Wired, a formerly non-partisan but now wildly left-wing tech outlet, had to retract a false claim it made about the newsletter platform Substack after it was called out on Twitter by Substack’s head of comms, Lulu Cheng Meservey.
The leftist tech publication falsely claimed that Substack “actively recruits and pays extremists.” The claim was made in an article about how to migrate your content away from Substack, the latest in a stream of hitpieces about the platform from Wired, including “The Tenuous Promise of the Substack Dream” and “Substack is Now a Playground For The Deplatformed.”
We got the correction.
Thanks to all of you who lent support and thanks to @WIRED for listening. https://t.co/dGeul6P1R9 pic.twitter.com/C3m1PUC4K7
— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) June 9, 2022
The latest smear had to be retracted following a thorough takedown by Substack’s VP of communications, who pointed out that Wired could not cite a single example of an “extremist” recruited by the platform.
The writer claims Substack “actively recruits and pays extremists.”
We do not and have not, and he can’t name any examples. Yet when approached about it, he said: “I'd be happy to remove it if you could provide evidence that it's inaccurate.”
That’s not how this works.
— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) June 8, 2022
It’s like a media outlet accusing you of money laundering, and when you protest, they refuse to issue a correction unless you give them your financial statements.
This is clearly unreasonable. That’s why the burden of proof is on the journalist, not the subject.
— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) June 8, 2022
It’s now common to use words like “extremist” not in the true sense, but as a slur against people on the other side — like how Putin calls Ukrainians “fascist.”
It’s unfortunate when people do this but crazy when it comes from a media outlet that makes any claim to integrity.
— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) June 8, 2022
A happy ending to this thread: https://t.co/zCw36K1WHw
— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) June 9, 2022
I previously wrote about the establishment media’s backlash against Substack, which is most likely driven by the threat the newsletter platform poses to the traditional media business model. Thanks to Substack and other paid newsletters, writers and journalists have the opportunity to make more money by freeing themselves from the shackles of editors and going independent.
Not only that, but Substack is not dependent on ad revenue and therefore cannot be pressured by the threat of leftist boycott campaigns. Nor is Substack particularly affected by the menace of social media censorship or app store blacklisting, because stories are delivered directly to the email inboxes of subscribers.
All told, it’s a nightmare for the pro-censorship establishment media, which is presumably why they are relentlessly attacking it.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @LibertarianBlue.
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