Why are Liberals taking aim at one another in an endless circular firing squad when we should be uniting against the propaganda machine created by the Trump/Putin bromance?
I recently read a poorly written editorial piece on Modern Liberals that tears into other liberal sites and falsely labels them as “Fake News” simply because they produce articles with a liberal slant and are direct competition for the owner of Modern Liberals apparently.
Almost seems like they’re working with Trump, who is constantly labeling anything that doesn’t report on him favorably as fake news. His tirade against CNN and Buzzfeed for reporting on a report released by U.S. intelligence agencies is a prime example. The discrediting of journalism is a tactic that has been used in dictatorships and was a prime tool of Hitler in Nazi Germany. The idea behind it is to get people so confused that they start disbelieving everything they see in print. Trump has been employing this tactic trying to ‘guide’ people to his recommended news sources – in other words, he is guiding people to the sites that produce the propaganda he wants people to see.
Sorry, Trump, but truth in journalism requires news organizations to report on you unfavorably because nothing short of you resigning and disappearing forever into your golden tower would be favorable to this entire country.
As to Manny Schithead over at Modern Liberals? HELLO???
Our readers are liberals, dumba$$! If they want to read stuff with a conservative slant they could punish their eyeballs with crap from the GatewayPundit, Breitbart, Fox News, and the like. They want their news presented with a liberal slant. And that means reading smaller, independent journalists who write with a liberal slant.
Places like Liberal America, Addicting Info, If You Only News, Crooks and Liars, and a host of other outlets that keep getting named in slanderous pieces written in an effort to supposedly expose “Fake News” are actually bonafide liberal news outlets with some pretty high standards for what they publish.
Here’s a newsflash – these small independent outlets aren’t fake news sites. They fact check their information, often better than main stream news outlets. Many of them have editors that fact check articles behind the writers. They CARE about presenting the news in a way that their readers want.
Is it slanted and biased? Most definitely. These are liberal blogs… they’re plainly marked. When you read liberal-based sites, you can expect the news to be presented in a biased and left-leaning manner – that is how they target their audience and give them what they want. That doesn’t make it fake news.
Do we use intriguing headlines? Yes, because regular headlines just don’t get read and we need the money. I can’t vouch for all liberal outlets, but most of the ones I do have direct knowledge of have a standard for headlines. At Liberal America, our standard revolves around “Is it TRUE?” and “Does the article support the promise made by the headline?”
My best example of this was an article we did at Liberal America about a young woman that helped a disabled man shop. The article was a tear-jerker piece with a happy ending. The man was so happy that the young woman had taken the time to help him that he cried. Our original headline on it was “Woman Pushes Disabled Man In Walmart And Makes Him Cry.” It was truthful. She pushed him in his wheelchair around the store and parking lot and even paid for his groceries. He cried. Was the headline intentionally provocative? Yes. Because no one would have clicked on it if we had used “Woman Helps Disabled Man Shop And Buys His Groceries.”
Until human nature changes and people stop looking for provocative news our headlines will be phrased to provoke emotion. We have kids to feed.
The list reprinted by Manny Schewitz at Modern Liberals was originally produced by Ed Brayton on Patheos and then replicated by Melissa Zimdars in a Google Doc and he is trying to claim it as his own. The Zimdar list was taken down after numerous complaints from legitimate sites that were listed as fake news. It was later put back up with more sites listed.
If Modern Liberals had done any research into these sites they have labeled as “Fake News” they would have found their About pages chock full of information about the site owners, what their sites are about, their writers, and other information. Amazingly, that identifying information (shocked face here) seems to be missing from the Modern Liberals site. The Facebook link on the site says “Error: Not a valid Facebook Page url.” And when you do a Google search for Modern Liberals you get this:
That leads me to wonder – who the hell are you? Manny Schewitz? Real name or FAKE name? My guess, based on trying to track you down online, is that you think you cleverly made a play on Manischewitz wine. You can’t even be original enough to come up with a fake name? Wow.
If you’re in the mood to check out more scathing exposés of Manny Schewitz, feel free to read this one by Thomas Clay over at American News X (fair warning – Thomas does not pull any punches). Or this one by Karoli over at Crooks and Liars. Allen Clifton over at Forward Progressives had a few words about Fake News here and he specifically addresses his former colleague Manny here. This other guy, Sawyer, has no love loss for Manny either, but this was apparently written before the split between Manny and Allen Clifton.
Manny apparently doesn’t play well with others and doesn’t have many friends in the liberal blogosphere.
The bottom line is this — we’re all liberals. We need to stick together. We have a crisis on our hands with Trump in the White House and a Republican Congress. It doesn’t matter where you work in this industry — liberal news outlets need to work together (or at least not against one another) to inform people of the facts so we can get these idiots voted out of office before they totally destroy America.
Let’s end the circular firing squad right here – right now.
Featured image found at Please… Cut The Crap!!!
