''Crooks and Liars'' is a progressive news blog focusing on political events founded by John Amato.

History

Crooks and Liars, a self-described liberal political blog, was started by John Amato in September 2004. Amato, known as the "Vlogfather," was a pioneer of video blogging, which he turned to after an injury undermined his saxophone career during a hiatus from a reunion tour with Duran Duran. Amato said he started the site "because he thought that mainstream media wasn't critical enough of the Bush Administration, and he felt motivated to speak out". In 2002, the site's coverage of CNN catching a falsehood in Fox News' coverage of Bill O'Reilly was highlighted by The Hill, as was its writeup about six potential President Barack Obama Supreme Court justice nominees, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's attacks on Obama, critiques of Obama "appeasing" House Republicans, criticism of President Obama's surrogates, the 2009 Republican Party leader's focus on supporting gay marriage and the site's 2009 donation drive. In 2021, Crooks and Liars helped expose President Donald Trump's supporters' efforts to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election. According to

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

, the site "dug up tax filings" that exposed connections between nonprofits and a chairman of the

Federalist Society The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies (abbreviated as FedSoc) is an American conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Headquartered ...

who opposed efforts to make it easier to vote.

Influence, recognition, and content

Crooks and Liars received the ''"Best Video Blog"'' award at the Weblog Awards in 2006, and a ''"Best Weblog About Politics"'' at the 2008 Weblog Awards. ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine listed Crooks and Liars as one of the 25 Best Blogs of 2009. In 2010, Crooks and Liars' content was featured by

New York (magazine) ''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker'', ...

's Intelligencer. A 2011 study in ''Journalism'' included Crooks and Liars in a list of the "12 most popular partisan blogs." A 2017 study by Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center found that Crooks and Liars was among the 50 websites whose content was most frequently shared on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

by supporters of

Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States sen ...

in the

United States presidential election, 2016 The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket ...

. In 2016,

Indiana University Kokomo Indiana University Kokomo (IU Kokomo or IUK) is a public university in Kokomo, Indiana. It is a regional campus of Indiana University serving north central Indiana. History In 1932, John and George Beauchamp opened the Kokomo Junior College ...

professor Paul Cook includes Crooks and Liars among a list of sites with a "tendency to rely on clickbait headlines". The same year, Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of media at

Merrimack College Merrimack College is a private Augustinian university in North Andover, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1947 by the Order of St. Augustine with an initial goal to educate World War II veterans. Its campus has grown to a campus with nearly 40 bu ...

, identified Crooks and Liars as one of several news websites with "a baiting or heavily biased tone". A 2019 study identified Crooks and Liars as a "biased source". The

Oxford Internet Institute The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a multi-disciplinary department of social and computer science dedicated to the study of information, communication, and technology, and is part of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford ...

identifies Crooks and Liars as a "junk news" source. A 2019 study published in the ''

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sci ...

'' found that self-identified Democrats trusted

Fox News The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...

more than Crooks and Liars. The same study classified Crooks and Liars as a hyperpartisan source.

Jane Mayer Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the Uni ...

, writing in ''

'', described Crooks and Liars as a "progressive investigative reporting site."

References

{{Reflist

External links

Crooks and Liars website
American political blogs Internet properties established in 2004