Slanties 2022: Slant Game

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 1/17/2022

	Related articles on ConWebWatch: 2004 Slanties 2005 Slanties 2006 Slanties 2007 Slanties 2008 Slanties 2009 Slanties 2010 Slanties 2011 Slanties 2012 Slanties 2013 Slanties 2014 Slanties 2015 Slanties 2016 Slanties 2017 Slanties 2018 Slanties 2019 Slanties 2020 Slanties 2021 Slanties

That's how we kick off awards season here, in the form of the 19th 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 pro-Trump conspiracy theories: The Media Research Center was such a pro-Trump enthusiast that it constructed its own companion Big Lie about how the election was stolen from Trump, hiring Trump's own election pollster to manufacture the results it wanted. It only somewhat distanced itself from it after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, but it had a new one to push: painting Trump as a victim because his social media accounts were banned for inciting the riot. Not only did the MRC falsely claim Trump was banned for calling for "peace," it refused to admit that what happened was an "insurrection."

-- Newsmax's election fraud conspiracy theories get it in trouble: Newsmax is even a bigger Trump lackey than the MRC is, and it enthusiastically promoted Trump's conspiracy theories. But that enthusiasm got it in trouble, drawing defamation lawsuits from election-tech companies Dominion and Smartmatic, and all the public distancing it did from its own reporting and commentary didn't keep that from happening. While fighting those, it settled with a Dominion executive and made a public statement retracting claims it made about him.

-- WND doubles down on conspiracy theories: The saying goes that if you are in a hole, you should stop digging. WorldNetDaily is disregarding that advice: As its financial crises have continued, it's ramping up its hype of conspiracy theories of the type that caused said financial crises in the first place. Not only did it continue the coronavirus conspiracies of the previous year, it fully embraced Trump's Big Lie about election fraud.

-- CNS' war on Biden and Pelosi: CNSNews.com showed its bias through its incessant bashing of President Biden -- by nitpicking him in ways it would have never done to Donald Trump and praising Vladimir Putin every time he attacked Biden -- and a spray of attacks on Nancy Pelosi. Both Biden and Pelosi underwent similar attacks for being insufficiently Catholic for the uber-Catholics who run CNS.

And the Slantie goes to ... WND doubling down on conspiracy theories. WND remains defiantly oblivious to the fact that its embrace of conspiracy theories have caused readers to abandon it and most credible companies from advertising with it. Instead, it prefers to believe that its impending demise is the result of a conspiracy theory too.

* * *

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:

A dirty election is a dirty election; a coordinated dirty election across multiple states with or without foreign assistance is an insurrection, subject to the use of military force against the plotters, without the permission of the states involved. I would also expect massive asset seizures against the plotters and financiers (read Executive Order 13848).

[...]

If President Trump were to invoke Article II, Section 4, he could certainly remove the existing state governments, set up a temporary government and schedule new elections in the fraud-prone, COVID-obsessed states. In some ways, I like this option better.

-- Craige McMillan, Jan. 1 WND column

This [Capitol riot] is an explosion of pent-up outrage from Middle America. Look, they are furious that they believe this election was stolen. I agree with them. They are furious that with the Deep State, they believe Washington is utterly corrupt, and they've had it. I agree with them. They are furious with Antifa and the rampaging in the streets and the lawlessness, and one cop every single week is being shot to death -- think about that one for a second -- and I agree. They are furious with the vast censorship of free speech that's taking place. So the fury was there.

-- Brent Bozell, Jan. 6 Fox Business appearance

Congress certified the Electoral College vote for Joe Biden in the middle of the night, just like how Jesus was convicted by the Jewish high priests in the middle of the night, just like five states committed election fraud last Nov. 3-4 in the middle of the night.

-- Michael Master, Jan. 7 WND column

Donald Trump is John Wick, and all those who oppose his policies are officials on the High Table council.

For the crime of not pledging his undying loyalty, for non-adherence to Deep State dogma and attempting to undermine the authority of this criminal enterprise, an "Open Contract" of sorts has been placed on "Don" Wick's head.

The American High Table is the merger of Democrats, deep state Republicans, Big Tech, media and finance. They have a full-court press on to ruin Donald Trump. They are literally hitting him from all sides, working toward this common end.

Trump has been the bane of their existence since he announced he was running for president in 2015. And like John Wick, Trump, to them, is the most dangerous man in America.

