Liberal media site ThinkProgress for sale due to $3m budget shortfall

ThinkProgress, the stalwart liberal opinion site, may not survive the Trump era. After operating at a loss for years, the website is now up for sale.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), the think-tank set up by the Podesta brothers that owns TP, told the Daily Beast on Monday that the project was in search of a new publisher due to dire financial difficulties – $3 million worth of them, to be precise. CAP added that it would ensure the new owners maintained the same editorial line.

The website, which pushed virtually every outlandish conspiracy theory related to President Donald Trump and his alleged ties Moscow, has had its share of gaffes over the years, perhaps explaining the exodus of readers and financial backers.

Last September, ThinkProgress columnist and editor Ian Millhiser caught flak when he urged liberal activists to “confront Republicans where they eat, where they sleep and where they work,” which sounded to some like a call to commit crimes against lawmakers.

“Breaking into someone's home while they are sleeping to confront them on their political beliefs is especially unhinged and illegal,” journalist Tim Pool pointed out on Twitter in response to the remark.

For an outlet that regularly concerns itself with “atmospheres” that are conducive to violence, Milhiser was all too willing to help create the same noxious cloud around his own political adversaries.

ThinkProgress has not only alienated Republicans, who were never likely to read the site in the first place, but has also drawn the ire of its more deeply progressive readership. A critical article published in April entitled “Bernie Sanders is a millionaire” prompted an angry response from the Vermont senator himself, who published an open letter in the New York Times slamming ThinkProgress and CAP for smearing him and other Democratic candidates. The divisive approach, Sanders argued, would hand another presidential term to Trump.

Liberal journalist Aaron Mate pointed out some additional reasons left-leaning readers might have decided to ditch the publication.

Particularly since President Trump took office, ThinkProgress has pushed for social media platforms to be more censorious of voices it deems to be “trolls,” once even arguing for greater restrictions on RT. The site became a casualty of its own favored policy last year, when Facebook chose to mark one of its stories as “fake news” – which is perhaps not the best business model.

With some irony, Facebook’s “fact checker” in that case happened to be the neo-conservative flagship publication the Weekly Standard – notorious for its full-throated support of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 – which has since gone the way of the Dodo. While it remains unclear if CAP has lined up any prospective buyers, if the website’s new owners continue business-as-usual, ThinkProgress may just suffer a similar fate.

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