The Problem Isn't The Media, It's The People Who Consume It

If you were to take Donald Trump at his word, the media is completely biased against him, and in the pocket of Hillary Clinton. Conservatives constantly complain that the media is biased against them, and Fox News claims to be "fair and balanced" which we know is a lie.

Then you have the far-right and far-left which are convinced that the media are controlled by the elite and "Zionists" - a thinly veiled reference to a range of anti-Semitic conspiracy ideas. These individuals range from Alex Jones' Infowars and Natural News on the right, and a range of wingnut sites like The Anti-Media on the left.

Unless a website is funded by private or public groups like NPR is, that site's existence depends on traffic and ad revenue. Because of that, both traditional and new media sources tend to produce articles based on what people will click on.

This is why the media runs stories on cute puppy videos lifted from Reddit, or the latest celebrity gossip - because that's what grabs people's attention and boosts their ratings. If ratings or web traffic are low, they can't make as much money.

Most of these media outlets depend on advertising to stay afloat, and in the age of Facebook, anyone can create a website and claim that they're a reputable news source or even a health professional. Many also state that they will tell you the stories and truth the mainstream media won't, but they're selling a snake oil sideshow carnival act for the people who are convinced the main circus act is a scam.
Upworthy or World Star Hip Hop-styled tabloid headlines overwhelm quality content from NPR or the New York Times, and most people tend to gravitate to them, let alone want to pay a subscription for material that other sites will just lift and recycle with sensationalized titles like "Fox News Is SUICIDAL After THIS Happened!"

As much as we may despise that practice of clickbait "journalism," in a time where anyone can pretend to be a media outlet, it's often easy money for individuals who can't or won't work a "real job." It's not hard to sit online scraping content from other places and passing it off as your own, and some individuals will stop at nothing to keep that revenue flow alive.

A common retort I hear from the left is that Fox News is the biggest cable news outlet, but younger people tend to get their information online, not from watching TV. We usually consume what appears on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook, and I can tell you that I really only watch MSNBC for Rachel Maddow.

If you truly want quality media, you have to put your click where your mouth is. Learn what is a reputable news source, what is an opinion site like we are, and who is just trying to profit from your time online. If you find that a site is unreliable or secretly promoting an anti-government agenda like Cop Block, remove them from your news feed and move on. Another example is Occupy Democrats which I have repeatedly spoken out against. Occupy Democrats posted an image that does little else other than slut-shame Melania Trump. 357,000 people have shared this image from their page, plus whatever other pages who have used it or made their own versions of it. That's a horrible example for liberals to make of themselves, and meanwhile, the owners of Occupy Democrats and their friends are laughing all the way to the bank. If you search Opensecrets.org, there is not one single donation made to any political campaign by either owner of the website, or the Occupy Democrats organization which advertises itself as a political cause. Yes, this is nothing more than a for-profit organization trying to make a fortune off politics.

Contribute money to your local NPR station or patronize local businesses that support them. Read websites that don't constantly fail Politifact scrutiny, and always, always be sure to fact check for yourself.

Why I Left Forward Progressives

Over three years ago when I was writing solely on this blog and had just a few hundred followers, I was approached by the editor and web manager for what is now Forward Progressives. I was asked if I would like to be a "co-founder" of a website that would be the answer to the clickbait bullshit from sites like Addicting Info and others.

As an amateur writer, I was excited about this new opportunity, especially after running into a dead end and very brief unpaid stint at Politicususa, which told me they were dumping all revenue into further building their site. At that time, my contact "Thomas Barr" and his business partners were running a number of pages like One Million Strong Against Mitt Romney in 2012, or unofficial fan pages for Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and others which they apparently used to post links for Politicususa for kickbacks.

This opportunity seemed like the great break I was hoping for. I was honestly honored that sources I naively bought into considered me to be qualified to graduate from a lowly blog site about punk rock, politics, fraud and whiskey to what I thought was the big time in liberal journalism.

One of the factors that I believe made me a candidate for their website was my utter distaste for Addicting Info and Being Liberal - as their owners and I had repeatedly clashed over reuse of my content without proper attribution. My friend John Henry was also offered a position writing for Forward Progressives, but only if he wrote under a pseudonym so as not draw unwanted attention to our website, which he declined to do.

At first, things went fairly smoothly and I was awestruck at the amount of traffic my articles were attracting. Before long, we had amassed a respectable squad of potential writers, and things were looking great. There were articles that went viral, our pages were booming, and we reached the front page of Reddit once. When I received my paycheck after the first month of writing that was enough to buy a new laptop, I really thought that this was amazing venture I could finally believe in.

Things started changing when we appeared on the radar of political blogging. While the website had a very large reach, priority was only given to "Allen Clifton" - and some of my articles while our other writers were put on the back burner, often for days. Even when their stories were finally published by "Thomas Barr," they were given little promotion and one by one, nearly every one of those writers quit in disgust.

