Orthodox organisation published on Sunday [Oct. 2]," reported The Jewish Chronicle.
Data on the abuse were collected from Israel's Welfare Ministry and the Central Bureau of Statistics, and were analyzed by the Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah Movement, a nonprofit educational research group in Jerusalem.
The numbers show that in Israel's national education system, the rate of sexual abuse is 1.04 per 1,000 students. In the haredi (strictly Orthodox) system, the rate was 1.98 per 1,000 students, nearly double the national rate. And in the national-religious educational system the rate was 2.39.
Again, one does not normally find this kind of content on a right-wing "news" site. Is Chapman doing an experiment to see if CNS can transition into a (gasp!) fair and balanced media operation? We shall see.
MRC Defends Right-Wing Radio Host For Crude, Cynical Defense of Walker's Abortion Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's aggressivedefense of Herschel Walker over his abortion scandal even extended to defending a right-wing radio host's crude, cynical defense of him.
When the co-hosts of "The View' called out the hypocrisy of right-wing radio host Dana Loesch in claiming that "I don't care if Herschel walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate," smearing the woman Walker paid to have an abortion as a "skank," and smearing all women who have an abortion as "skanks," Nicholas Fondacaro used an Oct. 5 post to generously frame her cynical, hateful remarks as "reject[ing] liberal attempts to suppress Republican turnout/support for Walker with the scandal," hitting all the usual deflection points like trying to baselessly dismiss the story as somehow not true because it came from the Daily Beast, which he described without evidence as "left-wing":
Wednesday was day two of ABC’sThe View obsessing over the salacious claims made by the left-wing Daily Beast against Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker (R) that he paid for a woman’s abortion back in 2009. On this second day, the cackling coven hyperventilated about conservative radio host Dana Loesch and how she rejected liberal attempts to suppress Republican turnout/support for Walker with the scandal. Loesch herself responded to NewsBusters reporting and blasted the ladies who were attacking her with vile suggestions.
[...]
“First of all, ma'am, there's a lot of women who find themselves in a position of having to have an abortion. How dare you call them ‘skanks,’ first of all,” Goldberg (who has had an abortion and tried to pressure her daughter into one too) sneered. “I'm keeping calling you a name out of my mouth ‘cause it's not the right thing to do.”
Loesch responded to Goldberg on Twitter (throwing her own words back at her), saying, “FIRST OF ALL, @WhoopiGoldberg -- I refuse to coddle or celebrate irresponsible women who use abortion as birth control. I'm right, so get over it. That you're angrier over that than murder speaks volumes about your character.”
As is de rigeur for Fondacaro, he lashed out at co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin for not agreeing with Loesch that women who have an abortion are "skanks":
Up next was faux Republican Alyssa Farah Griffin to bloviate about what was happening to “my party” and suggested Loesch was a manifestation of “the moral rot that’s taking over.”
“I can't defend that for a second. As a pro-life woman to hear someone else like Dana who is pro-life call women who get into situations where they need abortions ‘skanks’ is just shameful,” she proclaimed.
Loesch had something to say to Farah Griffin too:
That "something was a rant calling aboriton "murder" and defending her sleazy insult of woman "an honest description of females who use abortion as birth control ."
Later that day, Tim Graham devoted his podcast to rehashing "The View" vs. Loesch, with help from Fondacaro, who laughably described Loesch's crude insult of women as "blunt, inartful language" -- which, of course, neither Graham nor Fondacaro criticized; Graham instead defended her as "trying to get some attention." Fondacaro then sounded like a Walker flack in baselessly arguing that he deserves a pass because the abortion Walker paid for happened in 2009 and "people's hearts change. I know stories of women who have had abortion and then they've been wracked with guilt over it and become pro-life." Fondacaro offered no evidence that Walker himself feels that way.
Both Graham and Fondacaro predictably trashed Farah Griffin as purportedly being a "liberal Democrat" for leaving the Trump cult and not being a dogmatic conservative -- then, without any sense of irony, attacked "The View" co-hosts for doing the same exact thing: "Anybody who doesn't match, you know, Joy Behar's ideal, like Hillary Clinton -- if you're not full Hillary Clinton, you're a woman-traitor."
Graham was still defending Loesch in an Oct. 9 post, insisting that she was being misquoted by the Washingotn Post's Jonathan Capehart in a TV appearance, even though the transcript clearly shows (and Graham boldfaced) Capehart saying he was "paraphrasing":
The PBS NewsHour caught up on the Hunter Biden scoop on Friday night, but that wasn't the subject when it came to reviewing the news of the week. The taxpayer-funded crew all assumed Herschel Walker was guilty of paying for an abortion, as the Daily Beast is asserting, and there was zero mention of Walker's denials!
Jonathan Capehart was so eager to smear all the Republicans, he asserted that conservative radio host Dana Loesch doesn't care about children -- which is always a weird allegation against pro-lifers.
[...]
Loesch provoked liberals by asserting "If the Daily Beast story is true, you’re telling me Walker used his money to reportedly pay some skank for an abortion and Warnock wants to use all of our monies to pay a whole bunch of skanks for abortions.” She added "I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles — I want control of the Senate.” Like many conservatives, she sees the Daily Beast as using an anonymous woman's claims to keep Sen. Raphael Warnock in power.
Graham then jumped to an earlier PBS segment on Hunter Biden, with whom the MRC remainsbizarrelyobsessed.
WND's Kupelian Demonizes Dems To Try And Scare Voters Into Supporting Republicans Topic: WorldNetDaily
The September issue of WorldNetDaily's sparsely read Whistleblower magazine is called "Stopping the Madness: A Midterm Election Guide for Voters who Love America." As expected, the magazine is short on actual guidance and very long on fearmongering about anyone who's not as far-right as they are. This is further enforced by managing editor David Kupelian's introductory essay, which starts out by adding another freakout to the ones WND has already published about President Biden's speech calling out the extremism of MAGA Republicans:
Horrified by what has been called the Sovietization of the Biden administration – including the shocking criminalization of dissent and the weaponization of the FBI, whose agents daily arrest, intimidate and persecute the regime's political opponents – tens of millions of Americans anxiously wonder whether November's midterm elections will bring any positive change of direction for a once-great nation now careening toward total destruction.
Although many voices are weighing in on "what's at stake" in the midterms, ironically no one has expressed it more clearly or forcefully than Joe Biden himself, in his astonishingly dark Sept. 1 "Soul of the Nation" speech, delivered while bathed in ominous red lights and flanked by Marine guards.
Of course, the key to de-coding Biden's dire warnings about the "greatest threats to America" is to understand that he was engaging in a mirror-perfect case of political projection: Every single evil that Biden ascribed to "MAGA Republicans" – the Left's new name for America's vast center-right middle class, literally the nation's backbone – is actually true of today's Democratic Party and its unhinged supporters.
[...]
Again, by just substituting "Radical Democrats" for "MAGA Republicans," one gains a vivid and stunningly accurate description of the ever-growing neo-communist threat to America.
