The relentless purge of intellectual honesty from academia is continuing unabated. We have just spent a week watching university faculty coddling emotionally weak students who couldn’t handle the election results, not because they care, but to reinforce the indoctrination lesson that all things leftist are good and all to the right are bad.
It is no surprise that a college professor compiled this list, what is galling is that the Los Angeles Times “reported” on it without mentioning that it’s complete garbage.
During the election, many people fell prey to fake news stories on social media — even the president-elect ended up retweeting fake statistics. A professor of communication has created a list of unreliable news sites to help people do better.
Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, put together a publicly available Google doc cataloging “False, misleading, clickbait-y and satirical ‘news’ sources.” It’s been making the rounds on social media as people seek to cleanse their newsfeeds of misinformation.
The gist of the article is that the professor really knows what she’s doing and the tips she provides for spotting fake news sites are valid so her list must be legit.
Professor Che Shirt (I’m guessing, but probably right) is also proving that the kinds of people who take academics seriously are basically paste-eating stupid, as she includes obvious (and hilarious) satire sites like The Onion and Reductress.
What is dangerous, and I don’t often use that word when discussing politics, is the professor’s inclusion of Red State, The Blaze and Independent Journal Review (IJR) as “fake” sites.
Red State and The Blaze are decidedly conservative, while IJR is a bit more centrist but has employed arch-conservative writers over the years. What none of them are is fake. They are on the list simply because they’ll present center-right viewpoints without the hand-wringing caveats and disclaimers that accompany any non-leftist slants on other sites.
The Huffington Post, which is essentially Clickhole for faux intellectuals, probably publishes more bias-induced falsehood in an hour than the above three sites combined might accidentally post in a year, isn’t on the list. As I write this, here is the sidebar on HuffPo’s front page (click to enlarge):
Real click-bait free, Pulitzer-level journalism there, no?
Professor Hitler’s Mustache wants to remove all legitimacy from right-leaning opinions. She and her ilk have been doing this for decades, of course, they just used to be more stealthy about it. The last eight years have emboldened them, but they’ve been exposed to a more discerning audience in the process.
Maybe now we can begin the fight to stop having stupid people “teach” our kids.
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