The most popular conservative news websites

[_Brackite]

Frank Luntz published an article on aggregating the website ranking methodologies of Alexa, Similarweb, and Quantcast to determine the most popular conservative news websites, apparently being generous with "news." This looks only websites that are primarily online entities, so it excludes sources like Fox News or the Wall Street Journal. The top 10 are:

Drudge Report
Breitbart*
The Daily Caller
Zero Hedge
The Daily Wire
The Blaze
The Week
Washington Examiner
Gateway Pundit
WorldNet Daily (WND)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/50-top-con ... s-in-2017/

This article is getting heavy circulation in liberal media because it's a way of lording superiority over conservative culture. However, that shouldn't be the primary takeaway here even if you are a liberal. This is actually quite disturbing and is yet another data point in there being a large number of conservatives in America being in an alternative reality bubble that has information sources that are profoundly dishonest, conspiratorial, and/or outright crazy. That's dangerous, not an opportunity to get a brief hit of feeling good about oneself.

So, Breitbart is the #2 "news" source among conservatives? However, Breitbart is Not a legitimate news source. They put out "news" stories that deny Global Warming. They falsely claimed that Trump won in an electoral college landslide when he is among the bottom third of electoral college winners within the Post World War II era. Link

And then there is this:

In the final weeks of the U.S. Senate race in Alabama, Breitbart News strained to discredit Leigh Corfman, who accused Republican Roy Moore of sexually touching her when she was 14 and he was 32. The far-right website published non-scoops - Corfman didn't have a phone in her bedroom! Corfman moved in with her father 12 days after meeting Moore! - as if they somehow made her account less believable.

Now, Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow tells CNN that he actually did believe Corfman. Here's an excerpt from Oliver Darcy's report:

"Marlow also stressed that he was personally uncomfortable with the behavior attributed by The Post to Moore, and noted that he did believe the accusations from Leigh Corfman, who said Moore assaulted her while she was 14 - they were 'not perfect,' he said, but had 'a lot of credibility.' "



Marlow described Moore, whom Breitbart defended relentlessly, as a "weak candidate" and a "uniquely terrible candidate."

Marlow's sudden candor suggests that Breitbart's coverage of Moore after the accusations was a grand performance. The site's top editor thought that Moore had indeed preyed on a teenage girl and considered the former Alabama chief justice a lousy politician, yet Breitbart sent the opposite message to its audience.


Why? Here's a bit more from Darcy:

"Marlow said one of the factors in Breitbart's coverage of the allegations against Moore is that, he believes, the news media was trying to use them to set a bar on sexual misconduct 'that President Trump cannot match.' "

" 'I think they want to create a standard where President Trump, either from past or future accusations, will not be able to match whatever standard is now in place for who can be a United States senator,' he said. 'Based off not any sort of conviction or any sort of admission of guilt, but based off of purely allegations.' "



" 'I think that's the playbook here,' he added. 'And I think it's part of the reason why it was so important for Breitbart to continue our coverage of the way we covered it . . . and for Steve [Bannon], in particular, to hold the line the way he did for - I think part of it is because it's not just about Judge Moore, it is not even just about establishment, anti-establishment. It's about what's coming next for President Trump.' "

If we're talking about cold calculations, Breitbart's strategy made some sense. But it was just that - a strategy. Marlow's interview with Darcy is one of the clearest indications that Breitbart, at its core, is more of an advocacy organization than a news outlet.

http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index ... _he_b.html

[_EAllusion]

Socialism breaks into different permutations, the most unapologetic and blatant being fascism. The state own/controls all: if a paper "ownership" exists it is not anything more than a toothless legality, when State controls emasculate the "owner's" ability to use his property.

You appear to be confusing "fascism" and "totalitarianism" in this paragraph. In general, my best guess is that you take fascism and authoritarianism as synonyms. If so, quoting myself in a link I just shared:

The left/right dichotomy isn't some distinction cleaved in nature. It's a useful fiction that helps us categorize related political views. Fascism is a right-wing phenomenon by definition because it coheres statistically to other things that, by historical circumstance, are also thought of as right-wing. It helps that the founders of fascism thought of themselves as right-wing. The real problem is that for you "left" and "right" are synonyms for "evil" and "good" and you can't handle the dissonance of something with an intense negative connotation being a right-wing phenomenon. But it like, say, McCarthyism, has that honor.