Eventually, almost nobody wanted to write for us, and the few people I managed to recruit didn't last long. This venture was supposed to be a collaboration of writers that were the progressive answer to the clickbait headlines that littered Facebook, but we rapidly became everything that I hated. There was almost zero collaboration or discussion among writers, and "Allen Clifton" did very little to promote others on our team, myself included. Only Arik Bjorn and his delightfully esoteric Sunday column remained, much to the ire of "Allen Clifton" who had asked me to help him force Arik (and others) out.

Within the first couple of months of Forward Progressives, I had also been informed by the website manager, "Thomas Barr" that the site had come under attack from individuals he believed to be connected to our alleged competition, Addicting Info, among others. I was asked to do what I could to take them down, which I was more than happy to do.

At his instruction, I employed a number of techniques that he suggested, including reporting their racier articles to Google AdSense for any violation we could find. A couple of years ago, Addicting Info went silent for a couple of days with no new material as their founder flew from Santa Rosa, California to Chicago to apparently meet with a buyer.

I can only conclude that we reported the Addicting Info organization so hard that they lost all of their advertising revenue sources due to the complaints, and were bought out by a guy calling himself Icarus Verum, who has the real name of Daniel Gouldman. Daniel seems to also hold partial or complete control of a number of liberal websites like If You Only News, Winning Democrats, Reverb Press, Groopspeak and others.

After almost 3 years of battling this juggernaut and letting me take most of the heat, "Thomas Barr" claimed he didn't want to fight this battle anymore. While I was the one who had been relentlessly cyberstalked and reported into 30 day Facebook bans, he told me that people from the Addicting Info cabal had supposedly gotten too close to finding out things about him and his family in Minnesota - and that it was time to shut up.

Before my relationship with Forward Progressives ended with a group chat in January, the website had descended into clickbait stories, far away from the original mission I had signed up for. Articles I had written fell on the back burner, priority was given to Allen Clifton's latest recap of Sarah Palin's pleas for attention, and nobody else wanted to work with us.

What I found strange through this entire experience is that I was almost always the focus of the attacks by the Addicting Info army of trolls, and not Thomas Barr, Allen Clifton, or the site's owner, Logan. Things like my occasional donations to people in need were made the focus of Facebook pages like The Adventures of Beefaroni Tits or Whiskey Dick & The Most Ethical Blog.

Imagine having a group of Facebook pages devoted to harassing you and your friends, or even making fun of your dog? Thomas Clay Jr who commented on that picture was one of the people that worked with Addicting Info and others to relentlessly bully or even attempt to extort individuals into cooperating with them. He is currently the owner of the website American News X, an organization that includes a former admin of my page, Steve Ahearn who was booted after continually begging for money and harassing people.

This is what I continually dealt with since confronting the owners of Addicting Info and Being Liberal back in 2012, although I have enjoyed a brief respite since ending my relationship with Forward Progressives. While "Matthew Desmond" has repeatedly told me that neither he, nor any of his associates have had anything to do with the harassment, the evidence I've seen shows that isn't true.

Anyhow, back to Forward Progressives. Despite the fact that we were supposed to be politically "objective," Allen Clifton insisted on writing one condescending article about Bernie Sanders after another. At the same time, he also created Facebook pages like "Being Progressive" which were intended as an outlet for other links that appeared to be supportive of Bernie. I was instructed, after Thomas Barr gained access to a large pro-Bernie Facebook page run by Annabel Park, to write links specifically tailored for that audience.

This is when I knew that Forward Progressives had jumped the shark. Despite being told I was joining a site that was going to be the answer to the clickbait bullshit that I hated, we had become just like the rest. Logan and the others even claimed that FP was based in San Francisco, CA despite being a registered LLC in Ohio.

When that day in January came that I began writing for my new website and the first article was published, I received a Facebook message from the others that I was being let go. In exchange, I would not talk about the operations of Forward Progressives, and I would continue to receive payments for the traffic that led to my articles, and the site overall.

Those promises were broken, and the sites I helped to build were taken away from me. I have repeatedly tried to rectify these issues, only to be ignored. So now I am releasing this story, and I have recorded all of the conversations with these individuals in case they want to state this story is false.

Let the chips fall where they may.

Yes, Virginia, There Are Liberal Bullies

Over the past few years, a number of people, especially my friend John Henry, have been singled out for harassment by a group of people who call themselves liberal page admins or liberal trolls. Other people like the owner of Americans Against The Tea Party were the targets of extortion attempts which tried to get them to turn over the access to their Facebook page.

These attacks are nothing new, and have existed from the beginning of our page, but they have ramped up their efforts to include attempting to breach the website instead of simply being a nuisance and insulting myself and friends of mine.

