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Salon: Republicans Are Launching Fake Local News Sites To Spread 'Propaganda' (salon.com)
"The Tennessee Star claims to be the 'most reliable' online local paper in the state," reports Salon. "In fact it's just a GOP front." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
An investigation by the fact-checking outlet Snopes found that several new local news websites are actually being launched by Republican consultants whose company is funded in part by the candidates the sites cover. Politico first reported last year that Tea Party-linked conservative activists Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill and Christina Botteri were behind the "Tennessee Star," a website that purported to be a local news website but mostly posted content licensed from groups linked to big Republican donors. Snopes discovered that the trio has since launched similar sites in other battleground states ahead of the 2020 elections: the Ohio Star and the Minnesota Sun...
The group behind the sites does not appear content with just three outlets. According to Politico, Leahy has purchased domain names associated with Missouri, New England, the Dakotas, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, most of which are electoral battleground states that will be vital in 2020.
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who heads the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Snopes that political operatives are free to launch their own news platforms, but it's a problem if they are trying to deceive readers into believing the sites are nonpartisan local news. "I have no problem with advocacy organizations creating content that reinforces the positions they take on public policy issues on the left, right or center. The issue comes in when they're not transparent about that advocacy," Culver said... "The information sphere is so polluted right now that the average citizen has trouble telling what is real and what is not," Culver told Snopes. "I find that very troubling within a democracy."
An investigation by the fact-checking outlet Snopes found that several new local news websites are actually being launched by Republican consultants whose company is funded in part by the candidates the sites cover. Politico first reported last year that Tea Party-linked conservative activists Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill and Christina Botteri were behind the "Tennessee Star," a website that purported to be a local news website but mostly posted content licensed from groups linked to big Republican donors. Snopes discovered that the trio has since launched similar sites in other battleground states ahead of the 2020 elections: the Ohio Star and the Minnesota Sun...
The group behind the sites does not appear content with just three outlets. According to Politico, Leahy has purchased domain names associated with Missouri, New England, the Dakotas, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, most of which are electoral battleground states that will be vital in 2020.
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who heads the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told Snopes that political operatives are free to launch their own news platforms, but it's a problem if they are trying to deceive readers into believing the sites are nonpartisan local news. "I have no problem with advocacy organizations creating content that reinforces the positions they take on public policy issues on the left, right or center. The issue comes in when they're not transparent about that advocacy," Culver said... "The information sphere is so polluted right now that the average citizen has trouble telling what is real and what is not," Culver told Snopes. "I find that very troubling within a democracy."
Never forget the false flag operation at Alabama.
I repeat...
Never forget the false flag operation at Alabama.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jones-russia.html
The DNC are proven liars who have been caught red-handed. Never trust them.
Is there a difference? Republicans seem to be willing to go to any lengths for power, so if the Russians offer help winning elections...
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
No. None of what you said is true. Even "Let the GOP have one too." Fox News is a prominent "news" source, wholly run for the Republican party. You have got to be troll to claim to be unaware of Fox. You might not know of Sinclair, which is also a conservative news organization, that has been buying up local stations. They are converting local news programs into propaganda machines for the Republicans. So the right is not hurting for "news" outlets.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Facts beat feelings.
What is the meaning of the phrase “coined the term”?
The phrase “coined the term” is used to mean that someone basically created a commonly used term, so “coined the term” is synonymous with “created the phrase” or “was the first to use the phrase”.
It was not the Republican party and certainly not Trump that COINED THE TERM "Fake News"
According to NPR (of all stations) "Fake News" was first termed for fake reporting by a media damage control consultant hired by the Obama administration to assist Hillary in her election process in managing social media stories and rebuking bad optics (For Hillary) posts. The term was successfully co-opted by candidate Trump before team socialism could effectively use it for optics control.
If you actually used a critical eye on the story And the headlines for the liberal media (which is self admittedly 95% of the media outlets) you would see they are not objective. Maybe you have never had a journalism class. Maybe it doesn't matter. Presumably these so called journalists have had a journalism class and it hasn't stopped them from breaking the rules of professional journalism.
