Slanties 2024: Slantenheimer

For the 21st time, it's time to honor (as it were) the worst ConWeb reporting and craziest ConWeb opinions of the year.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/19/2024

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Here at ConWebWatch, we doubled and even tripled down on our work compared with some previous years: 171 articles were published in 2023, the largest amount in ConWebWatch history (and that doesn't count all the blog posts that were published as well).

More articles mean more bias and bad behavior to choose from, which means it's time to announce the 21th annual Slantie Awards, ConWebWatch's celebration of bad journalism and creepy right-wing sycophancy.

With that, it's 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:

-- Fretting over Trump's indictments: The Media Research Center (here, here, here and here), Newsmax (here, here, here and here) and WorldNetDaily (here, here, here and here) did their ConWeb duty and complained loudly that Donald Trump was indicted -- for each of his four indictments.

-- ConWeb love for RFK Jr.: The Media Research Center, Newsmax and WND spent a lot of time ironically promoting Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign in the hope that the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist might hurt President Biden's re-election prospects. But Kennedy then decided to run as an independent instead of a Democrat, and the ConWeb lost interest.

-- MRC's hero worship of Elon Musk goes sideways: The Media Research Center kept promoting Musk and his purchase of Twitter (well, X), though it showed some hypocritical concern when its Community Notes feature subjected conservatives to fact-checks. So devoted was the MRC to Musk that it cheered his anti-Semitic leanings and even called on racist cartoonist Scott Adams to defend him.

-- Shenanigans at Newsmax: Newsmax started the year loudly whining that its TV channel was dropped by DirecTV -- then had to do some backpedaling on its attacks when a new carriage deal was reached. Newsmax then got accused of forcing a pay-for-play deal on Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that would give him better coverage if he bought more ads there, and it created a legal defense fund for frequent guest Rudy Giuliani.

And the Slantie goes to ... the ConWeb's ironic promotion of RFK Jr. They looked bad in promoting him, though they showed no mercy in abandoning him after he started running as a Democrat. They followed this by embracing the next fringe Democratic candidate to surface, Dean Phillips.

* * *

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:

The "will of the people," as expressed by outcomes of heavily funded ballot initiatives, is a canard that should be rejected by Republicans. Direct democracy was feared and opposed by our nation's founders, who established a representative government for the United States and guaranteed "a republican form of government" to each of its member states.

[...]

Caving in to ballot initiatives is a betrayal of representative government, and of voters themselves. By denying the rights of voters to elect representatives to protect their state's way of life, Republicans give residents an incentive to move to Texas and other states that prohibit mob rule through ballot initiatives.

-- Andy Schlafly, Nov. 14 WorldNetDaily column

Count Dracula was actually a committed Christian and saw his Just War against the invading Turks as being first and foremost about defending Christendom from Islam. Far from blaspheming and turning against God following his first wife's death – as dramatically portrayed in the opening scene of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) – Vlad regularly visited, sponsored and spent his free time in Orthodox monasteries, and even sent donations to Mount Athos.

[...]

And so, on this Halloween, you can remember Count Dracula not as fiendish vampire, but as a fallible man who, like so many Europeans before him, did what he could, fighting fire with fire, to keep his tiny Christian kingdom safe from Muslim invaders.

-- Raymond Ibrahim, Oct. 30 WorldNetDaily column

The Obama woman is enormously unlikeable. She's a humiliatingly uncouth harridan; she's lazy, contumelious, and if persons with firsthand knowledge are to be believed, a lush who imbibes more vodka than water; she's at best boorish.

Additionally, she is without accomplishment. Her cheering section will claim otherwise, but apart from the perks associated with her husband, she in fact has accomplished nothing of merit on her own. Seriously, let's be honest: What has she done in her life? Exactly what was her professional career before cashing in on Barry's political ambitions? She was little more than a beard for her sexual-deviant pervert of a husband. Do we forget the alleged reasons for her mother moving into the White House, what amounted to a bribe to keep her from divorcing her perverted husband immediately after his first election?

-- Mychal Massie, Oct. 16 WND column

God seeks to guide people by His Goodness, not intimidate them by His power. We are, however, very close to witnessing God clean up some of the messes that have been plaguing our nation – and others – for a long time. In America's case, this mainly happens because we have chosen to ignore the constitutional guideline that says, Election Day means Election DAY. What part of this is difficult to understand? Before we had automobiles and public transportation, people traveled from their homes to polling places and cast their paper ballot. They were known by their friends and neighbors. They didn't have fancy counting machines designed to insure that the "right" candidate was elected.

