Charles Johnson

Yesterday, NB's Noel Sheppard noted the ignominious end of Klein's nearly six-year term as head of CNN/US.

If there is an example of anyone who has overseen a bigger audience decline and loss of competitive position and survived so long, I don't know who he or she is. Fox News, which first passed CNN in total viewers in January 2002 (interesting how this basic factoid is not at Fox's Wiki entry), now routinely trounces CNN and CNN Headline combined by a factor of 1.5 to 1 or more. On Thursday, Fox's primetime audience of 574,000 was 75% greater than the CNN pair's combined total of 329,000.

But before he arrived at CNN to do his damage, Klein inadvertently did the nation a service.

What do leftist documentary maker Robert Greenwald, Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson, and Daily Beast contributor Max Blumenthal have in common?

They all peddled malicious, false quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh and are unrepentant about furthering false information regarding the talk show host.

NewsBusters parent company the Media Research Center has a new Web site complete with video and/or screenshots of these and others in the media furthering the phony quotes.

Yesterday, the Public Editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt defended his coverage of Israel's war against Hamas. Unsurprisingly, he took the "since both sides criticize us we must be correct" approach. Surprisingly, his attempt, "Standing between Enemies," was marred by a particularly stupid mistake.

In order to show that the Times shows diligence in ferreting out fake news, Hoyt wrote:

Witty and his colleagues are frustrated because Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza, and although The Times has two photographers in the region ready to go, it must rely on pictures taken by Palestinian photographers. "When I can't have my own person there, I have to question every picture that comes in -- to an obsessive degree," he said. Last summer, Witty unmasked as a fake a photo of an Iranian missile test that ran on many other front pages.

This post follows up on last night's NewsBusters post ("They Never Learn: CNN Withdraws Apparently Faked Video of CPR Attempt on 'Dead' Palestinian Child").

CNN has reposted a video it withdrew yesterday. That video purports to show the death and hasty burial of a cameraman's 12 year-old younger brother, one of two children allegedly killed on the roof of their home in rocket fire from an Israeli drone.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee, and several NB commenters yesterday all questioned the credibility of the video. Johnson, Owens, and Morrissey still believe it was staged.

Here are some excerpts from CNN's explanation for re-posting the video, and why it believes it to be genuine (the video itself is here):

See Jan. 9 Follow-up -- "CNN Doubles Down: Reposts Withdrawn Video of Apparently Faked CPR Attempt on 'Dead' Palestinian Child"

Not that it ever really went away, but fake news is back in Gaza, and the worldwide media is being played.

Many readers will likely detect the fakery in the linked video pictured on the right on their own (HTs to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs [LGF] and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee via Instapundit).

The video purports to show the death and hasty burial of a cameraman's 12 year-old younger brother, one of two children allegedly killed on the roof of their home in rocket fire from an Israeli drone.

A seemingly pretty knowledgeable LGF commenter spotted what many inexpert readers who see the video will also catch (bolds are mine):

I’m no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child. He was just sort of tapping on the child’s sternum a little bit with his fingers. You can’t make blood flow like that. Furthermore, there’s no point in doing chest compressions if you’re not also ventilating the patient somehow.

The indefatigable Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has the news:

Alaska Democratic Party Deletes Page Crediting Sarah Palin with Killing 'Bridge to Nowhere'

A web site paid for by the Alaska Democratic Party says unequivocally that the state of Alaska officially abandoned the Bridge to Nowhere project, and credits Governor Sarah Palin.

Or ... it used to say that, before the page mysteriously vanished some time during the past few days

Indeed, the link goes to a now-empty page.

But Johnson notes that it has since been revived at another URL.

Last week's issue of the Village Voice featured Roy Edroso's review of "10 conservative Web scribblers," described therein as "buffoons" and in the article's subhead as "a confederacy of dunces." (Actually, Edroso names twelve bloggers, arriving at his figure of ten by counting the Power Line trio as one person.)

Lefty snark aside, the piece is problematic in part because at least two of the bloggers Edroso scrutinizes, Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle, really aren't conservatives. Moreover, by emphasizing individual bloggers he almost completely ignores lively large-group sites such as the Corner (he examines only Jonah Goldberg's contributions to NRO) and, of course, NewsBusters.

Employing children in military units, much less terrorist outfits, is a slam dunk case of human rights abuse. But not to Reuters, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs notes:

Just when you think the mainstream wire services can’t possibly debase themselves any further, they release a photograph like this one, taken by Reuters Palestinian propagandist Ibraheem Abu Mustafa, with an unbelievably sick and distorted caption:

Markos "Kos" Moulitsas has bought into the latest loopy conspiracy theory spinning around the left-wing Web.: that the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately darkened a photo of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to make him appear darker in skin tone than he actually is.

But as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs points out Markos and other

...morons are hyperventilating over videos they are watching via the internet, and assuming that the orangey color of Obama’s face in one video is somehow “genuine,” while the desaturated color and slightly different aspect ratio in the Clinton video is a nefarious racist plot.

That sounds about right. Here at NewsBusters, we often make basic color and contrast adjustments for video captures from network TV. If we posted photos from TV screen captures without doing so, everyone would appear darker, regardless of their race or ethnic background.

Besides, Johnson points out, following Kossack logic, the Associated Press would be playing the race card too while oddly enough the Black College Wire is making Obama whiter:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has issued a non-apology apology to blogger Charles Johnson for an article in which a reporter inaccurately and unfairly attributed remarks in a blog comment thread to Johnson himself. Writing at Little Green Footballs, Johnson quotes an e-mail from a Post-Dispatch editor. The editor was informing Johnson of a correction to run in the paper, but closed with a non-apology apology (emphasis Johnson's):

That is also the reason that he did not feel compelled to get a response from you for this particular story. At issue here were the comments in question, not your blog posting. No one in the article was criticizing or questioning you or your blog or holding you responsible for those comments.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has an item today about an Arabic newspaper editor pronouncing his plans to dance in London's Trafalgar Square should Iran ever use a nuclear weapon on Israel:

Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the UK-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, told a Lebanese TV interviewer he will dance in Trafalgar Square when Iran nukes Israel.

Bari Atwan is also a contributor to the BBC and Sky News, neither of whom seem to have much of a problem with this.

For more, check out LGF, which also has embedded video courtesy of MEMRI.

Sky News is a British sister network of the Fox News Channel.

"How in the world could anyone write a lengthy article about the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), without mentioning once that the group has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in the nation’s largest terrorism trial?"

That's what Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs is wondering about USA Today's gauzy August 21 profile of Islamic convert and ISNA president Ingrid Mattson.

In June, Johnson picked up on ISNA's brush with federal prosecutors in a blog post entitled "A Really Bad CAIR Day." You can also read more reporting on the matter in Josh Gerstein's June 4 New York Sun article, "Islamic Groups Named in Hamas Funding Case."

Indeed, while reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman failed to mention ISNA's ties to Hamas, the USA Today writer focused on how sick and tired Mattson is of persistently denouncing radical Islam:

On Saturday, NewsBusters reported an Associated Press story about the campaign by MoveOn.org and Daily Kos to get sponsors to pull their ads from Fox News.

According to Advertising Age magazine, "MoveOn has been pitching this story for weeks now," and has "been trying, with absolutely no success, to target Home Depot."

As a result, in AdAge's view, the AP bit on a story that nobody else was interested in covering until maybe this effort had some success.

As Ken Wheaton wrote Friday in an article entitled "MoveOn Gets Someone to Bite on Faux Fox Protest" (emphasis added throughout, h/t Glenn Reynolds):