Trump’s media favorites battle for the Trump trophy

So the race is on to determine which outlet — cable, radio, internet or otherwise — will embrace Trumpism the tightest. And the competition is driving the far-right MAGA echo chamber to cannibalize itself.

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At the center of it all is an impulse for confirmation bias, according to misinformation and extremist researchers. Trump supporters, they said, are looking for a place to migrate that promotes their theories on why their candidate lost. That’s why they’ve increasingly gravitated to places like One America News Network and Newsmax, two Trump-friendly conservative outlets that are more inclined to embrace the debunked ballot-fraud conspiracies Fox News will not touch. Similarly, Parler has fewer compunctions on fact-checking the evidence-challenged claims about fraudulent ballots that Twitter has started regularly flagging.

“The exodus from Fox to Newsmax and Parler is typical of a pattern in social movements, where they blame the infrastructure for their defeat,” said Joan Donovan, the research director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Policy, which studies and monitors the spread of misinformation. And with disinformation dominating the right’s debate over why Trump lost, “attempts to moderate that misinformation is being used to allege that the platform companies are colluding with the Dems and Fox.”

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