Suzanne Malveaux

PolitiFact decided to get cute with words and nail an accurate statement by a conservative advocacy group as "Mostly False" for supposed contextual issues. This is not the first time that the fact-checking outfit has labeled an accurate statement "Half True" or "Mostly False," as it did twice to the Romney campaign.

According to PolitiFact's Bill Adair, who appeared on CNN Monday afternoon, the ad correctly asserts that President Obama broke his promise to families making less than $250,000 a year, that their taxes would not go up. However, since the ad stated that ObamaCare alone raised 18 taxes, and PolitiFact determined that only five of those applied to the specific income bracket, they smacked Crossroads with a "Mostly False" rating.

Zach Wahls is an activist lobbying Congress on behalf of gay rights issues, and yet CNN's Suzanne Malveaux rolled out the red carpet for him with nary a critical question on Thursday's 12 p.m. hour of Newsroom.

When Wahls, the author of a book titled "My Two Moms," made light of the "big gay scourge" that some say America faces, Malveaux laughed and flattered him "That was really funny, Zach." Sensing an opportunity, she added "Do you think that we need to use more humor to get – to further this discussion?" [Video below the break. Audio here.]

News networks should remain objective, especially when approaching a hot-button issue of the present day, but CNN is clearly supporting the cause of same-sex marriage as evidenced by Sunday night's slander and its heavily slanted coverage of President Obama's "historic" gay marriage announcement last week -- and now its newest story that aired Tuesday afternoon.

When a man pushing for same-sex marriage made a viral video of himself and his deceased partner, CNN went above and beyond journalistic standards to boost his "very, very powerful message." Anchor Suzanne Malveaux showed over two minutes of the video and followed that up with a soft interview while more clips of the video played in the background. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Even though CNN's Suzanne Malveaux admitted she had no clue what Mitt Romney actually did in high school, she and a guest psychologist tried to speculate away on Friday afternoon's Newsroom. The conclusion: Romney may not recall the incident he has been accused of, but his apology for it reveals the probability of guilt for a "very violent" act of forcibly cutting someone's hair.

"I have no idea what Romney did or didn't do," Malveaux admitted ignorance, before intoning that Romney was probably still in the wrong. "[T]he bullies never recall what they did. I mean it's absolutely astonishing the kids who tormented and taunted others seem to have no idea as adults how their behavior actually impacted others," she noted. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

It must be campaign season. Fact-checking gurus are rating accurate statements by the Romney campaign as "Mostly False" or "Half True" or – the best – "True but False," since they're correct but they apparently don't tell the whole story.

However, when President Obama made a factually-incorrect statement last week, he did not receive a "False" rating from the website PolitiFact, but benefitted from a grading curve since he "has a point" to make. Romney received the same "Half True" rating for a factually-correct statement.

Four days before the holiest time of the year for Christians, CNN.com actually asked, "How ethical is your Easter basket?"

This was the headline for the video of a CNN Newsroom segment Wednesday about child slaves being used to harvest cocoa in West Africa (video follows with fuller transcript and commentary):

Shortly before noon Thursday, live from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), CNN political reporter Peter Hamby described the gathering as a “conservative petri dish” to measure “how Mitt Romney is received and how his challengers are received too.” Anchor Suzanne Malveaux chimed in: “I love that, conservative petri dish. That’s a great way to describe it.”

A petri dish is defined as “a shallow circular dish with a loose-fitting cover, used to culture bacteria or other microorganisms.” As if conservatives are some kind of organism in a contained space to be studied from above by the “scientists” at CNN for our harmful effects. We’re not the Ebola virus, but that seems as if it’s how CNN sees conservatives. Video below.

Their past antics might not lend them credibility as presidential critics, but CNN's Suzanne Malvaux and Carol Costello threw water on the GOP veneration of President Reagan on Friday. Echoing the liberal media of the Reagan years, the duo cast his conservative legacy as "revisionist history."