...what you really seem to be honing in on is the authoritarianism. That comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavors. If that authoritarianism is attached to things like hyper-nationalism (like making a big deal out of wearing a flag pin), xenophobia, corporatist economics, militarism, etc. then you are looking at something that is fascist.

College campuses are crammed with socialist preference and thinking.

College campuses are way more socialist than American society in general, but they aren't dominated by socialists. College campuses tend to be fairly liberal, but liberal isn't the same thing as socialist.

individualists are not concerned in the first place with conducting such studies, because by nature they approach teaching and learning from a freedom standpoint and unrealistically assume (until disabused by reality/facts) that others live likewise. Foolish hubris!

What? The studies concern information preferences / sources among people with different political affiliations in America and their influence on general media coverage. That's an interesting to know about for a variety of reasons. That has nothing to do with this.

[_canpakes]

Comparing this world to, "I’d only point out that for hundreds of years prior to the Internet, society acquired a great deal of varied knowledge using books, none of which have a function that allowed a reader to comment back" (canpakes), is so non sequitur I can hardly find the words. False comparisons to non existent climate conditions cannot be compared. The closest comparison to the "world of books" would be libraries banning certain books/authors: that's as close to Internet fora being prohibited as we will get I guess.

You bemoan the problem with your premise, then, because your premise is invalid. Specifically, that transparency is guaranteed when an information source includes a comment function. Or that an information source lacking such a thing is fully enveloped within its own bubble.

Even if the rest of the world decided as you do here to claim the nature of information as different in and of itself because it comes from a website as opposed to a book, or television program, or pamphlet, or public speaker, or radio - your premise still fails. Not only because a 'comments' section is no guarantee that anything rational will be presented within it, but also because there exists the ability to edit out opposing comments, which is a feature commonly used by the most partisan ("junk") websites.

You can see this yourself by visiting Conservapedia - just try posting or editing any article with a comment that doesn't fit the preconceived ideological flavor of the website's admin, and you can witness what will never be approved, or will be removed quickly if it even made it through.

We live in a world of instantaneous comment and response. So because partisans flock to their favorite website fora and nod together and castigate the opposition these should be banned? Controlled/moderated? Malarkey! What are people afraid of, losing the impromptu debate? How can they lose when they don't debate?

Banned? Controlled/moderated? This comment reminds me of that strange sense of entitlement that I've seen many self-identified conservatives exhibit when they have their own comments moderated out of a source, or don't have a way to speak their mind to whatever the information source is posting. There's no right mandated of any website operator to provide a public forum to folks who feel the need to comment. It's just that simple.

Online fora are the new permutation of meeting down at the forum (remember the etymology of that word?) and getting into fisticuffs. You do know that people who could not play nicely got disciplined, basically turned into social pariahs and outcasts in polite society. The hallmark of a mature person is one who can say anything and receive the same without melting down. That, to these old eyes, is called "winning". Not preventing the contest in the first place to spare the losers.

Perhaps the hallmark of a mature (as you put it) person is not having an impulsive need to press their point of view against anyone who dares speak a different point of view than their own - to the point of fisticuffs, especially.

Putting it as you have amply illustrates the quality of some of these comments sections. If you feel strongly that they are repositories of well-reasoned rebuttal and debate, then I invite you to post some links to the 'comments' sections of any articles from, say, the top 5 sources listed in the OP. Then anyone reading your defense can judge for themselves the relative level of quality and maturity that is on display within those sections, and decide to what degree of maturity, relevance or reason their purpose serves. If your point is valid then it would be more easily demonstrated this way than than by writing paragraph after paragraph of text heavily laden with little more than emotional reasoning and partisan characterizations.

[_EAllusion]

I checked out the a few of the most recent comments at Drudge just for a sample of how it is going there. Within a span of a few minutes, I read someone cheering on nuking Pakistan, a person wondering if Obama bows more towards Mecca or Pakistan, someone referred to as a "skinny jean wearing mutt" for suggesting that Congress controls foreign aid appropriations, and about a bazillion posts on the variation of the theme "f*** libs." I scrolled and scrolled hoping someone might understand and respond to why aid is given to Pakistan in the first place, but "screw those towel-headed bastards" was generally a median level of discourse.

