Immediately after the 2016 presidential election was over, Donald Trump having rocked the world of pollsters, none of which gave him much chance of winning over Hillary Clinton, right up until election day when he did win, liberals started talking about the "Rise of Conservative Media and Political Influence," because conservative Independent Media managed to bypass the large liberal media outlets biased news, by offering more choice, countering their agreed upon narrative.
Hence the scramble by big tech and social media giants to start adjusting algorithms to downrank conservative media outlets in search engines (Google), shadow banning conservatives (Twitter), limiting the reach of social media posts (Facebook), and purging conservatives off of the biggest video platform (YouTube).
The goal was to wrest the narrative driven news cycle back to the liberal medias preferred "official" line.
UPENDING THE HISTORICAL PATTERN IN THE AGE OF TRUMP
Traditionally media that leans towards one political party surges when someone from the opposing party takes the White House, while media that leans the other way declines, but the liberal media establishment is now warning each other that pattern has been "upended" in the Trump era.
Since 2017 we have a number of liberal pundits decrying the rise of conservative Independent Media, but it was more background noise until some of the bigger names started highlighting just how influential conservative media was becoming, and the fact that some of the most talked about articles on social media, regarding the Democrat candidates for President, came from conservative sources.
What's going on: Over the past two weeks, most of the stories about the candidates leading our tracker that generated the most interactions on Twitter (retweets and likes) and Facebook (reactions, comments and shares) came from conservative sites:
• Joe Biden — 2 of the top 5 articles (Breitbart x2)
• Kamala Harris — 4 of 5 (Fox News x2, Breitbart, The Federalist Papers)
• Cory Booker — 4 of 5 (Fox News, The Federalist Papers, The Blaze, Daily Caller)
• Julián Castro — 4 of 5 (Fox News, Washington Times x2, Breitbart)
• Bernie Sanders — 3 of 5 (Fox Business, Breitbart, Fox News)
• Elizabeth Warren — 1 of 5 (Daily Wire)
For Biden, Harris, Booker and Castro, the top story came from a conservative site. The articles run the gamut of conservative attack lines against Democrats.
Axios bottom line in that piece stated "While these stories might not be reaching many Democratic voters, they’re shaping the way a big chunk of the electorate looks at these candidates and exposing potential lines of attack for Trump to exploit."
[Note] - Before moving on to the latest warnings from liberals, it is worth mentioning the importance of using Axios to issue the warnings. Axios was created in 2016, officially launching in 2017, and all three of the founding members were former staffers for the left-leaning website Politico, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz.
Allen has been a name in liberal media for quite a while, and was a member of the now defunct listserv dubbed JournOList, otherwise known as JList, which exploded in the news when it was revealed that the group consisted of major liberal reporters, activists and think tank members who all colluded on narratives to push against conservatives.
ANP reported back in June 2018 that immediately after the JournOList scandal brought about the end of that listserv, another popped up consisting of approximately the same number of liberal "wonks," meaning they didn't so much stop as they simply started another group to do the same thing.
In other words, they are still colluding on narratives and timing which makes these warnings from liberal websites almost like a dog-whistle to liberal establishment media outlets that it is time to attack conservative Independent Media, collectively. [End Note]
An analysis of these sites, based on web traffic figures available through Comscore, reveals what a certain portion of America is reading as it approaches a pivotal election. The short answer: much more right-wing web tabloidism.
There are currently about 15 to 20 conservative websites which attract at least one million unique visitors per month. Some are venerable right-wing reliables like National Review, The Washington Times, or Newsmax. Others, like Infowars, The Gateway Pundit, Big League Politics, and Breitbart, mine the far fringes of the right.
The most significant change in the conservative media landscape has been the astonishing traffic growth of Foxnews.com, the digital arm of the most-watched cable news network. Its traffic has doubled since 2015 and is now at more than 100 million unique visitors per month, which represents nearly a third of the U.S. population.
Axios jumped right on that CJR analysis, but of course they are coming at it from the same liberal mindset as CJR did, claiming the growth of conservative media is because those sites are "widening their coverage," to cover a broader range of topics. We'll address the real reason conservative Independent Media is rising in popularity in the next bullet point.
