11 Liberal Media Lies

11 Liberal Media Lies That You Probably Did Not Even Know Were Bogus:

Guns Kill People And Gun Control Decreases Murders

A typical line of bias against gun ownership employed by the media is bogus “expert” testimony. An example might be the 2009 story ABC put out that aired the opinions of a rabid anti-gun group, but did not tell the viewers that those being presented as “experts” had a political agenda. Another thing the media does is use scary words that have little meaning.

To the media, any gun used in a crime is an “assault weapon,” even though there really is no legitimate definition of such a class of weapons. Another example might be the story of the Chicago gun buy-back program that the media touted as a good program even though gun related crimes continued to soar in the city. Instead of talking about why crime was occurring in the city the media focused on the guns as if guns got up and did the shooting all by themselves.

Unfortunately, almost every publicized shooting in America immediately signals the obligatory calls for gun control. The circumstances, motives, or mental condition of the shooters is rarely taken into consideration. Nor, tragically, are the victims. For the media, these unfortunate people are simply convenient fodder in their ongoing war against gun ownership and their unreasonable hatred of guns.

Of the over 14,000 murders committed in the United States in 2012, almost 8,900 were done using a firearm. Given the fact that gun ownership is legal here, and illegal gun ownership is prevalent among criminals, this is not really surprising. What might be shocking to the rabid anti-gun folks are the number of homicides committed using knives, blunt instruments, by poisoning, drugging, drowning and burning people to death.

And while the number of murders committed using a firearm are distressingly high, something the radical left does not want people to know is that a disproportionate number of these murders are being committed in cities and localities that already have strict gun control measures.

Conversely, the Cato institute observes; “The 31 states that have ‘shall issue’ laws allowing private citizens to carry concealed weapons have, on average, a 24 percent lower violent crime rate, a 19 percent lower murder rate and a 39 percent lower robbery rate than states that forbid concealed weapons. In fact, the nine states with the lowest violent crime rates are all right-to-carry states. Remarkably, guns are used for self-defense more than 2 million times a year, three to five times the estimated number of violent crimes committed with guns.”

The point here is that people kill people, whether they have a gun or not.

Lone Wolf Terror Attacks Are Rare

Of course, the media generally tends to ignore any Muslim connection to the increasing number of crimes carried out in the United States since 9/11. While the conservatives are often the first people the media blames for hate crimes, real or imagined, Islam is consistently downplayed or entirely ignored as playing a role in actual shootings and attempted terror attacks.

The question can be asked, “Have we had attempted terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11?” The short answer is, “Yes!” And the actual number of terrorist attacks that have been planned or actually carried out may shock you.

Of course, the reason you don’t know about these attacks is because they are not reported (or are grossly under-reported) by the main stream media.

The case of a 26-year-old man from Massachusetts is a good, but far from a singular, example. Few reports of the arrest of Rezwan Fedaus mentioned he was a Muslim. Instead, the mainstream media chose to characterize him “lone wolf” as if he just decided to plot a terrorist bombing with no connection at all to Islam or Islamic terrorist organizations.

However, Ferdaus was arrested by the FBI on September 28, 2011, for plotting to attack The Pentagon and the United States Capitol Building using remote-controlled model aircraft packed with C-4 explosives. 

In addition, he was charged with supporting Al-Qaeda by plotting attacks on American soldiers abroad and for making detonators for improvised explosive devices. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to destroy national defense premises, conspiracy to damage and destroy buildings owned by the U.S. government, and conspiracy to provide material support and resources to Al-Qaeda.

You may not have ever heard of Ferdaus because this incident, like so many others, was tellingly under-reported at the time and since. And Ferdaus is just one of a long list of perpetrators of Jihadist, Islamic terrorist acts committed, attempted or planned over the last 14 years since 9/11.  In fact, according to most reliable resources, there have been dozens of known plots and untold numbers being plotted or abandoned.

According to a report from The Heritage Foundation, on June 2, 2015 in Boston, Usaamah Abdullah Rahim drew a knife and attacked police officers and FBI agents, who then shot and killed him. He was being watched by Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force because he had been plotting to behead police officers as part of violent jihad. This plot marked the 69th publicly known Islamist terrorist plot or attack in the U.S. since 9/11. But it’s not likely you heard much about it.

