CNSNews.com abandoned the "news" part of its name to serve as a Republican Party mouthpiece by uncritically promoting partisan attacks, bashing President Biden and deflecting from criticism of the GOP after the attack on Paul Pelosi.
By Terry Krepel Posted 1/2/2023
As the midterm elections approached, CNSNews.com endeavored to be a Republican Party mouthpiece by giving Republican politicians and partisans a platform to peddle partisan talking points unencumbered by such inconveniences as balance or fact-checking. For example:
CNS even tried to clean up and spin away after Republican foibles, like in this Nov. 2 article by Jones:
President Biden and his fellow Democrats claim that Sen. Rick Scott -- and by extension, the entire Republican Party -- want to cut or end the Social Security and Medicare programs.
Biden said it on Tuesday while campaigning in Florida: "You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life. You earned it. Now these guys want to take it away. Who in the hell do they think they are? Excuse my language," the president said.
"I think the heat of South Florida's gotten to the guy, all right?" Sen. Scott told "Mornings With Maria" on Wednesday.
[...]
Biden on Tuesday pointed to the plan floated by Scott -- not by the Republican Party.
Scott has proposed the following: "All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again." And: "Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt."
Biden told his audience, correctly, that under Rick Scott's plan, "every five years, the Congress will have to vote to reauthorize Social Security — reauthorize it or else it goes away. Would have to vote to reauthorize Medicare, reauthorize veterans benefits, and I go down the list."
But Biden then translated "reauthorizing" as "cutting."
[...]
Asked if it was a mistake to float a plan that lends itself to misrepresentation by Democrats, Sen. Scott said Democrats "do the same thing" every election cycle:
"They say Republicans are going to cut Medicare and Social Security. They do it whether you put out a plan or not. I do believe that when you run for office you ought to tell people what you're going to do. I'm a business guy. I went and raised money when I was running businesses. Nobody gave me money and said I don't know how I'm going to spend it, just give me the money.
"If you want somebody's vote you should tell them exactly what you're going to do do... We ought to be very specific, how are we going to preserve Medicare; how are we going to preserve Social Security. We have to talk about it. Because what's happening right now, it's going away and nobody wants to talk about it."
As election day neared, CNS was eager to peddle Republican talking points on "election integrity" straight from the source (and, of course, without fact-checking or added commentary). A Nov. 7 article by Jones cheered how RNC chair Ronna McDaniel refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether Republicans would follow in Donald Trump's footsteps and scream "election fraud!" in every election Republicans lose:
Dana Bash, host of CNN's "State of the Union," asked Republican Party Chairwoman Rona McDaniel on Sunday for a "simple yes or no" answer -- "Should Republican candidates, Ron Johnson, all of them, accept the election results?"
McDaniel took the question and ran with it, concluding that Democrats talk a lot about "election deniers," but Democrats themselves are "crime deniers, inflation deniers and education deniers."
The exchange left Bash flustered, as McDaniel turned the "denier" label on Democrats. You can watch the entire exchange in the video below, complete with crosstalk, but here are the highlights.
In response to Bash's question, should Republicans accept the election results, McDaniel replied:
"Well, I would say the same to Stacey Abrams, right, or Hillary Clinton, who's already saying, in 2024, we are going to rig the election. That's not helpful.
"Listen, you should have a recount. You should have a canvass. And it'll go to the courts, and then everybody should accept the results. That's what it should be.
"But I'm also not going to say, if there's problems, that we shouldn't be able to address that. If there's real problems, everyone should be able to address that. And I think Ron Johnson and Stacey Abrams, in the end, once all their avenues are exhausted, right, they will -- they will accept the results."
Another article that day, by Melanie Arter, uncritically let McDaniel spin away reports of right-wing activists intimidating voters by keeping occasionally armed watch on drop boxes by declaring that "nobody should be intimidating or breaking the law. Nobody should, but poll watching is not intimidating. ...This isn't happening from the RNC." A Nov. 8 article by Craig Bannister, however, cheered McDaniel touting how Republicans have lawyered up to fight election results they don't like:
“We’re going to make sure it’s fair,” Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel reassured Americans Tuesday as they went out to vote in this year’s midterm elections.
