AIM Laments Crackdown On Fake News -- Then Spreads Fake News Topic: Accuracy in Media
John Ransom used a March 7 Accuracy in Media article to liken criticism of fake news -- largely promulgated byt right-wing media outlets -- to the crackdown in the free press in Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, insisting that calls to criminalize fake news or other misinformation is an assault on "free speech":
Of course, Western liberals don’t advocate for criminal penalties for free speech yet.
Or do they?
Seth Abramson, a journalist and lawyer on Substack, with a million followers on Twitter, in fact, has endorsed the idea of criminal penalties for “fake news.”
“America will continue to see conspiracies to commit election fraud in the form of mass disinformation campaigns targeting federal agencies and American voters until such schemes are treated as the federal crimes they are. And the same people will keep committing them,” Abramson wrote on Twitter.
Abramson is the same guy who said that voter fraud is “vanishingly rare,” thereby introducing the vanity use — and overuse — of the word “vanishingly” by liberal journalists who need to hit you over the head with their ideas to make a point.
And Abramson is not alone in advocating criminal penalties over free speech.
Ransom didn't explain why he considers fake news and misinfomration on the same level as "free speech," or why they are worthy of the same protection. But then Ransom added his own bit of fake news:
And then there is the case here at home where parents attending school board meetings were declared “domestic terrorists” for speaking out about the maladministration of their kids’ schools.
As we've documented, no parent was ever called a "domestic terrorist" simply for speaking up at a school board meeting -- the ones who made violent threats or otherwise acted in a threatening manner were given that label.
AIM has continued to make itself irrelevant in the past couple of years with numerous personel and management shakeups. This doesn't help.
AIM Is Proud Of Its Narrative Being Promoted On Fringe-Right Website Topic: Accuracy in Media
An Oct. 5 Accuracy in Media item -- under the headline "AIM’s fight against the media bailout is featured in the World Tribune" -- is pretty much what it says it is, a teaser of an article at said website that, in turn, is a rehash of a commentary at the right-wing Daily Signal by AIM president Adam Guillette about how AiM is attacking a proposed provision in the Build Back Better that would include a "$1.3 billion bailout for media organizations." According to Guillette, the bailout is "a way to turn every news outlet in America into a version of NPR." He offered no evidence to back this up that the World Tribune thought was noteworthy; perhaps that's because he offered none in is Daily Signal piece beyond ranting things like "Any pretense of objectivity would be destroyed once the media is on the federal payroll," further ranting that "many local newspapers took advantage of" money from the Payroll Protection Program and asserting that "Bad businesses should be allowed to fail."
Guilllette didn't mention that AIM also took PPP money -- $72,368 that AIM does not have to pay back to the government, thus making it free money. So if Guillette really believes "bad businesses should be allowed to fail," does he agree that AIM should have been allowed to fail since it felt the need to take government largesse? Does he believe that AIM's credibility was damaged (even further than it already has been, anyway) beause it accepted government money?
It's also weird that AiM woul so aggressively promote a rewrite of something at the World Tribune, because it's not exactly known for for journalistic excellence. Media Bias/Fact Check has rated World Tribune "questionable" because of its "far-right bias (propaganda), and poor sourcing, and misleading science, as well as a lack of ownership transparency." The website was founded as something of a hobby for a former editor for the right-wing Washington Times.
Is a shoddy, hyper-biased website like World Tribune the kind of media world AiM would rather see? It would seem so.
AIM Goes On Anti-'Woke' Tirade Against General Topic: Accuracy in Media
John Ransom goes off the rails quickly in a Sept. 28 Accuracy in Media column:
As the military’s top general, Mark Milley, prepares to testify in front of a Senate committee tomorrow about the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s important that we remember the media’s complicity in the disaster.
Too often the media has been willing to let incompetence slide, if that incompetent someone is ideologically safe, as is U.S. Gen. Mark Milley.
It’s especially alarming now given the cognitive decline in the White House.
