GOP

Zuckerberg’s conservative battle: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

Zuckerberg’s conservative battle: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

Lawrence Kudlow

Mark Zuckerberg and his massive social-media site Facebook have come under strong criticism for allegedly suppressing stories of interest for conservative readers from its influential "trending" news section. Facebook has roughly 1.6 billion users worldwide, 167 million of whom are in the United States. Its "trending" section is therefore a powerful political influence.

Zuckerberg has denied the charges, and he will meet Wednesday with a handful of conservatives to discuss allegations that Facebook's "news curators" have manipulated its list of stories. The way it works at Facebook is that this powerful group of curators, or editors, who have access to a ranked list of trending topics generated by the company's algorithms, control the content of the trending-news section. In effect, these curators exercise gatekeeping powers, which amount to political news-making powers that are transmitted to Facebook's massive audience. Even The New York Times published an article this week titled "Social media finds new role as news and entertainment curator."

What Trump must do to win over conservatives
Donald Trump

What Trump must do to win over conservatives

David Tuerck

"Today, the belief in American exceptionalism has vanished with the end of empire, the weakening of power, the loss of faith in the nation's future." Sound familiar? It could be a lament from anyone in Donald Trump's camp or from Trump himself. Actually, it is an excerpt from a 1976 article by Daniel Bell, a self-described "socialist in economics," whose view of America's role in the world reflected a dour minimalism, in contrast to Donald Trump's muscular appeal to greatness.

That Bell wrote as he did can be understood in view of the tenor of his times: national remorse over Vietnam and Watergate, stagflation, gas lines, emerging Soviet nuclear superiority and rising crime rates. What Bell could not predict and what Trump appears not to appreciate is that America recovered from this torpor largely as a result of the Reagan administration's stewardship of U.S. economic and defense policy during the 1980s. The story of that success is familiar to anyone who considers himself a conservative: rapid recovery from a deep recession, the onset of the Great Moderation that made economic growth and price stability possible for two decades, and – most dramatically – the end of the Cold War and of nuclear brinksmanship.

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