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Tea Party News Network Staffers Quits

A number of staff members have quit TPNN because they've turned into a click and bait news organization.

Well, well, well.

Is anybody shocked by this development?

The conservative Tea Party News Network website (TPNN) lost most of its staff on Thursday following a mass resignation over the site’s “despicable practices,”Politico reported.

“You regularly show contempt for the people who make all your financial success possible,” the group said in a letter to site owners Todd Cefaratti and Kellen Guida. “The staff who work around the clock to produce timely and breaking content is regularly reminded that ‘writers are cheap.’ The audience is regarded as unsophisticated simpletons.”

The letter was signed by TPNN’s social media director Jennifer Burke and two contributors, Matthew Burke and Greg Campbell. They were joined by Kris Hall and Dustin Stockton, who worked for Cefaratti’s other website, TheTeaParty.Net.

Why the sudden exodus, you ask?

Owned by TheTeaParty.net founder Todd Cefaratti, TPNN launched in 2012 as the self-professed "antidote to mainstream media bias." The resignations, however, come on the heels of a Daily Beast article detailing what some readers believe is TPNN's slow drift away from Tea Party-centric issues and toward sensationalized click bait. According to The Daily Beast, the site's Facebook page, which boasts some 1.2 million likes, often posts outrageous videos of fights and brawls. Much of the more gory content posted is taken from site's like Fights.buzz and Viral.buzz, both of which are also owned by Cefaratti.

“I won’t click on those damn stories. It’s about the shock factor. It has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with clicks," conservative activist Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, also known as “Joe the Plumber,” told The Daily Beast. "How far are they willing to go to compromise their integrity? It makes me sick, it makes me angry. It makes me want to go kick someone’s ass.”

The Daily Beast has much more.

With Right Wing News reporting that conservatives are getting ripped off by conservative PACs, I would say a certain trend has been taking place.

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