Eve Conant

Newsweek-Daily Beast Scare Story: 'White Supremacist Stampede' for Public Office?
By Tim Graham | July 8, 2011 | 7:05 AM EDT

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal just demolished a scare piece by Newsweek reporter Eve Conant (posted on July 4) with the overwrought headline "White Supremacist Stampede: A startling number of white-power candidates are seeking public office."

If we're being warned of dangerous new wave of white racist extremists, it naturally is another product of the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, which warns daily of a radical-racist-right takeover of America. Taranto asked: How startling is this wave of white-power candidates from sea to shining sea?

Could Repeal of DADT Put Gay Servicemen, Partners in Jeopardy On Middle East Deployments?
By Ken Shepherd | December 6, 2010 | 10:32 AM EST

In a brief entry at Newsweek.com entitled "What Repeal Will Mean," Eve Conant fleshes out some of the legal and cultural changes that allowing openly gay servicemen would entail.

For example, how would this impact conservative chaplains whose faith condemns as sinful homosexual practice?

But the last item Conant discussed seemed to me one that I've not heard in any of the coverage I've read or seen thus far:

Newsweek Reporter: Why Arizona Isn't Crazy
By Tim Graham | May 5, 2010 | 6:38 AM EDT

While the vast majority of national media stories from the controversy over Arizona's new immigration law are sympathetically centered on the plight of the illegal alien, Eve Conant offered a stunning contrast inside the pages of Newsweek based on reporting from Arizona last year. She said you might think the suburbs of Phoenix "were a safe and friendly place to raise kids. Ask me now and I'd say: think twice."

This piece must have been controversial inside the magazine's offices. Conant wrote:

Arizona has outraged the nation with a new immigration law that obligates authorities to check the documents of anyone they believe is in the country illegally, based on a "reasonable suspicion" during a "lawful" stop. Some accuse lawmakers and the 70 percent of Arizonans who support the bill of acting like Nazis, or of turning Arizona into an apartheid state. But spend some time in Arizona, and you may come to see why so many Arizonans want this.

Newsweek's Transparent Call for Legalizing Gay Marriage
By Carolyn Plocher | April 26, 2010 | 6:52 PM EDT

Newsweek's article "The Right to Love - and Loss" pretends to fight for gay couples' "right" to divorce. Instead, it is simply a transparent ruse to fight for gay marriage. How else could gay divorce be legal unless gay marriage preceded it?

In a shining example of journalistic bias, reporter Eve Conant included seven different sources in favor of the government recognizing gay divorce (and hence, recognizing gay marriage) and quoted them 14 times in her article. Opponents, however, were represented by a single, bland quote - a two-sentence statement from the spokesman for the Texas Attorney General. "Under the Constitution and law of the State of Texas, marriage is an institution between one man and one woman. Thus the parties' arrangement from another state is not a marriage under Texas law and therefore cannot be terminated by divorce."

Newsweek Denounces Hateful 'Antigovernment Extremists' -- Like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin
By Tim Graham | April 15, 2010 | 4:39 PM EDT

The April 19 Newsweek cover that's shamelessly selling the "remarkable" tale of our economic recovery also promises a story on "Hate on the Right." In fact the word "HATE" takes up half a page, white letters on a black background, with the subhead "Antigovernment extremists are on the rise – and on the march."

Pictures illustrating the article strangely connect Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin with 1930's socialists. The caption read: "Huey Long castigated the rich and Father Coughlin denounced Jews in the 1930s. Today, the microphones belong to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin." (Beck's previous impassioned rebuttal of the comparison to Coughlin is ignored.) This would not be the first time Newsweek's imagined "right wing" Coughlin as an Obama foil.

Evan Thomas and Eve Conant utilize the usual liberal experts – Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who unloads his usual line about militias "roaring back," and historian Alan Brinkley, who opines that "the current surge of fear and loathing toward Obama is ‘scary,' he says. ‘There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings. I can't see this happening if McCain were president.'"