We talk often, perhaps too much, about how the Daily Caller isn’t a media organization but the Koch’s propaganda arm, and how the Caller’s Michael Bastasch isn’t a reporter but a Koch political operative.
One may be inclined to rise to his defense by suggesting that even if he’s nothing but a Koch-backed political hack, he still might be good at journalism. That even if the Daily Caller is a key part of the EPA’s defense plan, that doesn’t mean Bastasch is incapable of, say, competently interviewing someone. But a recent 8-minute interview Bastasch did with EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler proves that, bias aside, Bastasch is kind of a bumbling doofus.
It appears that Bastasch had no interest in getting Wheeler off the talking points during their chat, resulting in an interview nearly indistinguishable from the ones Wheeler gave Fox or Breitbart. (This is probably not a coincidence, given the EPA’s recent history of scripting interviews with friendly “media” outlets.)
But Bastasch is hardly the only hack out there--there’s a little broadcast network you may have heard of called Fox News. Jane Mayer’s latest piece in the New Yorker reveals that Roger Ailes may have tipped President Trump off to a debate question, Mayer also reports that a reporter at the network had the Stormy Daniels story but editors chose not to run it, one reportedly saying: “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.”
Fox being rabidly pro-Trump isn’t particularly newsworthy. But Mayer’s reporting on just how intimately interlinked one of the biggest cable “news” networks is with Trump makes it clear that Trump’s climate position is likely driven more by the Fox News than any sham national security advisory board red team effort.
Unfortunately, it’s not just national “news” that’s out to influence Americans. There’s a whole network of conservative political operations disguised as local news sites. Building on a 2018 Politico story, Snopes recently uncovered how a group of ostensibly state-level news outlets are actually political propaganda arms for conservative PACs, documenting an overlap of PAC employees and so-called reporters at pop-up outlets like the Tennessee Star or Minnesota Sun. For example: before the Tennessee Star’s “investigative journalist” Chris Butler was writing stories critical of politician Karl Dean, he was the media spokesperson for Dean’s opponent Bill Lee. Another political editor at the “paper” had a lucrative side-gig as a political consultant, where he was paid by campaigns for media work while also ostensibly covering the campaigns as a journalist.
In defending themselves from charges of being apolitical, not journalistic operation, Tennessee Star co-founder pointed to an example of how their reporting, labeling a candidate “LaRaza Randy” in reference to the Latino advocacy group, “created a political perception of him” that cost him the election.
Interestingly, Snopes finds that a significant portion of these local “news” pages content are stories from third-party outlets. Nearly half of that content? None other than our friends at the Daily Caller. Other significant sources of stories reposted were from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal (which had its own softball interview with Wheeler), and The Daily Torch, the “news” site of Americans for Limited Government.
Koch groups with similarly banal names are also major ad buyers of the sites. Because these sites, large and small, Star to Caller to Fox, are supposedly for-profit news operations, and not funnels for undisclosed political spending meant to create a political perception among voters. But even politics aside, it’s hard to say it’s “good reporting, kiddo.”
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