-- Craige McMillan, Oct. 13 WND column

In today's episode of the left’s latest attempt to come for your kids: Word just broke that creators of a "Paw Patrol" children's show spinoff, “Rubble & Crew,” will feature non-binary characters.

To make matters worse, the writer of the spinoff, Lindz Amer, is an extreme LGBTQ activist and hosts a Youtube channel called “Queer Kid Stuff.”

Normally when there are predators like this, we try to keep them away from kids. Nickelodeon pays them to indoctrinate children.

-- Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, Sept. 21 NewsBusters post

I have no doubt they will outlaw all Republicans as "domestic terrorists." PTA parents will be arrested. Free speech will be criminalized. All opinions counter to government will be canceled and banned.

Green energy will leave you with $2,000 electric bills and $12-per-gallon gas. Social Credit Scores and Central Bank Digital Currency will be installed; conservatives will be de-banked and left in financial shambles. If the banks don't leave conservatives penniless, 86,000 IRS agents will finish the job.

Mass arrests will be carried out. Americans will be sent to re-education camps. Everyone will be locked down indefinitely, businesses closed, masks will be worn 24/7 – in your car, outdoors, in your own home. We will all be force-vaccinated with a dangerous, deadly, poison vaccine.

Until we are all compliant, intimidated, brainwashed, in prison or dead.

This is the America you can expect if Democrats take full power in 2024.

We will be the last Republicans – EVER.

-- Wayne Allyn Root, Sept. 16 WND column

My X account was suspended a couple days ago for daring to use what those sissies consider violent speech. What did I say, you ask? I said, "Fauci needs to get the electric chair" – and it caused a bowel secretion in their tortured worthless lives that was consistent with encopresis.

[...]

I've said it many times: I say what I mean and I mean what I say – and I don't apologize, especially to an entity I have virtually no respect for in the first place. There's nothing under this sun that could cause me to lament their actions. In fact, if they're smart enough to read sign language, they'll understand that the positioning of my thumb to the tip of my nose isn't a field sobriety test for alcohol consumption. Since I am a teetotaler.

Saying Anthony Fauci deserves the electric chair is me being extremely generous in my call for him to be punished. The death penalty is too good for him. He deserves the eternal agony of hell for knowingly and intentionally causing pain, faking data, fear mongering, censorship, and knowingly destroying lives and careers. All while he paves the way for his cronies to get richer.

-- Mychal Massie, Sept. 11 WND column

Prominent authors are chiming in on the growing criticism embroiling the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) amid the group’s latest assault on free speech.

Mark Levin and Scott Adams, both pro-free speech authors and podcast hosts, minced no words when each responded to ADL’s accusation that Elon Musk’s promotion of free speech is antisemitic. “If the ADL takes down X, free speech is gone,” Adams said. Levin echoed Adams’s remarks, directly slamming a Los Angeles Times op-ed that dubiously claimed Musk was attacking Jews. “No, Musk did not blame the Jews, assh*le,” Levin added.

-- Luis Cornelio and Catherine Salgado, Sept. 8 NewsBusters post

Let's start with black couples, clicking on Images. My search yielded row after row of black couples. What do you know!

Now we'll switch to gay Couples. What did the Google search engine produce? The same thing. Row after row of images of gay couples, some with their kids, but all male-male or female-female. The only exception was the occasional image of a throuple, but here too, all three participants were gay.

How about black gay couples? Yet again, exactly what you asked for: Every image is of a black gay couple, with "gay" specifically meaning "male."

Now let's try white couples. What comes up in the search?

The first couple features a white man and a black woman. The same with the second image (I'm not making this up). The fourth image is that of a black man and possibly a Hispanic man (the image links to the website, "Loving Interracial Couples"), and the fifth that of a white woman and a black man.

I tried this on different days and the results were shockingly similar. What in the world is going on?

[...]

Talk about political correctness on steroids and beyond. Talk about mass manipulation, especially when you realize that the vast amount of manipulation is not so obvious and blatant.

