Well, how did they learn their ads were running on Alex’s channel? Because CNN made of list of which ads were running, and then contacted the advertisers to pressure the companies into pulling them! Their story goes on, “CNN has discovered ads on InfoWars’ channels from companies and organizations such as Nike, Acer, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Network, the Mormon Church, Moen, Expedia, Alibaba, HomeAway, the NRA, Honey, Wix and ClassPass.” At the end of their story they admitted, “Many of the brands — including Nike, Moen, Expedia, Acer, ClassPass, Honey, Alibaba and OneFamily — have suspended ads on InfoWars’ channels after being contacted by CNN for comment.”433
MSNBC is usually not quite as insane as CNN but it’s still almost always off the rails. Donny Deutsch, who is a regular contributor on the Morning Joe show, has challenged President Trump to a fight on air,434 and their other regular panelists say things like Trump’s name is the “modern day swastika.”435 They also regularly compared him to a dictator and call him a white supremacist.436 When President Trump announced that he would be meeting face to face with Kim Jong Un, MSNBC claimed it was to “distract” the media from talking about his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels.437
The network’s darling is lesbian Rachel Maddow whose monologues are convoluted streams of consciousness rattling off all kinds of social justice warrior buzzwords without ever really making a point. Her show is so fanatical and hyper-partisan that the New York Times banned their reporters from even appearing on it out of concern it will tarnish their credibility.438
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald admitted, “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow [but] I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.”439
MSNBC’s research department is so awful they took seriously a parody Twitter account that listed its location as a city in Russia and tweeted satire about a variety of issues (calling itself Boston Antifa). MSNBC reported that it was more “evidence” that Russian bots were active on Twitter.440 They also fell for a tweet posted by the popular parody account for North Korea, the “DPRK News Service” which MSNBC cited in a report attacking President Trump.441
Immediately after Robert Mueller wrapped up his two-year long investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” with the Russians and found none, CNN and MSNBC’s ratings dropped like a stone over night. After stringing along their viewers for two years giving the impression that any day now Mueller would announce he found “proof” Trump was a Russian agent and that his impeachment and imprisonment was imminent, hundreds of thousands of disappointed viewers finally quit tuning in.
Following the Mueller nothing burger, Rachel Maddow’s viewership dropped by almost 20%.442 Anderson Cooper’s prime time show on CNN got only 835,000 viewers, and for weeks couldn’t break a million.443 Meanwhile Fox News continued to dominate, getting more viewers than MSNBC and CNN combined.444
Even Newsweek magazine, which is part of the anti-Trump smear machine, reported, “MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Found Huge Ratings Success Covering Trump and Russia — So What Now?”445 Election years are always huge ratings boosters for cable news, and the regular viewers who suffered through two years of endless speculation and listened to countless conspiracy theories about Trump and the Russians obviously aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. Most have already forgotten all about the massive deception they were victims of and due to their short attention spans and lack of intellectual capacity, these cable news companies will continue on as if they did nothing wrong, and hundreds of thousands of people will still tune in.
Normal Americans wonder how anyone could watch them again after the massive fraud the “news” networks had engaged in, but it’s easy to underestimate how many stupid people there are out there. After all, the Jerry Springer Show aired for 27 years and was able to keep audiences coming back every day to watch another group of trailer trash fight with each other about who cheated on who and who the father is of some poor child; and despite how mindless and repetitive the show was, enough people kept tuning in every day for it to stay on air for almost three decades.
Internet “News” Sites
Just like the Internet sparked the creation of countless different kinds of businesses selling everything from books to airline tickets, it also gave birth to new “news” companies as well. While the brand name newspapers and television networks eventually began migrating their content online, unknown entrepreneurs threw their hat in the news business as well, creating digital-only magazines and “news” sites like the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast, Politico, Axios, Vox, Slate, Vice News, and many others.
Since the barriers to entry are so low, and these companies didn’t need to invest in gigantic printing presses or develop supply chains to deliver their product to readers’ homes every morning, many of them saw the incredible opportunities the Internet opened up. But while most newspapers and magazines require people to buy them, the vast majority of Internet news sites are free to read.
All they had to do was get people to click on their articles and the advertisements on the website would fund their operation, so instead of focusing on producing quality content that people would be willing to pay for, they began flooding the Internet with sensational clickbait, throwing all journalistic standards out the window with one goal in mind—drive traffic to the articles, no matter what.
The Huffington Post was one of the first “successful” online “news” outlets. It was started in 2005 specializing in clickbait trash and other pop culture nonsense, but due to spamming the Internet with countless articles on anything and everything, they generated a lot of traffic and made a name for themselves as one of the most viewed online “news” outlets.446 In 2011 they were purchased by AOL for $315 million.447
When Conan O’Brien was the comedian at the 2013 White House Correspondents Dinner he mocked the Huffington Post for being invited, saying, “All the Washington news media here tonight including the stars of online journalism. I see the Huffington Post has a table, which has me wondering if you’re here, who’s covering Miley Cyrus’s latest nip slip? Who’s assembling today’s top 25 yogurt related tweets? [Or] 7 mistakes you’re making with bacon? That’s a real one, and you should be ashamed of yourselves!”448
The Huffington Post (later rebranded as HuffPost) being welcomed as part of the Washington press corps marked the beginning of the end of journalism.
BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed is another online abomination which took advantage of the new clickbait business model. The site was created in 2006, and began churning out ridiculously dumb quizzes about pop culture and recycling the same handful of topics over and over again to litter Google’s search results with their spam, often in the form of listicles like: “37 Things White People Need to Stop Ruining in 2018;” “21 Things That Almost All White People Are Guilty Of Saying;” and “33 Things That Almost All White People Are Guilty Of Doing.”