Google Funds Another 'Junk News' Study in What Looks Like a New Bid to Stomp Out Conservative News

By Monica Showalter
American Thinker
Dec. 18, 2018

Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project is back, this time winning headlines for its new study 'revealing' that Russia's Internet Research Agency sought to aid President Trump by manipulating the news, especially against black voters.

Newsbusters pointed out the problem with these guys: They're funded by lefties, including Google itself, and they're the same people who came out with the lousy report earlier this year declaring all conservative media, including American Thinker, 'junk news.' We're in at least some good company on that blacklist: National Review, Daily Caller, Newsbusters, Campus Reform, Judicial Watch, Hannity, The Federalist, Hot Air, LifeNews, Conservative Treehouse, Weaselzippers, and inexplicably, the New York Daily News, also made their 'junk news' blacklist. (Somehow, the New York Post escaped.)

It's a stupid list, because number one, these sites are commentary sites for the most part, not news sites. Some are quite a bit better than others. New Media, get it? I suspect they haven't heard of New Media What's more, the study is incapable of distinguishing simple little anonymous blogs of opinion, such as Conservative Treehouse, from edited e-zines such as American Thinker and Hot Air, from activist truth-tellers such as Judicial Watch, from large online operations such as the Washington Free Beacon and the Daily Caller, from actual newspapers such as the New York Daily News. To them, they are all the same, all junk news, with no fact-checking, no real names, a load of quite false stuff they claim identifies the group as a whole. It does define some, but certainly not others, such as, yes, American Thinker.

And more to the point, the overwhelming majority of the media outlets cited on the 92-site blacklist, are in fact conservative. The report operates on the premise that these sites are just fake news, rather than a response to inadequate coverage from the mainstream and lefty-biased press. They don't understand that dynamic, based on what I could tell from the report. Now they've got a new one out and are claiming Russia swung the election to Donald Trump because they manipulated the black vote, as if black voters were oh-so-easily manipulated and cannot think for themselves. (Based on Trump's high numbers with that demographic, about 20% very much think for themselves. And let's be fair, it's actually more.)

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