-- Brent Smith, Jan. 15 WND column

China Virus. China Virus. China Virus. China Virus. China Virus. China Virus. China Virus.

I figured I better get that out of my system while I still can.

-- Joseph Farah, Jan. 27 WND column

We are witnessing a purge unprecedented in America, but widely repeated through world history during tyrannical régimes. Dissenting voices are silenced, religious expression is suppressed, statues are toppled, history is rewritten, and – most importantly – the education of children is strictly regulated. As Hitler so accurately observed, "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. ... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."

And it's all happening in less time than you think.

-- Patrice Lewis, Feb. 12 WND column

If Donald Trump was America's judge, as I believe, he fits the mold of Samson (complete with iconic hair) – who furiously fought the corrupt Philistines and in the end (Jan. 6) pulled down their temple on all of their heads. What followed Samson in Israel (under Eli and Samuel) was the transition to a monarchy led by Saul, who transformed into an Antichrist figure during his reign, who was followed by David, the Christ figure.

This pattern also fits the last-days timeline of prophecy. If so, it could be that Biden is the Eli figure – famous for the criminality of his sons – and Trump could even return in 2024 for a second term as the transitional Samuel figure, but either way there was not in Israel, nor would there be in America, any restoration of the republic, just a possible continuation of the reprieve, consistent with God's longsuffering nature.

It all comes down to the hearts of the people ourselves, and, just as was true under the final judges of Israel, there is today no apparent hunger for a return to national godliness that would manifest in repentance.

-- Scott Lively, Feb. 15 WorldNetDaily column

The first thing is to depend on information from “conservative” sources and avoid paying attention to COVID information from leftist, mainstream sources. In the former category are shows on Fox News, especially Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. There are a multitude of conservative websites, many of which have been identified in the previous parts of this book. Of particular note are websites that have published pandemic articles by this author; they include WND.com, lifesitenews.com, globalresearch.ca, unz.com, opednews.com, nolanchart.com. Another important website is americasvoice.news, which airs the Steve Bannon War Room show that has often given reliable information on the pandemic.

[...]

Perhaps more importantly, ignore and discount COVID information that amounts to disinformation and propaganda on all the major leftist media, including the Washington Post and New York Times, as well as CNN and MSNBC.

-- Joel Hirschhorn, book excerpt published Feb. 28 at WND

The past few years have seen a plethora of LGBTQIABCDEFG targeting of preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school audiences.

Cross-dressing actor Billy Porter appeared in a gown on the show Sesame Street. Ru Paul's Drag Race star Nina West created a kids' ABC song using drag terminology. The classic children's cartoon Arthur had a same-sex wedding and PBS Kids sang about two dads and a baby. My Little Pony introduced a lesbian couple. Nickelodeon, alongside regularly promoting LGBTQIA+ propaganda on its children's shows, outed SpongeBob.

So, it is no surprise that Blue's Clues & You, Nickelodeon's reboot of the beloved children's classic, would insert sexual identitarianism into its programming.

-- Elise Ehrhard, Feb. 19 MRC post

I have been telling parents for decades that sending a child to almost any college is playing Russian roulette with his or her values.

But it is a different version of Russian roulette. In the traditional version, only one of the gun's six chambers contains a bullet. In the college version of Russian roulette, five of the six chambers contain a bullet. If your child attends almost any university in America (or Canada or anywhere else in the English-speaking world), the odds are that your child's decency, intellectual acuity, faculty of reason, character and moral compass will be damaged, perhaps permanently.

-- Dennis Prager, March 8 WND column

American psychologist G.M. Gilbert interviewed Hermann Göering, the highest-ranked Nazi official tried at Nuremberg. Goering reportedly told Gilbert that the masses can always be controlled with the right messaging.

''The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,'' Goering supposedly said, according to Gilbert's ''Nuremberg Diary.''

''That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.''

In the same manner, Americans are told that it's necessary and even ''patriotic'' to sit in your car alone while wearing a mask, avoiding human contact, closing businesses until they go bankrupt, and shuttering schools.

-- Michael Dorstewitz, March 24 Newsmax column

But in truth, there is a significant difference between those in the cancel culture crowd and institutions like the Christian family determining not to partake in certain things.

