The Poynter Institute, a non-profit school of journalism based in St. Petersburg, Florida that claims to champion "freedom of expression," recently put forth an "index of unreliable news sites" that, as you might expect, is just another blacklist of mostly independent news outlets that dare to challenge the status quo – which means the Left wants to silence them all.
Included among the 515 media outlets on Poynter's blacklist, which the school has since retracted after it sparked massive controversy, is none other than Natural News. Also featured on Poynter's blacklist are Breitbart News, Project Veritas, Zero Hedge, LifeSiteNews, and Judicial Watch, all of which have played some part in exposing the corruption of the deep state and its fake-news mouthpieces, hence why they're being targeted.
Poynter had initially claimed that the creation of its blacklist was necessary to fight back against "hate speech," "falsehoods," and "political messaging" that the establishment finds offensive. Another stated purpose of this blacklist was to convince advertisers to basically stop doing business with each of the news outlets on the list.
"Most ad-tech dashboards make it hard for businesses to prevent their ads from appearing on (and funding) disreputable sites," reads the announcement that accompanied Poynter's blacklist. "Marketers can create blacklists, but many of those lists have been out-of-date or incomplete."
"Aside from journalists, researchers and news consumers, we hope that the UnNews index will be useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation," the now-retracted announcement went on to state, the implication being that this effort at targeted bullying is somehow meritorious, and in the best interests of safeguarding "truth."
But the public quickly recognized Poynter's "UnNews" blacklist as exactly what it was: an ill-spirited attempt to not only tarnish the reputations of the names included on it, but also put them all out of business, if possible.
"This is straight-up McCarthyism," writes John Nolte for Breitbart News. "This is nothing less than the return of the 1950s' blacklisting crusade against those who hold inappropriate, unacceptable, and unapproved opinions."
For more related news, be sure to check out Faked.news, Censorship.news, and PoliticalCorrectness.news.
If leftists are calling it "unreliable news," chances are it's actually true
So who was actually behind the creation of Poynter's UnNews blacklist? As it turns out, Melissa "Mish" Zimdars, an assistant professor at Merrimack College near Boston, Massachusetts, populated it entirely on her own, based on her own opinions and biases.
At the bottom of the now-deleted blacklist was a single source for something called "OpenSources," a blank website that Zimdars apparently owns. But because this website is blank, we have zero information as to the methodology that Zimdars used to create the blacklist in the first place, other than the fact that Zimdars apparently believes that the now-exposed Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an authoritative source of truth about "hate."
Zimdars, as you may recall, is the same individual behind the infamous "PropOrNot" kill list that was created back in 2016, before Donald Trump won the presidency. Since leftists like Zimdars assumed that Hillary Clinton would win, they had planned to target every publisher on the PropOrNot kill list to have them all taken out through criminal charges, which obviously never came to fruition.
Now, their Plan B is to try to destroy all independent media outlets by depriving them of their paying advertisers. And if that doesn't work, then Big Tech's censorship agenda, which involves shadowbanning and deplatforming conservative news outlets to create "tolerance," will presumably take care of the rest.
The good news, of course, is that Poynter was caught and called out for attempting yet again to stifle free speech, which prompted Barbara Allen, its managing editor, to issue a sort-of apology for ever even publishing it.
"Soon after we published, we received complaints from those on the list and readers who objected to the inclusion of certain sites, and the exclusion of others," Allen explains.
"We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology. We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report."
Allen went on to explain that Poynter has removed its "unreliable sites list" until it's able "to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria," claiming that it was merely "a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that [purport] to offer news."
"There is simply no question that for over five years, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, ABC, CBS, PBS, NBC, MSNBC, Politico, BuzzFeed, etc., have relentlessly and deliberately misled the American people on the biggest stories of the day," reveals Nolte about the real purveyors of unreliable news, and how all of them have lied about hoaxes such as Trayvon Martin, Russia collusion, Brett Kavanaugh, the Covington Catholic High School boys, and so much more.
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