Chris Hayes called out the lying Trump and Republicans as he pointed out that Daily Kos, the largest Progressive site proved a guardian of truth.
Chris Hayes: Daily Kos a better guardian of truth
Chris Hayes brought us back to an article written in 2006 where ABCNews interviewed Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos. Here is the pertinent part of the interview that responsible site owners should heed instead of hiding behind some mythical tenet that allows the site to be the distributor of lies and misinformation en masse.
Jake Tapper was querying the power of the founder of Daily Kos implying that he had unlimited power. Moulitsas’s response showed in his answers that with power comes responsibility without curtailing democracy.
I like to liken myself more as a mayor of a big city, because you have people and they’re doing their own thing and they’re communicating with each other. I don’t control the flow of communication. I don’t have complete veto power over what’s being discussed. On rare occasions, I have basically said, ‘This topic is off limits.’ But it’s very rare — I think it’s happened twice.
Moulitsas pointed out the areas where he took the responsible positions.
It’s where you have 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I have no patience for people who want to say that the Mosad was behind 9/11 or George Bush was behind 9/11 or anything like that. I mean, I find that stuff utterly … That stuff it’s, it’s actually on the site, but those people, you know, I ban that kind of, that kind of …
And then the big one that could actually affect democracy as is with Trump now.
In 2004, there was — there were a lot of claims that there was fraud in Ohio. And for several months, people, you know, kept talking about how George Bush stole the election in Ohio. And after enough of that, I thought, ‘OK, the evidence isn’t there. This is being counterproductive at this point. If you have new evidence that would indicate that, then by all means, you know, share.’ But the same discredited, so-called facts were regurgitated over and over again, and finally I got tired of that. I thought it was destructive. I also banned that type of diary.
And I think, in a case like that, what the problem wasn’t necessarily people saying that the election was stolen. It’s they were making claims that it was voter-box stealing, when in fact, I think a really strong case can be made that enough people were disenfranchised in Ohio that perhaps that was the margin of victory for George Bush. And instead of focusing on the, on the real problems in the electoral system, such as ballot-box access, having people put in felon voter rolls when they were not felons, not enough boxes in poor neighborhoods, in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods while out in the suburbs, there can be an in-and-out voting in 15 minutes.
Those are real problems. And people are still fixated on, you know, the boxes — the black boxes were stolen. That, I thought, took the focus away. And then actually de-legitimize actual conversations on voter rights issues that actually, you know, voter right violations that happened in Ohio.
The rule is really is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That’s all we’re saying. And when people make accusations without proper supporting, it’s really frowned upon in the Daily Kos community, because we want to be reality-based. We want to be a reality-based community. We don’t want to be one that’s just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. I think I’d rather leave that to the Republicans — that’s what they do.
Well deserved kudos.