The latter is like going to a store to buy an apple and deciding you don't want to buy a certain kind of apple because you don't think it tastes as good, you don't prefer the way it was picked, how or where the apple company spends its money, etc. (Such preference provides choices and competitive options for individuals.) The former, however, is like going to a store to buy an apple and the store telling you, “We refuse to carry that apple anymore because we found out you liked it,” or we cancelled it “because we disagreed with it.” (Cancel culture limits choices and competitive options for individuals.)

-- Michael Morris, March 23 CNS commentary

I caught COVID at church – praise God!

That's a peculiar headline, I suppose – but one that expresses my gratitude for the opportunity I have had to worship with other Christians, maskless (shhh!), over the last few months, mindful of the risk.

[...]

Despite the risk and despite my having endured COVID-19 after taking that risk, I would do it all over again. For me the gathering of God's people in weekly worship and fellowship is too valuable an activity to put on the shelf for months on end. And the beauty of liberty is that other people can choose to do otherwise. Others can take different risks to participate in other activities, church-based or not. It's called living life.

-- Ron Strom, April 1 WorldNetDaily column

[JoJo Siwa announcing she is pansexual and "part of the LGBTQ community"] is unabashed brainwashing and the little red devil is complicit. The LGBTQ cabal is pushing their perverse agenda by the most subversive means. There is no disguising it, either, as Siwa clearly stated their evil machinations: “GLAAD has been working closely with kid and family show creators and publishers like ‘Little Bees Books’ to help them share LGBTQ stories for tween and teen audiences. Now even the littlest of kids can see what inclusion looks like.”

-- Veronica Hays, April 12 MRC post

Was the rough and ready Donald Trump an expression of God's mercy for our nation in our time of crisis? Was he similar to a Winston Churchill, whom God provided to stand courageously and help rescue people from the coming peril? Was there sufficient fraud in the 2020 election for Dems to rob it? Biden's middle name is Robinette - "robin' it." Interesting.

-- Larry Tomczak, April 13 WND column

Just in case kids haven’t gotten the message that gender confusion is cool, Nickelodeon is offering yet more LGBTQRX (and sometimes Y) propaganda for juveniles.

A new episode of the live-action series Danger Force will feature the first-ever transgender character and actor in Nickelodeon’s history. Sasha A. Cohen, a 13 year-old transgender boy, in reality, a biological female, was handpicked by the show’s creator Michael D. Cohen (no relation) to accomplish this groundbreaking moment in TV history.

The young transgender caught Cohen’s attention as one of the applicants for his Trans Youth Acting Challenge meant to help trans and binary youth excel in the entertainment industry. (And to promote the Trans agenda to teens.)

[...]

The poor girl-turned-boy is being used as a prop to further promote a system of insidious lies surrounding biological sex that manifests itself in the destruction of otherwise normal children.

-- Veronica Hays, June 4 MRC post

Trump, as I explain in my new book, "Citizen Trump," is not a Jesus but more like a John the Baptist. We don't like him eating locusts and lives in the desert, but to paraphrase Jesus, "what did you expect a reed tossed by the sea?" So you ask him to do the dirty work but complain it got dirty?

[...]

Jesus spoke in metaphors and parables. John the Baptist called his greatest enemies whitewashed sepulchers — in other words, phonies, frauds and fakes!

Yes, Trump performed his role as candidate and president; that's why he succeeded but just ran out of TV time.

-- Robert Orlando, June 16 Newsmax column

Why would Disney, the alleged family-friendly entertainment giant, want to encourage kids to reject their sex? And why aren't the media covering this story?

The Muppet character, Gonzo, has "transitioned" to a girl, Gonzorella. That is why he is wearing a dress to the "royal ball." He does more than wear a dress—he instructs Miss Piggy and Summer that "doing things a little different can be fun."

The message to children is: a boy can be a girl, and vice versa. Making this choice, they are told, is not something abnormal, it's just "a little different." Moreover, it can be "fun" to reject your sex and pretend that you belong to the opposite sex.

This needs to be called out for what it is: child abuse.

-- Bill Donohue, Aug. 5 CNS column

This is 1938. I'm a Jew. I now understand just a little of what it felt like to be a Jew in 1938. No, it's not the Holocaust. Nothing can be compared to the Holocaust. Ever.

But 1938 was not the Holocaust. It was the pre-Holocaust. It was the time before the nightmare, when the foundation was being laid to destroy the freedom, free speech, businesses and lives of millions of Jews.

