Critics Allege the Daily Signal is a Lying Heritage Funded Propaganda Rag
OK, OK, you caught us. It’s Assigned. We are the critics making the allegation.
by Evan Urquhart
When I first stumbled across the Heritage Funded Daily Signal, it was right after I started covering a situation in a Vermont high school, in which a cisgender girl had gone public with her discomfort over changing with a transgender teammate on the volleyball team. The story was still developing, and at first glance Signal struck me as distinctly coming from a right perspective, but doing so responsibly. The article I read seemed fact-based, reasonable, and grounded in accurate reporting, albeit with a clear anti-trans bias. Over time, however, I realized that that’s exactly what the Signal hoped someone like me will think. The truth about their work is much less savory.
Case in point:
This is the lede of an article which is not marked by the Signal as an opinion piece. Of course the words “transgender agenda” signpost from the start that this will be biased against trans people. However, the most weaselly sentence has got to be the last one, which places outright falsehoods (treatments for trans youth almost never lead to infertility, even trans adults are counseled heavily about the impacts on fertility of different treatments) in the mouth of as-yet unnamed critics.
The meat of the article is making a spurious connection we’ve already covered, as it has been made in other right wing outlets. The idea is that enshrining a woman’s right to access abortion under a Michigan ballot initiative will necessarily entail trans youth earning the right to access transition-related treatments, even over parental objections. While the specific argument is spurious (the MI law the right wing writers object to does not enshrine a right for minors to access sterilization), the connection between bodily autonomy, abortion, birth control, and trans medical care is a real one, and one the right has only recently begun making more explicit. The Signal article, though, connects the two only via references to unnamed critics. Here’s a second example, from the fifth paragraph:
Once again, this is not accurate information. The writer may very well be aware of this, too, because he keeps attributing it only to “critics.” Who are these critics? It’s not until the 7th and 8th paragraphs that we find out the critics are far right advocacy groups, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian activist group that works to limit LGBTQ+ rights as well as opposing any legal right to access abortion or birth control.
The Daily Signal is not a journalistic outlet, it’s far right advocacy that lightly cosplays as right-leaning journalism. This becomes obvious if you follow their coverage closely, but can be easily missed if you read a single story from their website, especially if your tendency is to be fair-minded and open to right leaning sources being accurate and fact-based. Jouralists beware, because these folks are slimy.