Immediately after the 2016 presidential election Barack Obama publicly blamed "Fox News" in part for Hillary Clinton's election loss, stating "In this election, [they] turned out in huge numbers for Trump. And I think that part of it has to do with our inability, our failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments....."
Fox wasn't alone is being blamed for Clinton's loss, as mainstream media outlets attacked almost anyone in the Independent Media that either supported Donald Trump when he was a candidate, and/or those that were simply anti-Hillary and fought against another Clinton presidency, calling them "Russian propaganda," while others attempted to conflate Independent News with outright "fake news" and hoax sites, by adding their website names to "lists" that included conservative Independent News along with sites like the satirical "Onion" and other hoax sites.
THE PUSH TO DESTROY INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Having lost the narrative, the messaging and most importantly the ability to influence the election, the MSM, and social media giants such as Facebook, along with tech giants like Google, immediately started their campaign to destroy Independent Media.
Google decided to hire liberal organizations and apologists like Politifact and Snopes to start "fact-checking" articles found using their search engine. Facebook also announced a similar initiative, recruiting Snopes, ABC News, Politifact and FactCheck.org, to "fact-check" articles shared on their platform, all of which have a history of liberal partisanship. YouTube which is owned by Google, started massively demonetizing videos from a number of creators that espoused more conservative values. While others have noted the same demonetization on their channels, in-depth analysis shows that far more with a conservative bent are being attacked than those of other ideologies.
For example, to give readers and idea of how big of a problem this is becoming, the screen shot below was sent to me by YouTube, on April 22, 2017:
Not advertiser friendly.... well, what is advertiser friendly? Does reporting current events stop advertisers from advertising on the local news, or on cable news which reports current events regularly? Are there not ads on mainstream media online outlets, which report the same "events" that we do?
Note the date on some of those are from 2013, meaning one of their liberal "super flaggers" actually went back throughout our whole channel and starting flagging videos left and right, to which YouTube automatically demonetizes without even having a human being review it without a manual request to do so.
How do I know this? Recently I created two videos, one about "snowflakes" and one about the MSM sitting on news because of their liberal bias, both were flagged by their "flaggers", and they were instantly demonetized, and after submitting them for review by a human, hoping it wouldn't be a liberal reviewer because the approval process doesn't seem to go by any guidelines, but rather by their personal ideology, they found both were advertiser friendly and remonetized them.. Rather than giving those flaggers set guidelines, they give them the power to strip revenue from creators without bothering to review the content beforehand.
ANP is not alone as dozens upon dozens of conservative channels are suffering the same type of issues, as shown clearly below.
Here is a sentence I never thought I would utter because rarely do I agree with the New York Times on anything, but one of their op-ed writers recently made a very persuasive case that Google and Facebook have become natural monopolies in their field and therefore in order to prevent them from harming the general public, they should be regulated, and I agree, they are out of control, using the power of their monopolies to "punish" Independent Media and they need to be reigned in.
Could it be that these companies — and Google in particular — have become natural monopolies by supplying an entire market’s demand for a service, at a price lower than what would be offered by two competing firms? And if so, is it time to regulate them like public utilities?
It is also noteworthy that Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Inc (which owns Google," also was an investor in The Groundwork, a start-up company associated with Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, and charged the campaign $177,000 in the second quarter of 2015. By 2016 the campaign had spent $500,000 on it. (Source)
FOX NEWS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
While Google and Facebook are shadow banning, tweaking their algorithms, and attempting to bankrupt publishers, the mainstream media and other groups are actively attempting to destroy one of the largest "mainstream" outlets that has a distinctive conservative bent in their talk show segments, by going after their media personalities directly.
First it was Bill O'Reilly, with accusations that he called females and talked dirty to them, not mentioning that each of those females could have just as easily hung up the phone, if the allegations are true. In turn, Fox News dumped O'Reilly, with a multi-million dollar severance package.
After that, Independent Media pundits predicted the next attack would come against Sean Hannity.
"And if you think this will stop with Bill O’Reilly, you are sadly mistaken. Media Matters is behind all of this and they’ll go after Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson next...."
Sure enough, we awoke this morning to the firestorm of reports saying that conservative pundit and former Fox News on-air guest, Debbie Schlussel, who has previously been accused of being a "very angry woman," with some questioning her mental state back in 2010, claimed that Sean Hannity "sexually harassed" her by inviting her back to his hotel.
Unlike O'Reilly, Hannity hit back fast and hard, calling her a "serial harasser," and threatened to take legal action against Schlussel, issuing the following statement to The Blaze:
LET ME BE CLEAR – THE COMMENTS ABOUT ME ON A RADIO SHOW THIS WEEK by this individual are 100% false and a complete fabrication.
This individual is a serial harasser who has been lying about me for well over a decade. The individual has a history of making provably false statements against me in an effort to slander, smear and besmirch my reputation.
The individual has not just slandered me over the years but many people who this individual disagrees with.
This individual desperately seeks attention by any means necessary, including making unfounded personal attacks and using indefensible and outrageous political rhetoric.
My patience with this individual is over. I have retained a team of some of the finest and toughest lawyers in the country who are now in the process of laying out the legal course of action we will be taking against this individual.
In this fiercely divided & vindictive political climate, I will no longer allow slander and lies about me to go unchallenged, as I see a coordinated effort afoot to now silence those with conservative views. I will fight every single lie about me by all legal means available to me as an American.
It didn't take long before Schlussel went into damage control mode and issued statements that her claims about Hannity did not add up to "sexual harassment," yet the damage was done.
Articles from liberal sites like the one at The Daily Beast, which originally headlined with "Sean Hannity Accused of Sexually Harassing Fox News Guest," simply changing the headline to "Sean Hannity Accused of Inviting Fox News Guest to His Hotel Room," with a simple one sentence update at the bottom explaining the change in headline, without mentioning that they did change the headline, which states "UPDATE 4/24/2017: This article was updated to say that Schlussel did not characterize Hannity's conduct as sexual harassment."
As I said, the damage is done because how many will remember that Schlussel said an invitation doesn't equal sexual harassment when the liberal echo chamber instantly headlined with that phrase?
The whole point is the concentrated effort to destroy conservative news and where better to start than with Fox News while Google and Facebook are coordinating to limit the reach of conservative Independent Media at the same time.
BOTTOM LINE
While the attacks against conservative and Independent news continues to escalate by the MSM, Google, YouTube, Facebook and others, President Trump has announced he will be hosting conservative media at a reception, which will include One America News Network, The Daily Caller and Breitbart, as well as some columnists and talk radio hosts.
The reason for this according to White House Press Secretary, is "They were neglected the last eight years, and they’re an important medium to communicate to a massively growing number of Americans who, frankly, have grown tired of mainstream media’s coverage."
Conservative and Independent Media were critical to bypassing the MSM's liberal bias during the 2016 election, in many cases forcing the MSM to address topics they would have preferred to not report or bury those reports, and Spicer's follow-up statement, makes it clear that President Trump has not forgotten that as he says "We’ve definitely done our fair share of meetings with mainstream reporters. Once in a while it’s important to appreciate the folks who have really covered the president fairly and covered a lot of issues ignored by mainstream media."
The attack against Fox News is only the beginning as the MSM, search engine, and social media giants, all of which invested heavily in their attempts to influence the populace during the 2016 presidential, lost. They lost control of the narrative, lost their influence, lost the election, and now they are coordinating attacks against conservative and Independent Media in an attempt to reclaim that control and influence.
This is just the beginning - Fox News is in the crosshairs now, the total destruction of Independent Media is next.
