Poynter, the "journalism" institute responsible for training writers and reporters, decided to promote a left-wing smear of conservative groups online.
The result was a hit job written by someone who works for the anti-conservative Southern Poverty Law Center for an organization funded by prominent leftist billionaires such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar.
Poynter, which has started the International Fact-Checking Network, shared the new report and dataset called “UnNews,” declaring at least 29 right-leaning news outlets and organizations to be “unreliable news websites.”
Report author and SPLC producer Barrett Golding combined five major lists of websites marked “unreliable.”
That result, which consisted of 515 names, included many prominent conservative sites — Breitbart, CNSNews.com, Daily Signal, Daily Wire, Drudge Report, Free Beacon, Judicial Watch, LifeNews, LifeSiteNews, LifeZette, LiveAction News, the Media Research Center, PJ Media, Project Veritas, Red State, The Blaze, Twitchy, and the Washington Examiner.
These sites were all blacklisted, along with conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
The ADF is considered a “hate group” by the SPLC and is marked on their “hate map.”
Poynter is funded by Open Society Foundations, (leftist billionaire George Soros’ massive front), as well as the Omidyar Network.
The two combined for “$1.3 million in grant funding.”
Funds were sent to Poynter specifically to establish the International Fact-Checking Network.
The ‘UnNews’ list was started to help fact-checking organizations determine what was “unreliable.”
That anti-conservative mindset was apparent throughout the incoherent and inconsistent report.
Conservative organizations were included throughout.
The National Review and Heritage were removed from the list but Heritage’s Daily Signal was on it.
That combined to create a shameless double-standard.
It specifically targeted conservative media watchdog groups and didn’t include leftist ones.
The goal of the report is clear.
Poynter is recommending that advertisers “who want to stop funding misinformation” should use its list.
It stated that while marketers can create their own “blacklists,” those lists might be incomplete.
Golding wrote that, “Advertisers don’t want to support publishers that might tar their brand with hate speech, falsehoods or some kinds of political messaging.”
Poynter has a longstanding history. Its board of trustees includes leftist activists from the failing New York Times, ESPN, Harvard, Vox, CBS, ABC, and the Washington Post.
Poynter is currently working with Facebook and Google for its "fact-checking" programs.
The announcement mentioned that some leftist sites, while initially on the list, were taken off, including the far left conspiracy site Alternet.
The report marked conservative sources as “unreliable,” “biased,” “clickbait,” or “fake.”
Breitbart, Alliance Defending Freedom, CNSNews.com, Project Veritas, and the Washington Examiner were all marked “unreliable.”
Unreliable was defined as “sources that actively promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination,” “sites that contain some fake news,” and “sources that may be reliable but whose contents require further verification.”
The Heritage Foundation’s The Daily Signal, Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, Drudge Report, Free Beacon, Judicial Watch, LiveAction, MRC, and PJ Media were tagged as “biased.”
The tag was explained as “sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.”
LifeNews, LifeSiteNews, LifeZette, RedState, The Blaze, and Twitchy were marked as “clickbait.”
This tag was defined as “sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.”
The list clearly reflects the biases of the organizations that compiled its component parts.
Poynter listed the organizations that contributed to the dataset in an attached document.
These included FactCheck.org, Fake News Codex, MetaCert Protocol, OpenSources, Politifact, Snopes, and the disgraced SPLC.
Ultimately, the list and the agenda showed how far Poynter is from its self-proclaimed role as “the world’s most influential school for journalists” to a far-left censor of conservatives online.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/corinne-weaver/2019/05/02/journalism-institute-poynter-tries-blacklist-29