A former paid scribe for an Iranian state-affiliated newspaper now works for a U.S. media watchdog group that produces a controversial “media bias” chart that consistently rates liberal outlets as more reliable than conservative ones, the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports. Universities like Cornell and journalism nonprofits like Poynter have cited and praised the media bias ratings of this organization, Ad Fontes Media, like it’s a neutral third party.
Meet Meisam Zamanabadi, an Ad Fontes Media analyst who was raised in Iran and served as an editor at Hamshahri, an Iranian newspaper owned and operated by Tehran’s municipal government that has been associated with hardline politicians and drew international condemnation after holding a Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006. Posts from his blog indicate that Zamanabadi worked at the paper in 2008 and 2009, when Iranian parliament speaker and chief regime negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf served as mayor of Tehran.
Zamanabadi now resides in California and works for Ad Fontes, the Colorado-based “public benefit corporation” behind the Media Bias Chart, which evaluates U.S. news outlets by political leaning and trustworthiness. The chart “consistently rates left-wing sources as more reliable and often less biased than their conservative counterparts,” writes Goodman. Socialist magazine Jacobin, for example, enjoys a higher “reliability” rating than long-established, edited publications such as National Review, the New York Post, and the Free Beacon. On television, the chart says Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are less reliable than their MS Now counterparts Chris Hayes and Jen Psaki.
News of Zamanabadi’s work for Ad Fontes—which markets its “analysis” to schools as a tool for teaching media literacy and claims that its ratings are “non-partisan”—comes as the watchdog faces questions about its own objectivity and ethics. Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission requested records about Ad Fontes’s business practices as part of an investigation into “possible collusion” in a scheme to get advertisers to withdraw their support for conservative content, the New York Times reported. The Trump FTC says these spending pullbacks are illegal boycotts.
The New York Times placed Gavin Newsom’s new book on its Best Sellers list even as the outlet acknowledged that Newsom used “bulk sales” to sell tens of thousands of copies of his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry. The Times has cited such sales to disqualify Republican politicians from the list, the Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson reports.
At the center of the controversy is a scheme in which Newsom offered to send a copy of the book to supporters who contributed “ANY AMOUNT,” even “a few bucks,” to his PAC. The California Democrat later disclosed in a recent campaign finance report two January payments to Porchlight Book Company—a Milwaukee-based business that specializes “in moving books in bulk”—totaling more than $1.5 million for “books at cost.” The money paid for 67,000 copies of Young Man in a Hurry—nearly three-quarters of the 91,000 copies Newsom’s team said the book had sold as of March 4.
The Times went on to place Newsom’s book on its March 15 Best Sellers list for nonfiction in the number four spot. Included underneath the book was a small “dagger” icon, which the Times says “indicates that some retailers report receiving bulk orders.” Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha also acknowledged in a statement that “when the Times has reason to believe that sales of a book include a mix of organic and bulk sales, the book’s best-seller ranking is accompanied by a dagger,” adding, “That’s what we did with the Newsom book.”
It’s not an ideal situation for Newsom, but it could have been worse: In 2015, the Times refused to place Ted Cruz’s debut book on its Best Sellers list “despite the fact that the book has sold more copies in its first week than all but two of the Times’ bestselling titles,” accusing the Texas Republican of “strategic bulk purchases,” Politico reported. Rhoades Ha did not answer a question about why the Times included Newsom’s book on the list with an accompanying “dagger” rather than excluding it altogether. But we have a few ideas!
Additional reading:
President Donald Trump told Bloomberg that the two-week ceasefire with Iran expires on “Wednesday evening Washington time” and that it’s “highly unlikely” he’ll extend it. Trump also said he won’t “be rushed into making a bad deal.” What happens, then, if the ceasefire expires without an agreement? “Then lots of bombs start going off,” Trump told PBS News, adding, “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Very simple.”
Sign of the times: A Dearborn-based attorney whose since-deleted social media posts praising Hezbollah terrorists and urging Iran to “show no laxity” against Israel were first reported by the Free Beacon won the Democratic Party’s nomination for the University of Michigan Board of Regents. The attorney, Amir Makled, ran to unseat incumbent Jordan Acker, a supporter of Israel, and recently introduced left-wing Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed at a rally featuring anti-American influencer Hasan Piker. The University of Michigan Board of Regents consists of eight members elected statewide to eight-year terms.
FBI director Kash Patel is suing the Atlantic for defamation, arguing that the Beltway outlet—owned by billionaire Democratic megadonor Laurene Powell Jobs—peddled “false and obviously fabricated allegations” when it ran a piece alleging that Patel is “MIA” from his job due to excessive drinking.
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Now ain't that something .. but ask me if I'm even a bit surprised.. cause I'm not.
Fuck iran