"And it's almost like revisionist history here. Back in the day, there were a lot of people who were suffering under the Reagan era," Malveaux insisted about GOP candidates invoking Reagan's name on the campaign trail. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

Hosting two far-left activists, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux teed them up with "controversial" quotes from Republican presidential hopefuls that she said "people found quite offensive and strange." The interview with PBS's Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West aired during the 12 p.m. hour of Newsroom. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

Unsurprisingly, the duo bashed Republicans and hit President Obama from the left. Malveaux simply provided a podium for them to proclaim their liberal gospel. The two "controversial" soundbites that were aired were quotes from candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum:

Once again hosting liberal Van Jones to discuss the "Occupy" movement, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux asked him how the illegal practice of protesters "squatting" on foreclosed homes could help the "Occupy" movement take off.

Malveaux didn't exactly question the legality or the ethics of protesters secretly living in foreclosed homes, but instead gave the former Obama-appointee and Marxist some PR time to tout what new direction the "Occupy" movement will take. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

By noon on Wednesday, CNN had already hosted a Wall Street protester and a leftist "community organizer" to talk about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Anchor Suzanne Malveaux then interviewed Van Jones, former Obama-appointee and Marxist, and told him he'd make a "good spokesperson" for the Occupy movement.

Van Jones, was Obama's green jobs czar before he was booted for a petition he had signed in 2004 demanding investigations into links Bush may have had to the 9/11 attacks. Jones, along with CNN's other guests, supported Occupy Wall Street. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

CNN used an "In Depth" segment on Tuesday to emphasize the diversity among protesters at Occupy Seattle, featuring a rapper, a group of "Raging Grannies," drummers and more. The report during the 12 p.m. hour was one of multiple segments that ran on Tuesday afternoon giving viewers a close-up look at the Wall Street protests.

The sympathetic look at the protesters can be contrasted with CNN's initial coverage of the Tea Parties in 2009, when reporter Susan Roesgen slammed the Chicago Tea Party as "anti-government" and "anti-CNN" and anchor Anderson Cooper smeared the protesters with an obscene label.  [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

To answer Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's claim that racism is not a big factor in African-American unemployment, CNN brought on radical left-wing activists Professor Cornel West of Princeton and Tavis Smiley of PBS, both of who co-host a public radio talk show.

Not-surprisingly, West and Smiley, both African-Americans, ripped Cain's comments. West griped that Cain needs to "get off the symbolic crack pipe" and added that he has "mediocrity, mendacity, mean-spiritedness toward the poor, and now mean-spiritedness toward black people fighting for their lives in this very ugly economy." [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

CNN's financial guru Ali Velshi admitted that the press didn't really challenge President Obama's proposal for tax hikes after his Thursday press conference on his jobs bill. Velshi, perhaps going soft himself, noted during the 12 p.m. hour that Obama's speech "seemed like a bit of an economics lesson" how the President attacked Republicans and their demands on the count that they don't create jobs.

"He spoke very little about the actual tax increases, and there wasn't a lot of challenge from the reporters," Velshi explained, "which leads me to believe that people either think that the jobs bill really is dead in the water, or they realize that most Americans, according to our polling at least, support the idea of a tax on people making more than a million dollars." [Click here for audio.]

Both CBS's "Early Show" and CNN's "Newsroom" sought out Rep. Maxine Waters on Monday for her reaction to President Obama's "stop complaining" rejoinder to the Congressional Black Caucus on Saturday, but neither outlet mentioned the continuing ethics investigation into the ultra-liberal Democrat. CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux even went so far to flatter Rep. Waters as having her "marching shoes" on.

CBS's Erica Hill brought on the liberal politician just minutes into the 7 am Eastern hour and first asked, "What was your reaction to that when he [President Obama] said, 'Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying'?" The representative gently critiqued the President's language:

After quoting an op-ed which criticized President Obama for his partisanship, CNN's Carol Costello then asked her audience to chime in on how the President could "end the partisan bickering."

She appeared exasperated later in the hour when she read the responses to the question – all of them negative – and whined that there just had to be something Obama could do about America's partisan problem. "I mean, we're Americans, for god's sakes!" she exclaimed.

[Video below the break.]

Perhaps CNN stands for the Closeted News Network. No, that doesn't work. There's nothing closeted about CNN's clear advocacy for homosexual causes.

A Culture and Media Institute analysis of 239 programs aired on CNN from the period June 15 to July 15 revealed that CNN quoted or interviewed nearly four times the number of gay-agenda supporters as critics.