As one example, here is a recent screenshot of yet another Facebook page created solely to annoy John Henry, and nothing else.

Why would they do that? Because these individuals are obsessed with harassing us and anyone who stands in their way.

My friend Erin Nanasi has also been bullied by anonymous Facebook pages with names like "Pot Meet Kettle" (now offline) who have mocked her and her family - all in an attempt to force her and her blog off Facebook, even after she stopped writing for my former website, Forward Progressives.

Since that time when I first called out these "liberal" websites and others like them for being as unethical and slimy as the conservatives they blog about, I have had my personal Facebook suspended multiple times after waves of false reports, as has John Henry and other people in our circle of friends.

Why do people who call themselves liberals do such things and why would they perpetuate falsehoods, distort the truth, or be just as ugly as the right-wing Tea Party conservatives they claim to be better than? It's simple, it's all about profit, and not furthering the liberal cause.

In the liberal blogosphere, it is a cutthroat game of tentative alliances between page owners who work together to maximize page traffic to their websites - or take payments from site owners to post their links. These are people who promote themselves as champions of the liberal cause against the right-wing, but care more about the money they can make from web traffic to their articles instead of publishing factual information that would further the left's agenda - the same thing Gawker has done with scandal stories for the past 12 years.

Utilizing these sketchy SEO tactics isn't a unique thing, other liberal bloggers like Lou Colagiovanni, Omar Rivero of Occupy Democrats and Samuel Warde (they all know each other) have all resorted to proxy alliances with a group of individuals that will harass and falsely report people who will not work with them, especially anyone who is critical of their brand of hyperbolic and false "liberal news."

Around the same time we were hit with the cyberattacks on the website I formerly wrote for, we were also the subject of an article by a blogger we believe to be the leader of the group that was originally hired by the folks at Addicting Info to target my Facebook page for harassment. Thomas Clay, Jr of American News X wrote a blog which falsely accused Forward Progressives of being a Tea Party plant, and relied on falsely reported Zoominfo data to make their claim.

In fact, they even boasted about it on one of a number of pages that have been blocked from interacting with mine and Forward Progressives.

Seriously, who sits around all day and makes up Bitstrips mocking people in hopes they can drive that person to the point of quitting political blogging? As I've said before, these aren't conservatives to the best of my knowledge, these are individuals who portray themselves as valiant liberal writers leading the charge against the Tea Party and the GOP. Except they aren't. They're really little more than political grifters hoping to make some easy cash off gullible liberals who will believe anything they see on social media.

In fact, one of the writers for American News X is one Steve Ahearn, the owner of a Facebook page called Stop Telling Lies About Liberals And We'll Stop Telling The Truth About You, and a former admin of my old Whiskey and the Morning After Blog page. He was finally removed from my page after he and others mentioned continually harassed an acquaintance of mine, David Haberman, over starting a GoFundMe account to be able to afford dental surgery. This is all while Steve Ahearn constantly begged for money over a period of years, claiming that his children were hungry, his car was out of gas, or that their power was about to be shut off. This is why he continually makes pages just troll mine, because former drug addicts who believe in conspiracy nonsense are so reputable, right?

Mr. Ahearn, along with his friends who include Kevin Plamondon, Thomas Clay, Jr and Sean Conners of American News X have apparently been working together to harass anyone who will not work with them. They claim I am "jealous" of their "success" but these are people who gauge their accomplishments on the size of their pages, and the size of the ad revenue checks they receive each month.

It's a sad story for liberal politics when people are so driven by profit and notoriety that they resort to the attacks that I and other have dealt with for the last 3+ years. The problem is it isn't going to stop anytime soon, as you can see by the obsessed comments from Sean Conners below, which I am screen-capping in chase he decides to delete them.

Bullies try to use back channels and they try to isolate people so that they can win. I have been the recipient of these attacks ever since I first started calling out Being Liberal and their friends back in 2012.

In case they want to continue their campaign of bullying and extortion attempts, I have many more screenshots of their antics that I will be more than happy to post as updates to this story.

I am never, ever going away. After 3+ years, I'd think you would have learned. UPDATE 10/11/2016: My email account is being spammed for porn and other subscriptions by a Louisville, KY IP address. I have reached out to the IP provider.

@TWC_Help @TWC the owner of IP address 74.141.223.101 is harrassing me and spamming me with porn subscriptions. Please address this. pic.twitter.com/CDymYKSgo6

— (((Manny Schewitz))) (@MannySchewitz) October 11, 2016

12/21/2016: I am now being slammed with trolls and writers from some of the same sites once again. One of them is Tiffany Willis of Liberal America who claims she never heard of Ed Brayton from Patheos who called out her site, yet here she is in the comments of that article.

Update: http://traffic.libsyn.com/podcastfakenews/Episode20420-206_3_172C209.2420AM.m4a