{would you like to know more?} https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/resources/courses/ethical-journalist-toolkit
Simply because a website sources some of their news from large national sources does not make it fake news. Local news companies source stories from Reuters and the Associated Press all the time. Why do you think you can find the exact same article in a range of news outlets?
Presuming news to be fake simply because it comes from a different political perspective is hubris at best.
I'm sure a local news service founded by a man with the following description (taken directly from his publisher's website):
Michael Patrick Leahy is an innovative leader in both the tactics and strategy of grassroots conservative new-media activism. As cofounder of Top Conservatives on Twitter, Leahy helped to form the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition....He lives in Tennessee
will be a bastion of fair, accurate and unbiased reporting. And, while I can see him being concerned about local news in TN since he lives there, it is hard to see what ties he may have to Missouri, New England, the Dakotas, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, as mentioned in the summary. Unless he is just really concerned about local news.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
for the party the coined the term 'fake news' (and 'alternative facts'), the Republicans seem to generate more of it than the rest of the world combined.
That's like giving Apple credit for inventing the smart phone, or Edison for inviting the light bulb.
Trump may have popularized the expression "fake news", but it was already beginning to gain a foothold several years before he ran for President. He took a phrase he liked and ran with it.
"Alternative Facts" however- that's ALL the Trump Whitehouse, they came up with that one.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
CNN doesn't shill for the DNC?
You know they've actually admitted (finally) that they have debate questions to Hillary ahead of time right?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Fortunately you don't need to take their word for it, you can easily confirm that these sites are fake by looking at them yourself. Here are the links:
http://theohiostar.com/
http://tennesseestar.com/
http://theminnesotasun.com/
Notice how they all use the same Wordpress template and have extremely similar content. All lack any information on who owns or operates them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's not a *conservative* trait. Philosophical conservatism -- that is to say skepticism of Utopian schemes -- has a long and honorable history. Projection is a *radical* trait, which is why radical groups tend to splinter and break down when they're under pressure -- e.g. when they gain power and have to get things done. As their underlying differences are unmasked, they turn on each other ruthlessly.
Conservative *branding* isn't the same thing as conservatism.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well TBH whoever named it "The Minnesota Sun" clearly knows nothing about Minnesota:
a) Two major papers in the state that everyone knows, regardless of whether the papers themselves are in decline: (Minneapolis) Star Tribune and (St. Paul) Pioneer Press;
a) Minnesota identifies with the North Star. Yes, it gets sunny here but we leave "Sun" for the Southwest US and Florida.
So it's hard to imagine that too many people in MN would even give "The Minnesota Sun" a first glance, much less a second.
No surprise, same shit with largest climate denial organizations.
Behind most of them is a Republican with no scientific background sponsored by fossil fuel industries. Follow the donation trail and you'll see it for yourself it's paid propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Mountain_Publishing
Have at it. All of the local news sites owned by the same company. You'll see they're a division of an even larger conglomerate. Start going through the sites all owned by them and you'll see they are all strangely similar.
Figure it's easier to just link the wiki page rather than the individual pages, as this provides a clear link that they're all owned by the same company, and also saves me posting a long list of links.
sure, It was pretty dissapointing when it happened. I did not know before then it was just a husband and wife and after they got caught, it then came to life all the photos with high level players in politics, specifically left leaning. While Im digging that up though, read this. Its not political but it is from a left-leaning site that outed them for doing the same pretending a false is a 'maybe true' thing, this time for monsanto.
https://foodbabe.com/do-you-tr...
I find it highly concerning that googling 'snopes fails to report false' that the first 5 hits are articles written BY SNOPES about how non-biased snopes is. Thats like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coup.
here is one where WaPo attacked their credibility and I wouldnt call WaPo right-leaning at all.
