The ‘Mainstream Media’ Has Already Lost

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. This October, in the closing days of the presidential election, the podcaster Joe Rogan said something extraordinary. He had just hosted Donald Trump for a three-hour conversation in his studio in Austin, Texas, and wanted to make clear that he had discussed a similar arrangement with Kamala Harris’s campaign. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour,” he…

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Right-Wing Media Are in Trouble

As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing. This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter…

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Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing

Why would the most notoriously cash-strapped man in America waste money on frivolous lawsuits? On Monday, Donald Trump—whose lawyers recently announced that he can’t come up with the money to post a $ 454 million bond in his civil fraud case—fired off yet another suit against a news organization that reported facts he didn’t like. The targets this time are ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who Trump alleges defamed him by stating that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. The case looks like a…

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State Department Partners With Left-Leaning Media in Propaganda Push, Documents Reveal

A State Department agency with a mission of combating disinformation abroad has helped shape coverage by—and in some cases subsidized—U.S. news outlets, according to records obtained by a conservative legal organization.  America First Legal says that over 600 pages of documents obtained in a public records lawsuit show the State Department’s Global Engagement Center worked with privately owned media organizations to tout government propaganda.  Among those named in the documents are The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and PolitiFact.  PolitiFact’s parent organization,…

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What Will 2022 Bring In The Way Of Misinformation On Social Media? 3 Experts Weigh In

<p class=”is-style-sans-serif”><em>At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media, given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines.</em></p> <p class=”is-style-sans-serif”><em>To get a sense of what 2022 could hold, we asked three researchers about the evolution of misinformation on social media.</em></p> <div style=”height:50px” aria-hidden=”true” class=”wp-block-spacer”></div> <div class=”wp-block-tpm-separator undefined TpmSeparator”></div> <h2>Absent regulation,…

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In 2021, Media Did More to Erode Trust Than to Repair It

It’s obvious that the media’s hatred for Donald Trump colored nearly everything they wrote or said during his presidency. But one hoped that after he left the White House, the media might recover a little objectivity. Sadly, a review of 2021 shows that in many cases, it simply did not happen. The case of actor Jussie Smollett’s fake hate crime came to a conclusion this month, revealing that media outlets still are eager to pounce on a racially divisive story and cast blame, but reluctant to examine themselves when the…

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