Closely related to why RINOs are RINOs is why many conservatives in the media avoid hot-button issues like election corruption. As with most perplexing issues in politics, it comes down to follow the money, nothing more complicated than that. Media has to get funding somewhere, and most outlets on the right are funded by GOP billionaires, ads, or both.
Perhaps the main reason conservative media avoids discussing election corruption is due to the fear of lawsuits by voting machine companies. Dominion sued Fox News and forced it to settle for almost a billion dollars, an amount of money that would put most smaller right-leaning outlets out of business. The Democrat-appointed judge who handled the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News granted a summary judgment motion for Dominion which resulted in jury instructions stating that all of the statements made by attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, as well as all negative claims made on the network about Dominion, were false. So there’s no way a jury would have found for Fox News based on that, it was coerced into settling.
A trial has been set in September 2024 for Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Newsmax. Unlike Fox News, Newsmax has far less money. The same judge who oversaw the Fox News case is hearing this lawsuit. Smartmatic has also sued Newsmax.
Conservative media is unable to get funding from government grants, since unlike left-wing media, they cannot accept all the woke terms that come tied to the grants. So they’re forced to rely on eccentric GOP billionaires and advertising.
Some of the GOP billionaires run corporations that must comply with woke government policies such as HR requirements, and others hire illegal immigrants. Some are nervous about being associated with people like Donald Trump who are being wrongly targeted by politically motivated prosecutors. They don’t have the time to exhaustively research the ins and the outs of the legal system to fully understand the complexities of how the left has mastered lawfare, and so it all comes down to which advisor has their ear and what that advisor wants to tell them. Many are very risk averse — such as their financial advisors — and know nothing about law.
The left viciously goes after these funders, most who would prefer to remain behind the scenes. For example, PR Watch declared that The Daily Caller “has several ties to white nationalists.” While no one on the right actually believes that’s true — the outlet is one of the top respected sites on the right — many donors may be nervous about having all future mentions of their name in the news being tied to something like that. It’s the exact same reason judges never rule there was voter disenfranchisement of Republicans; they’ve kept out of the public eye and don’t want to be only known for the rest of their lives as “election deniers” with all the negative career-affecting ramifications that come with the label.
Many conservative sites get a large percentage of their traffic from Facebook. Facebook heavily penalizes accounts that post about election corruption and COVID-19. I’ve had multiple people tell me that is why Breitbart stopped running many articles on those two issues. Hopefully things are changing now that Elon Musk bought X and is greatly expanding advertising. He’s setting it up so journalists don’t need to work for an outlet, but can make money directly from X ads on their pages and by offering paid subscriptions.
The ramifications have a snowball effect. Journalists on the left are able to collaborate and piggyback off each other, colluding to bombard the public with coordinated stories. ProPublica is notorious for this kind of collaboration with major left-wing publications. Meanwhile, journalists on the right are severely limited; I’ve had numerous conservative writers tell me their publications will not let them write about election corruption. While it’s great for me personally — I’ve been able to carve out a specialty and acquire a lot of readers — I can’t possibly be everywhere at once covering the issue.
The sad thing about it is even if these sites survive for now avoiding these topics, the squeeze is never going to stop from the left; if you give them an inch they will take a mile.
And it’s not a successful strategy for maintaining conservative readership. The conservative base eventually figures it out and moves on. The only reason Fox News has not significantly declined is because it still carries some of the best conservative commentators in the country. The station took a hit in 2020 after calling Arizona for Joe Biden early on election night in the presidential election, but has rebounded back better than in previous non-election years.
The left uses this fear by media publishers to pretend that conservatives don’t believe there is widespread election corruption or aren’t deeply concerned about issues like COVID-19. But reputable polls show otherwise. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was beloved all over the country as one of the most promising conservative governors ever, but he miscalculated thinking the right would desert Trump over election fraud and the politically motivated prosecutions and support him for president. Instead, the conservative base is doubling down sticking with Trump.
What can be done about it? Start reading and sharing articles from news outlets that have figured out how to survive despite the censorship. Use search engines other than Google like startpage.com to find conservative sites that Google won’t carry in news. Stop reposting bloviating, highly paid “influencers” who merely repeat tired old talking points about the latest shiny penny news such as transgenders, news that is considered safe, while pretending election corruption doesn’t exist.
Right now the left is on track to cheat again in the 2024 election. They’ve been able to stop many election integrity laws from being passed around the country. So unless this problem is addressed and fixed instead of ignored, we’re likely to go backwards.