Crooks and Liars

American progressive political blog

Crooks and Liars

Type of site

| News blog
Available in| English
Created by| John Amato
Editor| John Amato
URL| crooksandliars.com
Commercial| Yes
Launched| September 2004; 20 years ago (2004-09)

Crooks and Liars is a anti-fake-news, progressive political news blog founded by John Amato. The website has been described as hyperpartisan.[1]

## History

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Crooks and Liars, a self-described liberal political blog,[2] was started by John Amato in September 2004.[3] Amato, known as the "Vlogfather," was a pioneer of video blogging, which he turned to after an injury undermined his saxophone career during a hiatus from a reunion tour with Duran Duran.[4][5] Amato said he started the site "because he thought that mainstream media wasn't critical enough of the Bush Administration, and he felt motivated to speak out".[3]

In 2002, the site's coverage of CNN catching a falsehood in Fox News' coverage of Bill O'Reilly was highlighted by The Hill,[6] as was its writeup about six potential President Barack Obama Supreme Court justice nominees,[7] former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's attacks on Obama,[8] critiques of Obama "appeasing" House Republicans,[9] criticism of President Obama's surrogates,[10] the 2009 Republican Party leader's focus on supporting gay marriage[11] and the site's 2009 donation drive.[12]

In 2021, Crooks and Liars helped expose President Donald Trump's supporters' efforts to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election. According to The New Yorker, the site "dug up tax filings" that exposed connections between nonprofits and a chairman of the Federalist Society who opposed efforts to make it easier to vote.[13]

## Influence, recognition, and content

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Crooks and Liars received the "Best Video Blog" award at the Weblog Awards in 2006,[14] and a "Best Weblog About Politics" at the 2008 Weblog Awards.[15][16] Time magazine listed Crooks and Liars as one of the 25 Best Blogs of 2009.[17] In 2010, Crooks and Liars' content was featured by New York magazine's Intelligencer.[18] A 2011 study in Journalism included Crooks and Liars in a list of the "12 most popular partisan blogs."[19]

A 2017 study by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center found that Crooks and Liars was among the 50 websites whose content was most frequently shared on Twitter by supporters of Hillary Clinton in the United States presidential election, 2016.[20]

In 2016, Indiana University Kokomo professor Paul Cook included Crooks and Liars in a list of sites with a "tendency to rely on clickbait headlines".[21] The same year, Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of media at Merrimack College, identified Crooks and Liars as one of several news websites with "a baiting or heavily biased tone".[22] A 2019 study identified Crooks and Liars as a "biased source".[23]

The Oxford Internet Institute identifies Crooks and Liars as a "junk news" source.[24][25]

A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that self-identified Democrats trusted Fox News more than Crooks and Liars.[26] The same study classified Crooks and Liars as a hyperpartisan source.[1]

Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, described Crooks and Liars as a "progressive investigative reporting site."[13]

## References

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1. ^ a b Pennycook, Gordon; Rand, David G. (2019-02-12). "Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (7): 2521–2526\. Bibcode:2019PNAS..116.2521P. doi:10.1073/pnas.1806781116. PMC 6377495. PMID 30692252.
2. ^ Horne, Benjamin (2019). "Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media". Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: 261. arXiv:1904.01534. "Several of these sources are self-proclaimed liberal blogs, such as Crooks and Liars, RightWingWatch, and Daily Kos."
3. ^ a b Fischer, Sara (February 23, 2017). "The recent explosion of right-wing news sites". Axios. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
4. ^ Ehrman, Mark (December 11, 2005). "Meet the Truth Squad". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
5. ^ McNichol, Tom (February 18, 2009). "Top Blogs - Crooks and Liars". Time. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
6. ^ Zimmerman, Eric (June 6, 2009). "Saturday Roundup". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
7. ^ O-Brien, Michael (May 14, 2009). "Midday Roundup". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
8. ^ O'Brien, Michael (April 20, 2009). "Day's End Roundup". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
9. ^ Alarkon, Walter (January 25, 2009). "Sunday Roundup". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
10. ^ Alarkon, Walter (January 26, 2009). "Day's End Roundup". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
11. ^ Good, Chris (February 2, 2009). "Morning Read". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
12. ^ O'Brien, Michael (June 11, 2009). "Midday Roundup". The Hill. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
13. ^ a b Mayer, Jane (2021-07-31). "The Big Money Behind the Big Lie". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2021-09-04.
14. ^ 2006 Weblog Awards Results.[usurped] Retrieved May 20, 2007
15. ^ 2008 Weblog Awards Results. Retrieved March 11, 2008
16. ^ Wallace, Lewis (March 10, 2008). "SXSW: Dooce Bags Top Honors at Bloggies". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2021-09-18.
17. ^ McNichol, Tom. (February 18, 2009) 25 Best Blogs of 2009. Retrieved August 24, 2014.
18. ^ Amira, Dan (September 24, 2010). "David Axelrod Accused of 'Hippie Punching'". New York. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
19. ^ Meraz, Sharon (January 25, 2011). "The fight for 'how to think': Traditional media, social networks, and issue interpretation". Journalism. 12 (1). SAGE Publishing: 107–127\. doi:10.1177/1464884910385193. ISSN 1464-8849. S2CID 145628571.
20. ^ Faris, Robert (2017). Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation (PDF). Harvard University. p. 72.
21. ^ Cook, Paul. "Social Media and Information Literacy Exercise". wilmu.edu. Wilmington University. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
22. ^ Cole, Samantha (November 15, 2016). "This List of Fake News Websites Proliferating on Facebook Is Staggering". Vice. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
23. ^ Horne, Benjamin (December 2019). "Robust Fake News Detection Over Time and Atack". ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. 11 (1).
24. ^ Owen, Laura Hazard (February 9, 2018). "The far-right sharing fake news — or conservatives sharing conservative journalism?". Nieman Lab. Retrieved 2021-09-18.
25. ^ Narayanan, Vidya; Barash, Vlad; Kelly, John; Kollanyi, Bence; Neudert, Lisa-Maria; Howard, Philip N. (February 6, 2018). Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US (PDF). Oxford Internet Institute.
26. ^ Pegoraro, Rob (January 28, 2019). "New study finds trust in traditional media (mostly) transcends partisanship". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved August 29, 2021.

## External links

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* Crooks and Liars website