At the Daily Caller: The Mysterious Investigation Reporting of CNN’s KFile that Targets Republicans

Nov 6, 2018 | Featured

If you care about media bias, here is a piece that Dr. John Lott had at the Daily Caller. It is actually republishing a piece that he had at Townhall, but there is quite a story behind that piece as Townhall quickly took it down after CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski complained. The beginning of the piece provides a preface for people to understand some of the background involved here. The piece starts this way:

I don’t like bullies. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece pushing back against Andrew Kaczynski and the rest of CNN’s KFile unit, which has made a mission of taking out certain Republicans.

Townhall published the piece, in which I defended David Clarke, Monica Crowley and Congressman Jason Lewis from CNN’s attacks. But Townhall immediately removed it after CNN’s Kaczynski said my claims were incorrect.

For example, I noted that the Naval Postgraduate School only found that Clarke’s master’s thesis had a technical violation of proper citation formatting, not plagiarism, as Kfiles states.

But KFile’s main political target this year has been Minnesota Republican Congressman Jason Lewis. They mischaracterized statements that Lewis made as a radio talk show host six years ago, going after him for supposedly condoning sexual harassment and lamenting that society frowns on calling women sluts.

For example, Kaczynski’s deep responses mention that “Lott claims our only story about Krysten Sinema was a story on her party ID,” but, in fact, I wrote that their “hard-hitting investigations of Democrats includes Arizona Senate candidate Kyrsten Sinema” not mentioning her party affiliation in ads. My term “includes” was somehow interpreted as excluding another piece in which they discuss Sinema’s anti-war activism against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I have cut out my claim that CNN sat on allegations that Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison had physically abused a girlfriend. I cannot credit my off-the-record source, who is a long-time media person in Minnesota, with this information.

The Daily Caller has allowed me to make my case again. People can judge for themselves whether the attacks against David Clarke, Monica Crowley and Jason Lewis are justified or not.


Andrew Kaczynski and the rest of CNN’s so-called KFile unit ought to count their reporting as direct campaign contributions to Democrats.

Last year, in accusing Sheriff David Clarke and Monica Crowley of plagiarism when the Trump administration was considering them for positions, CNN omitted the authors’ footnotes, which contained the source attributions. CNN had one sentence acknowledging Clarke’s footnotes, but they left out the references when they showed readers the quoted passages.

As Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV and lecturer at the Yale English department, told the Yale Daily News in 2007, “Plagiarism is when you steal someone’s words and you don’t attribute it to that person.”

He went on to address the case of Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres, who copied large chunks of writing without quote marks — even more than a couple of paragraphs at a time: . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

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