That escalated quickly! But the only evidence of "cognitive decline" is an anti-Biden op-ed at Forbes that doesn't even reference "cognitive decline" until the third-to-last paragraph. Not exactly the proof that one would need to live up to the whole accuracy-in-media thing.
Ransom's osensible real point here is to attack Milley for acknowledging thing like systemic racism, citing another flawed item -- a Fox News article that quoted only anonymous people -- claiming that Milley andhis staff "spend time each week meeting about 'culture war' issues while never meeting about U.S. military readiness." He continued:
And in these activities, much of the media cheered them on.
For example, they reported on the partisan aspects of teaching Critical Race Theory in the military under Milley and other woke-enabled group-think, especially when Milley illogically tied them to events like the January 6 riots or the riots in Lafayette Park to discredit conservatives.
The media hurrahed the creation of Milley’s new military, a political military that could help progressives defeat conservatives.
Never mind that these activities had nothing to do with successfully advancing the actual mission of the military to protect the country, the citizens and ultimately the military itself.
“Until recently, critical race theory was anything but a household phrase,” NPR told readers as a cover for Milley when he defended the force-feeding of the radical CRT to U.S. troops, while pretending he didn’t understand what the fuss was about — even as he apparently ignored Afghanistan.
Ransom didn't explain why cracking down on extremism in the military ranks is a bad thing. And Milley specifically said he wanted to understand "white rage" -- which we assume Ransom is exhibiting here -- to figure what drove "thousands of people to assault this building [the Capitol] and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America." Doesn't Ransom think that's worth figuring out?
Ransom then weirdly listed Rep. Liz Cheney as among those receiving "the get-out-of-jail-free card issued by the liberal press to anyone smart and brave enough to regularly denounce conservatives, as Milley does." What crime is Ransom accusing Cheney of committing? Last time we checked, it was not a crime to hold Donald Trump accountable for his behavior.
Yep, lots of accuracy missing in Ransom's media missive.
AIM Is Mad Media Bias Chart Doesn't Reflect Its Own Bias Topic: Accuracy in Media
An anonymously written Sept. 14 Accuracy in Media article complains about the latest Ad Fontes media bias chart:
Despite claims by Ad Fontes Media that its analysts are some of the chart’s findings are dubious at best. For instance, it lists Reuters as a centrist, fact-reporting outlet. However, just this past summer, Reuters displayed a blatant double-standard about what types of protests were at risk of spreading Covid-19. Reuters claimed that Black Lives Matter protests would not lead to spikes in Covid-19 cases but that protests in favor of Cuban liberation risked exacerbating the Covid-19 spike. How is an outlet that acts as a lobbyist for the socialist dictatorship of Cuba a “centrist, fact-reporting” source?
In addition to Reuters, other outlets such as NowThis, Teen Vogue, and Vice are categorized as only “skews left” and are a mix of fact reporting and analysis when in reality, these outlets put out extremist content frequently. Just recently, NowThis put out climate propaganda on behalf of the Biden administration. Vice insisted that Marines were actually neo-nazis while also advocating for controversial vaccine passports and downplaying valid arguments against them.
Well, vaccine passports are a health issue, not a political issue. Similarly, climate change is also not a political issues much as AIM has been indoctrinated by its fellow right-wingers to portray it as one. And Ad Fontes likely didn't rush to a snap judgment on Reuters' alleged bias based on three cherry-picked articles out of the thousands it publishes each year, like AIM did. Indeed, as the anonymous AIM writer goes on to quote from the group's website, “Ad Fontes Media has a team of over 40 paid analysts who rate individual articles, episodes, and shows of news sources. They are politically balanced left, right, and center, and come from a range of personal and professional backgrounds.”
AIM wasn't done complaining:
When it comes to right-wing media sources, the chart plays fast and loose in terms of who they list as “extreme.” According to Ad Fontes Media, conservative outlets and personalities such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro and Fox News as a whole are all borderline propaganda sources that are nearly on par with Alex Jones of InfoWars.
Unlike with the outlets it complained weren't placed left enough, AIM offered no evidence to support its claims that Carlson, Hannity, et al, aren't "borderline propaganda."
