The media circus and big government (but I repeat myself) want censorship ASAP. Too many little people are starting to think for themselves.
In the perfect example of the government working to undermine free speech and freedom of the press, NPR wrote a hit piece on Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, whose podcast is one of the most popular in the country.
In this drivel of taxpayer-funded partisanship, NPR laments that The Daily Wire is absolutely dominating Facebook traffic when it comes to news. Look at the chart they include when comparing The Daily Wire to uber-lefty CNN and WaPo:
NPR says The Daily Wire is repackaging outrage instead of practicing actual reporting:
Daily Wire articles with headlines such as "BOOK REVIEW: Proof That Wokeness Is Projection By Nervous, Racist White Women Who Can't Talk To Minorities Without Elaborate Codes" regularly garner tens of thousands of shares for the site, and Shapiro is turning that Facebook reach into a rapidly expanding, cost-efficient media empire — one that experts worry may be furthering polarization in the United States.
"There's a demand amongst certain subsets of the public for outrage politics," said Jaime Settle, director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. "This happens on both the left and the right. But the people who do this on the right have just found a lot more successful ways of doing it."
Did you get it? NPR just subtly said that The Daily Wire is all about "outrage politics." Never mind that they are open about their conservative bias, unlike CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBS, ABC, WaPo, The NYT, and 91% of all other media (which report leftist narrative as fact on an hourly basis).
Nope, The Daily Wire is all about OUTRAGE.
I'm surprised they didn't include a quote from Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi to connect this to "white rage." Heck, they could have even emailed Gen. Mark Milley for a soundbite on that!
The site produces little original reporting but instead mostly repackages journalism from traditional news organizations with a conservative slant.
That alone wouldn't be noteworthy; the circle of life online means information is written and rewritten in a seemingly infinite loop.
But The Daily Wire has turned anger into an art form and recycled content into a business model.
Remember, this is a taxpayer-funded, government entity taking aim at a private company that doesn't share its values or political goals.
NPR then notes, sadly, that the nefarious Ben Shapiro and his pawns have completely dominated the lamestream media.
In May, The Daily Wire generated more Facebook engagement on its articles than The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News and CNN combined.
The reason, of course, is that they are tapping into aforementioned OUTRAGE, not that CNN and others are routinely lying to people to cover for the political Left while they say they are not partisan but "reality-based."
NPR then says conservatives should stop crying censorship because people are desperate to get balanced, fair news despite the algorithms working heavily against them:
Other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal that publish aggregated and opinion content aimed at invoking outrage have also generally been more successful at generating engagement than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis, which used data compiled by the media intelligence company NewsWhip.
The success of these outlets on Facebook may also undermine conservatives' oft-repeated claims that the social media network has an anti-conservative bias.
Only authoritarians would lament that their biased companies aren't performing well and trying to use it as evidence for both 1) why their competitors are not being persecuted and 2) why they should be persecuted at the same time.
On that second note, the article quickly moves into accusing The Daily Wire of misinformation. When you couple this with the Biden admin's open declaration that they are pressuring Facebook to crack down on such "misinformation," you'd have to be a dunderhead not to see what totalitarian game is being played.
The articles The Daily Wire publishes don't normally include falsehoods (with some exceptions), and the site said it is committed to "truthful, accurate and ethical reporting."
But as Settle explains, by only covering specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda (such as negative reports about socialist countries and polarizing ones about race and sexuality issues) and only including certain facts, readers still come away from The Daily Wire's content with the impression that Republican politicians can do little wrong and cancel culture is among the nation's greatest threats.
Yeah, curse them for decrying those socialist dystopias where tens of millions of people suffer every day. Why can't they just get with the program??
And as for the idea that cancel culture isn't among the nation's greatest threats, I suppose they should follow the other 99% of the media that says a bunch of neckbeards wandering around the Capitol nearly overthrew the Republic – you know, while you actively try to cancel them!
"They tend to not provide very much context for the information that they are providing," Settle said. "If you've stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation."
