Slanties 2021: Hy-Slantie-Chloroquine

It's awards season, so it's time to honor, as it were, the worst ConWeb reporting and craziest ConWeb opinions of the year.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/13/2021

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In that spirit, it's time to kick off awards season in the form of the 18th annual Slantie Awards, ConWebWatch's celebration of bad journalism and creepy right-wing sycophancy.

Time to document the atrocities -- er, hand out some hardware.

* * *

The first award is for the most egregious example of bias in "news" coverage. The nominees are:

-- MRC's failing war on social media: The Media Research Center is so desperate to falsely smear "Big Tech" as solely and uniquely hostile to conservatives that it defends coronavirus misinformation and embraces far-right extremists in order to keep up the victimization narrative -- even as sites like Facebook continued to suck up to conservatives (something the MRC has deliberately ignored).

-- CNS' aggressively pro-Trump election coverage: CNSNews.com has always acted like pro-Trump state media, but it turned that up to 11 for the 2020 presidential election, being heavily pro-Trump and anti-Biden before the election , adding biased coverage of the debates, and promoting Trump's bogus election fraud conspiracy theories after the election.

-- The ConWeb v. Norma McCorvey: When a documentary was released on Norma McCorvey, the "Roe" plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade court decision that legalized abortion, the anti-abortion activists in the ConWeb attacked the film, alleging that it somehow manipulated McCorvey -- who later in life became an anti-abortion activist as well -- into renouncing that activism, preferring to keep the "pro-life" narrative above the facts.

-- WND's coronavirus conspiracy theories: Because WorldNetDaily never met a right-wing conspiracy theory it didn't like, the coronavirus pandemic was too good an opportunity to pass up. It trotted out its coterie of dubious fringe-right docs to push hydroxychloroquine, and its columnist racked up the bad takes.

And the Slantie goes to ... CNS' aggressively pro-Trump "news" coverage. CNS has pretty much abandoned its mission statement to "fairly present all legitimate sides of a story" to serve as a servile stenographer to Trump, thus ensuring nobody ever takes it seriously as a "news" operation.

* * *

The next award is the LoBaido Award for the silliest statement made by a writer for a conservative news Web site (named after Anthony LoBaido, who wrote a post-9/11 column for WorldNetDaily that was so unhinged -- he blamed the attacks on America's immorality since "all that is evil in the world can be found in New York" and, for good measure, called Hillary Clinton "openly Marxist, treasonous and abortion-mongering, occultic" -- that WND eventually pulled it from its site). Here are this year's finalists:

One does not have to like Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein (I fought with the latter for decades) to like what their lawyers are saying in their defense. There are some lines of defense that are not only persuasive, they have direct application to accused priests.

[...]

What Weinstein’s lawyer says about women accusers is certainly applicable to priest accusers. Some are telling the truth but others are lying through their teeth, seeking revenge against an institution they despise. And just as Weinstein is a “powerful guy” who is easily exploited because of who he is, the Catholic Church is a “powerful” institution that is also easily exploited.

It would do the Catholic Church wonders if more aggressive attorneys such as those employed by Cosby and Weinstein were hired. No priest should be a sitting duck for rapacious victims’ lawyers.

-- Bill Donohue, Jan. 23 CNS column

The duped, historic majority of the U.S. will willingly cede political and institutional dominance in return for the constitutional safeguards – for the abstractions – offered by democracy. This, Democrats know only too well.

Moreover, being pushover-passive on matters domestic, Caucasian America is generally pro-immigration, the more exotic and culturally incongruent, the better. It makes for a warm and fuzzy feeling about The Self. But while Americans don't see race; the people they're importing see nothing but race.

Take Indian Americans. They're a relatively new addition to the United States' top-down, state-planned, multicultural mess of pottage. Most Indian Americans have "arrived in America over the past two decades." But they are highly aggressive politically and reliably Democrat.

-- Ilana Mercer, Jan. 30 WND column

I urge all women not to follow the example of the pettiest, rudest, lowest female in public America: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The utterly disgraceful display of lack of manners as President Donald Trump held his State of the Union address Tuesday, makes me ashamed to be a woman.

-- Hanne Nabintu Herland, Feb. 6 WND column

“Dora the Extorter?” “Exploited Development?” “How I Nagged Your Mother?” Whatever the eventual title, be afraid. Greta Thunberg is headed for TV.