Based on these faulty complaints, the anonymous AIM writer concluded by whining:
The trouble with this is that the Media Bias Chart is taught in classrooms across the country. In fact, its website has an entire section dedicated to resources teachers can use for their curriculum.
[...]
How can a company that has so failed at identifying its own bias teach America’s youth about how to identify it themselves?
How can an organization like AIM credibly analyze "media bias" when it has trouble admitting there's any in right-wing media?
AIM -- Which Got COVID Relief Money -- Complains Another Institute Got Some Topic: Accuracy in Media
John Ransom thinks he has a scoop in a July 1 Accuracy in Media post:
According to data from the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Confucius Institute, an academic group that has close ties to the communist Chinese party, applied for and received an SBA grant in June 2020, under the Covid relief plan.
The origination date is June 29, 2020, for four thousand dollars.
[...]
The Confucius Institute has a contentious relationship in the United States. Many have been shut down across university campuses in the United States after widespread criticism that they operate as a propaganda arm of the Chinese communist party.
This was followed by a July 8 post by Tyler Olson touting how Fox Business picked up AIM's story, complaining that the relief program was "hastiliy passed."
There are concerns about the institutes, but the controversy is also driven in no small part because it's being driven by anti-China Republicans, and that AIM is simply trying to advance a right-wing narrative.
The big irony here is not that the Confucius Institute got government money from a program signed off on by President Trump, but that AIM -- which, as a right-wing group, is not supposed to like government handouts -- received money out of that same program.
According to a database of recipients of relief money, AIM received $71,677 in a Paycheck Protection Program loan, which was forgiven to the tuen of $72,368 including accrued interest -- 16 times the amount of money that the Conficius Institute received.
We don't recall AIM ever complaining about getting what is essentially free money from the government, or about never having to pay it back.
AIM Misleads In Attack Biden Over Texas Energy Issues Topic: Accuracy in Media
Stephanie H. Freedman got one thing right in a Feb. 24 Accuracy in Media post examining the Texas cold snap and resulting failure of energy sources there: she wasn't trying to blame wind and solar and ignoring that failure to winterize power sources of all kinds was a major contributing factor. But she tried to put the blame on the Biden administration for its initial response:
While there is no denying there is a hybrid policy conversation to address this crisis, there is a very important fact that is missing from the major media analyses.
On Feb. 12, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “declared a state of disaster threat of widespread damage due to prolonged freezing temperatures.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which is responsible for 90% of Texas’s energy, reported they needed an “increase in energy supplies” to help counter the negative effects of the storm. ERCOT also reported that “numerous energy generation units will be unable to operate at full capacity without violating federal air quality or other permit limitations.”
These issues were listed in a request submitted to the Department of Energy on Feb. 14 regarding discretion for “using their energy generators and relief from exceeding state emissions requirements during emergency conditions”.
The Department of Energy responded that while it would allow a certain increase in energy output, it would not “provide relief from obligations to purchase energy allowances for emissions that occur during the emergency condition.” They also specified their priority to “minimize adverse environmental impacts, by limiting operation of dispatched energy units.”
The order from the Department of Energy also hiked the price of power credits being sold to the state at a price “no lower than $1,500/MWh,” a significant increase over the $18.20 that Texans typically pay for the same amount of energy.
But neither of those things are true. Both the Department of Energy and ERCOT confirmed to the Associated Press that the claim that DOE enforced emissions limits on power sources was false, and the DOE order actually approved what ERCOT requested. And ERCOT, not DOE, set the minimum $1,500/MWh price to ensure that its request to DOE would be used as a last resort, according to an ERCOT spokesperson. The DOE ultimately defers to the applicants and the market on how prices are determined.
AIM Mad The Truth Was Told About Limbaugh Topic: Accuracy in Media
Ella Carroll-Smith complained in a Feb. 17 Accuracy in Media post:
Rush Limbaugh, one of the most influential voices in the history of conservative talk radio, died Wednesday following a year-long battle with lung cancer. HuffPost immediately jumped at the opportunity to run this headline: “Rush Limbaugh, Bigoted King of Talk Radio, Dies at 70.”
