Politics

Harvard smears conservative sites as ‘fake news’

HarvardOn Friday, the Daily Caller reported that Harvard University has recommended a list of so-called “fake news” sites to its students that smears practically every conservative site on the Internet as being an illegitimate source of information.

According to the Daily Caller:

The Daily Caller, The Drudge Report, Breitbart News, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Free Beacon, Independent Journal Review (IJR), The Blaze and The Weekly Standard are all on the list, deemed illegitimate for reasons such as “clickbait,” “bias,” or “unreliable.” Liberal news sources like BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Vox.com and Salon aren’t on the list.

The list, compiled by Merrimack College associate professor Melissa Zimdars, is recommended to students as part of a Harvard library guide on “Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda.” The list is linked under a banner titled, “Identifying Fake News Sites.” A comment next to the link calls the document a “Huge list of fake news sites.”

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As previously reported, liberal journalists have struggled to come up with a concise definition of “fake news,” even as they declare war on it. Some liberal journalists have lumped in legitimate news organizations with objectively false websites, leading to concerns that a crackdown on “fake news” will be used by liberals to silence their conservative counterparts.

The list also includes this site.

Robert Spencer added:

Merrimack College’s Melissa Zimdars and those who take her list seriously at Harvard and elsewhere apparently think that if they call every perspective they dislike “fake news,” they will be able to destroy the influence of such perspectives, and attain the hegemony of their own point of view. The only problem with this is that their own point of view contains so many obvious falsehoods and fallacies (Islam is a religion of peace, poverty causes terrorism, etc.) that it will continue to falter at the bar of reality, and people will continue to look to these so-called “fake news” sites for the truth.

Note also that Zimdars labels my own news and commentary site on jihad activity in all its forms, Jihad Watch, as “Unknown.” This classification she explains thusly: “Unknown (tag unidentified): Sources that have not yet been analyzed (many of these were suggested by readers/users or are found on other lists and resources). Help us expand our resource by providing us information!” So a site that purports to identify “fake news” relies on unsubstantiated rumor, hearsay and innuendo to make its classifications. Doesn’t that make Zimdars’ Harvard-endorsed list a quintessential example of…fake news?

This list is just another example of an increasingly obvious fact: in the United States, the Left has come a long way from the Free Speech Movement of the Sixties. As a movement today it is frankly authoritarian, intolerant of dissent, and increasingly intent on demonizing and destroying its opponents, rather than engaging them in rational debate. Liberal journalist Kirsten Powers, author of The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, recalls that when she was growing up, “I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting that conservative views were illegitimate and unworthy of debate.”

Harvard, by the way, isn’t the only college to smear conservative websites, according to Campus Reform, who tells us:

At least two other universities, the City University of New York (CUNY) and Radford University, have published the same list of allegedly fake news sources on their school websites.

Perhaps it’s time conservative bloggers consider legal action to put an end to this insanity.

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Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad
Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad – Source: Author (used with permission)

 

 

Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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