Self-Described Politically Neutral YouTube Gives Massive Investment to Left-Wing News Org
Far-left digital news outlet The Young Turks is about to come into some money, partnering with YouTube to receive a substantial investment as part of the video-sharing platform’s $25-million expansion into the news media sphere.
The partnership is one of many in a far larger $300 million project of the same aim announced by Silicon Valley technology giant and YouTube parent company Google in 2018, Axios reported.
According to sources, The Young Turks is receiving an undisclosed amount of capital “in the mid-six-figures range” for the purposes of creating a series of web-based news production seminars for the newly launched TYT Academy.
Interwoven with quizzes and capped off with a final examination that, if passed, grants an official certification, the pilot curriculum will reportedly be aimed at training passionate, internet-savvy individuals in the art of digital media and local journalism, enabling them to supplement local news outlets’ perceived lack of presence on the web.
Despite an immense progressive bias from developer The Young Turks, however, which was co-founded by socialist California Democratic congressional candidate Cenk Uygur, reports seem to suggest the final product will not simply amount to an advocacy journalism training ground.
The Young Turks is “not interested in cranking out journalists who share [its] political viewpoint whatsoever,” the outlet’s Chief Business Officer Steven Oh told Axios.
But Uygur was quick to let slip in a Tuesday announcement video for TYT Academy that the goal of the program was to “make local news great” by granting anyone and everyone the tools to cover local news “just as [he and co-host Ana Kasparian] cover news at the national level.”
And that, of course, means “speaking truth to power,” Uygur said.
Which power, you might ask?
Well, if acolytes of TYT Academy really were to report important matters “just as” Uygur and Kasparian do on their web-show, they would be “speaking truth” almost exclusively to society’s supposedly conservative structures and institutions.
“Bernie wins! It’s been called!” @cenkuygur during @TheYoungTurks coverage of #NewHampshirePrimary #tytlive: https://t.co/HvyBQ1EbC7 pic.twitter.com/cPQVp3fnA1
— The Young Turks (@TheYoungTurks) February 12, 2020
OPINION: Mainstream news media is biased against progressives https://t.co/2SUH4LtkXe
— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) February 11, 2020
In fact, judging by the content Uygur shares on his public Twitter account, it would seem he and his peers live under a delusory perception that both the political media sphere and the culture at large have conspiratorially acted to push progressive ideology to the margins.
If only that were true.
A deeply radical member of the libertine modern left, Uygur is an unabashed believer in the mainstreaming of support for socialist — and culturally Marxist — solutions to national and global issues, from deeply re-distributive international climate resolutions to the introduction of Medicare for All and intersectional identity politics here in the United States.
But it is not for their beliefs that Uygur and The Young Turks may have been pushed to the margins of political media in past years.
In fact, if that has even happened at all, it’s likely for the fact that Uygur and his co-hosts have led careers riddled with controversy.
From a near-constant on-air use of expletives to frequent and violent verbal outbursts aimed at opposition figures, The Young Turks create content that can only be described as brutally abrasive — and that’s at best.
Not to mention Uygur’s previous public support for, among other things, legalized bestiality and Armenian Genocide denial.
Yet, none of that was enough to stop Google-owned YouTube from investing six-figures of liquid capital into Uygur and his colleagues for the purposes of educating future journalists in media “responsibilities” and “best practices.”
And hardly a well-conceived idea as it stands, the investment certainly does not aid the big-tech bullies at YouTube in defending themselves against claims the platform and its creators are biased against conservative content producers.
If you’ll remember, such Silicon Valley leaders as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google-Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress in 2018 with their companies under suspicion of manipulating search results and enforcing terms of service in a politically discriminatory manner.
“We use a robust methodology to reflect what is being said about any given topic at any particular time,” Pichai told the House Judiciary Committee, according to NPR. “It is in our interest to make sure we reflect what’s happening out there in the best objective manner possible.
“I can commit to you and I can assure you, we do it without regards to political ideology. Our algorithms do it with no notion of political sentiment,” he added.
But with Google’s subsidiaries granting aggressive left-wing outlets like The Young Turks massive educational investments while demonetizing conservative figures like Stephen Crowder or age-restricting Judeo-Christian religious content from right-wing non-profit Prager University, claims like Pichai’s are bound to fall on deaf ears.
As they well should.
Despite my firm belief that a company should be able to do as it pleases with regard to investment strategy and political affiliation, this is an outrage.
Not for the involved companies’ decision to get political or for whom they choose to get political with, but for those companies’ willingness to gaslight the general public with regard to their biases.
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