The Weekly Standard’s Arsenal to Fight Falsehoods: ‘Facts, Logic and Reason’ -
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, 1972
When Breitbart News ran a blaring headline last week suggesting
that new evidence “vindicates” President Trump’s still-baseless claims that former President Barack Obama put him and his team under surveillance …
When a Fox News contributor reported that Fox had “learned”
that the British government spied on Mr. Trump at Mr. Obama’s behest, though the network later said it had learned no such thing (because there’s no evidence it happened) …
When the White House press secretary repeated that flimsy (or, as the British put it, “utterly ridiculous”) claim from his powerful lectern …
It’s the end result — if not necessarily the intended result — of a dream
that American conservatives began pursuing more than 60 years ago: to break the informational hegemony of the mainstream news media.
Mr. Hayes said he made a simple case to Mr. Anschutz, who bought The Weekly Standard from Mr. Murdoch in 2009: “Let’s add more resources and make sure
that we’re basing our arguments on facts, logic and reason.”
Mr. Hayes shares the viewpoint of another prominent Wisconsin conservative, Charlie Sykes, the #NeverTrump talk radio host who declared last year
that he and his fellow conservative media stalwarts had been too successful in delegitimizing the mainstream news media.
