Throughout 2018 I didn't know. Nor did I know in 2019, or 2020. I didn't fully realize how much Google hated – and still hates – Donald Trump until the 2020 election played out the way it did.
In retrospect, it's clear not only that Google was fixated on defeating Trump, but also that WND was adversely impacted by Big Tech's years-long anti-Trump campaign, seeing as our formerly very stable revenues collapsed when we started enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump.
If you think the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN hate Trump, you need to look at Google News.
I know Google doesn't create content. But as the primary distribution system for content online, what it does is aggregate the most hateful, the most over-the-top, the most absurdly provocative anti-Trump fake news it can find. I have tested this theory, and if you doubt me, you can do so yourself. Just go to Google News and survey it any day of the week.
Keep in mind, because Google is not a "publisher" per se, it has legal obligations to be "neutral" in its presentation – "fair and balanced," if you will. That's a joke. It is provably a lie.
The fact that Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon all rely on the radical left-wing lunatics at the Southern Poverty Law Center as their guide to what represents "hate speech" is all you really need to know.
They all pushed the notion that the president of the United States was a hater, and thus all those who voted for him, twice, are haters also – or else misguided idiots.
But back to my humbling campaign of begging for money for the survival of the world's first independent online news business – one that started in 1997 because I saw the internet as a level playing field with low barrier to entry for such an effort. (And it was a level playing field, for the first 10 or even 15 years.)
In the first quarter of 2018, when revenue plummeted, WND visitors and subscribers responded with $300,000 in donations to bail us out. I knew we couldn't just keep asking our audience for money daily and weekly, so we weaned ourselves away from asking for donations in March. Thus, guess how much our revenues went down in the second quarter: $300,000. We found ourselves facing imminent extinction again. So, at the end of July, knowing we were facing a very tough August – traditionally a low revenue month in the best of times – we began pleading for money, again. I never liked doing this. But we had to do it. There was no other way out.
But we're a lot smaller today than in 2018 – thanks to Google.
We're operating on the edge. But we weren't throughout 2016. Our revenues were quite predictable from 2010 through 2016 – pretty much always around $10 million annually or greater. But no one got rich at WND – not me, not other shareholders, not other employees. Instead, if we grew, we plowed those resources into more content, more reporting, better reporting, better books and more of them – movies too.
It all came crashing down so quickly after the November 2016 election there can be no other explanation as to its cause. The Internet Cartel was going to make WND and other independent media pay for the election of Donald Trump.
But I don't think Trump really understood how much Google hated him until election night 2020. In reality, Trump got more votes than his opponent – but lost anyway. Ouch!
Are you angry about the fake news you see on CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC? Are you angry at the anti-Trump drumbeat of the New York Times and the Washington Post? Those are rhetorical questions. But understand who the puppet-masters are – the Internet Cartel, their distribution source, their cheerleaders. They won't give the news coverage of the independent media the time of day. We're all perceived as deplorables and irredeemables – the people they blame for Trump's upset win in 2016.
So, what's the logical thing to do if you are appalled at what the Big Media have become? Support the independent media voices like WND!
I didn't leave the euphemistically labeled "mainstream media." It left me. All I ever wanted to do was journalism. And I'm still doing it – applying the standards and practices of real American news-gathering, the same standards and practices I used when running major metro dailies and newsrooms through the early 1990s.
And I'm not giving up. If I have to continue to beg and borrow (and I have, and make no apologies for it), I'm determined to see this 24-year-old experiment in real American journalism through. I'm determined to build up WND to the point at which it rivals and exceeds anything we have achieved in the past. That's my pledge to you. And as long as you will support that mission, I will keep on fighting. I may be an old dog, but I've got a few tricks up my sleeve.
via wnd