Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Photos FacebookThe company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned.Called “Conservative Country,” the Facebook page
The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned.
There’s no hint of Conservative Country’s provenance on its Facebook “about” page, which reads in total, “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” But in 2017 Conservative Country was linked as the official Facebook page for a now defunct political news site using the same name and logo, ConservativeCountry.net.
Story continuesRealClearPolitics has taken major pains to be seen as nonpartisan and non-ideological in its reporting. The site’s news reporting focuses on horserace-style coverage of elections, evenly weighing opinions from both parties, while the RealClear pages curate a mix of stories and opinion articles from sites across the political spectrum.
Although it shies away from some of the most insane conspiracy theories—there’s no mention of Q or Seth Rich—the Conservative Country Facebook page is also no stranger to fake news. During the 2016 campaign season, the page drove traffic to Macedonian sites known for publishing outrageously false stories to reap ad profits. It’s unclear whether those links appeared by negligence or design.
A count of the Conservative Country posts featuring external links suggests the page’s main purpose is driving traffic back to RealClear’s own properties. Some 240 of the 1,070 external links posted on the page since January 2017 are to RealClear Media’s flagship title, RealClearPolitics. Fox News comes in a distance second with 71 links, followed by 41 posts linking to the conservative commentary site American Thinker.
Others don’t see it as a problem. The more extreme, bigoted memes appearing on the Facebook page are “certainly not a good look for RealClear Media,” Dan Kennedy, an associate professor and media ethicist at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, told The Daily Beast. “But I don’t think it calls into question the credibility of RealClearPolitics.”
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