It didn't take long for CNN to buy into the hype of New York's legalization of same-sex marriage and pose this question: Is it time for marriage equality in America? CNN asked the question on both the 11 a.m. 12 p.m. EDT hours of Newsroom.

The network referred to the words of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who stated that he believes "it is time for marriage equality all across the country." Cuomo signed New York's same-sex marriage bill into law over the weekend.
 

As NewsBusters previously reported, CNN on Monday did a segment about recent sex scandals that conveniently ignored that of its own Eliot Spitzer.

On Sunday, "Reliable Sources" host Howard Kurtz took his network to task for this glaring omission (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN continued its rehabilitation of Eliot Spitzer's political career in leaving his name out of a lengthy list of recent political sex scandals Tuesday. As MediaBistro and my colleague Tom Blumer reported yesterday, the network shied away from disclosing the checkered past of one of its prime-time anchors.

In the wake of former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's revelations that he fathered a child with a mistress, CNN ran a segment during the 2 p.m. EDT hour covering recent political sex scandals. Correspondent Suzanne Malveaux mentioned six by name and CNN ran old news clips of even more – but failed to disclose that the current host of a CNN prime-time show was once embroiled in an infamous scandal.

(Video below the break.)

CNN's Deborah Feyerick performed a cut-and-paste job on Thursday's Newsroom by partially re-running a biased report from September 2010 on the apparent rise of "Islamophobia" in the United States. Just as before, all but one of Feyerick's sound bites during her report came from those who were worried about the supposed "intensifying hostility and rise in hate speech" against Muslims.

Anchor Suzanne Malveaux introduced the correspondent's report, which ran 40 minutes into the 12 pm Eastern hour, by putting it in the context of Rep. Peter King's hearings into the radicalization of American Muslims: "King says his radicalization of Islam hearing is going to help protect America from a terrorist attack. Well, critics, they call it a witch hunt. One of the concerns is that it is going to cause more Americans to fear and hate Muslims. Our Deborah Feyerick reports Islamophobia is on the rise." A chyron echoed Malveaux's last sentence: "Islamophobia on the Rise."

Mark Potok of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center claimed on Monday's Newsroom on CNN that radical Islam wasn't "our biggest domestic terror threat," that instead, "that pretty clearly comes from the radical right in this country." Anchor Suzanne Malveaux touted Potok as "expert on extremism" from "one of the most highly regarded non-governmental operations that are monitoring hate groups."

Malveaux brought on the SPLC spokesman at the bottom of the 12 noon Eastern hour to discuss the upcoming hearings by the House Homeland Security Committee on the radicalization of American Muslims. The anchor first asked him, "From your study of tracking radical groups, potentially hate groups, what do you think of this hearing? Is al Qaeda radicalizing Muslims? Is that our biggest homegrown terrorism threat right now?"

Potok replied with his "radical right" claim, and went on to criticize the chairman of the House committee, Rep. Peter King:

On Monday's Newsroom, CNN's Don Lemon helped film director Qasim Basir promote his new film "Mooz-lum," which he hopes will "clear up some of this ignorance" about Muslims and their religion. Basir, whose last project "aimed at supporting presidential candidate Barack Obama," claimed that "in an average person's mind, who does not know anybody that's Muslim, it's like you see Muslim, you think terrorist."

Anchor Suzanne Malveaux introduced Lemon's segment, which ran 39 minutes into the 12 pm Eastern hour, as part of her network's "What Matters" series, which is a partnership with Essence magazine. Malveaux played up the film's "strong African-American cast and director," and stated that her colleague "sat down with the director Qasim Basir to talk about the movie, and the state of Muslims in America." An on-screen graphic signaled the primary focus of Lemon's interview: "Religion + Intolerance: Don Lemon, Qasim Bair discuss 'Mooz-lum.'"

On Thursday's Newsroom, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux announced that Ian Murphy, the blogger who prank-called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by pretending to be billionaire David Koch, was her network's "Most Intriguing Person of the Day." Murphy is the latest liberal hero to receive this designation from CNN.