During the BBC Showcase on Feb. 10, the network announced production of a docu-series on the life and and propaganda of the Swedish Scold. In a statement the BBC said, “The series will follow Greta’s international crusade, which takes her to the front line of climate change in some of the most extraordinary places on earth as she explores what actions could be taken to limit climate change and the damage it causes.”

So we’ll see Thunberg (which definitely does not rhyme with “Funberg") yelling at hapless politicians and hobnobbing with concerned celebrities, interspersed with classic tearjerker shots of supposedly starving polar bears, and footage of the burning Amazon Rainforest. (Context-free footage that is, since many of the fires are necessary for the environment and global incidence of fires has been on the decline in general since 2003. But we digress.

-- Gabriel Hays, Feb. 12 MRC post

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi acts more like Cruella de Ville in Disney's "101 Dalmatians" than she does a woman at the apex of the nation that is the most prosperous and generous in the world. Cartoonist Gary Varvel was genius in his recent illustration of Mrs. Pelosi as the evil Cruella throwing a vitriolic temper tantrum.

What Mrs. Pelosi fails to realize in choosing to emulate the children's cartoon character is that the purpose of the villain is to teach that being treacherous is not something to which one should aspire. Yet Mrs. Pelosi seems to relish it.

Doesn't she care that our daughters are watching?

-- Rebecca Hagelin, Feb. 13 WND column

"None of us," said the pronoun-challenged Buttigieg, "have the experience, the lived experience, of, for example, of walking down the street or in a mall and feeling eyes on us regarding us as dangerous without knowing the first thing about us, just 'cause of the color of their skin."

As [Heather] Mac Donald pointed out, "Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined."

People walking down the street would be imprudent not to look at black teens suspiciously. Black people look at young black men suspiciously.

-- Jack Cashill, Feb. 26 WND column

A more plausible explanation is that the virus was developed by China. At least that's what my Chinese driver told me after picking me up at the airport in Australia.

He told me quite emphatically that COVID-19 was man-made, developed as a weapon by Chinese scientists.

When I asked him where he learned this, he replied, "The internet."

But, he was quick to add, the YouTuber he followed was a former Chinese official with excellent, inside intelligence.

A few days later, a friend of mine in New York City, who is a pastor, shared a similar theory with me.

He said that a well-placed friend, formerly a higher-up in the FBI, told him that China developed the virus to hurt the American economy, thereby hurting Trump. And this was in retaliation against Trump for pushing back against China's trade policies.

-- Michael Brown, March 11 WND column

As the clock ticks, the number of new COVID-19 infections rise. While promising theories are emerging over potential vaccines and drug treatments, the stark reality is that without large-scale human experimentation of those new medications, the public will remain at risk. State and federal prisoners may hold the key to finding a cure for this pandemic.

[...]

To be sure prisoner volunteers would have to give informed consent of potential health risks and side effects before they are included in a test group. Current federal rules governing prisoner use for scientific experimentation allows it so long as the testing exposes the prisoner to "minimal risk" of harm. That regulation can easily be waived or modified by Congress or the Bureau of Prisons in the case of emergencies, which COVID-19 would seem to present.

-- Richard Kibbey and David Lamos, March 25 WND column

I don't wish to minimize the seriousness of coronavirus. But the pandemic is just the latest attention-getter from God, showing that disobedience to His way of life results in death. Believers are indeed saved by God's grace, which is underserved, but we need to make every effort to get sin out of our personal lives.

A fraction of all human beings who ever existed will die from COVID-19.

But every single person who does not stop his or her personal rebellion against the Maker of all things and repent of his or her own sins will remain infected with something far worse than coronavirus: being dead forever.

-- Joe Kovacs, April 5 WND article

But circumstantial evidence now has some wondering whether the virus release was intentional. Supporting this is the fact, while millions of people were on lockdown in Wuhan, there were no reported cases in Beijing where most senior political and military leaders reside – nor in Shanghai, the country's financial center. Additional evidence includes China building a 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan in just 10 days, the stockpiling of masks and ventilators then sold to other countries, the disappearance of medical personnel "whistleblowers" and causing havoc in foreign stock markets with little negative impact to its own. Now, as economic engines around the world remain shutdown, China begins powering up.

