The New York Times published a 5,000-plus-word hitpiece about conservative news website Western Journal. The piece accuses WJ of “sensationalist and misleading stories,” of being overly pro-Trump, and makes excuses for Google and Facebook arbitrarily throttling its traffic.
The piece, a case study in the way the mainstream media views its competitors in online alternative media, also repeats a smear from the politically partisan Anti-Defamation League (ADL), accusing the site of “the monetizing of digital mobs.”
The Western Journal is a mainstream conservative website that maintains high traffic numbers, despite being subject to censorship by various Silicon Valley tech giants.
“Writing like this is exactly why heartland America no longer trusts The New York Times and other establishment outlets,” said George Upper, editor-in-chief of The Western Journal. “Not only is it clearly disinformation — ironic, since it accuses The Western Journal of being a ‘disinformation mill’ — but it’s not even good disinformation.”
“The piece is so riddled with errors that I wrote 1,500 words rebutting it and I didn’t even include everything they got wrong. And that’s after they spent a year writing it. If I were The New York Times, I’d ask for my money back.”
The New York Times took a deep dive into the history of the website, going all the way back to its founder Floyd Brown’s opposition to Democrat presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988. Brown was the creator of the famous “Willie Horton” ad, which criticized Dukakis for being soft on crime.
The Times accuses the ad of “race-baiting.”
Recent revelations make this accusation ironic. Earlier this week, Breitbart News exposed a New York Times political editor for his long history of racist and anti-Semitic comments on Twitter. This followed the paper’s announcement that it would target President Trump on racial issues going into 2020.
The Times also continues to employ Sarah Jeong, a racist tech writer who has compared white people to “dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” and has said she enjoys being “cruel to old white men.”
The New York Times piece also expresses surprise that the Western Journal is on the lookout for “narratives.”
Via the piece:
Yet the reborn Western Journal functions almost like a news outlet in reverse. In interviews, the website’s editors spoke often about narratives — narratives in the mainstream media, narratives they wanted to counter, narratives they were seeking.
Despite its apparent shock that openly partisan websites look for news narratives, the Times, of course, does precisely the same thing. The newspaper’s executive editor recently praised his team for its breathless coverage of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, a narrative beloved by the mainstream media, before announcing a shift to a new narrative — that the president is a racist.
While the Times concedes that Silicon Valley can be “slightly unnerving” in the way it exercises its enormous power, the piece ultimately comes down on the side of the Big Tech Masters of the Universe that censored Western Journal — particularly Google, which blacklisted Western Journal and other conservative websites from its news search results.
The Times carries water for Google, stating that “independent experts have largely dismissed the claim that platforms are systematically discriminating against conservative content,” and blaming Western Journal’s blacklisting on the fact that the site allegedly uses “frowned-upon techniques to game Google’s algorithm.”
Mainstream journalists, by contrast, use an entirely different method to “game” Google’s search algorithm — they use the media’s bully pulpit to pressure the tech company into favoring their outlets.
Breitbart News recently exposed how Google-owned YouTube adjusted search results for politically charged terms like “abortion” and “federal reserve” to favor the establishment media. In both cases, the change came shortly after a member of the establishment media complained about the previous results.
Are you a source at YouTube, Google, Facebook, Amazon, or any other corporation who wants to confidentially share information about wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Breitbart Senior Technology correspondent Allum Bokhari at allumbokhari@protonmail.com. Use a free Protonmail to ensure your message is encrypted.
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