Malveaux devoted a half-minute segment 21 minutes into the 11 am Eastern hour to the blogger from BuffaloBeast.com, a site co-founded by left-wing Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi:

[Video below the jump]

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux complimented a media colleague on Tuesday's Newsroom who hit President Obama from the left that morning. April Ryan cited the liberal Congressional Black Caucus's criticism of Obama's proposed budget, that "rebuilding our economy on the backs of the most vulnerable Americans is something that is...not acceptable." Malveaux stated that Ryan "brought up a very good point."

Ryan, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, twice raised Mr. Obama's past as a community organizer in her two questions to the President during his 11 am press conference. The reference to the Congressional Black Caucus came in her first question:

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux led Friday's Situation Room by labeling the social conservative Value Voters Summit a "traditional showcase for hardcore conservatives." Later in the same segment, senior political analyst Gloria Borger stated that the Tea Party movement was "anti-health care" and bizarrely referred to Ronald Reagan as "the most secular president we've known in our lifetime."

Malveaux used her "hardcore conservatives" line as she introduced a segment on Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's speech to the Summit. Just before this, she stated how "some are calling her [O'Donnell] the new poster girl for the Tea Party phenomenon" and later continued that she apparently "preached a new kind of gospel at the Values Voter Summit: the Tea Party's anti-government mantra."

CNN's Deborah Feyerick joined the media guessing game as to the motivation behind the stabbing of Muslim taxicab driver in New York City, emphasizing the possibility it may have been "connected to this big Ground Zero controversy, where we're hearing so much anti-Muslim sentiment." Feyerick raised this hypothesis during reports on Thursday's Rick's List and The Situation Room.

The correspondent's first report on the attack aired 12 minutes into the 4 pm Eastern hour of Rick's List. Anchor Rick Sanchez played a clip from victim Ahmed Sharif's press conference on Thursday before introducing Feyerick. She began by stating that when "Michael Enright, the suspect, was arrested, he had numerous journals and notebooks on him, all of them filled with writings, some of it completely illegible. That is now with authorities, all of that being vetted and looked through to see whether, in fact, there was anything indicating that he had undergone some sort of a mental or emotional change."

Feyerick did mention that Enright "ironically...was a volunteer working for a non-profit organization that promotes peace," but didn't mentioned that the organization, Intersections International, actually supports the planned mosque near Ground Zero. She continued with the speculation over the possible motivation of the attack, including the "anti-Muslim" charge:

On Monday's Situation Room, CNN's Jeffrey Toobin used dire language to describe a federal judge's decision which struck down federal funding for embryonic stem cell research: "The bottom line is this is a major setback for stem cell research and for the Obama administration....it will certainly cut way back on federal funding." Anchor Suzanne Malveaux labeled it a "potential wedge issue."

Malveaux led the 5 pm Eastern hour with the "breaking news" about Judge Royce Lamberth's decision, who issued a preliminary injunction against federal funding for the life-destroying research. The anchor brought in Toobin and asked, "What does this mean today?" Toobin immediately gave his "major setback" assessment and described the grounds on which Judge Lamberth gave in his 15-page opinion.

The CNN senior legal analyst, like many in the media, omitted that embryonic stem cell research isn't the only field when it comes to stem cell research. The federal government has actually spent much more on adult stem cell research. According to a July 18, 2008 report by PBS, the NIH "spent $200 million funding non-embryonic stem cell research, and only $38 million on embryonic stem cells." Less than a month ago, on August 2, the Associated Press actually highlighted the successes of adult stem cell research.

On Wednesday's Newsroom, CNN's Tony Harris omitted the pro-illegal immigration activism of guest Isabel Garcia, just as his colleague Suzanne Malveaux did more than two months earlier. Harris twice referred to Garcia as merely the "deputy public defender in Pima County, Arizona," and didn't mention her involvement in the beating and decapitation of a pinata effigy of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The anchor brought on the activist, as well as Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, the author of the state newly-passed anti-illegal immigration law, for two segments starting 10 minutes into the 11 am Eastern hour. After asking Senator Pearce's position on the federal government's new lawsuit against the enforcement of his law, Harris turned to the public defender: "Isabel, you've been patient. Weigh in here."

Garcia (her pro-illegal immigration organization, Coalición de Derechos Humanos, whose website features a logo incorporating the southwestern states into Mexico, was identified on-screen as the "Human Rights Coalition") immediately went on the offense against Pearce, playing the race/ethnicity card against the Republican politician: