Conservative News Added To BLACKLIST, Targets Advertisers
Conservative News Added To BLACKLIST, Targets Advertisers. The Poynter institute published a list of "unreliable news" which is essentially a fake news website. Right away we can see it makes no sense as on it are satirical websites and even video hosting platforms. But the list includes right wing sites rated credible and states it wants advertisers to be aware if they fund misinformation. Not only that but Poynter essentially runs Facebook's fact checking. If these sites are listed as fake news they could get removed from Facebook outright.It turns out that the author of the list works for or with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far left social justice org that has smeared conservatives and centrists in the past.
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Recently, the Poynter Institute for Journalism published a list of what they call unreliable news websites.
One of their stated goals is to inform advertisers they may be funding misinformation.
Almost immediately, conservatives called out the list because, for one, the list is mostly conservative.
It does include some left-wing sites, but there are many conservative news websites rated as credible by NewsGuard.
The reason this is damaging is because Poynter essentially runs Facebook's fact-checking program.
If someone wants to be a fact-checker for Facebook, they have to agree to Poynter's terms.
If Poynter produces a list saying conservative websites are fake news, well then it may end up that these sites get removed from Facebook.
Now to make this whole thing even stranger, one of the sites listed on the list is The Daily Caller, whose fact-checking arm, Check Your Fact, was approved by Poynter to fact-check Facebook.
It turns out the guy who made the list works for or with The Southern Poverty Law Center.
Today, let's take a look at what's happening with this list and which conservative sites were falsely accused of being fake news.
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The list in question, from Pointer, an index of unreliable news websites.
By Barrett Golding, misinformation is a thriving industry on the internet, supported by social media shares,
advertising dollars, and political donations.
In the United States, scores of research reports try to measure how falsehoods spread online.
These studies often require lists of untrustworthy news sources, but many of these lists have grown out of date and incomplete.
Better data means better results for researchers, reporters, and readers.
So the International Fact-Checking Network built a more complete dataset, an Index of Unreliable News Sites.
To create the index, we combined five major lists.
See below.
Then eliminated the sites that were no longer active.
We only used lists that were public and curated by established journalists or academics, contained original data rather than information from other lists, stated their criteria for inclusion, and defined how they graded different sites.
See our methodology for more.
They say the list relies on FactCheck.org, FakeNewsCodex, OpenSources, PolitiFacts, FakeNewsAlmanac, and Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors.
Now, before we even get started, I can point out that PolitiFact is biased.
They're not so bad, but they're biased.
And Snopes is actually fairly bad.
They don't do a good job of fact-checking at all.
In fact, they've been criticized for simply doing cursory Google searches.
This is not a particularly strong methodology, but here's where it gets interesting.
First, we have the opinion pieces and the outrage.
A journalism advocacy group is trying to blacklist news websites, mostly those with a conservative editorial lean.
The examiner mentions it named several newsrooms that feature right-leaning commentary, including the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller, and for a while, it included the Washington Examiner.
That's the source I'm actually reading right now.
It was removed and corrected.
They say the really curious thing here is not that a pro-journalism group's blacklist would include right-leaning newsrooms, but that such an organization would produce a blacklist at all.
There is something discordant about a group whose mission is to champion freedom of expression, civil dialogue, and compelling journalism simultaneously being in the business of blacklisting real, albeit opinionated, news organizations as unreliable.
They include a quote from the author saying, aside from journalists, researchers and news consumers,
we hope that the index will be useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.
The Washington Examiner goes on to question some of the inclusion saying,
the UNNEWS index includes ClickHole, Reductress, the Drudge Report and Daily Kos.
None of these entries make sense in terms of rooting out fake news.
Reductress and ClickHole are satirical websites, the latter being an offshoot of The Onion.
The Index even labels them as satire, which raises the questions, why include them at all?
The Drudge Report, meanwhile, merely aggregates headlines from other newsrooms.
If Drudge, which the index labels as bias, links the New York Times, is the Times now biased?
Lastly, Daily Kos, which is rated clickbait, is not even a news site.
It's a site where progressives write commentary diaries and sometimes share news links.
But one of the most notable inclusions that I mentioned earlier is The Daily Caller.
The Daily Caller is rated as credible by NewsGuard, but this is actually kind of hilarious.
Barrett makes reference to the International Fact-Checking Network.
The International Fact-Checking Network is part of Pointer.
They say on Twitter they bring together fact-checkers worldwide.
They did issue a correction removing the examiner and first post, but here's the thing.
In a story from just three days ago, they say, in the past year, Facebook has quadrupled its fact-checking partners.
In the story, they say, Over the past year, Facebook has quadrupled its fact-checking partners, and it's adding more in preparation for elections around the world.
Disclosure, being a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network's Code of Principles, is a necessary condition for joining the project.
See, recently the IFCN included CheckYourFact.com to the outrage of many liberal news websites.
Grist wrote this.
The Koch brothers are funding Facebook's newest fact-checking partner.
Last week, social media giant Facebook announced that it would be partnering with CheckYourFact.com, the fact-checking offshoot of the Koch-funded, right-leaning news outlet, The Daily Caller.
The fact-checking site will help provide third-party oversight of Facebook's news content, including stories about global warming.
And yes, according to CheckYourFact.com, It is the news site produced by the journalists of the Daily Caller, who, as I mentioned, are on a list of unreliable news and had to agree to the International Fact-Checking Network's Code of Principles to get included as a Facebook fact checker.
It's kind of funny, isn't it?
Let me try and simplify this for the third time.
Pointer approved the Daily Caller's fact checkers, and then someone else at Pointer said the Daily Caller is biased clickbait.
You can't make this stuff up.
I don't think it's necessarily someone twirling their mustache trying to be evil, but the guy who wrote this apparently works with or for the Southern Poverty Law Center in some capacity.
They're an activist organization primarily focused on targeting far-right extremism, as they call it, but they've smeared run-of-the-mill conservatives.
They even smeared me and had to apologize in the past.
They're the last people who should be producing lists like this.
In fact, the SPLC should be included on the list.
Barrett Golding, the author, tweeted about how he was producing a podcast for the Southern Poverty Law Center back in March.
If Poynter wants to include a list of fake news, they probably shouldn't reach out to partisan activist organizations to produce this list, lest you see massive conservative backlash.
Robert Verbruggen said, I can't stop thinking about what an effing disgrace this is.
A journalism nonprofit put out a list of sites for advertisers to blacklist.
It's word.
And included the Washington Examiner and the Free Beacon.
Amber Athe of the Daily Caller responded by saying, Pointer's evidence that Daily Caller is unreliable is merely a link to all stories we are mentioned in at factcheck.org.
In the vast majority of these mentions, we are actually being cited as sources of information rather than factcheck.
The Daily Caller is actually cited by other factcheckers as sources of accurate information, and because of that, Pointer claimed the Daily Caller is unreliable.
Free Beacon writer Steven Gutowski pointed out that they list the Washington Examiner and the Free Beacon, but not ThinkProgress or Mother Jones, overtly partisan websites.
Grant Addison, the deputy editor of the Examiner, asked for a written letter of apology personally addressed to each member on staff and an agreement that Pointer will be added to the list of orgs to blacklist, to be honest.
Only then will this insult be ameliorated.
I'm going to say at this point, the entire list has been discredited.
I can't go through all of the sites to figure out who is reliable or who isn't.
But with this many errors, well, you can't just assume it's true.
We have to assume it's not true.
For instance, they have LiveLeak listed here as fake.
But LiveLeak is just a user-generated video hosting platform.
They don't post news, but they're calling it fake news.
And some of the sites I did decide to check, like cnsnews.com, while they are opinionated and conservative, they're rated credible by NewsGuard.
The Blaze, for instance, is called biased clickbait, but they're also rated as credible, saying, This website generally maintains basic standards of credibility and transparency, with only two instances where they're upset.
They don't know who owns it, and they think they don't handle the difference between news and opinion very well, but for the most part, they think it's responsible, and they don't publish false content.
And NewsGuard is not perfect.
I think there are many sites they give credibility ratings to they shouldn't, and some that they say are bad that are probably better than they realize, but that's okay.
I use them to counter my own personal bias and see what they have to say and read their justification.
After I do, if I determine that what they're saying is agreeable, I will use sources fact-checked by NewsGuard.
But what Poynter did is extremely dangerous.
All this can do is get people blacklisted from Facebook and other platforms.
Advertisers are skittish.
They're easily scared from platforms.
Activists know this.
We recently saw Babel apologize for appearing on Tucker Carlson's show, and then specifically tagged the activist organization Sleeping Giants, in my opinion, to let them know they were bending the knee.
Companies don't want to be involved in politics.
And sometimes that does backfire on the left.
But think about what this list could do.
Activists could take it.
They say, hey, Pointer, they're the Journalism Institute.
They're credible.
All these sites are fake news.
Some of them are literally satire.
Some of them you just post your own content.
They're not news sites at all.
And some of them are rated credible.
Some of them had to be removed.
It's particularly dangerous for a news organization to do this, especially when you realize, back to one of my original points, they include the Daily Caller, who they have also simultaneously approved to be a fact-checker.
It makes no sense.
All it does is target conservatives.
Yes, there are some liberals and left-wing organizations on here, but for the most part, it's targeting the right.
I can't say I'm surprised.
The guy who wrote it works with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a discredited organization that smears many people in the center and on the right.
They smeared me and apologized for it.
They smeared Majid Nawaz and they apologized and paid a massive settlement.
So they're not the people who should be doing this.
There's one more point I need to make.
In the Washington Examiner story, they say, meanwhile, certain highly politicized sites, including Alternate and National Review, were spared inclusion on the Fake News Index because they were mostly not fake.
I guess that is why the Huffington Post is also not on the list.
But that does not explain how CNS News ended up on the list, but now this news did not.
They link to this story from 2018.
NowThis News is not news.
It's a straight-up propaganda outlet.
And I can confirm 100% that is true.
Because I was present in 2017 at VidCon, when the president of NowThis News said they were working directly with activists at the highest level to produce their content.
unidentified
We've actually partnered with an anti-Trump organization, now this news says.
of young activists who are actively trying to stand up against the Trump administration,
against corporate greed.
And so I would encourage you all to check out that opposition.
We've actually partnered with an anti-Trump organization, NowThis News says.
Why are they not included on the fake news list?
The inherent problems of trying to do this.
Biased individuals trying to blacklist conservative sites and get advertisers to pull out while protecting massive, well-funded activist organizations.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
I'll keep the conversation going.
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