CNSNews.com’s cheerleading for the nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general is almost embarrassing in its utter bias — the kind that CNS’ parent, the Media Research Center, would be screaming bloody murder about if a “liberal media” outlet acted like this.
CNS churned a whopping eight articles on Jan. 10, the first day of Sessions’ confirmation hearing, designed solely to lionize him and promote his right-wing bona fides:
- Sessions Tells Senators: ‘You Know I Believe in Fairness, Impartiality and Equal Justice’
- Sessions: ‘It Would Certainly Be Constitutional, I Believe,’ to End Obama’s Executive Actions on Immigration
- Sessions: I Will Be Able to Say No to Trump
- Sessions: I Still Believe Roe Was One of Most ‘Colossally Erroneous’ Decisions of All Time
- Sessions Says He Never Disagrees With His Wife—Then Remembers He’s Under Oath
- Sessions: ‘There Was an Organized Effort to Caricature Me as Something That Wasn’t True’
- Sessions: Fact That Complainants in 1985 Voting Fraud Case Were Also African-American Has Been Overlooked
- Sen. Rubio on AG Nominee’s Character: ‘Never Had a Negative Interaction With Him’
All but two of these articles focus either on statements by Sessions solely or answers to questions from Republican senators.
CNS mostly ignored the second day of the hearing on Jan. 11, refusing to devote an article to testimony critical of Sessions from Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and John Lewis. Instead, an article portrays as whining the complaint from another Democratic senator complaining that Booker’s and Lewis’ testimony was pushed to the end of the day.
This was joined by an article in which CNS reporter Penny Starr goes the ambush route in trying to get a Democratic senator to agree with her that Sessions is “a man of high character” and “a kind and decent man who has worked relentlessly for desegregation and justice.”
Starr followed up with an article the next day touting how African-Americans testifying at the hearing “praised the senator as a man who has helped people regardless of their race.” She didn’t mention the testimony of African-Americans Booker and Lewis.
CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman contributed an article citing a 2016 speech in which Sessions attacked Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as having a “post-modern, relativistic, secular mindset” that is “directly contrary to the founding of our republic.”
The cherry on the top of this bias is CNS editor Terry Jeffrey’s column — tonally similar to his website’s biased “news” reporting — in which he touts Sessions’ hard anti-abortion stance and declares that “Sessions’ views on abortion and same-sex marriage are right” and anyone who disagrees with him is “wrong.”
That bias is reflected throughout CNS’ Sessions articles — which, again, if it involved a news outlet other than one the MRC didn’t own, the MRC would be all over it.
UPDATE: We forgot one — a Jan. 11 article by Melanie Hunter touting U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Peter Kirsanow — whom Hunter doesn’t identify as a conservative — fawningly declaring that “Sessions’ approach to civil rights is consistent, is legally sound, intellectually honest, and has an appreciation and understanding of the historical bases for civil rights laws.”