We're not aware of anyone who has referred to "the Sovietization of the Biden administration" other than Kupelian himself, so it's weird that he's trying to make it a thing. But Kupelian was nowhere near done ranting:
But delving deeper still, all of this is rooted in the fact that today's Democratic Party is, in a very real sense, "possessed" – that is, its political and thought leaders have been completelytaken over by the kind of dark psychological and spiritual forces that readily capture the minds of corrupted human beings who have turned their backs on God and His laws of life. These exact same forces have animated history's most destructive, cult-like political movements, most obviously communism/Marxism/socialism, which has been metastasizing around the world for the past century – and now has its sights set on America.
et even such controversial ideological labels are, themselves, essentially lies intended to create a moral façade that either covers up or justifies deeply inhuman and criminal behavior. That is, the ideological labels are just an attempt to sell the notion that, whether or not one agrees with their ideology, "communists," "socialists" and "Marxists" – and "Antifa" (short for "anti-fascist"), "Black Lives Matter" and today's "Democratic Party" – still somehow have the interests of others at heart.
It's a lie. We're talking about sociopaths, people without a functioning conscience. Deeply corrupt people like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff and their ilk do not possess the capacity to actually care about anyone else, any more than a drug addict has the capacity to unselfishly care about others. And these ruling elites are addicted to the most powerful and addictive drug of all: POWER.
[...]
What's being described here is a deeply compromised and corrupt class of people, possessed and controlled by dark spiritual "powers and principalities" about which they know nothing, and care less. Whatever their professed religion, they are mockers of God, the same sort of people who self-righteously expanded communism over so much of the world and made the 20th century the bloodiest and deadliest in all of human history. Today, they're laser-focused on the biggest prize of all: The United States of America.
That's what's at stake.
Of course, one could just as easily say that Kupelian, Joseph Farah and other WND employees are addicted to the alleged power that comes with being an unquestioning simp for Donald Trump. Indeed, by his own definition, Kupelian cold be described as a sociopath for selling out the Christian principles he claims to have to throw his support behind a profounding immoral, hate-filled man in pursuit of power in the form of having said immoral man reshape the country to his own far-right liking -- and then, four years later, publish lieafterlie about how the election was purported "stolen" from the immoral man. That behavior in and of itself shows what a profoundly hypocritial Christian Kupelian is.
Kupelian then moved to invoke another profoundly imm oral man -- and a criminal toboot -- to scare his fellow right-wing Christians into voting:
But good Americans, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon passionately argues, simply must outvote whatever fraud occurs.
Therefore, one final word to Christians, who still constitute the vast majority of Americans and potential voters:
Every election cycle, tens of millionsof American Christians do not vote!
How is that even possible, one wonders, considering that so much of what Democrats are pushing right now – from congressionally "codifying Roe" so that throughout America abortion will again be legal up to the moment of birth – i.e., straight-up infanticide – to expanding the satanic craze of amputating body parts of multitudes of children tricked into believing they're "transgender" – amounts to a grotesque frontal attack on everything Christians, indeed all decent people, consider sacred?
If Kupelian was the "decent person" he claims to be, he would stop publishing lies and profoundly apologize for the lies he is responsible for spreading (which would be all of them, given that he's the managing editor of WND).
Finally, if Kupelian was the genuine Christian he wants us to be, he would not be spreading lies, hate and misinformation in the name of Chrstianity to get people to vote, and he would give both sides a reasonable opportunity to argue their views. But Kupelian is not that man -- which is just one reason why WND continues to teeter on the brink of extinction.
A Black Woman Plays A Flute, And The MRC Is Outraged Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has a thing about making fatjokes about the musician known as Lizzo. So when she was given the opportunity by the Library of Congress to play a 200-year-old crystal flute once belonging to James Madison, the MRC did not take it well. Jason Cohen wrote in a Sept. 28 post headlined "Plus Size Pop Icon Lizzo Lauded for Historically Inappropriate Moves" -- the "move" in question, preumably, being a non-skinny black woman playing a historic flute:
In a crazy clash of classiness and trashiness, popular singer Lizzo played James Madison’s 200- year-old crystal flute at her concert in DC while scantily clad and twerking.
In typical narcissistic fashion, she tweeted:
“NOBODY HAS EVER HEARD THIS FAMOUS CRYSTAL FLUTE BEFORE
NOW YOU HAVE
IM THE FIRST & ONLY PERSON TO EVER PLAY THIS PRESIDENTIAL 200-YEAR-OLD CRYSTAL FLUTE— THANK YOU @librarycongress
As referenced in Lizzo’s tweet, the flute is owned by the Library of Congress. Lizzo is mainly known for being a singer and “body positivity” icon, but she has also been a flutist since grade school.
Despite the distasteful display, Lizzo’s actions were largely glorified by the media.
Adding to the obscenity, Lizzo exclaimed, “B***h, I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s. We just made history tonight!”
Ideas of history, along with those of beauty and class, just ain’t what they used to be.
When the co-hosts of "The View" called out right-wing outrage over this "move," Nicholas Fondacaro raged in a Sept. 30 post:
In a publicity stunt, some argue was designed to generate outrage this week, the Library of Congress allowed degenerate singer Lizzo to parade around half naked on stage while twerking and playing former President James Madison’s crystal flute. On Friday, the cackling coven of ABC’s The View looked on with glee as they mocked some conservatives for getting upset and argued that the disgusting display was retribution against Madison because he owned slaves.
Getting into the segment, co-host Joy Behar suggested conservatives were more interested in the flute than helping people recover from Hurricane Ian and stemming inflation. “While the country deals with hurricanes, inflation, and fight for abortion rights, some conservatives are focusing their rage on Lizzo. Why? They're annoyed that she's playing a crystal flute, a flute,” she chided (failing to mention President Biden was at a fundraiser while the storm killed people).
“These Trumpers need to have the same reverence for the Constitution as they do for the flute,”she whined following a video of Lizzo’s performance.
The hypocrisy in that statement was so thick that it ran like syrup. The View didn’t care about revering the Constitution when they gave a platform to leftist extremist Elie Mystal to call it “trash” and cheer. They also defended 2016 election denialism and decried the Electoral College. And they’ve also called for packing the Supreme Court.
[...]
Hostin went on to suggest Lizzo’s performance was justice, 200 years in the making. “Well, James Madison owned a hundred slaves. That's a degradation of history, right? And he still became the president. So, I think this is kind of a full-circle moment for American history,” she snarked.
Fondacaro never explained what, exactly, is "degenerate" about Lizzo -- leaving us to speculate that his main gripe is that a non-skinny black woman was allowed to play a historic flute, --and he did not explain why that act was supposedly "designed to generate outrage." Then again, that "outrage" purportedly engendered by Lizzo's act was pretty much limited to perpetually outraged right-wingers like Fondacaro who are prone to see anything that makes them mad as a "liberal" provocation rather than a sign that they should lighten up a bit and stop being perpetual rage-bots.
NEW ARTICLE: CNS' Holy War Against Nancy Pelosi, Part 2 Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com cheered that Pelosi's bishop forbade her from receiving Communion for refusing to impose anti-abortion laws on the entire country, then got mad that she visited the Pope. Read more >>
MRC Exploits Fetterman's Stroke For Partisan (And Oz's) Gain Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center largely ignored Democrat John Fetterman in his race for a Pennsylvania Senate seat. A February 2021 post by Alex Christy dismissed him as among the the "lefties" being promoted by the "hacks" on MSNBC, and another post that month briefly mentioned him -- but it wasn't until this past August, after Fetterman suffered a stroke yet still spent the summer owning his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, on social media that the MRC got around to mentioning him again, in a post by Scott whitlock fearmongering that Fetterman "supports abortion up to birth."