Fast And Furious Was Just A Botched Operation

To this day the media has not spent much time covering the Obama Regime’s murderous program of supplying weapons to Mexican Narco-Terrorists, a program that has killed hundreds of Mexican citizens and several U.S. law enforcement agents. To its credit, the L.A. Times has been very good on this story and so has Sharyl Attkisson, formerly with CBS, but months went by before the rest of the media began to begrudgingly cover the story.

The tactic known as “Gunwalking”, or “letting guns walk”, was used by the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) during a series of sting operations that were conducted between 2006 and 2011. These operations were concentrated in the Tucson and Phoenix area where, according to emails from the Justice Department, the ATF “purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them.”

These operations were part of a project that was allegedly intended to minimize the flow of firearms into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the United States. The stated goal was to allow gun purchases to continue and to then track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels. It was expected that this would lead to their arrests and the dismantling of the cartels. But it didn’t work out quite as planned… or then again, perhaps it worked out exactly as planned…

In fact, the tactic was questioned during the operations by a number of people, including ATF field agents and even cooperating licensed gun dealers. During Operation Fast and Furious, the largest “gunwalking” probe, the ATF released about 2,000 firearms to straw man purchasers who were known to sell weapons to drug cartels.

What happened?  Our government claims it made a mistake and neglected to install or activate tracking devices on many of the weapons utilized in the operation.  Was such gross and outlandish negligence an innocent mistake?  Giving our government the benefit of the doubt on that score does strain credibility.

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh even went so far as to say: “To me, it’s almost an inescapable conclusion that they wanted to put American guns… across the border…. The assault weapons ban had failed, and that’s not good enough for Obama and Holder and the rest of the Democrats who don’t want you having guns. This was a way to change your mind. They created crimes. They facilitated the creation of crimes. There were two hundred Mexican deaths at the hands of drug cartels. You could not escape what was going to happen here. In fact, it was just the opposite. You had to know, if you were the regime, what was going to happen, and you had to want it to happen.”

Of course, some of these weapons were later recovered (about 710) over the years at crime scenes on both sides of the Mexico–United States border, and at the scene where United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010. And although a number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted; as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures had been arrested.

By the way, a Google search for “Operation Fast and Furious Controversy” garnered 1,090,000 results whereas “Anchor Babies” brought back 8,670,000 hits. Go figure!

Fort Hood Was An Act Of Workplace Violence

Yes, we realize that most people now know that the Fort Hood Massacre was terrorist attack, but we include it because that was not always the case.  The media and political elites tried to tell us for months that it was an act of “workplace violence” and the fact that we now know otherwise is really nothing more than an affirmation that sometimes the American people are able to actually see the man behind the curtail.

One of the many ways to spot media bias is by examining what they don’t say as opposed to what they do say. The Fort Hood shooting in 2009 was a perfect example. The media did is best to either ignore Major Nidal Hasan’s Muslim religion or downplay it, choosing instead to focus on the fact that he was an Army psychiatrist. They focused on reports of Hasan’s alleged mental instability and – when it was apparent that they had to call it something – insisted this was classic case of “workplace violence.” Except that it wasn’t.

There are no recorded incidences of actual workplace violence where the perpetrator was heard to shout “Allahu Akhbar” while shooting unarmed co-workers. But we do have a few well-known instances of this behavior in conjunction with actual Islamic terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11.

In fact, Hasan’s actions have been noted to be just what they appeared to be: a terrorist attack. Both Michael Scheuer, the retired former head of the Bin Laden Issue Station, and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey have called the event a terrorist attack, as well as terrorism expert Walid Phares. And the testimony of others supports the idea that Major Hasan was primed to commit a terrorist attack in the name of Islam. Some of Hasan’s former colleagues have said he occasionally unnerved them by expressing fervent Islamic views and deep opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fox News released documents in August 2013, long after it became apparent to the majority of right-thinking Americans that Hasan was indeed a terrorist, written by Major Hasan. In most of these documents, in which he explained his motives, Hasan included the acronym “SoA”, which is considered shorthand for “Soldier of Allah.” He wrote that he was required to renounce any oaths that required him to defend any man-made constitution that superseded the commandments in Islam. In another place, he stated, “I invite the world to read the book of All-Mighty Allah and decide for themselves if it is the truth from their Lord. My desire is to help people attain heaven by the mercy of their Lord.”