“Everybody needs to be calm,” because Republicans are hard at work throughout the country to ensure voter integrity, McDaniel promised in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” conducted in a Pennsylvania diner:
"We have poll watchers everywhere. We have 100% coverage. And in Pennsylvania, we have poll workers. We have lawyers everywhere and we're going to make sure, if we see anything wrong, we're going to protect everybody's vote, and we're going to make sure it's fair.”
“But some of these states have wacky laws, and we're just going to have to deal with it and be patient. It may take some time," McDaniel cautioned.
Bannister also uncritically hyped that, in his words, "Democrats are to blame for delays in vote-counting and the erosion of trust in the integrity of the country’s elections."
Nitpicking Biden
In contrast to its uncritical stenography of Republican attacks, CNS articles on Democrats who criticize Republicans -- and especially articles quoting President Biden -- tended to include editorial criticism and fact-checking. It's something that CNS rarely did to Donald Trump when he was president. A good example of how this worked is an Oct. 27 article by Jones. First came the complaining:
Who's lying? Republicans are, according to President Joe Biden, who -- according to the Democrat-friendly New York Times -- "spins yarns that often unravel."
In a teleconference fund-raiser on Thursday, Biden said the midterm election is "not a referendum" on Democrat leadership -- "it's a choice," he insisted.
"And this is not your father’s Republican Party," Biden said, according to the White House transcript.
When Biden noted the MAGA extremists "who were breaking down the doors — literally, the doors and the windows of the Congress and two cops ended up dying," Jones did a selective fact-check:
The only person killed on January 6 was a protester, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a police officer as she climbed through a window. Four other people died of natural causes, including one police officer.
The D.C. Medical Examiner says Capitol Police Office Brian Sicknick died of natural causes following the riot. And press reports say four police officers who were at the Capitol on January 6 committed suicide much later.
Jones ignored that the medical examiner looking into Sicknick's death said that “all that transpired played a role in his condition,” or that at least two Capitol Police officers who died by suicide had their deaths declared to be in the line of duty.
Then came the whataboutism:
According to a New York Times article published on Oct. 10, 2022, "President Biden has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity."
[...]
The article adds that Biden’s “stories” have been “repeatedly and publicly challenged, as far back as his 1987 campaign for president, when his attempts to adopt someone else’s life story as his own, and his false claims about his academic record, forced him to withdraw.”
Note how Jones suddenly considers the Times to be a credible source when it criticizes a Democrat -- even though she began her article sneering that the Times is "Democrat-friendly."
Jones spent a Nov. 3 article whining about the attacks Biden issued against "extreme MAGA Republicans":
In a speech that bounced from warnings about political violence, to warnings about "autocrats," to warnings about election deniers, to warnings about “extreme MAGA Republicans” and to the premise that "democracy" is on the ballot, President Joe Biden seemed to be telling the country Wednesday night that unless they vote for Democrats, they can kiss the republic goodbye.
He echoed Abraham Lincoln; he slammed Donald Trump; and he urged Americans to prioritize "democracy" over "policy."
Biden also contradicted himself on the topic of voter suppression -- giving a nod to the "record" turnout in early voting, but also warning that "extreme MAGA Republicans" are "denying your right to vote."
"Once again we’re seeing record turnout all over the country," Biden said in his speech.
Jones then whined that Biden invoked the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln:
Biden also contradicted himself on the topic of voter suppression -- giving a nod to the "record" turnout in early voting, but also warning that "extreme MAGA Republicans" are "denying your right to vote."
"Once again we’re seeing record turnout all over the country," Biden said in his speech.
Abraham Lincoln also used the phrase in his First Inaugural Address, noting that "in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was 'to form a more perfect Union.'”
Lincoln was making the point that no state can lawfully get out of the Union -- "that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary..."
Biden also echoed Lincoln by saying, "What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure."
(Speaking at Gettysburg in November 1863, President Lincoln said: "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.")