Fox used to be notoriously Orwellian in its control of comments sections, but the Internet has evolved since then so I don't know if that still holds true. Contrary to Uncle Ed's impression, there's a wide range of approaches to comments sections across the ideological spectrum on websites. He should hang out with the feminists at Jezebel sometime. They're a warm bunch.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

And people wonder why I frequent Reddit so much. This was the only good answer on a thread full of cancer:

https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comme ... e/ds1hejj/

[–]Somizulfi [+1] 538 points 7 hours ago*x2
Pakistan has lost over 20,000 civilians due to War on terror and over 6,000 soldiers. http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries ... alties.htm

The Economic losses are over $120bn. https://nation.com.pk/26-May-2017/terro ... n-16-years

Out of the ~33bn in 'aid', about $14.5bn is payment for logistics and air support, this is not aid, this is payment for services, because tanks, guns, humvees and food don't fly themselves to Kabul. So the actual 'aid is about $18bn over ~15 years, which is far less than the Economic losses of over 120bn. https://tribune.com.pk/story/1498815/Washington ... 33-4bn-us/

US hasnt been sucking Pak's dick. It's more like both sides have been in an uneasy relationship and BAD DEAL making. I guess its the only deal where both sides see that it has been a bad deal, lol :/. I sincerely hope they can come together to kill the common threat here.

During Soviet Invasion, US nurtured and propped up Jihadists using western Pakistan as the base. Once the war was over, US left the space with millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and then even sanctioned them (because apart from all that, Pak and India were in a nuke arms race). Pakistan was sanctioned and even F-16s, for which they had paid were held back. Pakistan saw this as a huge betrayal. And I suppose that formed the basis of a relationship that would fundamentally lack trust.

Most of the 'aid' isn't 'aid'. It's mostly reimbursement for having the forces and army deployed constantly for over 15 years on western borders. The armies normally stay in barracks and Pakistan's economic resources do not allow for such level of constant deployements or being at war, while America has been at war constantly with one or another entity for 100 years+ now? They can support it, Pakistan simply cannot.

Conundrum for Pakistan is everyone outside US thinks Afghanistan is a lost cause. The Afghan establishment is a mix of Jihadists and warlords that lost the civil war to Taliban with both sides commiting tragic crimes, drug smugglers as well as more educated civil society, but as a mix, it's toxic, ineffective, corrupt and incompetent. They don't like Pakistan because Pakistan backed the winning horse (i.e. Whoever will bring whatever stability and certain level of peace in that country, while everyone else abandoned it) and still hosting millions of Afghan refugees while it doesn't have enough to feed its own population.

Pakistan has also built more check posts and is fencing the border to stop cross-border drug and terrorist movement.
https://america.cgtn.com/2017/10/19/pak ... tan-border

So, yes, there has been mutual benefits in that relationship. US and NATO couldn't win the war with 140,000 troops on ground and everyone wonders how they're supposed to win it with 15,000 troops.

Interestingly, Pakistan has also said it doesn't want the aid anymore.
https://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/headlin ... avid-hale/

US has also killed a lot of Pakistani soldiers in accidental friendly fire, that doesn't helps the overall relationship.

Furthermore, OBL being caught in urban Pakistan meant further deterioration of the relationship, although no evidence has been found that Pakistani govt was aware of it as per President Obama. ( https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/no-evid ... ma-1782607)

It's a very complex issues where both sides have been corporating as well as hedging against each other at the same time. While Trump's tweet is more targetted towards the domestic audience, the reality is the relationship is alot more nuanced, complicated with both sides having.

Everytime both countries spat, terrorists win. I do hope they can overcome it as the eventual end goal. i.e. eradication of terrorism will help both countries and in fact it will help Pakistan alot more.

Pakistan claims it has gone after all kinds of terrorists and US claims there is still room to do more.

I guess the unspoken difference between the sides are which factions are terrorists and which arent, kinda similar to Iraqi and Syrian quagmire where US indirectly funded and armed Al Qaeda to prop them up against ISIS. Pakistan basically wants to insulate itself against this kind of drama and avoid at all costs end up being like Libya, Iraq or Syria. If Pakistani state falls, it would be far worst, because Pakistan is a far more bigger country and having weapon systems generations ahead of what those other three countries and obviously the nukes.