Everything happening today to the American people ... to the U.S. Constitution ... to freedom ... and particularly to unvaccinated Americans reminds me of 1938. This is only the beginning. It gets much worse from here.

-- Wayne Allyn Root, Aug. 9 WND column

Holy shoehorned sexual deviancy, Batman! The Dark Knight’s greatest sidekick, the Boy Wonder himself, Robin has finally come out of the closet. What, really? Yep, in one of the latest Batman comics from DC, Robin is interested in men.

-- Gabriel Hays, Aug. 12 MRC post

Let it be said again, there is reason a professional athletes may not need to take the vaccine. One gander at a sideline of athletes – especially football athletes – are some of the most physically in-shape individuals on the planet. Furthermore, the NFL dedicates an ungodly amount of medical resources to ensure that their players stay healthy, so combining that with their incredible physical health and you have a demographic of people who should be the least concerned about their vaccination status.

The CDC has said that a vaccine’s effectiveness varies from season to season and person to person in terms of helping prevent sickness. So if the COVID vaccine- which has only been tested for months and not years-is just like any other vaccine, then it would be foolish for any sports team to make cuts based on something that has not been proven effective -such as the COVID-19 vaccine.

In the past, teams wrongfully used to make personnel decisions over skin color. Thankfully, we have moved past this foolish determinant of whether or not to allow an athlete to play a sport. But now, it seems we are reverting back to our old ways of discriminating against people and making them appear as second-rate citizens, this time based on someone’s medical history.

-- John Simmons, Sept. 2 MRC post

Today we have two contrasting quotations from world leaders. One said: "Mandatory vaccinations will never be allowed because [this] is a free country and its people are sovereign." The other said: "This is not about freedom or personal choice."

The first was by Vladimir Putin. Russia, a free country! The second was by Joe Biden.

The U.S. is no longer a free country, and the people are not sovereign. Nor are the once-sovereign states.

-- Jane Orient, Sept. 13 WND column

The government does not own our bodies. They are given us by God to use in glorifying him. We are not to be coerced or pressured into compromising them.

Biden’s forced vaccine initiative contradicts this truth. As such, it’s a violation of human dignity. And no amount of syrupy, guilt-laden appeals to conscience, to protecting “people you love,” can mask the fact that it, too, is deception.

Such things are the work of the Father of Lies, the Prince of Darkness.

-- Rev. Michael P. Orsi, Sept. 14 CNS column

Just as Christ flipped a few tables in the temple (John 2:13-16), a healthy rebuke to having your rights violated is more than only OK. It's an obligation to reject violations thrust upon our American way of life by the cultural Marxists of our day.

Hate speech is the very speech deserving of the most protection. Liberals declared opposition to COVID vaccines, voting for Donald Trump and questioning climate activism as hate speech. When that fails, the inevitable race card is played, since nothing is more truly hateful than real racism.

-- Judd Dunning, Oct. 4 Newsmax column

Let’s see: Heroic horsemen rode to the rescue at Del Rio, Tex., along the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans could’ve whipped the open-border Democrat degenerates with a first-principles case for sovereignty and self-defense, the thing Border Patrol horsemen were exercising so instinctively. Instead, the Right chose to beat around the bush, sweating the redundant details:

“Was it a whip or a rein?”

Who cares, when our border-patrol heroes—the last of the He-Men—were doing the work of the Lord! And, what on earth is wrong with the whip, in this context?

[...]

There is only one winning—and correct—answer, in the case of the whip versus the rein, and it is this:

If it was not a whip, it ought to have been one, and if our Guardian Angel of the border used a rein as a whip—then hooray for him. The End.

-- Ilana Mercer, Oct. 1 WND and CNS column

God's plan and purpose is always redemptive: order from chaos. But in typical Satanic style, truth and falsehood are reversed as the demonic realm brings chaos from order, and his regressive process is called "progress" by his army of "progressives."

-- Scott Lively, Oct. 4 WND column

Given the doubtful result and the judicial abdication, Trump’s response has been reasonably civil. When the majority of the Roman Senate condoned the murder of the distinguished reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi in the late second century B.C., they eliminated the possibility for the republic to continue to evolve sensibly.

When the senators, by their incompetence, squandered armies and left Rome vulnerable to invaders, and generals the Senate suspected of not being malleable (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar) repelled Rome’s enemies and acquired for themselves the loyalty of the armies that they had led successfully, the Senate surrendered the republic to political generals.

