ConWebWatch home
ConWebBlog: the weblog of ConWebWatch
Search and browse through the ConWebWatch archive
About ConWebWatch
Who's behind the news sites that ConWebWatch watches?
Letters to and from ConWebWatch
ConWebWatch Links
Buy books and more through ConWebWatch

Whitewashing A Black
Right-Winger

CNSNews.com loves to promote black right-wing activist Candace Owens -- and to censor the numerous controversies she's been in and the extreme statements she has made.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 8/6/2020


Candace Owens

During the 2019 edition of the right-wing CPAC convention, CNS went into its usual stenography mode on several speakers -- for instance, devoting three entire articles to Vice President Mike Pence's speech alone. And Melanie Arter was locked into total stenography for one lengthy article on someone whom CNS would lavish uncritical, Mark Levin-esque stenography on in the coming months:
Candace Owens, director of communications at Turning Point USA and founder of the Blexit movement encouraging blacks to exit the Democratic Party, said Friday that she doesn’t want a Green New Deal, she wants a Black New Deal.

“I say I don’t want a Green new Deal. I want a black new deal. And the good news, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that that actually can be free. It doesn’t cost $93 trillion,” Owens said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Nowhere in her lengthy article did Arter mention a little controversy from just a month earlier in which Owens responded to a question about pushing nationalism in the U.S. when it didn't end so well in Nazi Germany by responding: "If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well — OK, fine. The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German." After getting backlash for her failure to understand Nazi Germany, Owens blamed "leftist journalists" for unearthing the remarks and conceded that, yes, Hitler was bad.

Arter went on to uncritically repeat a dubious talking point from Owens:

She said she questioned how the left loved Donald Trump before he announced his candidacy for president and then hated him 24 hours later.

“I questioned at the time, is it really possible that a man that was loved by the media, Donald J. Trump – they loved him – loved by black America – every hip hop song that I listened to growing up, they wanted to be like Trump. Beyonce and Jay Z were sipping poolside at Mar-a-Lago. He was the dream. Obama said that the American dream was to be like Trump,” Owens said.

“Was it really possible that within 24 hours of declaring his candidacy for the White House, he became a racist, bigoted, homophobic, sexist rapist at one point, right? Was that really possible, and I said of course, no that’s it’s possible. There’s absolutely no way that’s possible,” she said.

In fact, there was plenty of evidence of Trump behaving in a racist manner long before he was president.

Arter also uncritically repeated Owen's claim that she "questioned how the Democratic Party, which 'instituted slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial terrorism in the KKK,' had the black vote,"which ignores that the answer is not that difficult to find -- driven in large part by Democratic support for civil rights laws in the 1960s and growing Republican opposition to same -- had Owens and Arter bothered to look.

And as for Arter definitively describing Owens as "founder of the Blexit movement," that's not exactly true either. The actual founder claims that Owens co-opted her movement and has threatened to sue Owens over it.

Nevertheless, CNS' love for Owens continued to grow over the following months, uncritically promoting more of her partisan claims:

Most of these were written by Craig Bannister, who helpfully added in most of them that "Owens’ Blexit movement is an initiative to introduce conservative values to urban society." Actually, her Blexit website is filled with falsehoods.

Naturally, all this got Owens invited to the White House for a "young Black Leadership Summit" in early October, and CNS reported on that too.

A second article by Arter touted Owens' ridiculous claim that "for the first time in decades, we had somebody who was telling us the truth, and he just kept on telling it all around the country, dropping bars. Honestly, Trump might be my favorite rapper right now." The video accompanying Arter's article weirdly superimposed a label on top of the C-SPAN video it used identifying Owens as the "Blexit Founder" -- which, again, she isn't.

Meanwhile, CNS has said nothing about Owens' bizarre tweet a few days earlier about Matt Lauer being innocent of sexual assault allegations because the woman he allegedly assaulted continued to have an affair with him (the woman said she was afraid Lauer would ruin her career).

First came a post by managing editor Michael W. Chapman echoing CNS' descent into divine-Donald thinking:

During the Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House on Friday, female Ethiopian immigrant Mahalet went to the podium to pray for the nation and especially for President Donald Trump. Mahalet thanked God for "giving us a great leader like Mr. Donald Trump," and asked God to "protect us" and "protect our president."

Mahalet was born in Ethiopia. She was abandoned by her parents and eventually adopted at age 11 by a Christian family from the United States. Vidoe [sic] of her prayer was taken by Turning Point USA.

[...]

She continued, "All right. Dear God, I just want to say thank you for giving us this opportunity to be in the White House. Thank you for giving us a great leader like Mr. Donald Trump. And I would like to thank you for waking up our nation."

"God protect us," she prayed. "God protect our president. He’s going through so much now, so much scrutiny. God, I believe you gave him to us and I know he’s going to accomplish so much more. I know you have more for us. Jesus, I ask you to protect us and walk with us."
CNS has had a toe tipped into divine-Donald thinking for a while. CNS first dipped a toe in the divine-Donald pool in November 2018 by highlighting how a gathering of Christians in the White House turned into an "impromptu worship session." In an anonymously written January 2019 article, CNS touted how "White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on the Christian Broadcasting Network on Wednesday that God wanted Donald Trump to become president." Later that day, CNS devoted an article to huffing that Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar responded to Sanders' statement by tweeting, "God has a strange sense of humor!" Then, a March article by Craig Bannister gushed over the CPAC speech by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell proclaiming that Trump is "the greatest president in history. Of course he is, he was chosen by God."

As with the writers at WorldNetDaily who have pushed this idea, nobody at CNS appears to have considered the possibility that even if one accepts the idea that Trump's election was ordained by God, he was sent as a warning and not as a deliverance.

The stenography continues

CNS -- mostly Bannister -- has remained a dutiful stenographer for Owens' pronouncements this year as well:

While CNS was touting Owens' right-wing-friendly declarations, it was censoring her most recent controversies:

  • After the death of black jogger Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of white vigilantes, Owens suggested he had it coming because he was "caught on camera breaking into an unfinished property ... Avid joggers don’t wear khaki shorts & stop to break into homes."
  • Owens ranted that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, was a "dictator" for locking down much of the state to try and prevent the spread of coronavirus. This got her briefly suspended from Twitter (which made CNS' cohorts at the Media Research Center very unhappy).
  • Owens also declared she would not get a possible coronavirus vaccine -- while fearmongering about other vaccines -- and will refuse to wear a mask to help prevent coronavirus spread.
  • She advanced more coronavirus conspiracies, claiming that the death toll from the virus was being inflated for "financial incentive."

Owens is a liar, conspiracy-monger and grifter, yet CNS continues to give her an uncritical platform. That tells us that CNS is a propaganda outfit, not a "news" organization.

Send this page to:

Bookmark and Share
The latest from


In Association with Amazon.com
Support This Site

home | letters | archive | about | primer | links | shop
This site © Copyright 2000-2020 Terry Krepel