Pakistan faced it's worst act of terror when a school was attacked and over 150 children were murdered. This terror was planned and was operationally commanded via Afghanistan. So, Pakistan's point of view is that US isn't doing enough to curb terror and drug flow in to Pakistan.

Afghanistan is one of if not the biggest producer of drugs, they end up on Pakistani streets and American streets, it bewilders them how US isn't able to clamp down on this drug production. It also bewilders them how US plans to win the war with an incompetent and corrupt Afghan establishment (which has been anti Pakistan since loosing the civil war), it also bewilders them how 15k troops will win the war if 140k can't. Afghan Army is highly corrupt and often the supplier of arms and intel to the terrorists.

Furthermore, over 40% of territory in Afghanistan is not under govt control, that's alot of land and Pakistan's point of view is that they don't need to come hide in Pakistan when they can just roam around freely in Afghanistan, why complicate the logistics and operations for themselves?

so there are genuine concerns from Pakistan, which is often not the main discourse in US media, but is in Pakistani media, and vice versa regarding the US concerns.

Pakistani losses far far outweigh any gains made up for by the 'aid', most of which is reimbursement, the losses in life and economy have been far worst, most Pakistanis would prefer Pakistan stayed out of this and prefer US to not giving any aid so Pakistan isn't obliged in any manner to the 'aid' that always comes with 'strings' 'attached'. Remember, it's a transaction based on national interests at the end of the day, there is absolutely no element of generosity involved. Pakistan wants to seal off the border, cut down cross border movements (surprisingly, to Afghan govt's protest, why would they protest this? they're free to seal the border as well, but prefer not to, it's bad for drug business and getting American cash :) ) and would prefer US does whatever it wants in Afghanistan but leave Pakistan out of it.

I also believe most Americans would prefer US to leave Afghanistan as well.

Like many Americans, Pakistanis believe there are certain elements in US and Pakistani establishment which would prefer this war keeps on going on, what do we call it? Millitary-Industrial Complex? US has that problem? Guess what? Many Pakistanis think they have a similar problem too. At the end of the day, it's the middle and lower class that actually suffers i.e. Majority of the population.

At the end of the day, it's better for both sides to figure this crap out so we can all end what is turning out to be a forever war.

Regards

Not that I expect to him to even make it this far down my post, but Uncle Ed, if for some reason you actually read posts by others that are longer than two sentences I strongly urge you to go to information aggregator sites like Reddit and subscribe to a variety of subreddits, or least read a variety of subreddits, to ensure you're getting yourself out of any echo chambers you might inadvertently be frequenting. You'll have to wade through a lot of noise to find some gems like the one above, but that's the burden we bear in this day and age when there's a firehose of information being loosed on the Internet day in an day out.

- Doc

[_Uncle Ed]

It'd be nice for the casual observers if the main contributors to this thread would define Conservative, Socialist, Liberal, and whatever else they're throwing around so we can understand their take on the politics at hand.

I find as soon as you describe someone as something they'll claim No True Socialist or No True Conservative because their idea about their affiliation doesn't mesh with what's being discussed.

- Doc

I can try. Take Columbia for starters (since I am reading about it in the current Nat Geo): Liberals and Conservatives have fought a 52 year long civil war. WTH? That's it, just Liberals and Conservatives? The two ideologies are meaningless unless placed in context. In this case radicalized Communists turned into guerrillas and took to the countryside (like Gadianton Robbers). The FARC fought from there, terrorizing the peasants of the villages. The "Conservatives" in gov't power killed them and their asserted sympathizers; and the "Liberals" returned the favor. Tit for tat. Fifty-two years! Now they're just supposed to get over it and "heal" the country. Unbelievable. Could it happen here in the US, ever, at all? Inconceivable. Because for all our differences, none of them seem remotely great enough to fight with weapons and terrorism over.

So what is a liberal and what is a conservative in the US? Many things. The Medía doesn't help by labeling this person or that group and being deliberately vague about it: so that the worst possible castigation of the target person or group is attained for political reasons. 2016 saw the worst mudslinging in my lifetime. Nobody is clean.