And in another document, Hasan had indicated that he believed there is an irreconcilable conflict between American democracy and obedience to Islam. “. . . in an American democracy, ‘we the people’ govern according to what ‘we the people’ think is right or wrong, even if it specifically goes against what All-Mighty God commands.”

Whether the Major was mentally unstable or not, the fact is he intentionally set out to commit an act that reasonable Americans view as an Islamic terrorist attack. The mainstream media begged to differ.

Gabrielle Giffords Was Shot By A ‘Right-Wing’ Nutjob

From the moment that the crime against Representative Gabrielle Giffords became national news, members of the media began to blame her attack on the “violent rhetoric” of conservatives in general and the Tea Party movement in particular.

Attention focused on the harsh political rhetoric in the United States allegedly promulgated by right-wing commentators and politicians. A “climate of violence” perpetrated by the right was at fault, said the media. This line of attack on the right was unleashed by the media before the name of the attacker was even known.

Some media commentators blamed members of the political right wing for the shooting. Names were thrown out and, in particular, there was an attempt to implicate Sarah Palin because of gun-related metaphors in her speeches and because of the website of her political action committee. This site had “targeted” the districts of a number of Democrat politicians, including that of Giffords, with pictures of cross-hairs on an electoral map.

It later turned out that shooter Jared Lee Loughner had no discernible political beliefs at all and, in fact, had been targeting Giffords before the Tea Party movement was even started. In addition, he was clearly unstable mentally and had already been refused re-admittance to his community college until he had a mental health evaluation and clearance to be readmitted. He never did. He was also attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army in 2008, but his application had been rejected as “unqualified” for service. There was a rumor that his disqualification may have been drug related.

Loughner was initially found by a federal judge to be incompetent to stand trial based on two medical evaluations, which diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. Even once he did stand trial in 2012 it was still unclear as to what he himself considered his motives to be for the shootings. At one point, he had posted on his MySpace account that he believed the government was brainwashing the citizenry with language. His distrust and dislike of politicians crossed party lines as he claimed to hate all politicians.

Sadly, despite the tragic murders of six people – including 9-year old Christina Taylor Green – the leftist media pundits chose to focus on gun control and seized on the shootings as an opportunity to slander their opponents.

Timothy McVeigh Was A ‘Christian Terrorist’ According to the entry in Wikipedia, “The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage.”

This is reasonably fair assessment of what Timothy McVeigh did and was: a domestic terrorist. However, there has been a long-running litany of statements and articles attempting to paint a different picture of McVeigh and his “real” motivation. For example, Bruce Prescott in a January, 2010 post in EthicsDaily.com, a piece by Pierre Tristam in July, 2011 on FlaglerLive.com, and an August, 2013 propaganda post by Alex Henderson in Salon.com all provide examples of this canard.

In a seemingly pathological impulse to defend jihadist Muslims these authors, along with dozens of others, have twisted and misinterpreted Timothy McVeigh’s grievances and his allegiances. Moreover, what most people still don’t know is that the Oklahoma bombing may have been an Islamic Terrorist plot.

Accuracy in Media reports: “[Jayne] Davis, author of a blockbuster book on the attack, The Third Terrorist, has examined and presented the evidence showing that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was in fact a front man for Middle Eastern terrorists. The third terrorist, in addition to the two, McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted, was an Arab. This was the mysterious ‘John Doe’ who was never found. But other members of an Arab terrorist network were involved, she says. She says the evidence was ignored and dismissed because the Clinton Administration didn’t want to go to war with Iraq, the likely culprit, and wanted to blame the attack on domestic right-wingers for political reasons.”

Consider this quote in an article from the U.K.’s “The Guardian” about McVeigh’s execution:  “In his letter, McVeigh said he was an agnostic but that he would ‘improvise, adapt and overcome’, if it turned out there was an afterlife.’If I’m going to hell,’ he wrote, ‘I’m gonna have a lot of company.’ His body is to be cremated and his ashes scattered in a secret location.”