The “obituary”, which reads more like a hateful tirade, goes on to claim that Limbaugh “saturated America’s airwaves with cruelty bigotries, lies and conspiracy theories for over three decades.”[...]
Even now, after his death, the media still can’t help but pile on their hatred of Limbaugh. NBC ran with this as the subhead for his obituary: “The Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree outraged critics with his long history of sexist, homophobic and racist remarks.”
NowThis reported that “[d]uring his decades-long media career, he used his platform to promote racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and conspiracy theories.”
The Washington Post, which famously described ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar” upon his death, covered Limbaugh as a man whodeployed comic bombast and relentless bashing of liberals, feminists and environmentalists to become a cultural phenomenon and lead the Republican Party into a politics of anger and obstruction.”
All of this is but a small sampling of the hateful rhetoric that’s making its way across mainstream news outlets Wednesday.
At no point, however, did Carroll-Smith dispute the accuracy of any of those "hateful" descriptions of Limbaugh -- perhaps because she can't. He indisuputably was bigoted and promoted racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and conspiracy theories. Which means that this AIM post is all about being mad that the truth was told about Limbaugh.
Nevertheless, AIM created an action alert over this:
We lost a titan of the conservative movement. But within hours of his passing, radical left-wing “journalists” began to smear Rush Limbaugh.
HuffPost called him the “Bigoted King of Talk Radio.” Rolling Stone ran the headline, “Rush Limbaugh Did His Best to Ruin America.”
Rush stood up for our beliefs throughout his entire career.
I hope you’ll take just a minute out of your day to stand up for Rush.
Use the box on this screen to send one prewritten message that goes to the editors of these publications, as well as the board of directors of their parent company. Or modify our message and send your own.
We should be able to respectfully disagree about politics in America. There’s no reason for them to use hateful rhetoric to smear a dead man.
Again, AIM does not dispute the accuracy of those descriptors of Limbaugh. Again, AIM is mad that the truth was told.
Also, it's rich to hear AIM declaring that "We should be able to respectfully disagree about politics in America" given that a key AIM employee for decades was CliffKincaid.
AIM Tried To Blame Media For Capitol Riot Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media president Adam Guillette issued a statement after the Capitol riot that labored to blame the media for it:
On Wednesday, I was disgusted by the scenes I saw unfolding on television. I’m sure you felt the same way.
The individuals who broke into the Capitol are ultimately responsible for their own actions. We must continue to believe in personal responsibility.
That said, it is worth acknowledging the flames that our national media fanned all summer.
Mainstream media and social media influencers have normalized violence by redefining riots as “peaceful protests”. Celebrities even paid the bail money of rioters so that they could go out and commit more crimes. But that doesn’t mean you and I should ever stoop to their level.
President Donald Trump began his speech yesterday with a line that stood out to me:
“The media is the biggest problem we have in this country.”
I couldn’t agree more.
The media should be exposed again, and again, and again. You and I must continue to hold them accountable for their unconscionable attempts to divide our nation.
We should do this not because we “hate” our enemies, but because we love our country.
Ah, but AIM and other right-wingers do hate their enemies, and they very much consider the non-right-wing media to be an "enemy."Their goal is not to improve the "liberal media"; it is to destroy it.
Guilllette is also dishonestly portraying all of the racial justice and police reform protests last summer as violent by falsely claiming the media portrayed violent riots as peaceful; in fact, the vast majority of protests were, in fact, peaceful.
It's also clear that Guillette and AIM will not hold Trump accountable for his role in instigating the riot -- after all, it's more important to them that Trump hates the non-right-wing media as much as they do.
AIM Morphs Into Project Veritas With Hidden-Camera Stunt Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media's president, Adam Guillette, came to the organization from the discredited Project Veritas. So perhaps it was inevitable that he would bring some of his former employer's stunts to AIM.
Before the election, it went after Democratic Iowa Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield. In the video, Guilllette ranted about how Black Lives Matter is a "radical, violent organization," then touted how AIM secretly taped Greenfield's husband stating that his wife supports BLM, as well as Greenfield herself. Guillette did not explain how his secret taping was legal, or why he was so desperate to pull this stunt that he had to go to Iowa to do it.