It was around then that the MRC started to realize it could exploit Fetterman's stroke to serve as a Republican surrogate in driving up concerns about his health and boosting Oz. A Sept. 1 post by Alex Christy complained about a "softball" interview Fetterman did with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle, mocking that Fetterman "looked like he was doing the interview from a dungeon" and whining: "Ruhle didn’t ask Fetterman if his health problems could limit his effectiveness as a senator, only how he plans to convince voters it won’t. She did ask if he eventually plans to debate Oz, but did not press him on it when he equated all concerns about his health with mocking his stroke."
In a Sept. 12 post, Curtis Houck cruelly sneered that a press release announcing the hated ex-CNN host Brian Stelter's new position as a fellow at Harvard sounds "just as painful as John Fetterman trying to offer a complete sentence."
That exploitation really kicked in after an NBC interview with Fetterman that just happened to mesh with right-wing anti-Fetterman narratives that seek to portray him as too sick to hold office. An Oct. 11 post by Kevin Tober repeatedly hyped Fetterman's purportedly fragile state:
NBC correspondent Dasha Burns broke news Tuesday when she revealed on both MSNBC and NBC Nightly News that Pennsylvania Democrat Senate candidate John Fetterman is in worse shape than originally thought after his near-debilitating stroke.
While previewing her exclusive interview with Fetterman, Burns told viewers that his “campaign required close captioning technology for this interview to essentially read our questions as we asked them.”
She went on to note that “in small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn't clear he was understanding our conversation.”
[...]
Despite his obvious struggles with putting together basic sentences, the Democrat Party and their propaganda arm in the media are still propping him up like nothing is wrong.
If he was a Republican candidate for United States Senate, this wouldn’t be Fetterman’s first tough interview and the media would be hounding him from now until November.
The next day, in whining about a Seth Meyers segment mocking right-wing Halloween candy fearmongering, Christylinked to Tober's attack post to sneer, Maybe for his Thursday show, Meyers will talk about how Starburst is really just another term for 'the John Fetterman Campaign.'" Tim Graham praised NBC's interview with Fetterman -- because it served Republican purposes in hurting Fetterman and helping Oz -- in the writeup for his Oct. 12 podcast:
Meanwhile, NBC reporter Dasha Burns sternly questioned John Fetterman about his lack of transparency about his medical struggles after a stroke. Burns upset liberals by explaining beforehand that Fetterman required a Tele-Prompter to understand the questions, since he's having "auditory processing" issues. Democrats don't want you discussing how Fetterman is currently unable to debate on the floor of the Senate.
The MRC then moved on to attacking anyone who defended Fetterman by pointing out the reality of post-stroke auditory processing issues. Christy huffed in an Oct. 13 post:
Trevor Noah used the Wednesday installment of The Daily Show on Comedy Central to defend Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman from criticism he is not healthy enough to serve by comparing him to disabled war veterans Dan Crenshaw and Tammy Duckworth.
[...]
After playing a clip from the NBC interview, Noah joked that Fetterman’s speech problems make him not that different than Presidents Trump and Biden, but why the country should want a third bumbler was not answered.
[...]
Those are physical disability that has not impacted those two’s ability to do their jobs. A stroke is a different matter.
Nicholas Fondacaro struck the same tone in another post the same day:
Two days after NBC News reporter Dasha Burns made headlines with her first-hand account detailing just how extensive Democratic Pennsylvania Senate nominee John Fetterman’s deterioration post-stroke was, the cackling coven of ABC’s The View had their knives out for her. They suggested Burns broke journalistic ethics, it was no big deal that Fetterman couldn’t comprehend speech and mocked Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R) for supposedly having an impairment too.
[...]
Flaunting a stunning level of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy, Haines would soon follow up by decrying a comment made by the “PR team” for the Republican in the race, Mehmet Oz, about Fetterman not eating vegetables. She made her point by reading the response from the Fetterman camp, “I know politics can be nasty, but even then I could never imagine ridiculing someone for their health challenges.”
Again, this came after Haines and the rest of the cast roared with laughter at the possibility that Walker had brain damage.
This wasn’t the first time The View defended the questionable mental capacities of a Democrat. Last month, they circled the wagons for President Biden after he called out for a member of Congress who had been deceased for nearly two months. They diagnosed Biden with a “brain fart” moment.
Mark Finkelstein whined that the folks on "Morning Joe" pivoted to criticizing Oz instead of continuing to further right-wing narratives, while also invoking the NBC interview:
It was a schizoid Morning Joe today. On the one hand, Joe Scarborough and others defended NBC reporter Dasha Burns against criticism she has received from the liberal media for her comments on her interview with Fetterman. During the interview, Fetterman relied on closed captioning to understand her questions. In a subsequent NBC Nightly News appearance, Burns noted, "in small talk before the interview, without captioning, it wasn't clear he was understanding our conversation."
But Morning Joe quickly pivoted to trashing Dr. Oz, Fetterman's Republican opponent in the US Senate race in Pennsylvania. The attack on Oz was capped by Mika Brzezinski saying "we'll put doctor in quotes for Dr. Oz." For the record, Oz received his undergraduate degree in biology magna cum laude from Harvard. He went on to obtain MD and MBA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Penn's Wharton School.
[...]
Note: Scarborough & Co. deserve little credit for not denying the undeniable. Of course, Fetterman's incapacity is a bona fide issue for voters. If Fetterman needs closed captioning to understand people, he will be incapable of functioning in informal environments where, on the fly, consitutents, reporters, and others are seeking to interact with him.
Houck used an appearance on Fox News -- presumably earned through all the Doocy-fluffing he has done over the past couple years -- to defend the NBC interview:
Making his latest appearance early Friday/late Thursday on the Fox News Channel’s Fox News @ Night, NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck teamed with District Media Group’s Beverly Hallberg to take down the liberal media for attacking NBC’s Dasha Burns after she pressed Pennsylvania senatorial candidate John Fetterman on his cognitive struggles since he suffered a stroke in May.
Houck picked this random act of journalism in the liberal media as his media highlight of the week, explaining that in sitting “down with John Fetterman for an in-person interview show” after he had skated by with taped, remote interviews with friendly liberals at MSNBC in Lawrence O’Donnell and Stephanie Ruhle.
“[O]ther than in the fact that she didn’t press him on abortion. You know, she really pinned him down about his fitness, physically and mentally to be a senator from the great State of Pennsylvania,” he added, noting that a Burns interview with Republican Mehmet Oz would air Friday on NBC’s Today.
[...]
Houck closed on a high note, crediting NBC for standing by Burns and remarking that he hadn’t “seen the media circle the wagons this much around a story since...the New York Post and Hunter Biden” in fall 2020.
Unmentioned, of course, is the right-wing media circling the wagons around Herschel Walker after his abortion scandal was exposed -- something the MRC defended. Houck also made sure not to mention his own embarrassingly softball interview with Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, so he's hardly one to praise the tough questions of others (but only if they advance right-wing narratives).