Unlike with the attacks from Republicans CNS uncritically presented, Jones gave space to a Republican responding to Biden:
In response to Biden's partisan speech, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted: "President Biden is desperate to change the subject from inflation, crime, and open borders. Now he's claiming that democracy only works if his party wins. What nonsense. Americans aren't buying it. Ask how the last two years have affected your family, and then get out and vote!"
Jones used a Nov. 7 article to hype Biden's response to a question in which he called for "no more drilling" and replacing coal plants with wind and solar. She then blockquoted Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's "blistering response to Biden's remarks about coal," then added that "As with many of Biden's remarks, the White House tried to walk back the one about coal plants." We don't recall CNS ever promoting walkbacks of remarks made by Donald Trump. We've already noted how Craig Bannister used a different Nov. 7 article to criticize Biden denouncing the violent attack on Paul Pelosi by claiming that he was "ignoring times in recent years when prominent Democrats have been criticized" for glorifying violence.
Jones adopted a whining tone in reporting more remarks from Biden in a Nov. 8 article:
Speaking to a group of Democrat [sic] Party officials by teleconference Monday night, President Joe Biden explained what "being a Democrat is all about."
He said Democrats want "power" only to "help people," and he described the opposition as "some of the darkest forces we've ever seen in our history."
"You know, you guys represent everything that’s good about our party, the reason why we got into politics in the first place," Biden told the Democrat National Committee [sic] National Finance Committee, according to the White House transcript:
[...]
Biden then quoted "my dad," as he does so often: "As my dad used to say, 'I don’t expect the government to solve my problem, but I ex- — I just expect them to understand my problem.'"
Jones somehow refrained from adding her usual huffy commentary to what is supposed to be a "news" article. But she did so stealthily by deliberately getting the name of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee wrong. It's sad that CNS employs someone who deliberately misspells words to advance a political agenda.
Deflecting from attack on Paul Pelosi
Mimicking its Media Research Center parent, CNSNews.com reacted to the violent hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by complaining that Republican anti-Pelosi rhetoric was being blamed, mixed with whataboutism. The first article referencing the attack was an Oct. 31 piece by Susan Jones complaining that a Democratic senator referenced "election deniers" in condemning the attack:
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is among the many Americans condemning the violent attack on Paul Pelosi. And she laid some of the blame on supporters of Donald Trump, who "have been expanding into our politics."
"This has to end," Klobuchar told NBC's "Meet the Press."
"And there are several things we can do from the security standpoint, which I'm happy to share with you...but it is also about making sure we don't add more election deniers into our political system."
Host Chuck Todd asked Klobuchar, "What's the bigger challenge, getting Republican leaders to deescalate or figuring out how to get these tech companies to stop amplifying this garbage?"
"They're both humongous challenges," Klobuchar said:
Jones became a one-person content mill after that, following this article literally just eight minutes later with an article quoting Vice President Kamala Harris' condemnation of the attack while weirdly leading with President Biden saying that Harris is "making me look good." And 20 minutes after that, Jones cranked out an article repeating Biden's condemnation of the attack and adding that "you can’t condemn the violence unless you condemn those people who continue to argue the election was not real, that it’s being stolen, that all the — all the malarkey that’s being put out there to undermine democracy." An hour or so later, she moved to documenting Republican whining that they're being blaming for fomenting the attack by their relentless attacks on Nancy Pelosi, while sneering at another critic:
Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said it's "unfair" for the Washington Post to blame "Republicans' increasingly violent and threatening rhetoric" for the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi.
In an op-ed published Saturday, the Post said: "For many Democrats, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband represents the all-but-inevitable conclusion of Republicans’ increasingly violent and threatening rhetoric toward their political opponents — a phenomenon that escalated under former president Donald Trump."
"Well, I think that's unfair," McDaniel told "Fox News Sunday."
[...]
MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, her voice quivering with rage, took her cue from the Washington Post on Monday, saying that “years of Republican propaganda and Trump-fueled fascism led 42-year-old David DePape to break into Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco home, with the intent to harm her."
