When our founders adopted a provision of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press they did so, in part, with the intent that the American media would hold those in power to account.
That’s what the “indie” media (that’s us) does today — we seek to hold people in power to account, while simultaneously reporting accurately on all sides of the political spectrum.
That is a radical departure from what the Left-leaning Pravda media does.
The “establishment” media purposely skew their coverage so that it always casts a favorable, yet undeserved, light on Democrats and their liberal allies, no matter what they do.
Now, the Leftist Pravda media are going a step further: They are attempting to discredit the truth-tellers simply because we hold differing opinions about how the country ought to be run.
Take what Facebook is now doing to all content published by Breitbart News: The social media platform is labeling all the site’s stories “intentionally misleading” using a Wikipedia "About this article" pop-up.
That’s really rich because if you ask nearly anyone who’s been to college recently, they’ll tell you that their instructors forbid them to use Wikipedia as a source because — wait for it — it’s an unreliable source. I know; I recently completed a graduate degree and not a single one of my instructors would accept Wikipedia as a reference (and with good reason).
As Breitbart noted, the Wikipedia pop-up claims the site is “far-right” and published “falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and intentionally misleading stories.” While it’s true that Breitbart has a conservative viewpoint, that doesn’t make its content dishonest or untrue.
What’s more, the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, the broadcast networks, and the rest of the legacy media all have a “far-Left” perspective, but Facebook’s “About this article” button does not alert readers to their perspective.
Furthermore, in the age of the Trump presidency, those legacy media sites have been responsible for publishing more fake news “and intentionally misleading stories” than anyone.
And you want to talk about conspiracy theories? WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, Politico and the rest have been trafficking in a conspiracy theory bigger than any I can recall in recent history: The Trump-Russia “collusion” hoax.
Those stories have slowed somewhat from their fever pitch in the weeks and early months after President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated, but all of those establishment media outlets still publish stories containing the allegations, mostly in reports dealing with that sham special counsel, Robert Mueller.
But of Facebook, what are we to expect? It’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is an avowed Leftist, and he’s currently trying to win back Democrats and aligned Marxists after they discovered that the Trump campaign managed to harvest user data — legally — in the same manner the Obama reelection campaign did in 2012. The libs think they own social media, and they’ve had their claws out for Zuck since the Cambridge Analytica “scandal” broke. (Related: Obama’s raid of Facebook data OK, but it’s a ‘scandal’ when Team Trump does it?)
Our founders envisioned a robust American press full of competing ideas and conflicting ideology, so I have no problems with the existence of media with various points of view. But when we’re talking about reporting facts as they happen — which is part of Breitbart’s daily news budget — labeling them ‘fake’ or ‘conspiratorial’ just because you don’t like their editorial slant is dishonest and not, in my view, what our founders had in mind.
Stay fully informed without the Wikipedia ‘warnings’ at Censored.news.
J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.
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