How CNS Flipped From Hating Kanye West To Loving Him Topic: CNSNews.com
Like its Media ResearchCenter parent, CNSNews.com hated Kanye West before it loved him, using its stable of columnists to do so:
It published a 2008 column by then-MRC apparatchik Dan Gainor complaining that "Top performers bash President Bush as a matter of faith," citing as an example "Kanye West’s embarrassing stupid comments saying: 'George Bush doesn't care about black people'" during a benefit concert for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
It also published a 2010 column by Michelle Malkin decaring that West won "the Olympic gold medal for racial grievance-mongering" for that comment, as well as a column that year by MRC boss Brent Bozell ranting about how "idiotic rapper Kanye West shouted during an NBC telethon that Bush didn’t care about black people."
Bozell sneered in a 2012 column that "Rapper Kanye West, worth $70 million, showed up to the [Occupy Wall Street] protests in New York wearing gold chains."
Bozell devoted an entire 2013 column to ranting about West:
Egotistical musicians often exaggerate their political influence, none more than the nattering, narcissistic rapper Kanye West. He has compared himself in global stature to Apple founder Steve Jobs and has titled his latest album "Yeesus."
Rolling Stone magazine has posted part of a West song titled "I Am a God," where West raps that Jesus is the "Most High," but he's a "close high."
Now it's The New York Times pandering to West's colossal self-regard — and it's downright embarrassing. Mouth-breathing Times writer/superfan Jon Caramonica stooped to telling West that "what I find probably the most moving thing that you've ever done, which is calling out President Bush at the Hurricane Katrina telethon. To me, that moment is actually the peak of putting a message in a pop format." West agreed, designating it as "a very pop moment of a lifetime or generation."
Do you remember this? Does anyone? Let me remind you of that generation-shaping moment. In the middle of an NBC telethon, as celebrities somberly asked for donations to the Red Cross, West lashed out, for no reason, and stupidly, arrogantly and rudely declared that President Bush "doesn't care about black people." He proceeded to add black people were smeared as looters and "now they've given them [police?] permission to go down and shoot us."
Lyndon LaRouche is more rational than this idiot.
CNS, however, did turn more favorably toward West a little earlier than the rest of the MRC, which didn't do so until he embraced Donald Trump. A 2015 article by Melanie Arter may or may not have been mocking West by reporting his reaction to receiving an award that "I think I maybe for the first time in my life I understand how it is to feel humbled."Another article by Arter that year foreshadowed the Trump-Kanye bromance:
If there’s one person you won’t hear GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump bashing, it’s rapper Kanye West. He told reporters Thursday that he loves West, because the rapper considers Trump to be his “all-time hero.”
“Kanye West, you know what? I’ll never say bad about him. You know why? Because he loves Trump. He loves Trump. He goes around saying Trump is my all-time hero. He says it to everybody, so Kanye West, I love him,” said Trump.
But the day after that araticle, it also published a column by Bozell and Tim Graham yet again rehashing his Katrina remark: "In the early spin, race-baiting rapper Kanye West and "objective" anchors like Brian Williams were in rhetorical sync: George Bush didn't care about black people."
A few weeks after that, though, Mark Judge -- who a couple years later would become infamous as a bit player in the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination as someone who engaged in drunken youthful antics with him (something his MRC employer sought to hide) -- touted how West praised another right-winger for president:
Rapper, Kardashian spouse and fashion designer Kanye West had high praise for Dr. Ben Carson, the Republican presidential candidate, in aninterviewpublished today by Vanity Fair.
"When I run for president, I'd prefer not to run against someone," West said, while discussing his Yeezy fashion line and his desire to run for president in 2020.
"As soon as I heard [Ben] Carson speak, I tried for three weeks to get on the phone with him," said West. "I was like this is the most brilliant guy.
"And I think all of the people running now have something that each of the others needs," he said. "But the idea of this separation and this gladiator battle takes away from the main focus that the world needs help and the world needs all the people in a position of power or influence to come together."
Judge followed up a few days later with an article quoting Carson telling West to start "doing some music that might be uplifting that might give young women a sense of their value and young men a sense of responsibility." And a couple weeks after that, Judge touted how West "praised soldiers, police officers and firefighters as brave." In April 2016, Judge hyped how "Pop superstar Justin Bieber recently posted a photograph on Instagram of himself praying with fellow musicians Kanye West and Sean 'Puff Daddy' Combs."
Judg continued to obsess over West: An October 2016 article noted that musician David Crosby criticized West by claiming that he “can neither sing, nor write, nor play."A Decmeber 2016 article noted that West met with Trump to "discuss multicultural issues. These issues included bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums, and violence in Chicago."
West didn't surface again at CNS until 2018, when he voiced his support for Trump. An April 2018 article by MichaelMorris quoted right-wing talking hed Ben Shapiro asserting that West support of Trump "might actually matter" because it might draw support of Black people to Republicans.An article by Arter a few days later lamented that West "is facing continued backlash over his support for President Donald Trump and for recently voicing support for black conservative commentator Candace Owens." It then published a May 2018 column by Shaprio voicing hsi full support of West's support of Trump:
It's easy to dismiss Kanye West.
It's easy to dismiss him because he's nutty. This is a fellow who tweets about antique fish tanks and fur pillows. This is the guy who calls himself Yeezus (after Jesus) and suggested that then-President George W. Bush didn't care about black people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He isn't exactly known for his bouts of emotional stability.
And in our celebrity-driven culture, we shouldn't pay too much attention to those who haven't spent a lot of time studying policy. That's how we end up with celebrity politicians, emotion-driven policy and reality television substituting for news.
With that said, Kanye West did something deeply important over the last two weeks: He opened up the debate.
[...]
What's happening? It's doubtful that West started reading Edmund Burke. It may just be that West, like a lot of Americans tired of being told what to think by their industry and racialists on all sides, is getting tired of being told what to do. It's possible that West, like most Americans, sees America as a place with problems but a place where individuals can think and achieve freely. And he's clearly willing to take part in a political debate so many of his friends aren't.
That makes West an important voice, at least for now. It does take courage to buck your entire cadre in order to publicly declare what you think. West deserves credit for that.
Yes, it only took West spouting right-wing talking points for Shapiro to deem him "an important voice." Then, in true echo-chamber fashion, Morris wrote a "news" article the next day rehashing Shapiro's praise of West. And the right-wing praise from CNS continued to pour in:
A column by David Limbaugh hyped how "Democrats are losing their minds over Kanye West's praise of Trump and his assertion that African-Americans should be free to think for themselves and not be pressured into identity groupthink."
Onetime WND columnist Jesse Lee Peterson wrote: "For two weeks, President Trump and artist Kanye West have expressed love and affection toward each other. Godless blacks and others have trashed Kanye for it and continued to drag Trump’s good name through the mud."
Walter Williams kept up the narrative, writing that "West's support for Trump, along with his criticism of the "plantation" mentality of the Democratic Party, has been met with vicious backlash from the left," adding that "Kanye West is not saying anything different from what Dr. Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, I and other black libertarians/conservatives have been saying for decades." He went on to cheer that "The Kanye problem for the Democratic Party is that if the party doesn't keep blacks in line and it loses even 20 to 25 percent of the black vote, it can kiss any hope of winning any presidential and many congressional elections goodbye."
