Since then, the conservative movement has clung to that story as evidence that Facebook is suppressing conservative views in a larger sense. At Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, Ted Cruz brought up the Gizmodo story and then proceeded to rattle off an insane laundry list of persecution fantasy grievances: They “shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page,” blocked “two dozen Catholic pages,” and, of course, banned Diamond and Silk. Imagine.
The problem with this criticism is that there is a reason why Breitbart and Newsmax shouldn’t feature in any “news” section: They’re not trustworthy or legitimate news sources. They are full of shite. A conservative or even a centrist might say, well, that’s what they’d say about Splinter or Gizmodo, so you have to take them seriously, or you don’t count either. They would say that!
But they’d be wrong; just because enough people say it loudly enough doesn’t make it true. Most medium-to-large partisan liberal news organizations have higher editorial standards than nearly all of the conservative outlets that consider themselves the mainstream outlets’ counterparts. (This is, in fact, why attempts to create “a Breitbart of the left” never work; most liberal journalists don’t want to work somewhere where fidelity to the truth takes a backseat to blatant propagandizing and agenda-pushing.)
> *Since then, the conservative movement has clung to that story as evidence that Facebook is suppressing conservative views in a larger sense. At Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, Ted Cruz brought up the Gizmodo story and then proceeded to rattle off an insane laundry list of persecution fantasy grievances: They “shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page,” blocked “two dozen Catholic pages,” and, of course, banned Diamond and Silk. Imagine.*
>
> *The problem with this criticism is that there is a reason why Breitbart and Newsmax shouldn’t feature in any “news” section: They’re not trustworthy or legitimate news sources. They are full of shite. A conservative or even a centrist might say, well, that’s what they’d say about Splinter or Gizmodo, so you have to take them seriously, or you don’t count either. They would say that!*
>
> *But they’d be wrong; just because enough people say it loudly enough doesn’t make it true. Most medium-to-large partisan liberal news organizations have higher editorial standards than nearly all of the conservative outlets that consider themselves the mainstream outlets’ counterparts. (This is, in fact, why attempts to create “a Breitbart of the left” never work; most liberal journalists don’t want to work somewhere where fidelity to the truth takes a backseat to blatant propagandizing and agenda-pushing.)*
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