Guillette proclaimed himself to be "morally outraged when politicians say one thing to one group of people and another thing to another group of people," though we doubt he will ever do this same thing to a Republican politician despitethe fact that many of them are also two-faced. Guillette then promised more of this shady behavior: "Accuracy in Media hidden-camera investigators exposing lying, two-faced politicians. Accuracy in Media will also be exposing exposing lying, two-faced journalists."
So can we also expect AIM to self-destruct with bogusattacks the way Project Veritas has this election season?
AIM Is Mad The Truth About Herman Cain And Coronavirus Is Told Topic: Accuracy in Media
We've noted how the Media Research Center threw tantrums when media pointed out the likelihood that Herman Cain picked up the coronavirus that ultimately killed him during a rally for President Trump in Tulsa in June. Now Accuracy in Media publisher Don Irvine is treating this fact as a smear in a Aug. 3 post:
In a headline Sunday, Reuters insinuated that former presidential candidate Herman Cain’s death from COVID-19 was due to his refusal to wear a mask.
Cain, 74, died Thursday after spending most of July in an Atlanta-area hospital after being diagnosed with COVID-19 on June 29, which Reuters noted was just nine days after a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that Cain attended without a mask.
The Reuters story also pointed out how many Trump supporters — of which Cain was one — are against wearing masks, mentioning his tweet about Trump’s July 4 celebration at Mount Rushmore.
“Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!”
Cain was a successful businessman and talk-show host and did not deserve to be smeared by Reuters for exercising his rights as an American to not wear a mask.
It's not a "smear" to report a fact. It's indisputable that Cain largely refused to wear a mask, and you don't have to be a "smear artist" to point out the basics of how viruses spread and how that played into Cain's illness.If you don't wear a mask while attending crowded events like Trump rallies, there's a chance you'll catch something. Unfortunately for Cain, the bug going around this year is coronavirus, which can kill you.
Irvine's post is of the old-school media attack in which reporting inconvenient facts about conservatives equals "liberal bias."
AIM's Double Standard On Alleged Presidential Candidate Health Issues Topic: Accuracy in Media
CNN editor-in-chief Chris Cillizza pushed a story questioning President Donald Trump’s health after Trump delicately walked down a ramp following a speech he gave at West Point.
But Cillizza has criticized health scare stories before – in 2016, when conservatives publicly questioned then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s health in the 2016 campaign cycle.
[...]
Cillizza speculated about Trump’s health because Trump’s “medical past is a total mystery.”
CNN, which has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, chose to ignore a recent poll that asked likely voters about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s mental capacities.
The Zogby poll, which was released this week, found that a majority of voters believed that Biden is in the early stages of dementia. Fifty-five percent of likely voters said it was more likely that Biden is in the early stages of dementia, with 45% of likely voters believed it was less likely to be true. The majority of Republican voters believed Biden has dementia with 77% expressing that opinion, while 32% of Democratic voters believed it. However, 56% of independent voters believed Biden has early dementia.
[...]
Only right-leaning media outlets such as the Daily Wire and NewsMax reported on the Zogby poll. CNN and the mainstream media were nowhere to be found when it came to this poll’s findings and potential implications for the 2020 presidential election.
Biden’s stuttering and losing his train of thought have been well-documented during this election cycle, but the likes of CNN and the mainstream media dismissed the possibility that Biden may lack the mental capacity to serve as president at his age.
AIM Chief Fails In Attacking Newspapers As 'Hard Left,' Unworthy of Bailout Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media is attempting to regain what little relevance it had and maybe create some buzz by railing against the idea of treating the media like every other business in America that is eligible for coronavirus relief money. Of course, AIM simply wants the non-conservative media to die any way it can. The latest step in this is a May 22 op-ed by AIM president Adam Guillette pubished by the Washington Examiner.