Republicans do love their message discipline, don't they?
MRC: Blame 'The Left' For Kim Kardashian Posing With Her Butt Exposed Topic: Media Research Center
Earlier this year, the Media Research Center's Joseph Vaqzuez praised Kim Kardashian for her endorsement of the work ethic: "Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days. You have to surround yourself with people that want to work." This was praised as "tough love advice " that had the added benefit of "send[ing] the politically correct crowd in the liberal media into a crazed frenzy." Of course, the MRC censored her walkback a few weeks later.
But time marches on, and as we saw with Alyssa Farah Griffin, those will get honored by the MRC will eventually get Heathered. Thus, we have the spectacle of Tierin-Rose Mandelburg spending a Sept. 7 post body-shaming Kardashian for doing a magazine photo shoot that included a photo of her exposed rear end, under the nasty headline "The American Dream: Kim Kardashian’s Fat A**":
The Kardashians are only good at one thing: being naked at inappropriate times. And they just keep proving it.
Interview Magazine released it’s cover for the September 6 edition of “American Dream.” The cover featured none other than Kim Kardashian's massive dump truck.
No, not a vehicle.
[...]
Damn! Baby got back is right! But, we’ve known that. Reminder: that IS how her fame erupted anyways.
Eight years ago, Kim’s last (intentional) booty pic on the cover of a magazine broke the internet. She posed naked for the cover of Paper Magazine with her butt facing the camera and what looked like a black garbage bag draped just below her butt crack. At least she had a jacket on in this week's booty pic. I swear I should get workman's comp. for having to look at this garbage.
I’m unsure what part of a giant butt with a jock strap screams “American Dream” but, to each their own I guess?
Body-shaming of Black women is a thing at the MRC -- just ask Lizzo.
Not only did Mandelburg censor any mention of her MRC colleague's praise of Kardashian's work ethic, she uncritically quoted cranky British buy Piers Morganwhining to Kardashian that "Your entire fame and fortune are entirely attributable to your shameless, cynical exploitation of your sex life and naked body, and short-lived marriage to one of the world’s biggest and most genuinely talented music stars, Kanye West. Your only “talent” has been in duping so many people into believing you’re someone worthy of their misguided idolatry and money."
(Boy, that Kanye West reference didn't age well, did it? Remember that Mandelburg praised Ye's conservative values even after he clearly expressed his anti-Semitism.)
Mandelburg then somehow found a way to blame "the left" for Kardashian posing in a magazine with her butt exposed:
Kim has four children of her own and is a popular figure that many others see and are influenced by. Not only that but she's also promoted by children's television. At the moment she's working on voiceover for a kids show called Paw Patrol. Not a good look for either party involved.
But(t), that’s what the left wants. They want to promote promiscuity. They thrive when the internet breaks over the latest display of a naked butt. They are fueled by stirring the pot.
The only way the young children that are the core audience of "Paw Patrol" -- which are not known for caring much about celebrity stunt-casting -- are going to know about this is if some adult lady bragged to them about how she got paid to write a post mocking Kardashian's butt.
Root Gone Wild: Biden Is A 'Figurative Suicide Bomber' Topic: WorldNetDaily
The last time WorldNetDaily columnist Wayne Allyn Root had a meltdown over President Biden, he demanded that Biden be not only impeachd but also tried for treason. We've already noted how Root freaked out over Biden's speech calling out the extremism of MAGA republicans like Root, huffing that the speech "was intended to incite civil war in America." But Root's Sept. 30 column took things to another level, ranting under the headline "Biden is a figurative suicide bomber":
Our country is being destroyed. It's clearly a purposeful communist attack upon America from a thousand different directions. But the president isn't Joe Biden. He is just the figurehead/puppet. The real president is former President Barack Obama.
This is clearly the third term of Obama. His fingerprints are everywhere.
No president can legally serve three terms – hence the need for a figurehead. I believe Biden is just a "DDD": a dummy with dementia who's in diapers. He says whatever is written on cue cards and signs whatever paper is put in front of him. That allows Obama to run the country from the shadows.
As long as they feed Biden his baby food, change his diapers and allow him to sniff little girls' hair, Biden does whatever his handlers tell him to do.
But Obama isn't the brains of the operation. Obama is just a communist tool. Obama takes his orders from a team of what I consider communist suicide bombers: Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and of course, the boss of all bosses, the capo di tutti, China and the Chinese Communist Party.
Root then moved to rehashing and updating his old Obama conspiracy theories:
Obama is owned lock, stock and barrel by the deep state, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and China.
The reason it's important to know that I believe Obama is the real president is because Obama was my college classmate at Columbia University, Class of 1983 – where we learned the plan to destroy America.
That plan was called "Cloward-Piven."
Obama learned it well. It's happening today. Look around. The powers that be have just given it a different name: "the Great Reset."
But the goals are the same: Destroy America; make us into a socialist nation; make everyone poor and dependent on government to survive; and make us into a one-party country (Democratic Party) with no opposition or dissent.
They are following the Cloward-Piven game plan to a T.
It's death by a thousand paper cuts. Under eight years of Obama, they "boiled the frog slowly." They attacked in slow motion, hoping you wouldn't notice. Like cooking a frog, they set the temperature so low that the frog doesn't realize he's being boiled until he's dead.
Then, the old discredited election fraud conspiracy theories were dragged out once again:
It all started with a stolen election.
That was No. 1. They had to remove then-President Donald Trump. There's evidence they spied on his campaign; they spied on his actual presidency (which is treasonous); they trumped up fake charges to frame him; they spewed propaganda like the Third Reich – and they tried to impeach him multiple times over nothing.
Evidence suggests that when they failed at all of that, they simply stole the 2020 election.
Now they've weaponized the Department of Justice and FBI to raid the former president's home, ruin him, demonize him, bankrupt him, frame him and indict him for crimes he didn't commit – all to prevent him from ever running again.
Trump scares them that much.
With Trump out of the way, there is no one to stop them. Now they're coming for you and me.
Root promised that "I'll explain the whole TOP TEN list of the greatest scams in history, in detail, in my next column." But that column was, instead, yet another recounting of discredited election fraud conspiracy theories and a list of "exactly where we'd be if Trump was still president of the United States."
MRC Tried To Blame Biden For High Gas Prices, Now Won't Give Him Credit for Prices Dropping Topic: Media Research Center
Over the past year or so, the Media Research Center has labored hard to blame President Biden for higher gas prices -- despite never being able to name any specific Biden policy that directly corresponded to a specific price increase. But now that gas prices have been falling from early-summer peaks, the MRC now wants you to believe that Biden has no control at all over it. Emms Schultz complained in a July 19 post:
With the steady increase in gas prices over the past few months, the Biden Administration and the liberal media routinely stated that the prices were not the President’s fault and he could not do anything to change them. But on Monday’s CNN Newsroom with Ana Cabrera, a different story is painted as declining gas prices were suddenly the result of Biden rolling up his sleeves. Never the villain, always the hero.
Amos Hochstein, a Biden energy advisor, joined Cabrera on Monday afternoon as they discussed these decreases in prices and Biden’s role in it all.
[...]
This time, he also added in what the President had been doing for months to reduce the price at the pump. That Biden had “released a million barrels a day from the strategic petroleum reserve,” stating that “that’s the most anyone has ever done.”
