Tag: local news

NewsBreak, Americans’ Most Downloaded News App, Poses Likely Chinese Communist Threat

Restoration News
Newsbreak App

by Jacob Grandstaff   Chinese-owned NewsBreak provides the Chinese Communist Party the ability to highlight chaos and amplify conspiracies and discord among Americans through its news content and comment sections. The app boasts 50 million monthly users and became the top-ranked app in the News category on Google Play in 2021. NewsBreak claims to fill the gap created by the loss of tens of thousands of newsroom jobs and the closing of most countywide newspapers, but this overnight success comes with shoddy and subversive tactics to gain unfair market advantages and influence in the U.S. The real goal of the CCP-owned app is more subversive. Users can click on a “local” tab in the app that aggregates local news from over 10,000 sources, including national media outlets, local TV stations, local blogs, and independent contributors. Jeff Zheng, former head of Yahoo Labs in Beijing, founded NewsBreak in Mountain View, California in 2015. Zheng is a Chinese citizen with permanent residency in the U.S. He started the company as a subsidiary of the popular Chinese news aggregation app Yidian Zixun, which he co-founded with a former Baidu executive. Yidian accustomed hundreds of millions of Chinese news consumers to follow machine-recommended articles rather than human-curated content, success Zheng sought to replicate in the U.S.…

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Report: Most Counties Have Little or No Local News Sources

American Greatness
News Room

A new study reveals that a majority of American counties have either one local news outlet or none at all, following a rise in closures of local newspapers.

As reported by Axios, the data compiled by the Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism reveals that over half of the United States’ 3,143 counties have either one local media outlet, or zero; this amounts to approximately 55 million people with limited or no access to local news.

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Buying the News: Documenting the Takeover of Local Journalism by Leftwing Donors

RealClearWire
"The Chronicle" Newsroom, 2007

American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.

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Kari Lake Releases TV Ad During Her Former TV Show Instructing Viewers to Turn It Off

Rachel Alexander

Coming from a 30-year career in the mainstream media as a local broadcaster, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has naturally been able to spotlight many of the biases of the media while campaigning. The Trump-endorsed candidate’s second TV ad launched this weekend, including on Monday during the former show she co-anchored on Fox 10 News. It instructs viewers to turn the show off. 

She began in the ad, “The media isn’t just corrupt, they are anti-American.” A clip of her walking next to 12 News reporter Brahm Resnik is shown, with Lake telling him, “I noticed that you would not say the Pledge of Allegiance and that’s really despicable. Why can’t you put your hand on your heart? When these Media Hacks show you how much they hate America, believe them.”

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Commentary: Big Tech Has Been Destroying Local News

RealClearWire
close-up of a newspaper showing the "Classified" section

It’s no secret that local newspapers have been dying. Since 2004, the United States has lost a quarter of its newspapers — 70 dailies and over 2,000 weeklies. This has been devastating for communities across the country who depend on these newspapers to stay informed and engaged. There are many factors causing this decline, but one of the main culprits, especially as of late, has been Big Tech.

There’s a term to describe the actions of massive corporations manipulating the levers of state power to dominate their markets and pad their bottom lines at the expense of others. It’s crony capitalism. Under this system, crony capitalists flood Washington, DC with campaign contributions, pay-to-play experts, and legions of lobbyists to shape the laws and regulations that govern their industries.

Sound familiar? If you have observed Big Tech’s movements within the halls of power in our nation’s capital over the past decade, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s said that if you whisper “Section 230” to yourself three times while walking through the Capitol, a Big Tech-funded lobbyist will suddenly appear to explain why changing even one word in the arcane law might trigger the apocalypse.

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