User:Chetsford/rcm

Real Clear is an American media brand owned by Real Clear Media Group which operates a network of 14 news websites. The brand was established in 2000 in Chicago by Tom Bevan and John McIntyre with flagship site RealClearPolitics. From 2007 to 2015, Forbes was the majority owner of RealClearPolitics. A consortium composed of Bevan, McIntyre and Crest Media bought Forbes' stake in 2015 and formed Real Clear Media Group to operate RealClearPolitics and additional sites under the Real Clear name.

2007 to 2017
In 2007, Forbes purchased a 51 percent stake in the company; the remaining 49 percent was retained by the partnership of McIntyre and Bevan, doing business as Real Clear Investors. Seven years later, in 2015, Forbes sold its shares in the company to Real Clear Investors and Crest Media, owner of Al-Monitor. A round of surprise layoffs in 2017 resulted in the redundancy of 20 of RealClearPolitics' 70 full-time employees. According to Bevan, the layoffs were necessitated by the cyclical nature of traffic to the advertising-dependent website which saw visitors drop following the 2016 United States Presidential Election.

In 2014, RealClearPolitics began operating a Facebook page called "Conservative Country" that, according to The Daily Beast, was "filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears". The page did not disclose its connection to RealClearPolitics, or its successor Real Clear Media Group, until 2019. According to the company's chief technology officer, Anand Ramanujan, the page was created to conduct market research on traffic patterns between Facebook and political news websites. A representative of the Poynter Institute criticized Real Clear Media for not disclosing its affiliation with Conservative Country. Dan Kennedy, a media ethicist at Northeastern University, said that - while some of the memes posted to the Facebook page were "not a good look" for the company - he didn't think it "called into question the credibility of RealClearPolitics".

In 2016, Real Clear Media Group was formed to operate Real Clear Politics and additional websites created under the Real Clear brand. Erin Waters was named inaugural president of the new company.

RealClearEducation
RealClearEducation is a website that aggregates news articles related to education policy.

RealClearEducation was established in 2014 as a joint enterprise between Real Clear Media and Bellwether Education Partners, what NPR has described as "a national nonprofit that focuses on underserved youth". From 2014 to 2016, content was curated by Emmeline Zhao, a former editor at the Huffington Post, and Bellwether's Andrew J. Rotherham, a former domestic policy advisor during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Research published in the journal Nonpartisan Education Review found that content sourced by RealClearEducation during this period overwhelmingly privileged that produced by Democrats for Education Reform and Education Next which was criticized as "over-representing funders of education policy work" and giving prejudicial emphasis to stories favoring charter schools, school vouchers, and the Common Core curriculum.

The partnership between Bellwether and Real Clear Media ended in 2016 after Zhao and Rotherman departed for new positions at The 74. The role of editor of RealClearEducation was thereafter assumed by Christopher Beach.

RealClearInvestigations
RealClearInvestigations was launched in 2016 as an investigative journalism website producing original content under the editorship of Tom Kuntz. Its work is financed by the Real Clear Foundation.

History
In October 2016, RealClearPolitics reported it had achieved the highest traffic in the site's history up to that point, claiming 32 million unique visitors that month.

In 2020, RealClearPolitics was among the websites designated by Amazon as "authoritative sources" for the generation of voice responses to election information questions posed to the Amazon Alexa voice assistant.

During 2020 United States Presidential Election, RealClearPolitics and its reporters were accused of having a pro-Trump bias and an anti-Trump bias. The site was described by the New York Times' Jeremy W. Peters as having taken "a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years" and, after the general election of that year, linked "to stories that reinforced the false narrative that the president could still somehow eke out a win". Trump, meanwhile, accused RealClearPolitics reporter A.B. Stoddard of being a "Trump hater". RealClearPolitics publisher Tom Bevan objected to claims by Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that the site had retracted its recognition of Joe Bien's victory in Pennsylvania, tweeting that the assertion was "false".

Content aggregation
RealClearPolitics curates and aggregates stories from across the political spectrum. Links are selected and published several times each day. Mashable's Todd Wasserman has described its selection of content as representing a "smorgasbord of opinion" from "lefty pubs like The Nation and Mother Jones, right-leaning outlets like The Washington Times and Glenn Beck's TheBlaze, and more mainstream sources like The Wall Street Journal and USA Today". In 2013, Nicholas Lemann named RealClearPolitics and Arts and Letters Daily his two favorite news aggregators.

Elections data
According to the New York Times' Jeremy Peters, RealClearPolitics is "well known as a clearinghouse of elections data and analysis with a large following among the political and media establishment". RealClearPolitics publishes averages of polling data for major election campaigns; according to David W. Brady, these use the mean of several polls the site considers to have "some level of accuracy and integrity". The RealClearPolitics polling averages are frequently cited benchmarks.

Original reporting
In 2013, RealClearPolitics was given its own seat in the White House Briefing Room for the first time.