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
they even quoted a forbes article
The fact-checking site was originally founded in 1995 by David and Barbara Mikkelson, who divorced in 2015. In December 2017, Forbes ran a piece that concluded Snopes has major credibility problems such as: David Mikkelson’s “responses regarding the hiring of strongly partisan fact checkers and his lack of response on screening and assessment protocols present a deeply troubling picture of a secretive black box that acts as ultimate arbitrator of truth, yet reveals little of its inner workings.”
heres an earlier forbes article where they outlined other credibility issues with snopes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...
crap I hate citing this source, because using a right-leaning source to discredit an alleged left-leaning one is subjective at best... the takeaway is that you'll need to independently verify the claims outlined here..
https://dailycaller.com/2019/0...
it its true then its a very recent excample of what I saw them do a couple years ago. Are you any good at using the wayback machine? I never used it and would need to verify this screenshot that showed they were both on the board of that PAC.
If only they had learned how to trick a FISA court with their propaganda, they might be 1/10th of the unethical shit bags that Democrats are!
i said this story is probably true but they do have a credibility issue, theyve been caught skewing the results. Even the WaPo has called them out, I linked their article in another thread. RealClear politics rated them and showed that they actually cited THEMSELVES as sources of their fact checking. Its fact checking. You cannot site yoursel or for that matter opinion articles (they scored a 90% on the topic f using the media as their 'fact check'. Considering journalists often use snopes for their fact checking, this means that a journalist runs with an article because snopes said another journalist said its true)
Believe me, I am highly skeptical, of everything. Im one of the few that believe both sides of these debates work in concert to keep us believing the world would be a better place if only the other side wasnt preventing progress. The reality is this 50/50 split serves to guarantee no progress ever happens and noone is ever held accountable. its entirely by design. But some more tidbits of this supposedly fact-only not bias'ed group:
Snopes’ main political fact-checker is a writer, Kim Lacapria. Before writing for Snopes, Lacapria wrote for Inquisitr, a blog known for publishing fake quotes and even downright hoaxes. Couple of examples
https://www.inquisitr.com/6700...
https://www.rawstory.com/2015/...
While at Inquisitr, she consistently displayed clear partisanship. She described herself as “openly left-leaning” and a liberal. She trashed the Tea Party as “teahadists.” She called Bill Clinton “one of our greatest” presidents. She claimed that conservatives only criticized Lena Dunham’s comparison of voting to sex because they “fear female agency.” She once wrote: “Like many GOP ideas about the poor, the panic about using food stamps for alcohol, pornography or guns seems to have been cut from whole cloth–or more likely, the ideas many have about the fantasy of poverty.” (A simple fact-check would show that food stamp fraud does occur and costs taxpayers tens of millions.) These are not good traits if you're trying to portray yourself as someone only about the facts.
After blogging the Inquisitr, Lacapria joined Snopes, where she regularly plays defense for any rumor or otherwise against democrats.
She wrote a “fact check” article about Jimmy Carter’s unilateral ban of Iranian nationals from entering the country that looks more like an opinion column arguing against Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
After the Orlando terror attack, Lacapria claimed that just because Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat with an active voter registration status didn’t mean he was actually a Democrat. Her “fact check” argued that he might “have chosen a random political affiliation when he initially registered.” Eactly how is this fact checking and not a platform to substitute her opinions as given facts. The FACT was he was a registered democrat. Why did she need to downplay this fact and rate it as a Mixture and not simply True. https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
here is the quote
"What that lone fact means is the subject of a good deal of speculation, with possibilities ranging from Mateen’s being a supporter of Democratic ideology to his simply having chosen a random political affiliation when he initially registered. Mateen didn’t appear on the FBI’s radar until 2013, and it’s possible that in the ten years between 2006 and 2016 his political outlook (whatever it was to begin with) might have changed radically, even
As with Donald Trump's hiding of his grades when asking for Obama to show his, yeah, that's a conservative trait.
Or the President, who has spread memes from Stormfront, saying that the Democrats are the party of antisemitism.
here is one where WaPo attacked their credibility and I wouldnt call WaPo right-leaning at all.
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
That's the Washington Times, not Washington Post. Washington Times was created as the conservative alternative. It was created be Unification's Revered Moon, and a prominent proponent of the Obama birther conspiracy.