Author Lou Michel spent many hours interviewing McVeigh when he wrote “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing”.  During an interview with CNN Michel stated, “McVeigh is agnostic. He doesn’t believe in God, but he won’t rule out the possibility.”

Yet, the mainstream media has portrayed convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as a so-called “Christian terrorist.” Yet it is clear that McVeigh never claimed he committed his crimes in the name of religion, Christian or otherwise. He described himself as a type of anti-government activist and never used religion to justify any of his crimes.

But the claim of McVeigh being a “Christian terrorist” is still being made. As recently as four years ago it was voiced by journalist Juan Williams. Along with this implied slander of Christians, there was also McVeigh’s alleged affiliation with the hyped “white militias” the media imagined in the 1990s.

Banning DDT Has Saved Countless Lives

It’s not the sexist of liberal lies but the reality is that banning DDT has probably killed more people than it has saved.

It was in 1962 that a book entitled Silent Spring was published. Author and biologist Rachel Carson created a firestorm of debate and ecological angst among 60’s liberals, eco-warriors, and a vast swath of the unsuspecting American public. Carson’s work was highly touted by the mainstream media and rarely disputed or challenged. As far as the media was concerned it was valid science. Except that it wasn’t.

In her book, Carson stated that “Dr. DeWitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”

However, Dr. James DeWitt published in 1956 an article in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry that came up with quite different results. In his study, quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. He reported that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the “control” birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Less than a 4% difference? Hardly a conclusive indictment of DDT.

Carson also left out Dr. DeWitt’s report that “control” pheasants hatched only 57% of their eggs, yet those fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs! And the science goes on in various studies for over four decades. The truth is that DDT would have saved millions upon millions of lives throughout the world by increasing crop yields and decreasing the spread of diseases.

In fact, according to the National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences of the Committee on Science and Public Policy in 1970, “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT… In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable.”

Yet, almost 20 years later, it was stated in the Africa News, January 27, 1999 “It is believed that [malaria] afflicts between 300 and 500 million every year, causing up to 2.7 million deaths, mainly among children under five years.”

As late as 1999 Time magazine named Carson one of the “100 People of the Century.” However, the fact is that DDT has never been shown to be a human carcinogen even after four decades of intense scientific study. And the ban has been contributed to the almost 3 million malaria deaths each year in Africa alone. Yet, the media continues to tout Rachel Carson’s work as fact.

There Is A Wild Surge Of “Right-Wing Extremist” Groups In America

Increasingly over that last 10 years or so, there have been stories from various TV news reports, or newspapers and magazines that claim that there is an alarming growth of extremist hate groups in America.

One example is a recent story on CNN.com referencing an intelligence assessment report released by the Department of Homeland Security back in February 2015. According to the CNN correspondents, the DHS claimed that domestic terrorism threats are on an equal par with that of Islamic terrorist cells. What’s their supporting source?

“Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism. Perhaps 100,000 people form a core of the movement, he said.”

Stories such as these are conspicuously based on the claims of only one source: the Southern Poverty Law Center. There is cause to suspect the claims of the SPLC for many reasons.

In fact, not only conservative, but moderate and left-leaning media have criticized the group. Writing in Counterpunch, a left-wing website, Alexander Coburn referred to SPLC founder Morris Dees as “king of the hate business.”

Coburn wrote, “Ever since 1971, U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC.”

In a Harper’s Magazine blog in 2007, Ken Silverstein wrote, “What [the SPLC] does best… is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of [right-wing fringe] groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest ‘civil rights’ organization.”

But does the bulk of the media establishment take care to consider the accuracy or truthfulness of the SPLC? Apparently not.  Its claims are taken at face value, especially if they support the spurious left-wing agenda of the mainstream media.

Detaining Terrorist At Guantanamo Bay Was An Unjust Exercise In Folly

The media has gone out of its way to portray the terror detainee facility run by the U.S. military as an illegitimate, even racist venture. President Obama even ran his campaign promising to close the facility in a year after he ascended to the White House (a promise he later broke).