[...]

Trump, in fact, has been quite moderate in response to the questionable 2020 result and to what is now being unearthed as the politicization in 2016 of the national intelligence agencies and the FBI as they unconstitutionally assisted the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in trying to cheat Trump out of the 2016 election.

-- Conrad Black, Oct. 5 Newsmax column

All things considered, it doesn't take a fortune-teller or palm reader to predict Joe Biden isn't long for this earth. At least he isn't long for this earth in a bipedal position.

It's not just delusional and an outright lie to argue Biden is competent to execute the most basic functions associated with the office his minions stole; it is a sign of psychological impairment. Biden is a shuffling, mumbling, disaster of a human being who, as I have oft said, needs sticky notes with pictures on them posted in bathrooms to show him how to pull down his zipper.

He is the semi-ambulatory textbook definition of non compos mentis, which is a legal phrase for "not of sound mind or not mentally competent to conduct one's affairs." The same was the case with Barack Obama in December of 2010, when there were "allegedly" unconfirmed whisperings that Obama was unstable and being heavily medicated.

-- Mychal Massie, Oct. 18 WND column

My 100-year-young mom was so thrilled to receive her first Chuck Norris Silver Coin. As she did, she said to me, reflecting back upon the struggle of our family's early years in poverty, "This sure will buy a lot of caramels!" We both laughed out loud!

But then I said quite seriously, "Mom, thanks to our GOLDCO precious metal investments, we and our family will never have to face a future of financial uncertainty again."

-- Chuck Norris, Nov. 8 WND column

In 1940, the Germans defeated the French with incredible speed. The armies of fascism and totalitarianism simply went around their opponents' elaborately constructed defenses, and the swift collapse of what had only recently been a major military power came shortly thereafter.

In a similar fashion, America's strongest bulwark for the preservation of our most cherished liberties, embodied in the Constitution, has been neatly bypassed. The forces of collectivism, socialism and tyranny, uniquely American versions of Marxism and progressive dictatorship, moved swiftly through an undefended gap.

That gap was a wildly and deliberately exaggerated health crisis. A disease that has a low mortality rate for young and healthy people was used as a pretext for draconian denials of rights that not too long before had been considered inalienable.

-- Joe Keysor, Nov. 11 WND column

And the Slantie goes to ... WND's Ron Strom, for being bizarrely grateful at not only being so irresponsible as to worship maskless in a church at the height of a pandemic but also to be bizarrely grateful that he inevitably caught COVID as a direct result. Strom is WND's commentary editor, which tells you the caliber of the people left running the site.

There were a couple noteworthy runners-up: Wayne Allyn Root's fearmongering about how this is 1938 and we're all Jews, and Ilana Mercer's hearty endorsement of whipping undocumented immigrants.

* * *

Our next 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 ... Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center. Noyes retired in September after 22 years at the MRC, most recently serving as research director. That means he was the guy behind some of the MRC's most biased "media research" of recent years -- so-called studies that purported to quantify "liberal bias," largely by pretending that subjective things like "spin" and "negative" coverage could be documented in an objective manner. Those highly flawed studies shared several features, including a focus on only a tiny sliver of the media so the desired results and refusal to make the underlying data public.

That biased research demonstrated how the MRC is merely a group of partisan activists, not actual "media researchers."

* * *

Our final award is the Doocy-Gasm Award, which we are giving for obvious reasons to ... Curtis Houck of the Media Research Center.

ConWebWatch has spent the past year documenting how Houck has continually engaged in partisan bashing of White House press secretary Jen Psaki -- something he never did to Trump's final spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany. His view on the reporters in the briefing room has flip-flopped too -- instead of lashing out correspondents like CNN's Jim Acosta, he seems to have fallen deeply into love (or at least man-crush) with Fox News' Peter Doocy. Houck's near-daily fawning over Doocy is embarrassing to watch -- hence the award name -- and he can do no wrong in Houck's eyes. But if he does, Houck is eager to play clean-up. He did that at least twice in 2021: He stealth-edited a briefing summary to downplay the fact that Doocy asked a question to Psaki based on a false story, and when Doocy accused the Biden White House of illicitly "surveying" purveyors of COVID misinformation, Houck buried the fact that all that was being done was monitoring the misinformers' public social media posts.

Such sycophancy and (unpaid?) PR for Doocy and Fox News is how one wins a coveted Slantie Award.