In addition, Hochstein suggested their tough talk was winning the day, saying, “we’re holding the industry accountable… we’ve told them we want them to bring down the prices. And I think, so far that’s working.”
According to Hochstein, analysts that were reporting on prices rising were “trying to scare the American public,” as he so cheerfully encouraged Cabrera to “focus on the achievements that>This encapsulates the narrative. Rising prices weren’t because of Biden’s runaway spending and cutting of domestic production, but he’s suddenly the hero by nibbling at the margins.
[...]
This encapsulates the narrative. Rising prices weren’t because of Biden’s runaway spending and cutting of domestic production, but he’s suddenly the hero by nibbling at the margins.
For Schultz, the narrative is just the opposite: Biden is always the villain, never the hero. She never identified any of this "runaway spending" that she says directly caused higher gas prices, not did she prove that Biden engaged in "cutting of domestic production."
Kathleen Krumhansl howled in an Aug. 10 post that a Univision reporter "crowed, in his zest to fulfill the role of regime media propagandist, that the current gas prices of under $4 per gallon, 'delight the soul', as he allegedly saw from people's 'happy faces' goign to huff that "No one is fooled by Univision’s theatrics, designed to make us all believe that all is beautiful and that our souls are delighted with $4 a gallon gas."
Krumnahsl returned for an Aug. 17 post to rant that Spanish-language TV channels noted the drop in gas prices, declaring that reporting on this fact was "blatant pro-Biden propaganda" and "delusional talking points repeated by the Hispanic corporate media to an economically challenged viewership, one that has repeatedly appeared on air to confirm their struggle to put food on the table and gasoline in their tanks."
Sounds like Krumhansl is an aspiring right-wing regime propagandist.
Jeffrey Clark tried to dismiss the price declline as "small" and "minor" in an Aug. 19 post -- despite the numbers he cites showing a 20 percent decline, which is, in fact, not "minor." He then hyped how MRC fave Ted Cruz claim that "gas prices are UP nearly 65% since Biden took office" which conveniently ignores how gas prices were unusually low due to the pandemic.
Joseph Vazquez spent a Sept. 20 post complaining that PolitiFact blew up the right-wing argument that Biden is solely to blame for rising gas prices -- but he cited only his fellow right-wing hacks in response:
PolitiFact had the audacity to argue like President Joe Biden’s eco-extremist policies didn't really have anything to do with America’s energy inflation crisis, continuing to prove why its worthless so-called “fact-checks” belong in the trash bin.
The Facebook fact-checker seethed at Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) for daring to tweet in August: “Democrats' radical green energy policies caused record gas prices. They want to fundamentally transform our economy."
PolitiFact rebuked Johnson for his wrongthink and falsely stated: “Green energy policies didn’t cause record prices at gasoline pumps” and suggested Johnson said this, of course, simply because he was “locked in a tight re-election battle.”
JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy repudiated the so-called fact-checker in exclusive comments to MRC Business: “The notion that anyone but Biden is responsible for high gas prices has no basis in fact.”
Climate Depot founder and "The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown" author Marc Morano gave a blunt assessment of PolitiFact’s gaslighting: “It's time to rename these 'Fact Checks' for what they truly are, agenda-driven 'opinion checks' and nothing more.’”
Neither Milloy or Morano have any special expertise on the oil price market -- their main job is being climate deniers, making it puzzing why Vazquez devoted an "exclusive" piece on activists ranting about something they're not experts on. And as usual, Vazquez did not quote his reliable right-wingers identifying any specific Biden policy to a specific rise in gas prices. Vazquez also complained that "PolitiFact also adopted the 'Putin’s Price Hike' fallacy," but at no point did he prove what, exactly, the "fallacy" is.
Kevin Tober tried to keep the right-wing narrative alive in an Oct. 10 post:
On Monday night's edition of NBC Nightly News, correspondent Andrea Mitchell did all she could to make excuses and cover for President Biden's outright lies and excuses for the skyrocketing price of gasoline. Going as far as to let Biden claim he brought gas prices down $1.60 before the "Russians and the Saudis" let it move back up. This of course is a flat-out lie. But Mitchell is always happy to cover for the Biden regime and Democrats in Congress.
Helping Biden entirely skirt blame for rising gas prices, Mitchell led off her report by parroting her party's talking points. "The Saudi announcement, a blow to American consumers and a gut punch to President Biden," Mitchell bemoaned.
Tober went on to whine: "Then there's the fact that when prices were skyrocketing earlier this year, White House talking points became the media's refrain saying there was nothing Biden could do about the price of gas. But suddenly now he dropped it by $1.60?" Tober didn't explain how, in his biased worldview, Biden can only be blamed for increasing gas prices but never credited for lowering them.
Tober then hufffed: "Continuing to sing from the Democrat Party [sic] sheet music, Mitchell listed a number of solutions Biden could pick from that would allegedly lower the cost of gas. Notably missing was allowing oil companies to freely drill for oi." But he didn't explain how, exactly, Biden was keeping that from happening, given that oil companies already have thousands of leases on federal land they could be drilling on but aren't.
Demonstrating how well he sings from right-wing sheet music, Tober concluded by ranting: "The media doesn't care about middle-class Americans struggling to afford to fill their cars so they can go to and from work. Their only concern is for the well-being of the Democrat Party [sic]. The middle-class can go bankrupt for all they care." But Tober has shown that he only cares about partisanship, not facts.
WND Tries To Whitewash Oath Keepers To Protect Member Politician Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily tried to soften the violent-thug image of the Proud Boys before the Capitol riot, which didn't age well. (It ultimately mostly threw them under the bus to protect Donald Trump.) WND has been trying to keep up the whitewash job ever since; for instance, we noted that in July, WND writer Bob Unruh laughably described both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers as "groups that mostly have acted in patriotic situations" -- as if the Capitol riot violence was somehow "patriotic."
Art Moore served up his own softening job for the benefit of an Alaskan lawmaker in trouble for his affiliation with the group in a Sept. 30 article:
Does membership in the group Oath Keepers – which is at the center of the partisan Jan. 6 committee's theory that the Capitol riot was an "insurrection" – disqualify someone from holding public office?
That's the contention of Democratic leaders in the Alaska state House of Representatives and a lawsuit against state Republican Rep. David Eastman, a West Point grad and Army veteran who served in Afghanistan.
In a video interview with WND, embedded below, Eastman said the effort to remove him from office is part of a larger, nationwide effort to "redefine" the Constitution, loyalty to America's founding document and terms such as "insurrection."
"If they're able to succeed in this, then we no longer have the Constitution," he said. "We have a new Constitution with definitions which are incompatible with the old Constitution."
And those who are loyal to the Constitution conceived by the Founders, Eastman continued, end up being condemned as disloyal.
"One of those sides is going to prevail," he told WND. "And if the goal is to purge society of whoever whoever loses the election and put them on an enemies list and target them and send the FBI to raid their house – that's a very different America than I grew up in."
The lawsuit accuses Eastman, by virtue of his Oath Keepers membership, of violating the Alaska state constitution, which disqualifies anyone who advocates "the overthrow by force or violence of the United States.
[...]
