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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."
One that goes back to our oldest elections, though I think those papers were mostly focused on slandering opponents.
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.
This has nothing to do with nerds. Nor is it news... /.
Salon is the biggest piece of shit masquerading as journalism out there right next to Mother Jones and The Daily Stormer. Who gives a rat's ass what they think?
Do better,
When did slashdot become a politics site where propaganda sources are allowed like salon? Np, we do not want this in our nerd news. Keep this crap on twitter.
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
Why are political news on Slashdot all of a sudden? Actually there has been an increase of this garbage. I don't give a fuck if you are Republican, Democrat, anarchist, whatever, don't post your garbage here. Fuck off already.
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
You know Fox is basically controlled opposition and that any time one of their, in many cases real conservative hosts, start talking too close to the core about what's wrong they get shit-canned right? Fox news is right-wing news with a restraining bolt.
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If that's restrained, I don't even want to know what they be like totally unhinged.
It's an old Soviet tactic that was borrowed and perfected by a GOP operative named Karl Rove. Take whatever your faults are and accuse your opponent of them. It puts them on the defensive and distracts from you and your problems. It wouldn't work if we had a media that wasn't owned lock, stock and barrel by mega corps but, well, we do.
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I think it's funny you pointing to Salon's political bias (which it certainly does have) while making claims of an eminent communist revolution in this country. You either don't understand what communism is or have a personal political bias so far departed from reality that you're consciously choosing to characterize the mild Leftist push the Democrats are actually experiencing as communism.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"I think it funny that you believe that AOC is "mild Leftist"."
I think it's funny that you think that AOC is the entirety of the Democratic party and not just one of 235 Democratic house members who represent's only one of New York's 27 congressional districts. Is the entire Republican party libertarian because the people of Kentucky elected Rand Paul to the Senate?
" What they want is to take my money so that the politicians can decide who deserves it."
Every government, no matter where on the political spectrum, does this. It's what governments do and the odds are fairly certain you're in favor of government doing this in some sort of context so you can quit with the delusion that only those on the Left practice what you describe.
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The "Convington boys" were bused to an anti-abortion march and allowed to wear MAGA hats by their school. Many things failed to create the circumstances that lead to those boys feeling the need to do what they did and none of those failures were the media. Making boys as part of their school field trip decide the fate of women's reproductive rights was failure number one and failure number two as allowing school children to wear MAGA hats and incite the coverage they deserved their own own actions. Why would school bus boys from OK to protest women's reproductive rights and allow them to wear MAGA hats and then let them get involved in making political statements that they then sued to hide? Why would these boys or the school need a PR Firm?
What you are doing is projection. You're blaming others for your own actions as if being a liberal or having liberal media is the problem. The media reported on these kids and if they didn't want to be used for the propaganda they shouldn't have been sent for propaganda.