The Weekly Standard’s Arsenal to Fight Falsehoods: ‘Facts, Logic and Reason’ -<br />“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”<br />—Hunter S. Thompson, 1972<br />When Breitbart News ran a blaring headline last week suggesting<br />that new evidence “vindicates” President Trump’s still-baseless claims that former President Barack Obama put him and his team under surveillance …<br />When a Fox News contributor reported that Fox had “learned”<br />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) …<br />When the White House press secretary repeated that flimsy (or, as the British put it, “utterly ridiculous”) claim from his powerful lectern …<br />It’s the end result — if not necessarily the intended result — of a dream<br />that American conservatives began pursuing more than 60 years ago: to break the informational hegemony of the mainstream news media.<br />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<br />that we’re basing our arguments on facts, logic and reason.”<br />Mr. Hayes shares the viewpoint of another prominent Wisconsin conservative, Charlie Sykes, the #NeverTrump talk radio host who declared last year<br />that he and his fellow conservative media stalwarts had been too successful in delegitimizing the mainstream news media.
