Budapest Post

Cum Deo pro Patria et Libertate
Budapest, Europe and world news

RealClear Media Has a Secret Facebook Page to Push Far-Right Memes

RealClear Media Has a Secret Facebook Page to Push Far-Right Memes

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Photos FacebookThe company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned
Called “Conservative Country,” the Facebook page was founded in 2014 and now boasts nearly 800,000 followers for its mix of Donald Trump hagiography and ultra-conservative memes. One recent post showed a man training two assault rifles at a closed door with the caption “Just sitting here waiting on Beto.” Others wink at right-wing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s “ties to Islam” or the Clintons having their enemies killed, or portray Muslim members of Congress as terrorist infiltrators. The page is effusive with praise for Vladimir Putin, and one post portrays Russia as the last bastion of freedom in Europe.

It’s a far cry from the usual fare on RealClearPolitics. Founded in 2000, the site was an early online aggregator of political news, curating links to widely read politics stories and opinion articles in other major outlets. The site has become synonymous with its polling aggregator, which is regularly cited by news organizations on both sides of the aisle as an objective metric of major political races. In recent years, the site has expanded to cover health care, finance, foreign policy, and more.

There’s no hint of Conservative Country’s provenance on its Facebook “about” page, which reads in total, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” (It’s an apocryphal quote attributed to George Washington.) But in 2017 Conservative Country was linked as the official Facebook page for a now defunct political news site using the same name and logo, ConservativeCountry.net.

That website featured professional writers instead of memes, but it too omitted any mention of who owned or operated the site. The Daily Beast connected ConservativeCountry.net to RealClear through archives on the Wayback Machine, which show that the website had RealClear’s Google Analytics tracker code and that some of the site’s images were served from the WordPress account of RealClear’s chief technology officer. Interviews with former editorial staff of ConservativeCountry.net confirmed that it was a stealth RealClear property.

“It was a site put out through RealClear Media,” said Kevin Whiteley, who in an interview with The Daily Beast recalled coming to RealClear in April 2016 by way of a Craigslist help wanted ad. He worked out of RealClear’s Chicago headquarters, and at first his job was writing for the publisher’s branded websites. “And then they launched Conservative Country to do conservative politics,” he said. “Once they started Conservative Country, I was just writing for Conservative Country.”

RealClearPolitics has taken major pains to be seen as nonpartisan and non-ideological in its reporting. The site’s news reporting focuses on horserace-style coverage of elections, evenly weighing opinions from both parties, while the RealClear pages curate a mix of stories and opinion articles from sites across the political spectrum.

But the willingness to share and aggregate all political views has also made the site more receptive to Trump-friendly writing than some other outlets. Of the seven featured “opinion writers” listed in a tab on the site, three—including occasional Trump adviser Steve Cortes—are openly supportive of the president’s agenda.

Conservative Country isn’t the first ultra-partisan title that’s been connected to RealClear. A 2017 SEC filing listed RealClear co-founder John McIntyre as a director at FDRLST Media and put both companies at the same Chicago address. FDRLST Media is the parent company of The Federalist, the conservative news site behind last month’s false story claiming the deep state secretly revised official whistleblower regulations to allow the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower to provide secondhand information. Even after the story was widely debunked, Trump and several GOP lawmakers pushed it on social media and the Sunday morning political shows, and a link to the Federalist article appeared in 1600 Daily, the official White House newsletter.

Although it shies away from some of the most insane conspiracy theories—there’s no mention of Q or Seth Rich—the Conservative Country Facebook page is also no stranger to fake news. During the 2016 campaign season, the page drove traffic to Macedonian sites known for publishing outrageously false stories to reap ad profits. It’s unclear whether those links appeared by negligence or design. According to a former writer for Conservative Country, RealClear monetizes the Facebook page with a pay-for-play model: Third-party publishers can put up cash to get a post featured on the highly trafficked page.

“There were companies paying RealClear for traffic, and Conservative Country was another RealClear page that companies could promote on,” the writer said. “The whole thing was money based, not activist based or anything like that.”

RealClear didn’t respond to questions about the Facebook page but acknowledged that it created the website. “The Conservative Country website was created as part of an effort to understand the flow of traffic from social media—particularly Facebook—to political websites,” said RealClear CTO Anand Ramanujan in an email to The Daily Beast. “There are no other non-RealClear titles out there.”

A count of the Conservative Country posts featuring external links suggests the page’s main purpose is driving traffic back to RealClear’s own properties. Some 240 of the 1,070 external links posted on the page since January 2017 are to RealClear Media’s flagship title, RealClearPolitics. Fox News comes in a distance second with 71 links, followed by 41 posts linking to the conservative commentary site American Thinker. “We have a contract with Real Clear Holdings to handle some of our non-editorial functions,” said American Thinker’s founder Thomas Lifson, when asked generally about his site’s relationship with RealClear.

It is unusual for media companies to run pages without disclosing their ownership. In an email to The Daily Beast, Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at the media-monitoring Poynter Institute, noted that transparency is a crucial element for readers seeking to understand whether they can trust a news outlet.

“Legitimate and respectable news organizations are transparent about their ownership,” McBride said. “It should be clear to the audience consuming a news product who the owner is. Conversely, audience members who are interested in ownership structures should be able to see all the media properties owned by a corporation.”