The fact Chinese President Xi Jinping surprisingly walked through virus-infected areas donning only a facemask raises a nefarious observation. The president for life should have worn more protective gear; the fact he did not begs the question whether China has developed a virus antidote administered to its leaders.

-- James Zumwalt, April 15 WND column

It seems like some folks have used the ghost of Ernesto "Ché" Guevara as their guide through the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States. Said Ché: "To send men to the firing squad [job loss, suicide, substance abuse], judicial [scientific] proof is unnecessary. ... This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate [of President Trump]."

Apparently, Ché was on to something. Forty-three percent of U.S. adults and 52 percent of low-income adults say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut due to the outbreak. How can any American stuck at home not be disgusted by politicians who are still collecting their full paychecks while the middle class and working poor descend into an abyss?

-- Marilyn Singleton, April 27 WND column

Progressive ideas and global pandemics go together like a strain of COVID-19 and a mucous membrane.

The media tries to look the other way, but one progressive policy after another has been found to be a major cause of the spread of the coronavirus.

For decades, left-wing city planning experts have told us that sprawl is a bad thing. It’d be better for society, they insisted, if we all lived in high-density cities. Then the virus hit. Which area suffered more? Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Kansas?

One of the main reasons dense cities have suffered so much is their reliance on public transportation.

-- Adam Guillette, April 29 Accuracy in Media column

Is there any reason to believe that the SARS-CoV2 virus is not America's Trojan horse, or should we say Trojan virus? A Trojan horse that provides the tools for the left to weaponize the invisible enemy and empower it far beyond its inherent physical capabilities. America's Trojan horse provided the blueprint to America's anti-freedom left to brilliantly engineer a coordinated campaign against the American culture and society. A crusade of lies, blame, deceit, deception and false accusations all designed to spread division, fear and panic – like a virus – from coast to coast throughout our republic. All to accelerate America's rush to national suicide by the tyranny of socialism.

-- W. Scott Magill, May 5 WND column

I'm sick of hearing how black lives matter. Black Lives Matter is a Stalinist domestic terrorist group comprised of bigots, racists, anarchists and terrorists with three things in common: 1) They all hate America; 2) they're funded by taxpayer money and Soros money; and 3) they're all going to hell when they die, if they do not confess their sins, repent and turn from them, and accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.

-- Mychal Massie, June 8 WND column

The national media has been stubborn about awarding any recognition to Ivanka.

In the process of its condescending coverage has often ended up with egg on their faces.

Such as their rush to judgment about total jobs created by Ivanka, versus net jobs created during the same time period.

By any measurement, Ivanka Trump’s work has resulted in many hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans.

-- Doug Wead, June 24 Newsmax column

Such violence happened 75 years ago – Aug. 9, 1945 – when President Harry Truman unleashed the second atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Nagasaki had little military, but vast cultural and religious, significance. Nagasaki had been Japan's only port open to foreign ships and influence. It is the setting of Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly," a star-crossed romance between a Japanese woman and an American sailor.

Nagasaki was home to Japan's only Roman Catholic cathedral. The carefully aimed plutonium bomb "Fat Man" detonated within a quarter-mile of that cathedral.

Thousands of Japan's secret Christians went to Nagasaki, believing that Christian America would never destroy Japan's most "Christian" city. More Japanese Christians died in that atomic blast than during centuries of Japan's persecution of Christians.

They did not know that the leftist Democratic ruling elite in 1945 Washington, D.C., as now, were anti-Christian.

-- Lowell Ponte, Aug. 6 WND column

In 1999 the late Rev. Jerry Falwell exposed an example of indoctrination of young children in the British-originated "Teletubbies" TV program. One of the four characters, Tinky Winky, was defined by a mocking journalist: "purpleness (the gay pride color), [an inverted] triangle (the shape of the gay pride symbol) and 'magic bag' [a purse] as evidence for Tinky Winky's same-sex preference." The U.S. distributor replied, "To think we would be putting sexual innuendo in a children's show is kind of outlandish." [The effrontery!], but the article did admit "Tinky Winky has been a gay icon in Britain since the show premiered there in 1997." The ridicule of Falwell was so relentless that few would defend him for what we front-line pro-family activists instantly recognized as unmistakable toddler-targeted conditioning, called "grooming" in criminal justice terminology.