Eastman told WND he ran for office because of his concern about issues such as crime, upholding the rule of law, religious freedom and the right to life. He joined Oath Keepers, he said, as a commitment to uphold his oath to the Constitution. But there is no Oath Keepers chapter in Alaska, and he has never been to a meeting. He did travel to Washington on Jan. 6, he said, to show support for President Trump and the legal effort to contest the election results, and never went to the Capitol.
The Democratic leadership of the Alaska state House, headed by Speaker Louise Stutes, is trying to remove his legislative committee seats while a group called the Northern Justice Project is in court representing a constituent, Randall Kowalke, who says he supported Eastman until he found out about his membership in Oath Keepers.
Nnote the rhetorical tricks Moore is using here: He tries to delegitimize any criticism of the Oath Keepers as coming from "partisan" Democrats, and he portrays Eastman as a patriotic man who doesn't support violence. But at no point in the article does he quote Eastman disavowing violence or the actions of the Oath Keepers that day -- something you'd think he want to highlight if you're trying to portray Eastman as a peaceful man.Instead, he tried to whitewash the Oath Keepers some more:
The group's founder, Stewart Rhodes, and 10 other members have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the Capitol riot. Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate and former U.S. Army paratrooper, has no criminal history. He never entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 and says he was in communication with members on that day to "keep them out of trouble."
Rhodes acknowledges a handful of Oath Keepers who "went totally off mission" did enter the Capitol.
That defense is also not aging well, given that an Oath Keepers member testified during the seditious conspiracy trial of Rhodes and others that the group brought a massive cache of wepaons it stored at a hotel in Arlington, Va., across the river from Washington, D.C., ready to be deployed on the day of the riot. And Rhodes' deflection that the violent Oath Keepers went "off mission" conflicts with his behavior befor the riot, Reuters reported that "In numerous text messages, online postings and speeches shown as evidence, Rhodes promoted the use of force and implored Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a 19th century U.S. law that empowers presidents to deploy troops to quell civil unrest."
Moore isn't going to tell you this, of course -- he's doing a whitewash job, not actual reporting.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Double Standard On Cross-Party Election Meddling Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center and its "news" division CNSNews.com got upset over Democrats promoting extremist Republicans -- but censored the fact that they endorsed Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" cross-party meddling scheme. Read more >>
CNS' Jeffrey Again Dishonestly Hypes Pockets Of High Unemployment Topic: CNSNews.com
Last year, we caught CNSNews.com editor Terry Jeffrey taking a partisan shot at the high unemployement rates in areas like Yuma, Ariz., and El Centro, Calif., in an apparent attempt to make President Biden's jobs record look bad -- but he didn't tell readers that these areas are impoverished, undiversified, overly dependent on farming, and have been that way for years. With those employment numbers still looking good for Biden, Jeffrey felt the need to cherry-pick Yuma high unemployment rate again in an Oct. 3 article, with a guest appearance by El Centro:
While the national unemployment rate was 3.8 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Yuma, Arizona metropolitan area not only had the nation’s highest unemployment rate of 21.0 percent, it also had the highest year-to-year spike in unemployment.
Yuma sits on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The August 2022 unemployment rate of 21.0 percent in the Yuma metropolitan area was up from 16.6 percent in that metropolitan area in August 2021.
By contrast, the unemployment rate was only 4.0 percent in August in the Tucson metropolitan area, which sits about 70 miles north of the border.
It was only 3.4 percent in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area and 4.2 percent state-wide in Arizona.
Meanwhile, in the El Centro, California metropolitan area, which also sits on the border, unemployment was 16.2 percent in August 2022, the second highest in the nation after the Yuma metropolitan area. However, the El Centro unemployment rate of 16.2 percent for this August was down from 19.4 percent in August 2021.
The statewide unemployment rate in California was 4.1 percent in August.
As before, Jeffrey censored the reasons why the unemployment rate in Yuma and El Centro are high: seasonal agricultural jobs and little else, the migrants who work those jobs, and lower educational levels.
It's also worth noting that CNS devoted no articles to these pockets of high unemployment when Donald Trump was president -- indeed, its previous hyping took place during the Obama administration:
A November 2012 article by Jeffrey stated that "The metropolitan areas of Yuma, Ariz., and El Centro, Calif., have the two highest unemployment rates in the country, according to data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
Ali Meyer wrote in a December 2013 article that "The Yuma, Ariz., metropolitan area, which sits on the U.S-Mexico border, had a 31.9 percent unemployment rate in October, the highest of any metropolitan area in the country, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
Susan Jones wrote in March 2016 that "El Centro, California had a 19.2 percent unemployment rate in January, the highest of the 387 U.S. metropolitan areas surveyed by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics."
Jones repeated the complaine in a June 2016 article: "El Centro, California bills itself as one of Southern California’s "most promising new commercial and industrial regions." But it had a 20.1 percent unemployment rate in April, by far the highest of the 387 U.S. metropolitan areas surveyed by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics."
It clear that Jeffrey and CNS cares only about these pockets of high unemployment when they can be used to attack a Democratic president.
MRC Cheers Ye's Purchase of Parler, Censors The Person (And MRC Funder) He's Buying It From Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center was an early booster of right-wing social media site Parler -- though it censored the fact that Parler's biggest funder is also the MRC's biggest funder, Rebekah Mercer. But it grew bored with Parler as newer, shiner right-wing social media sites popped up, especially the Donald Trump-endorsed Truth Social; the only relevent reference to Parler at the MRC in recent months was a Sept. 6 post by Catherine Salgado touting how "More than a year after Google canceled the Parler app, the tech giant quietly let Parler back onto its Google Play Store." In typical fashion, Salgado censored the fact that Parler shares a funder with her employer; whiile she touted how John Matze co-founded Parler "as a pro-free speech alternative to increasingly woke social media companies like Twitter and Facebook," she didn't mention that Matze is suing Mercer for screwing him out of his share of the company whwen she seized control of it. (We wonder if Salgado had to clear the reference to Matze with Mercer before including it.)
That neglect of Parler fipped when Kanye West bought the company. Brian Bradley touted it in an Oct. 17 post:
Censored on one platform? No problem. Just buy another. That seems to be the situation for the rapper and fashion designer, “formerly known as Kanye West.”
Parler, on Monday, announced that Ye will acquire Parler from Parlement Technologies, which is expected to take effect by the end of this year.
Parler bills itself as “the world's pioneering uncancelable free speech platform.”
Platform CEO George Farmer expressed apparent optimism in reaction to the news, and said Ye will fight for free speech.
“We welcome Ye in the fight for free speech,” Farmer said in a statement to MRC Free Speech America. “As the social justice mob continues to put the crosshairs on people they disagree with, Parler’s open door and viewpoint--neutral take on social media offers an environment where everybody can speak freely. “
After the acquisition, Parlement would provide “ongoing technical support” and open up use of its cloud services via its private cloud and data center infrastructure, according to the announcement of the transaction.
"In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves," Ye said in a statement.
Lots of stuff missing here. First, Bradley fell into the MRC trap of censoring the fact that the person selling Parler to Ye is the person who funds his MRC paycheck. Second, Bradley failed to report that Farmer is married to Candace Owens, the person with whom Ye did the stunt of wearing "White Lives Matter" shirts a couple weeks earlier that gained him even more favorable press from right-wingers like the MRC. That means Bradley avoided having to raise the question of whether that stunt was a ploy by Owens and Farmer to maneuver Ye into a position in which Parler could be unloaded on him.