-- Michael Brown, Sept. 4 WND column

"If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman," said former South Carolina governor, U.N. Ambassador and now Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley at last week’s GOP debate.

Haley’s misandrist quip was her response to an invitation asking the eight candidates who participated to state their case for their party’s nomination.

[...]

By any right, Haley’s crude stereotyping of half of humanity as feckless dolts who cannot get anything done — and dismissal of all of her rivals on the basis of gender — should disqualify her from any position of responsibility.

-- Paul du Quenoy, Aug. 30 Newsmax column

Putin is a reactionary Russian patriot, a natural ally of any sovereign, conservative nation-state. The American objective is to end Russian sovereignty and make it over in the woke image of America: a radical Jacobin stronghold. By America's prescriptions, Russia should be a woke, minority white, multicultural sewer, awash with MeToo, BLM and Antifa sensibilities.

-- Ilana Mercer, Aug. 10 WND column

It’s not a movie I had any interest in seeing, whether it was a movie made for grade-school girls or a satirical sendup for the angry feminists.

But my wife wanted to see it, so off we went. It was the worst movie we’ve seen since “Elvis.” It’s a disjointed mess. Just like “Elvis,” we sat through it despite the temptation to skedaddle.

It’s like a series of bad “Saturday Night Live” sketches that are placed at the end of the show. Any movie that ends with a triumphant first visit to the gynecologist? Eminently skippable. “It’s like Pinocchio, with tampons” did not make the newspaper blurbs.

[...]

This feminist screed could have been worse. It could have ended with Barbie triumphantly getting an abortion. But that could represent one less little girl reaching for a Barbie doll.

-- Tim Graham, Aug. 4 Media Research Center column

Trump – the GOP front-runner in the 2024 presidential race – has been indicted three times in just four months. He's also been charged with 40 felony counts involving allegations he took boxes of classified documents and materials from the White House and stored them inside his Mar-a-Lago estate. A lie from the pit of Hell!

Donald Trump's daughter and son-in-law are Jews. I'm sure he loves them both. And he loves Israel and did more for the Jewish state in his administration than any other president. He was not committing some blood libel against them. He was simply saying, there might be a Nazi living the in the White House.

-- Joseph Farah, Aug. 3 WND column

The current U.S. president, Joe Biden, is a criminal – in fact, he's the patriarch (“big guy”) of an entire crime family. Their influence-peddling operations, through which many family members have raked in millions of dollars selling access to Biden to foreign actors – including major adversaries China and Russia – are now well-documented and indisputable, leading members of Congress to introduce articles of impeachment, and some congressmen and veteran analysts even to accuse Biden of the high crime of treason.

Moreover, Biden’s perverse policies in every area – from intentionally destroying America’s energy sector to intentionally engineering a massive foreign invasion of America – are degrading the nation at breathtaking speed.

And of course, the election process by which the obviously incompetent and mentally impaired Biden became leader of the free world in 2020 was egregiously compromised – which is to say, rigged – a fact every politically aware American now knows to be true, thanks to recent revelations confirming epic collusion between the FBI and Big Tech in suppressing extremely negative news about Biden shortly before the election.

-- David Kupelian, July 25 WND column

Over the past several years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has been promoting the implementation of an urban planning concept called the "15-minute city" (sometimes abbreviated as FMC). This is described as arranging an urban area in such a way that most daily necessities such as going to work, buying food and clothing, going to school, visiting the doctor, and engaging in leisure and entertainment can all be done within a 15-minute walk or bicycle ride from any point of the city.

According to its proponents, this would be a convenient way to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, improve the well-being and quality of life of city residents, and greatly reduce carbon emissions in the ongoing fight against climate change.

Under the guise of climate-change prevention, car ownership and use would be eliminated over time by making it too expensive and limiting the infrastructure to sustain it. Roadblocks and gates would be erected over time throughout the city. Along with restrictions on the freedom of movement, constant surveillance would characterize life, turning the FMC into an open-air prison similar to the districts in "The Hunger Games."

-- Rolaant McKenzie, July 6 WND column

Juneteenth, initially celebrated in Texas, is now is a federal holiday that celebrates nothing. The fact is that Dec. 6 conflicts with the Marxist agenda to keep the slavery propaganda at the forefront and suck in more government dependents.