I'll be mocked for reviving what the left thought they killed with ridicule, but bring it on! Christians need to see examples of leaders who can survive the smears without backing down or apologizing. I've made a career of doing that.

I'll now double-down by contending that the ubiquitous "rainbow unicorns" and similar rainbow imagery for children is a more recent example of intentional LGBT grooming of very young children. To be sure, the rainbow has long been an element of the entertainment culture of American children, so the scoffers have more ammunition for scorning this analysis. But, given the nearly quarter-century long worldwide effort the LGBTs have made to hijack (God's) rainbow as their exclusive brand, modern designers of children's toys and entertainment cannot claim innocence of their potential effect on children's association of rainbows with goodness, planted in young minds like seeds lying dormant until puberty – when these same pre-conditioned kids will be ripe for recruitment.

-- Scott Lively, Sept. 28 WND column

What we're seeing in the whole charade of the Biden-Harris campaign right now where the entire media are playing along pretending this is a real person, pretending this is a person who has a mind, pretending he has any original thoughts going on at all right now, it's all a huge pretense. What we're seeing really is a -- what has infected all these people, the Democratic Party, the news media, culture, the incubator for all of it which is our colleges and universities, is something that we call Marxism, OK? But again, that's just a label. What it really, really, really is is a rebellion against God, a rebellion against God's laws and his son and his morality.

-- David Kupelian, Oct. 9 WND video

The Deep State is allied with Democrats and has failed to protect our president against this Chinese viral invasion. Apparently tanks and planes are easier to repel than a virus, particularly if genetically designed to cause harm.

All of Fauci's horses and all of Fauci's men have been useless in protecting Trump and our country. The reliance on testing obviously failed to keep the virus out of the White House.

-- Andy Schlafly, Oct. 6 WND column

Anybody with eyes to see knows that the globalist whores had nearly destroyed America since they took over both political parties. Trump rebranded the Republican Party in 2016. When he started it was half the globalist cartel, in bed with all those self-identified elites who wanted to run the world for their own benefit. In 2020 Trump is rebranding the Democratic Party as the corruptocrats, who never met a dictator or tyrant they didn't like ... provided he had sufficient money to spread around to "the family."

Just like 2016 this election comes down to evangelical Christians. You know, the ones who don't like the way Trump tweets, even though he did move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, something the foreign-policy globalists have cautioned against for decades. Maybe a roughshod tweet here and there is a reasonable cost to bear for doing God's bidding in international affairs?

-- Craige McMillan, Oct. 30 WND column

While votes are still being counted and the outcome of the election is undetermined, there is one thing we can say with certainty: once again, the polls weren’t just wildly wrong, they were deliberately wildly wrong.

This was no mistake. These were the same pollsters who predicted the same thing four years ago, day after day after day: there was no way Donald Trump could win. It was clear then that they were attempting to suppress the vote.

[...]

There needs to be a federal investigation. This is clearly election tampering. At the very least, this is a violation of federal election laws.

So many of these pollsters worked for the national ‘news” media.’ It’s yet another reason why Americans should never believe these hucksters again.

-- Brent Bozell, Nov. 4 MRC statement

Former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris decided to give victory speeches in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday night, causing NBC to break away from its broadcast of the football game between No. 1 Clemson and No. 4 Notre Dame to cover the speeches.

The game was in the second quarter--and Biden could not even wait until halftime.

Did Biden believe it would increase his audience to interrupt the broadcast of a contest between the No. 1 and No. 4 college football teams in America?

Did Biden--a self-described devout Catholic--know that Notre Dame was playing Clemson?

Notre Dame and Clemson fans--and fans of college football wanting to watch the contest between two of the leading teams in the country--were forced to switch to a cable channel to continue watching the game as Harris and Biden interrupted it.

-- Terry Jeffrey, Nov. 7 CNS article

Anyone who factually believes Joe Biden won this election is a moron, a fool or both. Common sense dictates no other options. Not even Democrats and/or people in the Biden campaign believe he actually won. The Biden camp enjoined with the Democrats and media are cheering that for the moment it appears the cheating has worked.

The socialist ideologues and anarchists are beside themselves with glee, but what happens if the truth prevails, i.e., there was massive voter fraud and corrupt counting practices on a level that's beyond quantifying based upon the scale of the cheating? How will the cheaters feel if they're exposed and justice finally prevails? What if at long last those responsible for the political fraud that stripped honest Americans of their right to participate in non-rigged elections end up in handcuffs, ankle chains and federal prison jumpsuits, in prison vans going into federal courts?