Others don’t see it as a problem. The more extreme, bigoted memes appearing on the Facebook page are “certainly not a good look for RealClear Media,” Dan Kennedy, an associate professor and media ethicist at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, told The Daily Beast. “But I don’t think it calls into question the credibility of RealClearPolitics.”

With a full-time editor and a handful of paid freelance writers, the Conservative Country website was more costly to run than a Facebook page. According to the former writer, the site’s traffic cratered when Facebook tweaked its algorithms to favor Facebook content over external links. After eight months in operation, RealClear closed the website in October 2017 without ever officially acknowledging its existence.

Whiteley, who served as ConservativeCountry.net’s line editor for the life of the site, said he doesn’t know why RealClear’s branding never graced Conservative Country. “I can confidently say there was nothing sinister about that,” he said. “Maybe whoever built the site didn’t think to put that there.”
AI Disclaimer: An advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system generated the content of this page on its own. This innovative technology conducts extensive research from a variety of reliable sources, performs rigorous fact-checking and verification, cleans up and balances biased or manipulated content, and presents a minimal factual summary that is just enough yet essential for you to function as an informed and educated citizen. Please keep in mind, however, that this system is an evolving technology, and as a result, the article may contain accidental inaccuracies or errors. We urge you to help us improve our site by reporting any inaccuracies you find using the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of this page. Your helpful feedback helps us improve our system and deliver more precise content. When you find an article of interest here, please look for the full and extensive coverage of this topic in traditional news sources, as they are written by professional journalists that we try to support, not replace. We appreciate your understanding and assistance.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Emails Leaked: How Passenger Luggage Became a Side Income for Airport Workers
Polish MEP: “Dear Leftists - China is laughing at you, Russia is laughing, India is laughing”
Western Europe Records Hottest June on Record
BRICS Expands Membership with Indonesia and Ten New Partner Countries
Elon Musk Founds a Party Following a Poll on X: "You Wanted It – You Got It!"
China’s Central Bank Consults European Peers on Low-Rate Strategies
France Requests Airlines to Cut Flights at Paris Airports Amid Planned Air Traffic Controller Strike
Poland Implements Border Checks Amid Growing Migration Tensions
Emirates Airline Expands Market Share with New $20 Million Campaign
Amazon Reaches Milestone with Deployment of One Millionth Robot
Yulia Putintseva Calls for Spectator Ejection at Wimbledon Over Safety Concerns
House Oversight Committee Subpoenas Former Jill Biden Aide Amid Investigation into Alleged Concealment of President Biden's Cognitive Health
Amazon Reaches Major Automation Milestone with Over One Million Robots
Extreme Heat Wave Sweeps Across Europe, Hitting Record Temperatures
Meta Announces Formation of Ambitious AI Unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs
Robots Compete in Football Tournament in China Amid Injuries
China Unveils Miniature Insect-Like Surveillance Drone
Marc Marquez Claims Victory at Dutch Grand Prix Amidst Family Misfortune
Germany Votes to Suspend Family Reunification for Asylum Seekers
Budapest Pride Parade Draws 200,000 Participants Amid Government Ban
Southern Europe Experiences Extreme Heat
Xiaomi's YU7 SUV Launch Garners Record Pre-Orders Amid Market Challenges
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez's Lavish Wedding in Venice
Russia Launches Largest Air Assault on Ukraine Since Invasion
Massive Anti-Government Protests Erupt in Belgrade
Iran Executes Alleged Israeli Spies and Arrests Hundreds Amid Post-War Crackdown
Hungary's Prime Minister Criticizes NATO's Role in Ukraine
EU TO HUNGARY: LET THEM PRIDE OR PREP FOR SHADE. ORBÁN TO EU: STAY IN YOUR LANE AND FIX YOUR OWN MESS.
Hungarian Scientist to Conduct 30 Research Experiments on the International Space Station
NATO Members Agree to 5% Defense Spending Target by 2035
NATO Leaders Endorse Plan for Increased Defence Spending
U.S. Crude Oil Prices Drop Below $65 Amid Market Volatility
International Astronaut Team Launched to Space Station
Macron and Merz: Europe must arm itself in an unstable world
Germany and Italy Under Pressure to Repatriate $245bn of Gold from US Vaults
Iran Intensifies Crackdown on Alleged Mossad Operatives After Sabotage Claims
Trump Praises Iran’s ‘Very Weak’ Response After U.S. Strikes and Presses Israel to Pursue Peace
Oil Prices Set to Surge After US Strikes Iran
BA and Singapore Airlines Cancel Dubai Flights Amid Middle East Tensions
Trump Faces Backlash from MAGA Base Over Iran Strikes
Meta Bets $14 B on Alexandr Wang to Drive AI Ambitions
FedEx Founder Fred Smith, ‘Heart and Soul’ of the Company, Dies at 80
Chinese Factories Shift Away from U.S. Amid Trump‑Era Tariffs
Pimco Seizes Opportunity in Japan’s Dislocated Bond Market
Labubu Doll Drives Pop Mart to Status as China’s Most Valuable Toy Maker
Global Coal Demand Defies Paris Accord Goals
United States Conducts Precision Strikes on Iran’s Nuclear Sites
US strikes Iran nuclear sites, Trump says
Telegram Founder: I Will Leave My Fortune to Over 100 of My Children
16 Billion Login Credentials Leaked in Unprecedented Cybersecurity Breach
×