Since Guillette, like most right-wing media critics, has never worked a day in the media he attacks -- he came to AIM from the discredited right-wing provocateurs at Project Veritas -- he doesn't understand how the media busienss works; he's too caught up in his biases. He began by ranting:
If Lenin said that capitalists “will sell us the rope we use to hang them,” newspapers are saying that conservatives will fund the ink they use to smear them.
Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress have now signed on for a proposed media bailout. This isn’t a bailout for smaller newspapers and television stations. Those businesses were already eligible for the Payroll Protection Program, and many of them took advantage of it — in a big way.
The Seattle Times took $9.9 million tax dollars, and the Tampa Bay Timesbagged $8.5 million. Two of the most hard-left newspapers in America didn’t even hesitate before grabbing their Trump Bucks.
Needless to say, Guillette offers no evidence that either of those newspapers is "hard left" -- he simply assumes so because they don't have a right-wing bias.
Guillette then attacked the newspaper chain McClatchy for filing for bankruptcy. He continued to whine:
For years, conservatives bemoaned how far left their local newspapers shifted. Little by little, the editorial boards of nearly every local newspaper were taken over by progressives. Then the editorializing started spreading to each article. In response to their complaints, conservatives were always told, “It’s a private company, they can do what they want!”
But now we’ve learned that alienating a large portion of your marketplace isn’t a winning business strategy. Why, then, should customers be forced to pay for a product they’ve already rejected?
Of course, the newspapers claim their bias isn’t the problem. They blame the internet. Countless business models have been upended by the internet; should we bail out each of them? Should we have bailed out stone tablet makers after the invention of the printing press?
If Guillette is going to complain that newspapers' purported liberal bias are not a "winning business strategy" then he must also admit that explicitly conservative newspapers were never a "winning business strategy." As we've documented, newspapers like the Washington Times, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and New York Post have always been failures in the market and kept alive only because they were owned by deep-pocketed right-wing owners -- even in the pre-internet years when mainstream newspaper reliably turned profits. Even the publication where Guillette's op-ed appears, the Washington Examiner, is the remnant of a daily newspaper that failed after a new owner, Philip Anschutz, infused it with right-wing bias.
In order to be an effective critic, one must understand what he is criticizing. Guillette clearly doesn't.
When dishonest journalists spread smears and lies, they should be exposed. But when honest journalists speak out against these things, they should be praised. Please use this action alert to thank Lara Logan for taking a stand against dishonest journalists who focus on advancing their agenda rather than educating the public.
It's not clear from this link what AIM is referring to, but it might be a recent rant at the New York Times criticizing the Trump administration over its response to the coronavirus pandemic, where she said that "This is a moment for all of us reporters to stand up for journalism and stand up for our profession and just admit that on every single page of The New York Times, opinion is infused with facts."
The funny thing, of course, is that Logan is not the "honest journalist" AIM would have you believe she is. She effectively lost her job at CBS' "60 Minutes" for promoting the claims of an alleged witness to the Benghazi attack whose story turned out to be a lie and not disclosing that said bogus witness' book was published by a division of CBS -- a story which, by the way, AIM promoted at the time but has since scrubbed from its website (fortunately, the internet never forgets).
Since her re-emergence last year, Logan has shown herself to be dishonest in another way, by pretending she's not a conservative. After declaring that "I'm not going to pretend to be conservative so I can be the darling of the conservative media," she did exactly that, first joining the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group and then, earlier this year, starting a Fox News show laughably titled "Lara Logan Has No Agenda" despite the fact that Fox Nation is known for nothing but having a decidedly conservative agenda (that and the sexual harassment), and that Logan had a very specific agenda in attacking the New York Times.
So we're going to pass on signing this little petition.
AIM Can't Figure Out Conservative Media Is Biased On Tara Reade Topic: Accuracy in Media
Spencer Irvine wrote in a May 5 Accuracy in Media post:
Data journalism site FiveThirtyEight discovered that the mainstream media covered Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against former Vice President Joe Biden less than conservative media.
The website’s findings confirmed Accuracy in Media’s reporting that the mainstream media ignored Reade’s allegations longer than it should have.
[...]