[...]

This said and being true, the one thing I know that both groups fail to calculate in their formulas is that God is on His throne, and if God wants Donald J. Trump to have four more years as president, there's nothing anyone can do to prevent it.

-- Mychal Massie, Nov. 9 WND column

Who would look more manly? A gnarly-faced Scot who’s clad in a kilt, sporting a fierce beard, brandishing a claymore and wearing a scowl that could kill a snowflake? Or a smooth-faced boy with styled hair who’s wearing a dress that resembles a ball gown from the 1800s?

While appearance doesn’t reveal everything about one’s character, it can send off a message about one’s beliefs. Harry Styles, British vocalist of the band One Direction, seems to think that it’s alright for men to wear dresses, as evinced by his latest photo shoot with Vogue magazine.

-- Sergie Daez, Nov. 17 MRC post

We are truly witnessing corruption of biblical proportions that God alone can deliver us from. We don't yet know how this struggle will end, but we do know that He has empowered President Trump and a massive MAGA army of constitutionalists to wage war in the cause of truth in a manner unseen since the founding of this nation.

President Trump broke the Alinsky Box by turning out a Red Tsunami of freedom-loving voters on Nov. 3, and I believe that if we all press in and fight like tigers to defeat the leftist coup, we WILL save this nation and smash the domestic and foreign enemies behind it.

-- Scott Lively, Nov. 20 WND column

I feel disenfranchised with last month's vote because of such apparent widespread voter fraud in six key swing states. But the media say, "There's nothing to see here." As of this writing, 40 court decisions seem to agree with them.

Thank God for the alternative media, which is a lifeline of information and which big tech, big media and the cultural elites are doing their best to suppress. But you can't suppress the truth forever.

-- Jerry Newcombe, Dec. 8 WND column

Donald Trump's late father Fred loved quoting a poem by Edgar Guest, one he kept framed on his desk.

It read, in part, "Success is failure turned inside out – The silver tint of the clouds of doubt, You can never tell how close you are, It may be near when it seems so far; So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit – It's when things seem worst that you must not quit."

For Fred's son, the key to winning was always about never quitting, even to the bitter end.

It's no surprise then that our President is fighting to that very last moment.

-- Christopher Ruddy, Dec. 20 Newsmax column

And the Slantie goes to ... CNS' Terry Jeffrey, for whining about how Joe Biden's victory speech interrupted his football game. That kind of pettiness would not be tolerated in the real world of journalism, and that's why Jeffrey can't be considered a real journalist.

A close second was Richard Kibbey and David Lamos offering up prisoners as captive test subjects for coronavirus vaccines and treatments. There are reasons nobody does this anymore and should never do this again -- namely, that "volunteers" tend to end up being anything but -- but they don't care.

* * *

Our final award is the Slantie Award for Career Achievement in Conservative Bias. This goes to a reporter or commentator with a consistent record of biased and slanted reports that fly in the face of time-honored journalistic practice, the truth and/or common sense.

This year's honoree is ... David Kupelian, managing editor at WorldNetDaily. Kupelian has been with WND almost since the beginning, running the "news" operation, writing pedantically preachy books and assembling his pet project, the sparsely read Whistleblower magazine. If Joseph Farah was WND's flamboyant front man, Kupelian was the guy in the background, keeping the right-wing faith by hating Obama, loving Trump and spreading falsehoods.

But when Farah suffered a stroke in early 2019, forcing him to take time off to recover, Kupelian had to step up to be the public face of WND. Unfortunately, Kupelian is no Farah, lacking his boss' panache, chutzpah and utter shamelessness. So when Kupelian tried to drum up donations by insisting that WND tells "real news stories about important issues free of bias and selective reporting," it rang even less true than when Farah claimed it (not that it ever was true in the first place). Kupelian's portrayal of WND's continued dire financial circumstances as a result of its victimization of tech websites also rang hollow for anyone who knows that nobody who wants to read actual news has any interest in an operation so laden with falsehoods and conspiracy theories as WND.

Kupelian has made it clear he's a WND dead-ender and that he'll be going down with the ship -- which may be sooner rather than later.