The U.S. has been accused of committing acts of torture, a claim that has been disputed and debated endlessly. But one thing the media has not reported on is that the recidivism rate in detainees returning to terror upon release from the facility is extremely high.

The very fact that the media uses the term “recidivism” as if they were speaking of domestic prison inmates who return to a life of crime is, in itself, a form of bias. But these are not mere criminals, nor are they U.S. citizens. These are enemy combatants who have either killed, or aided in the killing of American military personnel. We’re not talking about grand theft auto here.

The actual numbers is difficult to verify (released detainees don’t check in with a parole officer!). However, it is estimated that the current number of released combatants that have returned to the fold is as high as 30% or more. Republicans have made claims of a 30 percent recidivism rate which are based on combining the figures of all detainees confirmed and suspected of re-engaging in terrorism. There are some who believe that the actual numbers may be even higher.

Regardless of the actual percentage, what this means in real life is that of the 620 prisoners formerly detained in Guantanamo, almost 200 of them have, or probably have, gone back into action against the U.S. and others.  But the Obama-loving media types would have you believe that the real number is closer to 38, or 6 percent. Well, that should make everyone feel better: the administration has “only” put less than 40 combatants back into circulation!

Climate Change Is The Number One Threat Facing Our Nation

The mainstream media establishment has almost exclusively reported global warming from the point of view of religiously zealous global warming advocates. But when thousands of emails were released to the public by hackers that proved that climate “scientists” were cooking the data and then working with members of the media, especially the BBC, to sell global warming theories, the Old Media tried its best to completely ignore the story. Weeks and weeks went by before the first few mavens of the Old Media finally mentioned the emails that put the lie to the “consensus” of global climate change.

John R. Lott reported in a column in 2009 on FoxNews.com that “Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Yet biased media piece after biased media piece attempted to counter this disturbing story with plaintive accusations of misinterpretation and blaming conspiracy-theorists. The mainstream media dutifully circled the wagons and continued to cry “global warming” in an attempt to drown out the dissenting voices pointing at the “smoking gun” of damning emails. And it may have worked.

That was then, this is now. And now, according to Robert Tracinski writing in TheFederalist.com, “…one of the big problems with the global warming theory: [is] a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models.”

So what do the conscientious researchers do in the face of contrary data? “Why, change the data, of course!” And, in the meantime, thousands more Climategate emails have been released, but have you heard of them? Probably not…

The Soviet Union Was Not An Evil Empire

Most people now believe that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, but that was not always the case in the days prior to and just after WWII. It might shock people to know that back then, the general consensus among the media and political elites was that Josef Stalin had indeed succeeded into transforming his nation into a workers’ paradise.

Probably the single worst example of liberal media bias, of the last century, is the media’s steadfast refusal to accurately report the monstrous evils of the Soviet Union — even still to this day. It didn’t matter how many millions of Soviet citizens that Joseph Stalin and his successors murdered, it didn’t matter how evil the Soviet Union was, the liberal media was not going to report about it. The media even awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Walter Duranty, a New York Times columnist who wrote articles shilling for the murderous Soviet Union.

The New York Times did initiate a third-party assessment of Duranty’s veracity and objectivity back in 2003. A Columbia University history professor was hired by The New York Times to make an independent assessment of the coverage Duranty provided from the Soviet Union during the 1930’s. The professor, Mark von Hagen, said that the Pulitzer Prize the reporter received in 1931 should be rescinded because of his ”lack of balance” in covering Stalin’s government. The Pulitzer board chose to let the award stand.

To be fair, this was not the first time The New York Times conceded that Duranty’s take on Soviet atrocities was less than truthful. As early as 1986 it was pointed out in a review of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. And it only took them 50 years to acknowledge it!

And there are the famous Venona Project files publicly released in 1995. These disclosures from reams of secretly intercepted and decrypted Soviet transmissions between 1943 and 1980 have, in fact, been grossly ignored and underreported by the media.  This is typical of the mainstream journalists since a number of academics and historians assert that most of the individuals mentioned in the Venona documents were most likely either clandestine assets or contacts of Soviet intelligence agents.

A short list of revelations includes the fact that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indeed guilty of espionage, as were Klaus Fuchs who worked on the Manhattan Project, and Alger Hiss of the U.S. State Department.

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