Welcome to ConWebWatch on Substack!
After a couple decades of watchdogging right-wing media, it's time for an upgrade.
I began ConWebWatch in 2000 as the advent of the Internet created new sources of news that pretended to be fair and balanced but were, in fact, just peddlers of right-wing politics using less-than-rigorous methods — as well as so-called media watchdogs that were actually just about attacking any outlet that doesn’t peddle right-wing talking points:
WorldNetDaily originally had some journalistic credentials through its founder Joseph Farah, but it quickly devolved into a generator of right-wing conspiracy theories and fake news, the false Obama birther narrative and false claims around the death of Seth Rich being the most notorious.
The Media Research Center pretends to be an objective “media research” organization, though it only attacks non-right-wing media and never calls out the obvious political bias of Fox News and other right-wing outlets.
Newsmax was created by Christopher Ruddy as a way to spread anti-Clinton conspiracy theories in the 1990s. It has tried to act like a credible media organization, but it still has spasms of right-wing partisanship, demonstrated recently by its spreading of false election-fraud conspiracy theories after the 2020 presidential election, which has resulted in defamation lawsuits that it’s continuing to fight.
Along the way, we lost a couple of our targets: CNSNews.com abruptly shut down in 2023, apparently because its owner, the Media Research Center, got tired of the charade of running a right-wing talking-points factory masquerading as a “news” operation. Accuracy in Media, a media-bashing pioneer, got overtaken by others who did that sort of thing better and gave up media criticism, turning itself into a Project Veritas clone relying on deceptively recorded video to attack non-right-wingers (helped along by hiring Project Veritas veteran Adam Guilette as its leader).
While the ConWeb has evolved, however, the technology behind ConWebWatch hadn’t. ConWebBlog ran on the same archaic platform it was founded on in 2005, and that it eventually become so unreliable to readers that earlier this year, it was transitioned to WordPress software and its own domain name — the benefits of which are mobile-friendly content, easier and more reliable searches and new tags so that the most reported-upon people in the ConWeb can be found quickly. The blog couldn’t be exported as a whole to the new platform, unfortunately, which means I’ve been adding old posts into WordPress one at a time. I’m one-third of the way there, but with more than 20,000 posts, it will take a while. ConWebBlog will remain the more rapid-response arm of this operation.
It’s time for a behind-the-scenes upgrade for ConWebWatch as well. Since its inception, it was been created in an old HTML design program that came to be increasingly archaic though still functional. The ancient computer running the program died a few weeks ago, which is why there have been no new ConWebWatch articles lately — thus, the move to Substack, which will bring new capabilities and mobile-friendly content. Legacy ConWebWatch articles will remain on that website for the time being, as the website itself works fine, and you can find it by following the Legacy ConWebWatch link on the front page. Articles are free to read, but you are more than welcome to contribute to help keep ConWebWatch alive.
This upgraded setup is what ConWebWatch will be running on into the future. There’s lots of bias, fake news and bad reporting to document, so keep reading!
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