"There is no mischaracterizing what happened," Brzezinski said: "Are we to insist this attack was not the direct result of the dangerous, violent rhetoric we have heard from Donald Trump's Republican party over the last six years? The deranged man who violently assaulted Paul Pelosi got his idea from somewhere...
Jones didn't explain why it was somehow bad form for Brzezinski to be "quivering with rage" over the attack.
On Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) wife responded to a flashback video tweet recalling how one MSNBC host made light of a 2017 assault that blindsided her husband and left him with six broken ribs.
After a vicious attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband on Friday, Jason Howerton posted the flashback video in anticipation of left-wing media attempts to blame the attack on Paul Pelosi on right-wing rhetoric:
“I remember when @RandPaul was viciously attacked and an MSNBC anchor accidentally let her true feelings come out: ‘...the incident that left Senator Rand Paul with six broken ribs, this might be one of my favorite stories...’"
Kelley Paul replied:
“I do too, @kasie. I was caring for Rand as he struggled to breathe in terrible pain as you called his attack and injuries ‘one of my favorite stories’ on air. Yet you still have a job.”
While Bannister plucked the "one of my favorite stories" quote out of context to manufacture right-wing outrage, he did surprisingly include the full statement by the anchor in question, Kasie Hunt -- who, it turns out, said it was one of her "favorite stories" because "the first assault on a sitting U.S. senator in decades" involved a dispute with a neighbor over lawn care, not politics.
Melanie Arter served up more mundane Republican denunciation of the attack:
For her first article on Nov. 1, Jones went to the whataboutism well to whine about heated Republican rhetoric being blamed for the attack, while making sure to describe the alleged attacker as an "deranged, homeless nudist" in an effort to further distance Republicans from him:
Democrat [sic] activists, particularly those with cable TV platforms, berated Republicans on Monday for stoking the violence unleashed by a deranged, homeless nudist on Paul Pelosi, who is recovering from hammer blows to the head and body.
Not so fast, said Republican lawmakers Steve Scalise and Rand Paul, both of them badly injured at different times by people opposed to their conservative politics.
"I mean, there's an eagerness on the left to make this political and immediately to start blaming Republicans, but where's the sympathy, even from the left, for Paul Pelosi?" Sen. Rand Paul asked.
[...]
"Laura, my thoughts and prayers are with Paul Pelosi," Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) told Fox News's Laura Ingraham Monday night. "[W]e need to be praying and hoping that he fully comes out of this and we stand up against any kind of violence, that is something I have been hearing loud and clear from all ends of the political spectrum, as it should be.
Jones served up further whining from a Republican candidate:
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake says she's being "attacked by the media," because "I'm speaking the truth" about topics that a leftist media has "prohibited."
"You know, you can't talk about vaccines. You can't talk about elections," Lake told Fox News's Tucker Carlson on Monday night:
"You can't talk about Paul Pelosi, now you can't talk about Nancy Pelosi, and you can't talk about the elections, and you can't talk about COVID. And I'm talking about all those things because I still believe we have a little bit of the First Amendment left."
Lake said another thing the media won't talk about is illegal immigration and its effect on Americans:
She noted that the man suspected of breaking into her opponent's campaign headquarters is an illegal alien, but "you can't say that now because you can't talk about that. It's insensitive. And the press won't report that.
Jones didn't mention that Lake is an election denier of the type Klobuchar warned about. A Nov. 2 article by Jones criticized Hillary Clinton for bringing up Lake's dismissive attitude to the Pelosi attack and tried to invoke a "point of clarification" to defend Lake:
Former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined MSNBC's Joy Reid Tuesday night in demonizing Republicans -- not just individuals, but the "whole" party.
Reid mentioned the attack on Paul Pelosi by someone she described as having "sort of (a) right-wing conspiracy theory mind."
Clinton followed the leftist’s lead:
"I don't see Republicans running for the Congress or governors in many other different positions taking down their violent ads, or I don't see them curbing their rhetoric," she said:
"You played something from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was calling for the death, because of treason, for Speaker Pelosi.
"The level of just plain crazy, violent hate rhetoric coming out of Republicans -- you played something from the candidate, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. I want viewers, I want voters to stop and ask themselves, would we trust somebody who is stirring up these violent feelings, who is pointing fingers, scapegoating, making a joke about a violent attack on Paul Pelosi?
