For a year that featured Joy Behar’s anti-Christian tirade on The View, faux conservatives making fools of themselves on cable news, Jim Acosta’s nuttiness, and Samantha Bee’s ugly use of the c-word against First Daughter Ivanka Trump, 2018 provided an inordinate amount of content for the NewsBusters staff.
Following the precedent set in 2016 and 2017, the following post gives you, the readers, a look at the top ten posts of 2018 based on traffic. NewsBusters would be nowhere near what it has become today without the support of readers from across the political spectrum who view us as essential reading for the latest media bias and news.
So, once again, thank you for your support. Here’s the list:
1. CNN and MSNBC Helped Russia Sow Discord by Promoting Fake Anti-Trump Rally
Research director Rich Noyes took the top spot in 2018 with a February 19 blog about CNN and MSNBC coverage of anti-Trump protests that took place on November 12, 2016.
But the reason Noyes blogged this concerned the fact that, according to a February 16 indictment from the Mueller team, the protests were allegedly organized by Russian social media trolls to sow division in our American discourse.
Noyes wrote that “both CNN and MSNBC gave enthusiastic coverage to the Russian-organized anti-Trump rally that day, with live reports every hour” while “the Fox News Channel offered only a short re-cap (66 seconds) at the start of their 4:00 p.m. Eastern hour.”
The #1 blog of the year was cited by our friends at Conservative Review, the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Family Research Council, Mark Levin, Red State, and Washington Examiner to name a few.
2. Nets Go Gaga for Wild Nunberg Speculation About Trump Collusion
The first of seven appearances by news analyst Nicholas Fondacaro came at the two spot with his March 5 item on the broadcast network evening newscasts salivating on their latest attempt to search for Trump-Russia collusion.
The hysteria came in reaction to a day-long public meltdown by former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg that took place live on cable news for the world to see. The networks were eager to promote Nunberg and his off-wall interviews about the Mueller probe even though, as the Daily Beast reported, friends were concerned about him and the possibility that he was drunk.
3. Maddow Seethes Over Trump Leading Possible Peace Talks With North Korea
Fondacaro wrote four days later about MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s public meltdown on the same night that the Trump administration announced he would sit-down with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un for a face-to-face meeting. As Fondacaro wrote, she “was anything but enthused by the idea as she spewed skepticism and threw shade at the commander-in-chief for accepting North Korea’s offer.”
It’s safe to say Maddow was a little bitter the Obama administration didn’t pull that off.
4. Facts First? CNN Speculates Melania Wearing White to Protest Her Husband
Rewinding back to the State of the Union address on January 30, Fondacaro also found a real doozy of liberal bias when CNN White House reporter Kate Bennett seemed to speculate (without evidence) that First Lady Melania Trump wore white and didn’t ride with her husband to the Capitol so as to protest the President.
5. NBC Ignores Own Reporter and Crew Assaulted By Antifa in Charlottesville
Fondacaro’s fourth item in the list came from August 12 when he reported that NBC’s Sunday Today ignored how “NBC News reporter Cal Perry and his crew were...ganged up...and attacked” by Antifa members in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Both sides were there in Central Virginia to mark one year since neo-Nazis held a rally and hurled anti-Semitic slurs before one of them drove his car into a crowd, killing counterprotester Heather Heyer.
6. Nicolle Wallace Gets Shut Down by Condoleezza Rice for Implying Trump Is Racist
A new edition to the team in 2018, intern-turned research analyst Bill D’Agostino had a strong item on March 1 when he wrote about former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shutting down former colleague Nicolle Wallace on her MSNBC show Deadline: White House (which, in reality, is an anti-Trump, faux Republican therapy session).
Wallace was doing her usual trope of attacking President Trump and implying he’s a racist when Rice repeatedly shut her down. Check out the video below to watch it.
7. Wolff Touts Book ‘Will Finally End…This Presidency’
Fondacaro returned to the list with the seven spot thanks to his January 6 item about Michael Wolff’s interview a day earlier with BBC Radio as part of his largely gushy and unchallenged media tour for his erroneously concocted book Fire and Fury.
In the interview, Wolff told the host that his version of events would “finally end” Donald Trump’s time as President. Wolff went onto sell hoards of books, but his act quickly wore out as errors were found and he unceremoniously slid from the spotlight.
8. This Is the Left: Fox’s Shannon Bream Forced to ‘Bail’ on SCOTUS Set After Threats, ‘Volatile’ Scene
Yours truly made an appearance on the list as well with a July 9 item on Fox News @ Night host Shannon Bream being forced to leave her live shot outside the Supreme Court on the night of the Brett Kavanaugh nomination because of threats and a “volatile” scene of far-left protesters.
Bream first tweeted about her decision to not host her show from outside the Court and then explained on-air during a segment with Republican Senator Ben Sasse (NE) “it got a little too rowdy out there at the Court tonight.”
9. ‘SNL’ Mocks ‘Gross’ GOP Candidate Who Lost His Eye to an IED Blast
The most recent blog in the top ten was Fondacaro’s November 4 story about Saturday Night Live cast member Pete Davidson mocking Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) the night before as someone who looks like “a hitman in a porno movie.” Crenshaw has an eyepatch and glass eye after he lost his right eye and sight during a 2012 IED blast in Afghanistan.
The bipartisan outrage quickly reached a fever pitch and Davidson apologized. During the next show, Crenshaw appeared alongside Davidson during the Weekend Update segment in a genuine display of forgiveness and unity.
10. Nets Push Fake News Trump Made It Easier for Mentally Ill to Buy Guns
And finally, Fondacaro ended the 2018 list of most-read NewsBusters items with a February 15 blog one day after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that slammed the “big three” networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) for spreading fake news about the President and gun control.
All three newscasts claimed that the President and Republicans supported a 2017 move that they claimed allowed the mentally ill to have easier access to guns and thus relevant to Parkland considering reports about the state of the alleged gunman.
In reality, the ACLU and the American Association of People with Disabilities supported the bill and, as National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke put it, the previous “rule would have allowed bureaucrats within one of our federal agencies to bar American citizens from exercising a constitutional right — and on the highly questionable grounds that to be incapable of managing one’s finances is, by definition, to be a ‘mental defective.’”
