The Grade for Biden-Era Conservative News Outlets? ‘F’.

In the weeks since the Hundred Days were up, I’ve been checking in on the few remaining news sources who are supposed to be telling us the truth.

Mostly, we’re talking Breitbart, Newsmax, OAN, and Rasmussen Polling. Here at InstaPunk Returns, we’ve been tweaking the nose of Rasmussen in particular, whose daily polling of presidential approval consistently gives Biden a 50+ approval rating, without ever telling us who exactly is being polled, how, and on what rotating or other basis to ensure that they aren’t just ‘Old Reliables’ who answer the phone. Other polling subjects seem to indicate profound displeasure in the electorate on a wide range of issues and policies being pursued by the Biden administration. But the Rasmussen site does nothing to explain the discrepancies between these issue-oriented polling results and the seeming presidential approval flatline. So that flatline’s a joke and we’ve treated it as such.

OAN is just boring. A lame website format and no substance other than regurgitated gets from other sources. No reason to go there every day. Why we haven’t.

So the movers and shakers are Breitbart and Newsmax. Both flunking, sometimes for the same reasons and sometimes for different reasons. Does it matter? Kinda.

They’re both stranded somewhere between headline sensationalism and Op-Ed page. Breitbart is the worse offender at this. Newsmax does the same things but eschews the giant red fonts for its headers that make up Breitbart’s chief grab attempt at readers. What neither of them do is report or investigate.

They don’t report because they have no reporters. Neither site reliably gives us the “who, what, where, when, and why” that a news story is supposed to provide to readers. The lede is consistently opaque, frequently buried by and from the reporter. The writing itself is lame, better than in the early Breitbart days when misspellings were the chief attraction, but still well below the level of the accomplished news fakers at the New York Times and Washington Post. You can get three quarters of the way through an article before you learn that the story subject is not a national but a local controversy. Breitbart, especially, likes to overblow stories, and their headlines frequently promise bottom lines the copy does not deliver on.

Neither site has actually done the hard work of defining and communicating its mission. They’re both some kind of queasy admixture of partisanship and let’s pretend objectivity that keeps readers gasping “why” when a story is just reprinted from the AP or Reuters wire and not identified as such until the end of the published copy. Nobody thought to begin the piece, “AP is reporting…” Apparently not. At this isolated moment in time, we’re wearing our ‘objective’ hat. At the next isolated moment in time, we’ll pretend it’s news that we interviewed an attention-seeking Republican member of Congress who wants to throw red meat to our target mob.

None of this is reporting. It’s just incompetence. In the early Breitbart days, I made concerted attempts to get in touch with somebody in charge, because I wanted to volunteer my copy-editing services, free of charge, to mitigate the daily embarrassments they were committing in print. To this day, I note that both Breitbart and Newsmax have Comment functions, usually filled with embarrassing illiterates, but neither has any forum called “Letters to the Editor,” which this piece would be by the way. There’s nobody to tell because they don’t want to hear it. In addition, neither has an effective Search function for its own site, and since both of them post and retire stories at lightning speed, sometimes after only minutes on the main page, they have a heightened obligation to make it possible for readers to find a headline they saw an hour ago but is now missing. I have had great success finding such missing headlines at the hated Google when they were nowhere to be found at Breitbart or Newsmax.

The upshot is that Breitbart is still poorly written, poorly administered, directionless, and — sadly — a last resort now that Rush and Breitbart himself are dead and buried. Pollak and Nolte are exceptions, Nolte’s frequent over-enthusiasm notwithstanding. How to characterize the Breitbart experience? An unending succession of WTF moments. Headlines that have to be read three or four times to penetrate their concussive incoherence. Acronyms in copy that are never explained but presumably just understood by insider readers. References to office holders whose parties and locations are never identified up front but must be inferred from copy. (For the longest time I thought ‘Blinken’ was a nursery rhyme joke on Biden’s name, not a real-life joke in Biden’s cabinet.) Breitbart is amateur hour. But Newsmax is, in its own way, worse.

Newsmax wants your money. They hold back some of their most tantalizing stories because they want you to subscribe. You know, it’s not as if the fate of the nation is in the balance or anything. They need to be the next Fox News. Right. We’ve all seen how well the NYT and WAPO and WSJ made out with their pay walls. Right? We’re supposed to be reassured by the very long list of conservative mummies available for viewing (pun intended) on Newsmax TV, most recently — and announced with great fanfare this morning — Eric Bolling, who was fired from Fox for sending lewd photos to three female staffers at FNC. Yes, I remember. So, I’m thinking, do others. (But who remembers all that ##metoo stuff anyway? That was months ago.) Breitbart lards its copy with advertising you can accidentally click into. Newsmax does it differently. They act as if it’s another news story, only slightly grayed out. Which kind of makes you wonder if everything is advertising, especially when the boldest headlines steer you straight into their pay wall.

So here, and far most importantly, is what’s missing from both Breitbart and Newsmax.

— A mission statement and an active, articulate editorial board capable of receiving and responding to Letters to the Editor. What’s at stake for the nation? Why does this publication exist? Are we a partisan advocacy publication or a new-age objective journalistic endeavor? Just tell us which. We can live with either, but not with a gassy mix of both. How are readers supposed to appraise your performance if you don’t tell us what you’re trying to do and be?

— Investigative reporting. Completely absent from Breitbart and Newsmax. Quasi-investigative pieces by “contributors” to Newsmax TV don’t count. Without your editorial imprimatur, all such contributions are merely Op-Ed speculations. What happened to the Barr investigations of Democrat attempts to bring down Trump? What really happened in the 2020 election? What exactly is going on at the border, right now, today? You don’t know? Don’t want to risk investigating it? Don’t have any honest-to-God Reporters to throw at it? We know they exist. They’re all women btw: Sharyl Atkisson, Katie Pavlich, Michelle Malkin, K.T. McFarland… you could hire them, guys, to make up for all your dribbly dyslexics on the 24/7 beat.

To conclude, we’re dying out here. We need competent news outlets. Sadly, we don’t have them. We don’t even have a mailing address for our Letters to the Editor. Shame on you.