-- Carole Hornsby Haynes, June 19 WND column

We don’t know if Garth Brooks personally drinks Bud Light, but we can assure you he’s an avid, two-fisted drinker of leftist Kool-Aid.

Brooks recently made the news when he announced his new bar, "Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk" — located in Nashville, Tennessee — will be proudly (no pun intended) serving Bud Light.

This after a Bud Light marketing campaign embraced female impersonator Dylan Mulvaney who is famous for his manic woman-face portrayals of real women.

[...]

Why must having an "open mind" include sane people associating with disturbed people and giving a big old hug to decadence?

Why does culturally imposed "diversity" force us to live in Sodom with electricity?

-- Michael Reagan, June 17 Newsmax column

My oh my, America sure looks pretty good to [Brittney] Griner now that we got her idiotic self out of a Russian prison. Gosh, what a difference that makes!

Maybe Griner - and all her self-centered, America-hating peers - will shut up and realize that they have it pretty good on American soil. Maybe they’ll be more appreciative fo a country that allows them to act like spoiled children and make more money than the average American playing a sport. I guarantee you countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and Pakistan wouldn’t put up with their bullcrap.

But knowing Griner, she’ll likely hop back on the social justice train soon. She’ll just needs some time.

-- John Simmons, May 15 NewsBusters post

You know the election of 2020 was an exercise in treason. You were there. You saw what was done. We all did. You can say there is no God, but He will disagree. You can say the election was fair and honest. Or you can say the vaccines were safe and effective.

You know that Joe Biden is a corrupt and thoroughly compromised puppet, who was selected as our presidential figurehead solely by virtue of his willing ascent to every lie placed before him and his unique and in-your-face talent for delusional embellishment. You know his presence in the White House is a purposeful mockery, telling us of our impotence to even know who is truly governing us.

You know that it is impossible for us to avoid the most obvious. That every policy of this administration has been directed at our destruction and that every implausible justification is pure rot.

-- Jim Darlington, April 28 WND column

Posted Thursday afternoon for Friday’s print edition on page A-12, Washington Post White House reporter Tyler Pager was joined by colleague and chief Biden apple polisher Matt Viser in a syrupy propaganda piece on President Biden’s unofficial vacation to Ireland that sounded like it was originally written in North Korean state media for a trip taken by Kim Jong-un to a missile launch.

Pager and Viser must have had weak knees in crafting the headline and subhead “Biden, the American president, seems awfully at home in Ireland; Biden this week has repeatedly wondered how anyone could leave the Emerald Isle.”

With takes like this, how are we supposed to consistently (if ever) take their journalism seriously?

-- Curtis Houck, April 14 NewsBusters post

What was all this shucking and jiving about for the last few weeks?

President Donald Trump was about to be indicted. Then he wasn't. Then he was.

What was going on in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office, I wonder. Who was he talking to besides his fairy godmother, George Soros? Was he seeking permission from Merrick Garland or Joe Biden? Did he know what kind of furor he would set off by criminally indicting a U.S. president for the first time in history?

-- Joseph Farah, March 31 WND column (Bragg is black.)

Maybe it is just me but the more I hear the Democratic representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), rant, the more I wish her parents had been celibate.

-- James Zumwalt, March 3 WND column

Once upon a time, everything Walt Disney touched turned to gold. These days, everything his namesake company touches turns to garbage. Disney announced 7,000 layoffs last month. They didn’t come in time to avert the live-action remake of “Peter Pan,” the company is inflicting on the culture in April.

The “Peter Pan and Wendy” trailer is getting torn apart on social media. Gone all multicultural and with The Lost Boys now including girls (which the trailer makes a point of shoving it in viewers faces), this was predictable.

-- Matt Philbin, March 2 MRC post

The rigid walls of toxic masculinity are crumbling before our eyes -- because a major league baseball player for the Boston Red Sox plans to paint his fingernails and toenails before every game this season. First baseman Tristan Casas is helping to change the “stereotypically macho image of MLB players for the better,” according to sensationalist Outsports writer Ken Schultz.

[...]

Even though no major leaguer has ever come out as an active player, a guy painting his nails is no small feat. It’s another step in the feminization of men. Somehow, this is supposed to make us a better nation.

