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35. Newsweek Embraces the Anti-Democracy Hard Right

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/11/04/newsweek-embraces-anti-democracy-hard-right



November 04, 2022

Although opinion pages in ostensibly nonpartisan, mainstream publications promote political opinions, sometimes controversial ones, Newsweek stands alone among such brands in its willingness to elevate such figures as Jack Posobiec, known for promoting the Pizzagate disinformation campaign, and Dinesh D’Souza, whose film 2000 Mules researchers roundly debunked for spreading conspiracies about the 2020 election. Under Hammer’s leadership, Newsweek has also aired bigoted views, like appearing to call for the state to deny adults access to trans-affirming medical care and supporting a ban on all legal immigration into the U.S. They have also spread baseless conspiracies about COVID-19, with one of Hammer’s collaborators describing vaccines designed to fight the virus as a “bioweapon.”

Newsweek has also failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest emerging in the content published through Hammer’s opinion section and his Newsweek-branded podcast, “The Josh Hammer Show.” Hammer donated to the campaign of Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters and at least four times published the work of a man who ran one of Masters’ fundraisers. On his podcast, Hammer told Newsweek’s audience to “go ahead and vote for Blake Masters.” Hammer also promoted hard-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán in a Newsweek dispatch authored from Hungary, without disclosing that he arrived there in collaboration with a group directly affiliated with the Hungarian government. Hammer also claims membership in a number of reactionary activist groups, and regularly publishes people who are also affiliated with them. He will appear on behalf of the New York Young Republican Club alongside Posobiec and QAnon influencer-turned-congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene in December.

Hatewatch reached out to Newsweek for comment about the reporting published in this analysis. Newsweek first introduced Hatewatch to a representative of the journalism-focused non-profit Poynter, whom they contracted to advise them on ethics in 2019. Hatewatch had three different conversations with Poynter about Newsweek and their relationship, which are detailed later in this analysis. A representative from the public relations agency LBG PR replied asking for our questions. Hatewatch responded by emailing 19 different specific questions inspired by the reporting in this analysis, and LBG PR issued the following statement in reply:







Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, has emerged as a favored candidate of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other admirers of fascism. (One of his major donors, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, has said he no longer believes freedom and democracy are “compatible.”) The notorious white supremacist website American Renaissance has republished versions of stories about Masters’ controversies from other outlets, drawing cheers from their notoriously racist comment section. White nationalist Nick Fuentes, who praises such fascist dictators as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, also supports Masters. Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin of the hate site The Daily Stormer wrote to his fans about Masters in June:



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