I appreciate Charlotte Schieder’s response to my letter to the editor. As I stated in that letter, democracy relies on an educated citizenry and an open forum for discussion and debate. To that end I took heart to her recommendation for me to read Invisible Coup by Peter Schweizer, though I confess that, at the recommendation of my tenth grade AP World History teacher, I usually try to do a little research into the biases of the author before reading. It seems that there is so much being printed nowadays that it is hard to get a grasp on what one should believe, so I did a little research on the book and the author, and this is what I found out.
According to Wikipedia, Peter Schweizer is a senior editor of the far-right media organization, Breitbart News. The term “far-right” is characterized by a range of ideologies that are marked ultraconservatism, authoritarianism, ultranationalism, ethnonationalism, and nativism. Still, since Breitbart does publish, I thought it would be best to go to an objective source to determine the quality of their views and publications. For me, the nonpartisan website mediabiaschart.com is a wonderful resource to better understand the biases of the information that I am consuming. I would highly recommend it to anyone trying to navigate all of the narratives that we are being bombarded with nowadays.
Their chart places various media sources on a graph that shows the source’s bias from middle to extreme left or right on the horizontal axis, and the reliability of the information that source publishes, from original fact reporting with high effort to containing inaccurate, fabricated information on the vertical axis. On the chart, Breitbart is located as being “strong right and publishing opinion with a wide variation of reliability”. I also looked into the reviews of Mr. Schweizer’s book that you recommended I read, The Invisible Coup using the website factually.co. The website’s conclusion is that “based on the provided reporting, The Invisible Coup cannot be deemed reliably fact based in the sense of being independently verified; it is presented as heavily documented and has enthusiastic partisan endorsement, but the available material lacks external corroboration and is counterbalanced by a history of authorial inaccuracies that raises legitimate caution”. Therefore, because I do have quite a large stack of books that I am trying to get through, you will have to excuses me for not pursuing this book or its author.
But getting back to Mr, Warden, as you can see, I do value having an understanding of the biases and reliability of the books I read. I also put more weight in firsthand experiences. It is with that understanding that I personally know that Mr. Warden’s statements with regards to the No Kings Rally that was held at the Capitol was false.
Rob Overly
Linn, Missouri
