With so much political mud being slung by both major parties online and on social media, it’s probably helpful for conservatives to recognize which websites are actually legitimate news sources, and which ones are merely vehicles for partisan name-calling or outright smearing.
In the spirit of a “Fake News Sites” list being circulated by liberal Professor Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College, here’s a brief rundown of websites and Facebook groups that are less than legitimate or which are funded via undisclosed sources:
- Huffington Post
When The Huffington Post was launched in 2005 by author Arianna Huffington, it was hailed as a truly alternative and independent news outlet that covered stories the mainstream media was missing out on. That was then.
Flash forward 11 years, and The Huffington Post is a shell of its former self, having been purchased by AOL in 2011 and AOL itself having been purchased by communications giant Verizon in 2015. The Huffington Post’s reputation for proactive reporting and veracity has long since been punctured by editorial directions motivated and aimed primarily at not offending advertisers or connected organizations.
Verizon is one of the largest corporate donors to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative; is it any wonder that the Huffington Post’s stories about notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein mention President-elect Trump (who knew Epstein socially in the early 2000s), but conveniently leave out Bill Clinton, who traveled to Epstein’s “Orgy Island” and rode on his “Lolita Express” jet 26 times?
- Think Progress
This colorful site, which would love for you to think of it as simply a progressive news blog, is actually an arm of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal activist think tank founded in 2003 by Hillary Clinton’s campaign Chairman John Podesta. CAP also owns college campus activist organization Generation Progress, science website Science Progress and environmental blog Climate Progress.
- Five Thirty Eight
This website claims to be a go-to source for all sorts of political and polling information, and it’s true, some of the numbers published by the site are legitimately accurate.
But did you know that Five Thirty Eight has been owned by sports television network ESPN since 2013 and that ESPN itself has been owned by Disney’s ABC television network since 1984? And, wouldn’t you know it — Disney is a large Democratic donor, giving $1.5 million to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and various other Democrats in 2016.
- Vox
Cute little websites with cute little names make some people think they’re run by small little independent shops of Mom-and-Pop writers. In the case of Vox, however, the Mom-and-Pop operators number about 400, and its parent company, Vox Media, publishes some 300 websites, including Curbed, Eater, Racked, The Verge, Recode and SB Nation.
Chairman James Bankoff is a former executive vice president of AOL (see above) who established entertainment gossip website TMZ. President Marty Moe is a former advisor to Larry Summers, the Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton and the Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. It probably doesn’t take much thinking to figure out which way content on Vox slants.
- Mic
Mic, formerly known as PolicyMic, is a “media company that targets millennials,” according to Wikipedia and has “a higher composition of 18- to 34-year-old readers than any other millennial-focused news site, including BuzzFeed and Vice.” Contributors to Mic include Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and radio host Daisy Rosario, both supporters of Hillary Clinton for president.
Investors in Mic include the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, run by Alberto Ibargüen, the former chairman of PBS and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, both strong backers of Clinton in the recent election. Advisors to Mic include Jacob Lewis, a former editor of The New Yorker and David Shipley, an executive editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, publications that also advocated strongly for Clinton as well.
- ATTNATTN says that its mission is to create “content that breaks down complex issues, making politics interesting for millennials, and analyzes the world from the perspective of the social media generation.” It claims 30 million monthly visitors and 400 million monthly video views.
ATTN is a brand of nonprofit organization Our Time, “an American organization founded by Matthew Segal and Jarrett Moreno, focused on organizing campaigns that register and educate voters, advocating for economic opportunity, and covering political news aimed at young Americans,” according to its Wikipedia entry.
The entry further goes on to note “[ATTN] absorbed Declare Yourself and the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, and began operations as a 501(c)(3) [group] in March 2011.” Declare Yourself was founded by television producer and philanthropist Norman Lear, a longtime critic of the religious right who partners with billionaire George Soros in another major political organization, People for the American Way (PFAW).
ATTN founder Matt Segal is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post (see above) and is a frequent guest on liberal television network MSNBC.
- Now ThisLike ATTN, Now This produces video clips that are seen by a huge number of social media viewers. Now This was started by the co-founder and former CEO of The Huffington Post and features contributors and management who formerly worked at Vice Media, New York magazine and MTV Networks, all companies that vigorously supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president.
The managing partner of the primary funder of Now This, Kenneth Lerer, has hosted fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Lerer’s other venture Buzzfeed notably canceled election ads from Donald Trump in June of this year.
- Raw StoryAccording to Wikipedia, “Raw Story describes itself as progressive, bringing attention to [news] stories that it sees as downplayed or ignored by other media outlets.” The managing director and vice chairman of Raw Story, Michael Rogers, has been described as a gay rights activist, blogger and fundraiser who forced Subway, the world’s largest restaurant chain, to add gender identity and sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policies.
He’s a member of the WikiQueer Advisory Board and the founder of a national network of fundraising events for LGBT organizations. He also helped start for Scouts for Equality, a gay-rights advocacy organization for the Boy Scouts of America.
- AJ+AJ+ is the social media brand name of Al-Jazeera Media Network, a Qatar-based Muslim media group founded by the royal ruling family of Qatar, which seized power in a bloodless coup in that country in 1995.
Al-Jazeera has in the past been embroiled in controversies accusing it of anti-Semitism, pro-Wahhabism and anti-Shia sentiment. It’s also been accused of being the “primary ideological and communication network” of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that in the past has stated that it desires to destroy non-Muslim culture from within.
- U.S. UncutU.S. Uncut is both a website and a Facebook group that has enormous reach. It has no information about itself available on its website, but Wikipedia’s entry on the company notes that it was originally founded to focus on tax issues. The entry further states that U.S. Uncut “has been criticized as being partisan liberal [news] site. The organization’s website has been accused of deceiving readers and of publishing inaccurate news stories.”
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, U.S. Uncut promoted a story showing a man named Chris Ball who supposedly had been bloodied by Trump supporters in a bar in Santa Monica, California.
There were graphic pictures of Ball wearing an extremely bloodstained shirt that looked more like it had been taken from the aftermath of a shooting than a fistfight. Ball’s face was covered with what looked like blood, but no wounds can be clearly seen in the photos.
Fact-checking site Politifact noted “The Santa Monica Police Department and the City of Santa Monica have not received any information indicating this crime occurred in the City of Santa Monica. We encourage the alleged victim to come forward and work with us if a crime did, in fact, take place. A check of local hospitals revealed there was no victim of any such incident admitted or treated as well.”
- Occupy DemocratsLike U.S. Uncut, Occupy Democrats is both a progressive news website and a Facebook group. According to its “About Us” page, it was “Founded in late 2012. Occupy Democrats is a political organization and information website that provides a new counterbalance to the Republican Tea Party. The Occupy Movement changed the national conversation around the issue of class and inequality, but unlike the Tea Party, it failed to achieve legislative victories.”
In bold capital letters, the group’s site states, “WE ADVOCATE WORKING WITH DEMOCRATS, NOT THIRD PARTIES, TO FIGHT SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND WE LOVE, SUPPORT, RESPECT AND ADMIRE PRESIDENT OBAMA.”
What it doesn’t state is that like the Occupy Wall Street movement, the site is almost wholly funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Politifact rates Occupy Democrats’ posts as “66% False,” including “33% Pants-on-Fire False.”
- The Other 98%Readers of posts from Facebook group The Other 98% might be shocked to learn that most of its funding comes from “the other 2 percent” of society, specifically from billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations is a major donor. The Other 98% shares content with Occupy Democrats and is rated “50% Mostly False” by Politifact.
~American Liberty Report