-- Jay Maxson, Feb. 21 NewsBusters post

Based on my own due diligence, I believe Vladimir Putin is legally and ethically in the right in the matter of Russia's "Special Military Operation" (a position I explained last March in my essay on Putin talking points and the Monroe Doctrine) and that both the U.S./U.K. deep state that orchestrated the war, and the controlled liberal and neo-con media spoon feeding its propaganda to the American people, are as thoroughly dishonest as the devil himself. Thus, as a truth-loving Christian attorney, I would not hesitate to take the role of Putin's defense counsel in the matter of the Ukraine war and, if the trial court were a genuinely just venue where all the facts and evidence (the heart of which is well summarized and documented here) could be fairly presented to a truly impartial jury, I would be highly confident in victory for my client.

-- Scott Lively, Feb. 13 WND column

There were two major elements of the [Super Bowl] pregame ceremony that has something to do with wokeness:

1) Singing Of The Black National Anthem: Singer Sheryl Lee Ralph performed her rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” marking the first time that the song - also widely referred to as the unofficial “Black National Anthem” - was sung before the Super Bowl.

Of all the backwards ways in which progressives try to elevate black voices so that they are viewed as “equal,” this might be the most counterproductive method they choose.

If one ethnic group sings an anthem that only represents themselves and not the rest of the country, doesn’t that mean they are choosing to further the divide they claim is a problem that needs to be addressed?

-- John Simmons, Feb. 22 NewsBusters post

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) sent out a tweet on January 6 of this year stating that January 6 of 2021 was “one of the darkest days in our nation’s history.”

[...]

Schumer did not mention what other days he considered to be among “the darkest days in our nation’s history.”

If Jan. 6, 2021 was “one of the darkest days in our nation’s history” in Schumer’s analysis, it presumably would rank near Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; or Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Towers in New York City; or the days from 1861 to 1865, when the United States fought a Civil War; or the days that marked the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy; or April 4, 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated; or Oct. 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed, marking the beginning of the Great Depression.

-- Anonymous writer, Jan. 19 CNS article

And the Slantie goes to ... the MRC's Matt Philbin, for whining that a new interpretation of "Peter Pan" wasn't white and male enough. Interestingly, a few days after ConWebWatch highlighted Philbin's white supremacist-adjacent view, he was out of a job at the MRC. It's entirely possible that Philbin got the ax as part of a cost-cutting effort, since his departure occurred around the same time the MRC shut down its "news" operation CNSNews.com, but the timing is close enough not to speculate on our role.

Runners-up included Joseph Farah accusing a black prosecutor of "shucking and jiving," Mychal Massie aggressively defending his call to execute Anthony Fauci, and Paul du Quenoy claiming that Nikki Haley doesn't deserve to be president because she made a joke about men.

* * *

Our next award is the Malicious Moonlighting Award, which goes to ... Matt Palumbo. His day job is working for right-wing radio host Dan Bongino and writing books with right-wing friendly narratives, such as bashing George Soros and fact-checkers, but for part of 2023, he was moonlighting as a paid propagandist for shady right-wing (and criminally indicted) Chinese millionaire (and Steve Bannon's benefactor) Guo Wengui (a.k.a. Miles Guo), writing pro-Guo op-ed pieces that were in turn used by Guo operatives as paid "editorial content" on right-wing websites such as Gateway Pundit and Newsmax. Palumbo has refused to talk publicly about this work or how much he was paid, and Newsmax has since deleted most of the paid articles it published by Palumbo and other writers; one can only hope it was done in shame.

* * *

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 honorees are ... Terry Jeffrey, Michael W. Chapman, Susan Jones, Melanie Hunter and Patrick Goodenough, all formerly of CNSNews.com. All were key employees of CNS, cranking out reliably biased right-wing "news" takes on such diverse topics as unemployment, Catholicism and Nancy Pelosi. Then, a couple months before CNS' 25th anniversary, the Media Research Center abruptly shut down CNS without a word of explanation to readers or even giving its longtime employees -- most of whom had been there for 15 years or more -- a chance to say goodbye before they were unceremoniously fired. The only former CNS staff member allowed to stay employed at the MRC was Craig Bannister, who oversaw the deconstruction of the operation from a full-fledged "news" organization to a right-wing blog relegated to the MRCTV website to which the CNSNews.com domain name merely redirects. The shutdown offers further proof of the fact that the MRC never cared about journalism and is only about right-wing activism.