To me, I repeat, a liberal-leftie-socialist is anyone who loves controls in place to keep people from damaging themselves and others: no trust, just control for our own good: a group-thinker who defines who s/he is by what other people say: who parrots the dogma of state control and "sensible legislation", and the stock denigrating words that define the opposition: and will attack the messengers personally rather than debate issues, etc. I know that is broad (I lumped them together under the acronym LLS, after all), but the key feature is a mindset and agenda that grows gov't control at the expense of true individual liberty.

A conservative, true to the word, is simply an individualist who obeys laws and minds his own business. He dislikes government but allows that it is necessary to coordinate actions for the general welfare, defense and protection from criminals and even the gov't itself. A conservative will not agitate or promote disorder to get his way. He works through the political systems established in our founding documents. The conservative will not treat anyone or any group as elite or somehow superior to others based on some perceived traits. To be a true conservative means accepting blame for wrongdoing or mistaken ideas, not looking for scapegoats. Debate and rational accumulation of the facts to fuel meaningful discourse are indispensable toward communication with the other side that conservatives must work with in government.

I dislike intensely the use of the words "left" or "right", because the Medía has destroyed any clear meaning. Adding "alt" to left or right does not help.

Finally, socialism is in my book any system that grows dependency on government to supply what individuals are supposed to provide for themselves, if the free market economy is working without undue gov't controls on it as it should be. Socialism is the preferred system of the liberal, obviously because it involves gov't control increasingly as more people become more dependant on the gov't to keep their heads above water. When the gov't has no reason to fear any negative PR, it can simply openly admit that it is taking over everything in the name of "promoting the general welfare", and effectively abolish free enterprise, i.e. freedom to use one's property without a pile of gov't regulations, red tape and outright control. This is called fascism, the most blatant and virulent form of socialism because the gov't is powerful enough to be above criticism (any such can be crushed effortlessly).

[_EAllusion]

If conservatism is defined by a support of a Nozickian night watchman state, then almost no one in the United States is conservative and the people who describe themselves as conservatives that you seem to like and vote for are so far from what that is that your worldview looks incoherent. You're simultaneously defining true conservatism as a form of hardline libertarianism while sounding trumpets of joy for some of the least libertarian people in politics. It makes no sense.

[_Kevin Graham]

Finally, socialism is in my book any system that grows dependency on government to supply what individuals are supposed to provide for themselves

I think you just pin-pointed your problem: you're relying on your own ignorance.

Try reading an actual book instead of relying on your book. Funny how by your own definition, "Socialists" tend to thrive in Red States.

[_DoubtingThomas]

because they won't want to comment section to be flooded with Russian bots.

That is conspiracy theory crap. And it is asserting that the technology operating our social Medía is controlled by human launched A.I.. Ridiculous.

Even your retarded fox news admits "Russian trolls and bots disrupting US democracy via Facebook and Twitter"

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/10 ... itter.html

Conspiracy my @$$!

[_Uncle Ed]

College campuses tend to be fairly liberal, but liberal isn't the same thing as socialist.

Forgive me if anything I have written up to this point was asserting socialist and liberal to be synonymous. What the liberal is politically (in order to more directly advance his agenda) is a socialist, even if that word is dispensed with in favor of another, such as progressive. Words are warped these days as never before. That is also a tool of the radical "progressive":
reduce real communication to a nullity by taking authority to redefine once commonly understood words.

What? The studies concern information preferences / sources among people with different political affiliations in America and their influence on general media coverage. That's an interesting to know about for a variety of reasons. That has nothing to do with this.

What was the bias going in? To show that "conservatives" (defined as GOP mainstream,
fly over country people, rurals lacking higher education, etc.) flock to propaganda sources masquerading as News sources. Yes, that is interesting to SHOW, by whatever chosen criteria:
lumping information websites by content into "conservative" and even "alt right" sources, and then showing them to be the bread and dogmatic butter of "alt right" voters, etc. Very interesting to blacken an entire group of American voters. We saw the fruits of that "research"
last year, endlessly: until the voters just kept mum about what they believed and who they were going to vote for. That was actually pretty smart. The rest of the political affiliations in the study would just be there to lend a verisimilitude of non biased research, for interests sake. The true motive of the study, which "they" "knew" beforehand, was to show by inference that conservatives are intent on setting up their own populist gov't and returning to the days of ante-Leave it to Beaver.