Interestingly, while the audience is growing for Independent Media, big tech is still doing their best to bankrupt those same sites, when you have more of an audience, more impressions and views, yet the advertising revenue doesn't match that increased growth, it becomes clear that despite leveling the playing field in the information war, the war against Independent Media is still raging.
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THE REAL REASON CONSERVATIVE INDEPENDENT MEDIA IS RISING IN POPULARITY
Not once does the Axios article highlight that the growth in audience for conservative IM websites coincides directly with the dwindling trust Americans have in the establishment media where the liberal bias isn't subtle, and after a multitude of outright fake news stories, with others needing corrections, changed headlines and in some cases total retractions and deletions.
According to a recent statement by pollster Scott Rasmussen "78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened... If a reporter found out something that would hurt their favorite candidate, only 36% of voters think that they would report that."
"So voters are looking at them as a political activist, not as a source of information," he concluded. (Transcript: Real Clear Politics)
The Rasmussen interview starts at approximately the 1:30 minute mark in the video below.
Make no mistake, conservative Independent Media also reports from a biased point of view, but unlike a recent statement from a leaked New York Times' internal meeting, we in the IM do not want to "teach" people how to think as they said they wanted to do, we provide video proof of our assertions when available, as with embedded documents is available, and links to our sources so that readers can read everything and make their own determinations.
The establishment media seems to ignore the fact that Americans generally do not appreciate being lied, misled and they definitely to not like to be told what to do or how to think, which is a major factor in why the so-called MSM has lost the trust of the American public and Independent Media is becoming more popular.
AND YET ANOTHER FAKE NEWS STORY GOES VIRAL
As yet another example of this, we see that NBC News, the outlet that targeted Epoch Times recently in an attempt to smear their news reporting, pushed two fake news stories, one of which had to be retracted, apologized for on air and on Twitter, and has even liberal writers banging their heads against the desk.
If MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell isn’t a secret double-agent for Donald Trump, he has sure functioned as one this week. On Tuesday he flat-out reported “fake news” about Donald Trump, soberly relaying a second-hand rumor of dubious provenance as the smoking gun that would bring down Trump’s presidency. After impeachment fever too over liberal Twitter for an entire night, O’Donnell then had to retract the whole thing and apologize on air Wednesday, creating that stopped-clock moment when Trump’s unhinged accusations against the press are partly true — or at least can’t be convincingly rebutted.
Both on Twitter and on his Tuesday night live program, O’Donnell reported that “a source close to Deutsche Bank” had told him that “Russian oligarchs” close to Vladimir Putin had co-signed the bank’s loans to Donald Trump, which amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously that would be a huge story, and it was one that spoke directly to the prior beliefs and convictions of the MSNBC audience: that Trump is a criminal, that he is financially entangled with the Russians in some way, and that sooner or later some revelation will break through the wall of lies and denial and bring him down. Since Robert Mueller’s report didn’t slake that thirst for narrative catharsis, maybe the Deutsche Bank records would!
But there were so many red flags around this so-called reporting from the beginning that it’s deeply disheartening anyone took it seriously. O’Donnell admitted that he hadn’t seen any evidence that this was true — and neither had his unnamed source, who was “close to Deutsche Bank” but not close enough, evidently, to have personally laid eyes on the paperwork. In other words, this was no better than a second-hand barroom rumor: O’Donnell knows a guy who knows a guy, who quite possibly knows another guy. Who has a cousin.
At this point all of us in the Independent Media should most likely be sending gift baskets out to the establishment media outlets for helping us grow our audience, because they are quite literally pushing their audience over to Independent Media.
BOTTOM LINE
The establishment media has been given their orders: "Destroy conservative Independent Media," by any means necessary and the fact that three different liberal media outlets, NBC News, NYT and Buzzfeed, has put out multiple hit pieces on three different IM sites, Epoch Times, Western Journal and The Federalist," means like good soldiers, the establishment media is marching right to their tune.
By doing so, they are driving more and more people to Independent Media.... which in and of itself, is entertainingly ironic.
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