Марк Дайс - The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

Things are getting so dire for the major online “news” businesses that some are now asking for donations. At the bottom of every Guardian article now there is a notice that reads, “Since you’re here… we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are failing fast. And unlike many news organizations, we haven’t put up a paywall — we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money, and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters — because it might well be your perspective too. If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as $1, you can support the Guardian — and it only takes a minute. Thank you.” 475

In August 2017, BuzzFeed “News” started asking for donations at the bottom of all their articles too. There’s a banner that reads “Play a bigger role in our journalism” encouraging people to donate $5 dollars a month to them which readers get zero benefits for other than being added to a BuzzFeed email list. People who donate $100 get an “exclusive BuzzFeed News tote bag.” 476Soon we may see major media outlets join Patreon!

Encyclopedia Britannica is the world’s oldest encyclopedia, first published in the late 1700s. For many generations they were the standard in school libraries and some homes if parents decided to spend the $1000 plus dollars for the 32-volume set. But in 2012 the company announced they were no longer going to print the books (after 244 years), and instead Encyclopedia Britannica became an online only edition available for a small yearly subscription fee. 477Unfortunately in the Internet age where everyone wants everything for free, Encyclopedia Britannica has been largely forgotten and Wikipedia has become the new standard “encyclopedia,” which is both sad and disturbing.

Wikipedia is one of the top search results, if not the top search result, for almost anything you Google, and gets 33 billion page views a month. 478And you probably know that literally anyone can edit almost any article on the site, anonymously, without even registering as an editor. In theory, other editors will watch over new updates and remove or correct them if someone posts incorrect information, but this often results in “edit wars” where people go back and forth posting something and then others change it, and then others change it back, and on and on. So depending on when you read an article on Wikipedia, information could be completely different or even missing entirely.

For benign pages about things like plants and animals there may be little controversy about what is said about them, but for pages that are biographies of people, particularly political figures (and even for some products and corporations which have entries on the site) they are usually a battleground between different editors fighting to have the final word in terms of what is (and is not) said about the topic.

Wikipedia is a major part of the Liberal Media Industrial Complex smear machine because it solidifies the liberal consensus about individuals by using careless and defamatory online articles as the “sources” for labeling someone a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc. Once outlets like the HuffPost, Daily Beast, Vox, etc., publish an article making baseless claims about a person, then the Wikipedia editors update that person’s page to paint them in a false light and cite the salacious hit pieces as the source in the footnotes, cementing the allegations in the target’s Wikipedia page.

Because public figures have to prove “actual malice” in a defamation case, unlike private citizens, its difficult to win a judgment against “news” outlets for libel because they can easily claim they “thought” what they were writing was accurate, or it’s their opinion that someone is “far-right,” “racist,” “Islamophobic,” etc. Often they’ll sneakily add a weak qualifier about someone they’re smearing by saying they are an individual “who some people call far-right.” Who calls them that? A few random trolls on Twitter, so technically “some people” have called them that and it’s a devious way many of these outlets try to get labels to stick.

They also know that suing them can easily cost a plaintiff a million dollars in legal fees, and even if they win a judgment for the defamation, that person will still be on the hook for their own legal costs, which may be much more than the actual judgement awarded to them for the defamation in the first place.

For months Wikipedia had a section on Tomi Lahren’s page saying she was considered “White Power Barbie,” because an article in the London Guardian labeled her that simply because she’s a beautiful blonde woman who has had a few viral videos criticizing Black Lives Matter. 479Wikipedia is such a pit of disinformation and slander that Ron Paul was included on their white supremacist list for three weeks before editors finally fixed it. 480Wikipedia even listed the California Republican Party’s ideology as “Nazism” for a period of time. 481

There is even an entire Wikipedia page titled “Racial Views of Donald Trump” which paints him as a huge racist, detailing how he is a “birther” for questioning Barack Obama’s heritage; taking his comments about “fine people” on “both sides” of the Confederate statue controversy out of context, and including a whole long list of supposed “evidence” that he’s a racist because he referred to El Salvador, Haiti and parts of Africa as “shit hole countries” and makes fun of Elizabeth Warren, calling her Pocahontas.

In September 2018 a Democrat congressional staffer doxed several Republican Senators including Lindsey Graham by posting their home addresses and phone numbers right on their Wikipedia pages. 482The perpetrator was later arrested and sentenced to 4 years in prison for computer fraud and sharing restricted private information, showing the seriousness of his crime and that the lack of oversight and editorial control makes Wikipedia the Internet’s equivalent of a wall in a gas station bathroom.

Wikipedia editors fiercely protect the Antifa page, and (at the time of this writing) have successfully prevented any references to their violent and terrorist activities. The subsections of the article are “History,” “Ideology and Activities,” and “Notable Activism;” but nothing about their violence at all. 483These are the scum who wear black masks and look like members of ISIS that show up at events to harass, intimidate, and assault Trump supporters with sticks, bricks, and mace. This is the same group that went to Tucker Carlson’s house, banged on his door, and shouted threats through a megaphone. 484

After Antifa members assaulted Quillette journalist Andy Ngo at an event in Portland, Oregon in June 2019, punching him in the face and throwing milkshakes on him (causing him to be hospitalized for a brain hemorrhage) word of the incident made national news. 485President Trump even mentioned the attack but Wikipedia editors decided that it wasn’t “significant” enough to warrant being included on the Antifa page. 486

Wikipedia is also preventing any mention of the terrorist attack on an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement [ICE] facility in Tacoma, Washington, where an Antifa member approached the property armed with a rifle and firebombed the building, resulting in him being shot and killed by police. He had also posted a manifesto online before his attack using language from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, claiming the United States was keeping illegal immigrants in “concentration camps.” His manifesto began declaring “I am Antifa.” 487