By Hunter
The Daily Kos (9/20/17)
We were all distracted by the sheer terribleness of the Republican efforts to strip health insurance, and Republican efforts to specifically deport children, and Republican efforts to defend Trump’s campaign team from being investigated as conspirators assisting the intelligence efforts of a foreign government. Then there were the
What’s the point of going to such efforts to hide a party-produced website as an independent media outlet? There’s only one: to intentionally mislead voters.
Republican efforts to pack the courts by systemically nullifying the very same rules they used to block the last Democratic president from appointing judges to the seats now still open, and the Republican efforts to ignore blatant cash payments to Trump for his policy choices, and take-your-pick from the rest of it. While all that was going on the Republican Governors Association has been getting into the fake news business. And not in a small way, either:
“The Republican Governors Association has quietly launched an online publication that looks like a media outlet and is branded as such on social media. The Free Telegraph blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively. It asks readers to sign up for breaking news alerts. It launched in the summer bearing no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.”
The effort is led by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who has had time to recover from his embarrassing performance as would-be presidential candidate and has now fully returned to his daytime duties of screwing everyday Americans in ways both small and petty.
The game plan here is relatively straightforward. The Republican Governors Association has created a “news outlet” under the nondescript “news outlet” name of Free Telegraph, one of those generic but geographically abstract names of the sort that a Macedonian teen might use to convince U.S. voters that their laptop computer is in fact a Super Credible News Outlet. The association did so in such a way as to intentionally obscure ownership of the site. …
(Commoner Call photo by Mark L. Taylor, 2017. Open source and free to use with link to www.the commonercall.org)