NPR: Paranoid conservatives say cancel culture is the greatest threat to America. Here's why they should be cancelled for that.
NPR then goes into a segment on "news as entertainment," where they stop just short of saying The Daily Wire isn't a real news outlet. The implication, of course, is that we should pine for those "traditional" outlets that controlled 99% of information for nearly a century.
A recent Pew Research Center study found that roughly 70% of Republicans said news organizations don't care about the people they report on, and 56% said they hurt democracy.
That opens the door for less-established conservative websites and personalities to siphon off an ideologically minded audience.
The result? Why division, of course!
"You're more likely to read the same news as somebody who lives a thousand miles away from you, but holds the same perspective, than share news and share information with your next-door neighbor," Stephens said.
In practice, that means a society with more division and conflict.
NPR is mere steps away here from justifying why a site like The Daily Wire or Not The Bee should be shut down for "the greater good." Seriously. They are right at the doorstep.
I'm reminded of so many others in history who said sacrifices must be made for such "greater good."
It couldn't possibly be that people like me saw the media circus and lost all trust in them over the past few decades, but especially after everything that happened with Trump, Kavanaugh, and others in the last 5 years.
No, it's just that I'm "ideologically minded" [read: "extremist"] and am using this dangerous new technology to get information from sources that aren't controlled by big money and big government.
They then mention Critical Race Theory and take direct aim at Shapiro himself:
Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said Shapiro also taps into people's desire to consume information that doesn't cause "cognitive dissonance" or interfere with their preexisting biases.
"Traditional media would set the agenda but not necessarily tell people what to think," Freelon said. "Ben Shapiro is sort of cornering both aspects: telling [people] what to think about, and secondly, telling them what their opinions should be about those particular topics."
Let's replay a line of that again:
"Traditional media would set the agenda but not necessarily tell people what to think."
Oh, like this?
Or this?
How about this?
And this??
That literally took me 30 seconds just to find those examples. I have hundreds more from just 2021.
NPR had to acknowledge that Shapiro hasn't made any QAnon claims, but made sure to also remind us that the BLM riots promoted by a Marxist revolutionary group didn't actually do billions of dollars of damage around a false narrative surrounding police and systemic racism.
But in the same column, he quickly turned his attention back to Democrats and their support of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests last summer, which many conservatives have falsely sought to paint broadly as riots. He's been widely condemned for anti-LGBT comments.
Two extra points for calling him an anti-LGBT bigot!
NPR then twists the knife by casually inferring that it's not fair to traditional newsrooms for a company like The Daily Wire to be able to report on stories that they didn't initially source from their own reporters in the field.
"The Chicago Tribune has to pay for this beat reporter, they have to do the work, they have to attend the meeting, they have to have sources," Legum said. "The Daily Wire doesn't do any of that, and they're getting pretty much all of the traffic and the benefits from Facebook."
No, only those like the Associated Press and the power brokers should be able to control the flow and distribution of information!
Legum's previous reporting also revealed how the company operates a number of large Facebook pages that don't obviously appear connected to The Daily Wire at first glance, with titles such as "Conservative News" and "Don't Mess With America," but which exist only to promote Daily Wire content.
Facebook struggled internally over how to handle that page coordination, according to reporting last year by The New York Times. One employee told The Times that Facebook worried "taking action against a prominent right-wing network could set off a Republican backlash."
Ah, the infamous "Republican backlash." It's nearly as deadly as their "pounce."
Since the refuse bin formerly known as public radio seems intent on drawing us back to a more traditional era of media, let me remind you that the media monopoly founded in the 20th century is not what the press originally looked like.
When America was founded, the media was largely a competing set of partisan publishers that gave you the news from alternative perspectives. Over time, journalism morphed into a professional media class ruled by a handful of networks and papers.
Said establishment doesn't like that outlets like The Daily Wire (or the even better Not The Bee) have risen with the internet to meme, poke fun at them, and refute the garbage they keep trying to serve the public.
