Mendacity Matters

In our last FHWiR we noted the Media Matters obsession with a Fox-Business ‘invented’ claim about FOIA and the SEC. It turned out that the ‘invented’ story was real enough that the House of Representatives passed a bill to repeal the rules, led by none other than Barney Frank! We suggested at the time that MM would ignore this news and pretend like it never happened, and Chris Golas checked up on our prediction:

So this week I've been reading Media Matters and have yet to find a single story on it. Even in Media Matters corrections section there is nothing. This shows Media Matters being hypocrites because they bash others of being dishonest, when they are also flat out dishonest.

Mr Golas also noted MM outrage at Fox for reporting on an egregious instance of hate speech:

Media Matters is currently bashing Fox Nation for daring to cover the hateful comments that are coming from the "New Black Panther Party" Fox Nation posted a video of A New Black Panther saying: Panther: Whites Use Black Babies As Alligator Bait...Why is Media Matters attacking FN for exposing a hate group? Is it that only the right wing hate groups should be exposed and not left wing hate group? So instead of addressing the comments, MM decides to move the goal posts. This is a new low for Media Matters.

MM is also up in arms over the News Corp contribution of $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce, per its VP Avi Rabin-Havt:

Fox is having it both ways right now as a news organization and political campaign. With $2 million direct from their corporate treasury invested in the defeat of Democratic candidates...

Not quite true. First of all, the Chamber of Commerce is a pro-business organization, not a partisan political committee. More to the point, the contribution is not $1 million ‘invested in the defeat of Democratic candidates’:

Under tax rules, [the Chamber of Commerce] must funnel its donations into a general fund used for all of its activities, political and nonpolitical alike. Its donors are not permitted to direct funds to specific political uses.

Media Matters duplicity continues with Matt Gertz, who attacks Fox News Watch for not covering News Corp’s donations:

A Nexis search reveals that the program has also never mentioned the exposure in August of News Corp.'s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association, the GOP organization that helps coordinate Republican gubernatorial campaigns and pays for independent ads in support of their candidates.

Fascinating question: why is Media Matters suddenly relying on Nexis searches? They can be hit-or-miss, as they don’t catch every broadcast. MM is well-funded and they record everything on FNC. Why not just go to the tape and see? Perhaps they did and didn’t like what they found. Yes, News Watch did ‘mention’ the RGA donation. We remembered it from the August 21 broadcast, and it took less than a minute (without Lexis!) to turn up the transcript. Another Media Matters fabrication bites the dust.

Pin-Heads and Plagiarism

Funny thing about that Matt Gertz Media Matters piece. It turns up again, almost word-for-word (with a few tacked-on shots at Mr Bill) at that paragon of journalism, oreillysucks.com. Only there it’s not credited to MM. No, the site modestly attributes it to themselves (‘By: Steve’). It’s still false, but you can’t expect the inmates at oreillysucks to actually verify what they steal. Chris Golas notes more examples of Steve Senti swiping Media Matters articles--at oreillysucks, plagiarism marches on.

And so does stupidity. To wit: O’Reilly calls illegal aliens ‘illegal aliens’, and that’s ‘not fair at all’. Arthel Neville is a ‘Republican’. In the ratings business ‘rerun numbers are never counted’. Yada yada. The hits just keep on coming. Like this one:

So it's a group of liberal Americans who are marching on Washington to speak out on jobs, justice, and education. Great idea right, not in O'Reillyworld. O'Reilly implied the communist party was involved.... He claims to never use right-wing talking points, but that is exactly what he did, claim the communist party is involved to make them look like bad Americans.

O’Reilly ‘impied’, he ‘claimed’...we suspect ‘reported’ might be a better word. Not only was the One Nation rally promoted on the Communist Party website, the Party is listed on the One Nation website as one of the endorsing organizations!

Guilt by Insinuation

Another week at the newshounds means seven more days of the usual smears, personal attacks, and houndpocrisy. Doyen of the dog pound Ellen Brodsky comes out in support of deceptive editing via doctored video clips--as long as it’s done to smear Dan Webster. Guest blogger ‘Aria’ lies that the Q3 ratings show ‘MSNBC is actually growing’, except that MSNBC’s viewership was actually down about 5% total day, and down about 15% in primetime. Meanwhile Priscilla, a beacon of tolerance, objects to a Megyn Kelly report on vandalism of a sunken US WWII ship. Why? Apparently because the author of this story on the same subject is gay and may have appeared in gay films. Is Priscilla homophobic? And this has what to do with vandalizing a sunken ship?!? Don’t try to make sense out of it. It’s Hound Logic.

This week Prissy turned her guns on her latest obsession, Father Jonathan Morris:

Fox News has one clergy person on staff and he is a Roman Catholic priest...

Yeah, well, that might be true if it weren’t for these guys.

Father Jonathan Morris who is always willing to belly up to the news desk with an affirmation of whatever right wing talking point Fox is pushing.

Really? Presumably like this view of the Arizona immigration law:

I think all of us, whether you're a believer or not, we can use our human reason to say that even if somebody is doing something wrong, like crossing the border illegally, and I think that is wrong…but does not mean that therefore we can do whatever we want to them. And that — we have to be able to stand up as a country and say we have to have laws that are just.... This law is idiotic. It's crazy, because it's not going to fix the situation.

Or this:

Torture, like rape and other intrinsic evils, is always wrong.... But when it comes to defining torture and rejecting every one of its forms, it seems President Bush is so immersed in the fight, he is unable to see the long-term danger of a short-term, un-American, unethical fix.... Even more dangerous than a hardened terrorist is a future America where evil is enshrined in law.

