A Facebook Bigwig Runs a Personal News Site With an Apparent Vendetta Against Elizabeth Warren
When last we checked on Campbell Brown, the erstwhile CNN anchor, she was working to throw America’s public school students onto the mercies of America’s corporate marketplace. At the moment, she heads Facebook’s “news partnership teams,” which means she runs Facebook News, one of the newer tentacles sprouted by that particular octopus.
However, journalist Judd Legum, in his newsletter Popular Information, recently reported that, in addition to this gig, Brown also founded and runs a personal media outlet called The 74 which, in recent months, seems to have dedicated itself to being a hit squad on Senator Professor Warren’s presidential campaign.
Beginning this fall, The 74 has harshly criticized presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. On October 23, The 74 published an article with this headline: "Elizabeth Warren’s Education Plan Is Exactly What We Need — If Our Goal Is to Make the Achievement Gap Permanent." The piece described Warren's detailed education plan as "a cut-and-paste genuflect to the public relations departments of America’s national teachers unions." It goes on to claim that Warren is not a "straight shooter" and lacks a "moral center." The piece eventually dispenses with education policy altogether and launches into a diatribe of attacks on Warren:
She’s a millionaire who raves about socialism. She was Republican before she was a Democrat. She was for school choice before she was against it. She was for charter schools before she was against them. She was for standardized testing before she was against it. She was Native American before she wasn’t.
This piece is not an aberration. An October 10 piece described Warren as "the second coming of Karl Marx.”
As a result of Legum’s revelations, there’s a lot of ducking and dodging, at least according to Business Insider.
A Facebook spokesman told Business Insider: "The 74 is not part of Facebook News. Campbell's work with The 74 is well-known and she's been transparent about her role with the nonprofit for many years.” The 74 did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
It can be argued that SPW’s campaign is scaring all the right people; in fact, given the recent news about Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, it can be argued that her campaign has resulted in her having helped scare people into the race, which is not something that always happens. If Campbell Brown's site is slanging you, you have to be doing something right.
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