Western Journalism was founded in 2008 by political consultant Floyd Brown, who also founded the Political Action CommitteeCitizens United and served as executive director of the Young America's Foundation. The site was acquired by Liftable Media, Inc. in 2014, which also owns the political opinion websites Conservative Tribune and Liberty Alliance, and the human-interest website Liftable.com. It also owns and provides content to dozens of conservative Facebook pages. Newsweek reported that the site has grown from receiving 1,000 page viewsa day in 2009 to more than 1 million during 2016. The New York Times reported in 2019 that the site has more than 36 million readers and followers on Facebook. Western Journalism previously stated it featured "conservative, libertarian, free market and pro-family writers and broadcasters" and seeks to provide "God-honoring" content. In practice, according to the New York Times, this philosophy, in which "tradition-minded patriots face ceaseless assault by anti-Christian bigots, diseased migrants and race hustlers concocting hate crimes," results in "a torrent of sensationalized, misleading, or entirely made-up stories, often aimed at Muslims and immigrants." Because of negative rulings by fact-checking sites and user trust surveys, Western Journalism was blacklisted by Google and Apple News, and by 2017 its Facebook traffic declined to near zero. The company responded by changing its name in 2018 to The Western Journal, hiring trainedcopy editors, and introducing a corrections page. In a story on how fake news spreads on social media, The Intercept reported that: "Thanks to views sourced largely to referrals from Facebook, Brown's websites now outrank web trafficgoing tonews outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and NPR, according to data compiled by Alexa". In February 2019, The Western Journal published an article which alleged "Climate Change ‘Heat Records’ Are a Huge Data Manipulation." Scientists criticized the article, saying it was deceptive and that it contradicted existing research. The Western Journal subsequently retracted the article.