Or this:

We can break down pro-death penalty arguments into two major groups: deterrence and retribution.... In my opinion, neither of these two arguments holds water....It would follow that if a human person’s intrinsic value, in spite of his greater or lesser moral value, is so precious — inestimable — no government should use it as a commodity of retribution, and certainly not as a mere tool for deterrence.

See, a steady stream of ‘right-wing talking points’. But don’t confuse Priscilla; she’s got some insinuation to do:

He’s a Legionary of Christ – “a secretive religious order beloved by Pope John Paul II but now discredited because of revelations that its charismatic founder sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.” Its founder Marciel Maciel “hobnobbed with Mexico's rich and famous, cut lucrative real estate deals and was rumored to travel on occasion with a briefcase full of cash.” But it seems that whenever Fox wants to promote a right wing meme, they drag out the youthful looking Morris.

Usually when Fox haters play the ‘guilt by association’ game, they find someone who at least had some involvement with their victim, not a deceased padre. But that’s why it’s guilt by insinuation. The description of Fr Morris as ‘youthful’ was an especially nice touch. It’s a bit more subtle than Ellen Brodsky’s use of the term ‘baby-faced’--also, by an amazing coincidence, part of an even more extensive rehash of the Maciel allegations. Why do the tail-waggers repeatedly belabor this, something with no logical relevance to Fr Morris’s commentary?

Unfortunately for Prissy, she had to be told that Fr Morris is not a Legionary of Christ, and appended a hasty correction to her piece. But that’s OK. She achieved her purpose, as comments from the kennel-dwellers demonstrate [vulgarities edited by J$P]:

• Father John is a toned-down version of raging Bil Donohue. I would not want to be alone in a public men's room with either of them. --Truman
• That priest is a fake bastard,I think he is an actor or Shep's gay lover.What a lying hateful f#cker. --janet james

By another amazing coincidence, an earlier Priscilla post on Father Morris engendered a similar reaction:

• First, he's gay; second, he's lived the majority of his life living with nothing but men where women are treated as second class citizens by his chosen religion. and three, he's very insecure about his manhood so he has to belittle women in order to make his penis seem larger. he's the type of gay man that has known he was gay from birth and therefore has had no interest in even understanding women and their role in society. --andy phx

Apparently it’s not just Prissy who has a problem with gay people, it’s her groupies as well. But this is the sort of utterly unfounded character assassination that the biased bassets want. It’s why they bring up the Maciel allegations over and over, each time linking them with Fr Morris for no purpose other than to feed their diseased desire to defame. It’s sick.

The Lie of the Week

They hadn’t even finished cleaning up the trash from the ‘One Nation’ rally, and already Fox haters were looking for ways to spin the event to their nefarious purposes. You may recall David Neiwert--he smeared Jon Scott and Megyn Kelly with a brazen lie. He’s back again (at the appropriately named Crooks & Liars) with another dubious slander about One Nation coverage:

CNN barely covered it at all. Of course, Fox carried nary a word of it. None of the major networks -- CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox -- even bothered to report on it.

Far be it from us to defend NBC, but a lie is a lie. Of course the NBC Nightly News covered the rally: see for yourself. (ABC did too.) And as for his claim about Fox News? We’ll let these clips from just a portion of FNC’s Saturday coverage speak for themselves []:


The bigger misrepresentation is the concerted effort to transform the event into some sort of defeat for Glenn Beck. That project got underway weeks ago, when Ed Schultz announced his intention to outdraw Beck. At the rally itself, organizers claimed that they had bested Beck’s turnout, and that was good enough for the echo chamber. Back to Crooks & Liars again, where one Nicole Belle boasts:

One Nation Rally Draws More Attendees Than Beck's "Whitestock"... Without the benefit of months and months of advertising and promotion on Fox News Channel (in fact, I'm only aware of Ed Schultz on MSNBC doing any kind of TV promotion), the One Nation Working Together rally in Washington DC has gathered more supporters than Glenn Beck's much ballyhooed rally.

Nicole isn’t telling the truth here, since 1. there was no advertising for 8/28 on FNC, and B. Fox News ‘promoted’ (i.e. reported on) the upcoming rally far less than, say, MSNBC did. But the Big Lie is the attendance. And the bigger the lie, the quicker it spreads through the noise machine. In short order we read that the One Nation rally ‘officially’ drew more attendees than Beck’s. No surprise, this trumped up talking point makes its way to the newshounds forum, where hound guest blogger ‘Aria’ parrots the spin:

I've already heard rumours that Beck's foaming at the mouth about the turnout for this being so much better than 8/28.

Um ‘Aria’, those voices in your head do not constitute ‘rumours’.

The pics I've seen don't lie- the turnout is visibly better.

The pics don’t lie, but ‘Aria’ does. Don’t take our word for it. There are photos taken from the Washington Monument: 8/28 [via AP], and 10/2 [via HuffPo]. Compare them for yourself. Q.E.D.

By the way, that photo from HuffPo is attached to an AP report of the rally. But there’s something odd about that report. Here’s the last paragraph of the AP story as published by the Huffington Post:

More than 400 organizations -- ranging from labor unions to faith, environmental and gay rights groups -- partnered for the event, which comes one month after Beck packed the same space with conservatives and tea party-style activists.

But that’s not the last paragraph of the AP story, which is much longer than what HuffPo published. In fact, right after HuffPo’s ‘last paragraph’, the AP story continues with this:

Organizers claimed they had as many participants as Beck's rally. But Saturday's crowds were less dense and didn't reach as far to the edges as they did during Beck's rally.

Was Arianna running out of bandwidth? Is that why HuffPo excised this from the AP report? Whatever the reason it’s clearly dishonest, but a drop in the trickery bucket compared to the obvious whopper from Nicole Belle, ‘Aria’, and the parade of fabulists who told The Lie of the Week.

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Tags: mediamatters, huffpo, crooks, newshounds, schultz