CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman did his part to forward Republican talking points on the border in a March 3 article:
In just one area of Arizona, not even on the border with Mexico, fentanyl pill seizures have gone up 610% in two years and human trafficking has risen 377%. Testifying about the crisis, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb told Congress to “stop saying the border is secure, because the border is not secure.”
Sheriff Lamb spoke before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security on Feb. 28. He was joined by Rebecca Kiessling, a private citizen, whose two teenage sons were killed by ingesting fake Percocet pills that were made with fentanyl. They did not know what they were consuming.
[…]“In 2018, we had zero seizures” of fentanyl, he said, “and in 2019 we had around 700 pills. In 2020 we had over 200,000 pills. In 2021 we had over 1.2 million pills, and this last year we had over 1.4 million pills come into my community.”
In the state, in 2021, “we lost 44 children to [fentanyl] poisoning, under the age of 17,” said Sheriff Lamb. “Seven were under the age of one year old. If that doesn’t mobilize the forces of the country to stop this problem, I don’t know what will. This is what we deal with on a daily basis.”
Chapman dutifully censored the fact that Lamb is a right-wing extremist. There’s a reason he’s called the “QAnon Sheriff,” according to Salon:
To date, Lamb has appeared on at least five QAnon-friendly shows, including the podcasts “X22 Report” and “Uncensored Abe” as well as shows hosted by John Michael Chambers and Sean Morgan, both prominent figures in the QAnon movement who have pushed a variety of conspiracy theories to their audiences.
During his appearance on “X22 Report” last January, Lamb said: “I follow the show, so this is a treat for me.” That show literally features a section on its website titled “Latest From QAnon.”
[…]Law enforcement agencies have warned about the potential for violence by QAnon believers, and very few Republicans in elected office have engaged the movement directly, which makes Lamb a notable exception.
On top of that, Lamb’s son hosts a podcast that has featured “election deniers, QAnon-adjacent activists, and right-wing vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse.” Further, Lamb is a guy who actually cares more about advancing his own political career than engaging in responsible law enforcement;a month after the congressional testimony Chapman lionized, Lamb announced his campaign for an Arizona Senate seat.
But pushing Republican narratives was more important to Chapman than doing his job as a reporter, so Lamb’s extremisim was ignored.
That’s not the only thing Chapman underreported in his article. Describing Rebecca Kiessling only as “a private citizen” is a bit disingenuous; in fact, she’s an anti-abortion activist who’s so extreme she opposes abortion even for rape victims. And despite Chapman’s implication that the overdose deaths of Kiessling’s sons were somehow the fault of Biden’s border policies, they occurred in 2020, before Biden took office.
That became a point of contention in a couple other CNS articles. When extremist Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to blame Biden for the deaths of Kiessling’s sons, Patrick Goodenough complained in a March 2 article that even tried to defend Greene a little:
President Biden on Wednesday evening hit back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for blaming his administration for two fentanyl deaths that occurred before he took office.
Addressing a meeting of House Democrats in Baltimore, Biden suggested that GOP lawmakers such as Greene were going to cause a lot more Republicans to seek bipartisan cooperation with Democrats.
[…]After the House Homeland Security Committee heard testimony from a Michigan woman whose sons died after unknowingly taking the synthetic opioid in 2020, Taylor Greene tweeted a clip from the hearing.
“Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s [sic] from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl,” she tweeted.
Biden said he probably “shouldn’t digress,” but then continued, “I’ve read – she was very specific recently, saying that a mom, a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl, that – that I killed her sons.”
“Well, the interesting thing is, that fentanyl they took came during the last administration,” he said, chuckling.
[…]While Taylor Greene in her tweet did link the two young men’s “murders” to “the Biden administration’s refusal to secure our border” she did not – as Biden said in Baltimore – accuse him of having “killed her sons.”
After right-wingers maliciously portrayed Biden’s chuckling as directed toward Kiessling and not Greene, CNS surprisingly came to a rare defense of Biden with a March 3 article by Melanie Arter featuring press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointing out how Biden’s words were being “mischaracterized.”
If that rare stab at fairness was meant to stave off the day that the Media Research Center would shut down CNS, it appears not to have worked.