"Why would you trust that person to have power over you, your family, your business, your community? So, I want to take this a step further away from the incident, that terrible incident with Paul Pelosi, and broaden it out, because what we have with the rhetoric coming from the Republican candidates, from their party right now is so disturbing.
Jones huffed in response:
Point of clarification: Republican Kari Lake, running for Arizona governor, did not make a joke about the attack on Paul Pelosi, although liberal media outlets accused her of "mocking" the attack.
In remarks about school safety at a campaign stop in Scottsdale, here's what Lake said:
"Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection," Lake said, stating the obvious.
Lake’s audience laughed, and that gave rise to reports that Lake was "joking" about the attack on Pelosi. Lake continued: "If our lawmakers can have protection, if our politicians can have protection, if our athletes, then certainly the most important people in our lives — our children — should have protection."
That doesn't make Lake look any better, but it's clear that Jones will bend over backwards to try to clean up offensive remarks by Republicans.
Jones also stayed true to repeating Republican talking points by using an article the next day to invoke the exact same distraction its Media Research Center parent did regarding the alleged assailant:
The U.S. Justice Department on Monday released a federal criminal complaint and supporting affidavit against David DePape, the homeless man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer after smashing his way into the Pelosi's San Francisco house.
But of all the facts detailed in the eight-page complaint/affidavit, this one was missing: DePape was in this country illegally.
[...]
But the first words of the Oct. 31 DOJ news release announcing the federal charges say this: "A California man was charged today with assault and attempted kidnapping in violation of federal law in connection with the break-in at the residence of Nancy and Paul Pelosi in San Francisco on Friday."
San Francisco is a sanctuary city.
Jones didn't explain how DePape being in the country illegally somehow made him a violent felon. She also didn't highlight the details on how that happened, which don't mesh with the right-wing "sanctuary city" rhetoric Jones was invoking: He overstayed a travel visa from Canada he received in 2008 -- meaning that Donald Trump likely had an opportunity to expel DePape during his presidency but did not.
The husband of the House Speaker was brutally attacked, and all Democrats and their media cohorts can talk about is how they want to blame the attack on conservatives, in order to influence the midterm elections, Fox News Channel late-night host Greg Gutfeld said Monday.
In the opening monologue of “Gutfeld!,” the comedian-commentator mocked the left’s lone obsession regarding the vicious home-invasion assault on Paul Pelosi: scoring political points.
While Democrats and liberal media are desperately trying to tie the home-invasion attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband to Make-America-Great-Again (“MAGA”) extremists and criticism of liberal politicians, Republicans are actually focused on the issue of crime, like the one committed against Paul Pelosi, Gutfeld said:
[...]
“It’s MAGA extremists behind this - because they always attract illegal alien nudists who live in school buses, who think they’re Jesus Christ,” Gutfeld mocked.
But, the people freaking out never mention attacks on conservatives, Gutfeld noted: “Remember how many jokes were made about Rand Paul getting his ribs broken, ‘Ha, Ha, Ha.’”
Bannister contributed even more Fox News-assisted whataboutism in a Nov. 7 post:
On Sunday, President Joe Biden claimed that his party never glorifies violence, ignoring times in recent years when prominent Democrats have been criticized for doing just that.
Speaking at a campaign event supporting the reelection of Democrat New York Governor Kathy Hochul, Pres. Biden said he couldn’t recall another time since the Civil War “where violence is condoned.”
Biden accused Republicans of inciting violence and engaging in dangerous rhetoric. He also accused unnamed Republicans of “making fun of” and “making excuses” for, the recent, brutal, home-invasion assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, Paul – but, provided no examples:
[...]
However, on Sunday, Fox News recalled just some of instances when prominent Democrats have appeared to support violence, based on their political goals:
The first alleged example Bannister noted was "Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) threatened Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in 2020 during a pro-choice rally." In fact, Schumer merely said in that rally that right-wing justices "have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price." There was no endorsement of violence in that statement.