Fox News “has devoted the most attention to Reade so far” and intensified its Reade-related coverage. It has mentioned Reade 371 times, compared to CNN’s 35 clips that mentioned Reade. FiveThirtyEight said that MSNBC “barely mentioned her” until last week. But FiveThirtyEight pointed out that conservative online outlets “accounted for most early coverage” of Reade’s allegations from websites such as The Blaze, Daily Caller, and Breitbart.
FiveThirtyEight’s media analysis on Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden confirmed that media bias played a significant role in dictating media coverage. The mainstream media was slow to respond to the allegations and ignored them longer than it should have, while the conservative media covered the story early and often.
Note how Irvine assumes that the conservative media's coverage of the Reade story is his default, cheering how they covered it "early and often" and criticizing the "mainstream media" for waiting "longer than it should have." But he's ignoring the fact that the conservative media have a motivation for covering Reade "early and often": it's biased.
Irvine seems not to have considered that the conservative media pushed the Reade story "early and often" because they believe the story will hurt Biden and help President Trump. If Irvine thinks the "mainstream media" held off "longer than it should have" because it's purported biased for Biden, then the opposite must be true.
There's simply no reason for Irvine to assume that the conservative media is the standard of political coverage when it actually is as biased as he likes to think the "mainstream media" is.
AIM President Goes On Anti-City Tirade Topic: Accuracy in Media
Accuracy in Media president Adam Guillette hadn't really shown the kind of next-level craziness demonstrated by his AIM forbears like Cliff Kincaid (though, frankly, that make AIM pretty boring), even though he came to AIM from the disreputable Project Veritas. Guillette finally popped his crazy cherry, as it were, in an April 29 column in which he ranted that coronavirus proves that cities suck:
Progressive ideas and global pandemics go together like a strain of COVID-19 and a mucous membrane.
The media tries to look the other way, but one progressive policy after another has been found to be a major cause of the spread of the coronavirus.
For decades, left-wing city planning experts have told us that sprawl is a bad thing. It’d be better for society, they insisted, if we all lived in high-density cities. Then the virus hit. Which area suffered more? Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Kansas?
One of the main reasons dense cities have suffered so much is their reliance on public transportation.
[...]
Another progressive idea that has fallen apart amid the pandemic is the obsession with banning single-use plastic bags and embracing reusable bags at the grocery store. Reusable bags are the hipsters of COVID-19; they were carrying disease before it was cool. Study after study shows that E. coli, salmonella, and coliform bacteria are frequently spread by these virtue-signaling totes.
Now some cities that previously banned safe, single-use bags have actually reversed course and banned the reusable bags. Many stores that once encouraged reuse now forbid it.
[...]
The notion that central planning experts know how to run cities is a symptom of the most dangerous disease spread by urban liberals — narcissism. Their so-called “progressive” proposals actually embrace century-old technology — densely-packed cities, trains, burlap sacks, and trolleys. This is a large part of what got New York City into this mess.
Conservatives and libertarians are mocked for glamorizing 1776, but is it any better to glamorize life in 1876?
Congratulations, Adam. You might just be fringe enough to have a career at AIM after all.
John Ransom used a March 7 Accuracy in Media article to liken criticism of fake news -- largely promulgated byt right-wing media outlets -- to the crackdown in the free press in Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, insisting that calls to criminalize fake news or other misinformation is an assault on "free speech":
An Oct. 5 Accuracy in Media 
An anonymously written Sept. 14 Accuracy in Media 
Ella Carroll-Smith complained in a Feb. 17 Accuracy in Media 
Accuracy in Media's president, Adam Guillette, came to the organization from the discredited Project Veritas. So perhaps it was inevitable that he would bring some of his former employer's stunts to AIM. 
A link promoted at Accuracy in Media 
Accuracy in Media president Adam Guillette hadn't really shown the kind of next-level craziness demonstrated by his AIM forbears like Cliff Kincaid (though, frankly, that make AIM pretty boring), even though he came to AIM from the disreputable Project Veritas. Guillette finally popped his crazy cherry, as it were, in an April 29 