Third, and most important, Bradley made no mention of Ye's anti-Semitic tweet in this part of the article -- even though said tweet is the big reason anyone is paying attention to his purchase of Parler and, thus, should have been the lead. As a result, Bradley's prattling on about Ye being "censored" and expressing "conservative opinions" leaves readers wondering if he's really saying that anti-Semitism is a valid "conservative opinion" that must not be "censored."
It wasn't until the eighth paragraph of his post that Bradley finally addresssed the elephant in the room:
Ye caused widespread controversy after he reportedly claimed he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” in tweet on Oct. 8
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” he reportedly tweeted, according to screenshots. “The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti[-]Semitic because black people are actually Jew also [y]ou guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”
Ye’s tweet came after Instagram restricted his account for other content that some users also viewed as being anti-Semitic.
Twitter locked Ye’s account after his anti-Semitic post on that platform. His last tweet was on Oct. 9.
"Reportedly"? Really? Nobody's disputing that Ye made that anti-Semitic tweet -- given how many people screenshotted it -- not even Ye himself. Note that Bradley could not be moved to criticize Ye's anti-Semitism, making him the second MRC writer, after Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, to refuse to criticize blatant anti-Semitism when given the opportunity. It also means that in thte eight days between Ye's tweet and Bradley's post, no MRC item has explicitly criticized Ye's ugly anti-Semitism.
Seems like someone at the MRC needs to set up a field trip into Washington, D.C., down the road from MRC headquarters in the Virgina suburbs, to the Holocaust Museum to provide a lesson to these scrubs.
P.S. The MRC also censored Parler's post-purchase PR nightmare: Politico reported that Parler sent an email to its VIP users to announce the news, but it forgot to put the email list in a blind CC format, meaning that everybody knows everyone's email address on the list, with the side effect of some VIP users not being aware they were VIP users or why they were designated as such. Politico also reported Parler's puny size -- 16 million registered users and just 40,000 active ones, compared with Twitter's 237 million active users.
UPDATE: The MRC additionally censored how Farmer couldn't be bothered to criticize Ye's anti-Semitism, claiming that the anti-Semitic tweet was merely badly worded, that anti-Semitism is "up for conversation" and that Ye has "fallen victim to the cancellation narrative." He has a company to unload, after all.
WND Promotes Yet Another Dishonest, Discredited Attack On COVID Vaccines Topic: WorldNetDaily
It wouldn't be WorldNetDaily if it wasn't promoting bad studies that fearmonger about the COVID vaccine, and Art Moore is at it again in a Sept. 27 article:
A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television now is calling for a suspension of the shots, arguing in a scientific paper that there is evidence the risk of harm is greater than any benefit.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who presented his paper at a news conference in the British capital Tuesday, said "there is a strong scientific, ethical, and moral case to be made that COVID-19 vaccines rollout must stop immediately until raw data has been released for fully independent scrutiny."
His paper, published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in two parts, here and here, is titled "Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine."
Joined at the news conference by Dr. Ryan Cole, a Mayo Clinic-trained pathologist, and Dr. Tess Lawrie, co-founder of the non-profit World Council for Health, Malhotra said real-world safety data indicate a rise in hospital cardiac arrests and heart attacks linked to Pfizer's COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
The presence of Cole and Lawrie -- both prolific COVID misinformers that WND has previouslypromoted -- should be a warning that this was going to be a misinfo-fest. So Moore quickly moved to try and burnish Malhotra's alleged credibility:
An internationally renowned expert in the prevention, diagnosis and management of heart disease, Malhotra is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of The Public Health Collaboration. He also is an honorary council member to the Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Actually, as Science-Based Medicine noted, Malhotra published a book promoting what the British Dietitic Assocation called one of the "Top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018." Moore continued:
He began his presentation, hosted by Lawrie's World Council for Health, talking about the concept of "willful blindness."
"I was willfully blind, certainly in relation to the vaccine and the harms, until I wasn't," he said.
Malhotra said that's why it's crucial that the issue be tackled both with the facts and with compassion, "because there are many people who are still willfully blind."
As happens so often with so-called studies that Moore promotes, this one is shoddy. As Health Feedback documented, Malhotra's article "cherry-picked evidence supporting the narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and possibly harmful, while ignoring the larger body of evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective." Science-Based Medicine further exposed the shoddiness of Malhotra's research:
As I said at the beginning, one of the favorite tactics of quacks, cranks, and antivaxxers is projection: To accuse their critics of what they themselves are guilty of, and both of Dr. Malhotra’s articles are prime examples of this tactic, starting right from the title, in which he claims the mantle of evidence-based medicine for himself against what he characterizes as “misinformation” coming from health authorities and the conventional press. Interestingly, Dr. Malhotra barely uses the word “misinformation” in his first article, but uses it much more frequently in his second article, as though he were doubling down on his first assertion.
[...]
For instance, COVID-19 cranks (like Dr. Malhotra) take advantage of the low quality and reliability of a lot of medical research to contribute even more to that low reliability by publishing propaganda in journals like The Journal of Insulin Resistance. Indeed, I once called this phenomenon scientific review articles weaponized as disinformation, a label that describes Dr. Malhotra’s two part “narrative review” quite well.
Looking back at both articles, it’s clear to me that the first article was intended to sow doubt about COVID-19 vaccines through the use of a compelling anecdote about his father followed by cherry-picked data. As much as I might feel sorry for Dr. Malhotra because of his loss, I cannot allow that feeling to prevent my directly addressing his misuse of the anecdote of his father’s death to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines. The second article is more of a generalized antivaccine rant that uses tried and untrue techniques that try to paint big pharma and government regulatory entities as so completely corrupt (as well as ideology- and profit-driven) that they ignore evidence of harm.
[...]
Dr. Malhotra’s article is projection, pure and simple, or, as I put it: “I know you are, but what am I?” He’s accusing conventional medical authorities, big pharma, and social media companies of spreading medical misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines by using the very techniques of misinformation that he claims to decry, such as cherry-picked studies and conspiracy theories, to do it. I know you are, but what am I, indeed.
Rather than noting any criticism of Malhotra's work, Moore simply parrots it. And he continued to do so: Moore uncritically repeated Malhotra's claims in an Oct. 5 article, and he gave Malhohtra another uncritical platform to spread misinformation in an Oct. 19 article:
A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television is warning his colleagues and the public he has evidence tying the incidences around the world of "unexpected" cardiac events in otherwise healthy people to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra made the statement in a video posted Wednesday on Twitter.
"It is my duty and responsibility as a consultant cardiologist and public health campaigner to urgently inform doctors, patients and members of the public that the COVID mRNA vaccine has likely played a significant role of being a primary cause in all unexpected cardiac arrests, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure since 2021, until proven otherwise," he said.
Moore censored the fact that Malhotra's earlier work had been exposed as the misinformation it is -- instead, he parroted it yet again, right down to the bogus appeal to authority by listing his credentials.
An inquisitive reporter i snot not -- he's nothing but a partisan stenographer.