PragerU

Formation	2009; 15 years ago (2009)
Founders	Dennis Prager Allen Estrin
Website	prageru.com

PragerU
Personal information
Nationality	American
YouTube information
Channel	PragerUniversity
Years active	2009–present
Genres	Politics current affairs
Subscribers	2.8 million[1]
Total views	1.15 billion[1]
Creator Awards 100,000 subscribers 1,000,000 subscribers 2017
Last updated: December 2020

PragerU, short for Prager University, is an American media company that creates videos on various political, economic, and philosophical topics from an American conservative perspective.^[2] The organization was co-founded by Allen Estrin and talk show host and writer Dennis Prager.^[2][3][4][5] The organization relies on donations, and much of its early funding came from fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.^[2][5]

PragerU is a non-profit organization but is not an academic institution and does not offer certifications or diplomas.^[5][6]

History

PragerU was founded in 2009 by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager and radio producer and screenwriter Allen Estrin,^[7] in order to advocate for conservative views and to offset what Prager regards as the undermining of college education by the left.^[4][8] The two originally considered making it a brick-and-mortar university, but the idea was revised into a digital product to save money.^[5] PragerU is based in the San Fernando Valley,^[2] and it had around 50 employees as of January 2020.^[5]

Since a lawsuit over the use of a photograph in 2013, PragerU has used animation in its videos.^[9] According to its CEO, Marissa Streit, a group of approximately 500 students called "PragerFORCE" promotes its videos.^[8] PragerU reached a billion views in 2018.^[2]

In July 2019, PragerU representative Allen Estrin attended President Donald Trump's Social Media Summit, along with other conservative organizations and people such as Charlie Kirk and James O'Keefe.^[10][11]

Conflicts with YouTube and Facebook

In October 2016, PragerU published a petition which said that YouTube had unjustly put 21 of PragerU's videos in YouTube's "restricted mode" setting, which limits views based on factors such as the viewer's age. The petition requested that YouTube remove the videos from restricted mode.^[12][13] YouTube responded, saying: "We aim to apply the same standards to everyone and we don’t censor anyone. Often it’s not the right approach to say that videos with the same topic should get the same rating. We’ll need to take into consideration what the intent of the video is, what the focus of the video is, what the surrounding metadata of the video explains."^[4]

In October 2017, PragerU filed a federal lawsuit against Youtube's parent company, Google, claiming that 37 of its videos were unfairly demonetized or flagged so that they could only be viewed with "restricted mode filtering", which limits views based on certain characteristics, including the age of the viewer.^[14] PragerU claimed that Google's actions violated the First Amendment and asserted YouTube was a public forum. In March 2018, the case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, who ruled that because Google was a private company, PragerU had failed to show that it had infringed its free speech rights.^[15][16][17] In February 2020, this ruling was upheld by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.^[18][19]

In August 2018, PragerU criticized YouTube for adding fact-checks to YouTube videos which cover climate change.^[20]

In August 2018, Facebook removed two PragerU videos from its platform, later restoring the videos, saying that they "were mistakenly removed."^[3][21] According to Francesca Tripodi, professor of sociology at James Madison University, there are plausible non-ideological explanations for Facebook's removal of several of the videos.^[22] PragerU contended that Facebook had engaged in deliberate censorship of their videos.^[3][21]

Funding

The organization depends on donations to produce its content.^[23] Much of the early funding for PragerU came from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.^[2][5] Two members of the Wilks family are on PragerU's board.^[2] The next-largest donor is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.^[7][24] Other donors include the Morgan Family Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Donors Trust, and the Minnesota-based Sid and Carol Verdoorn Foundation, led by former C.H. Robinson CEO Sid Verdoorn.^[24]

As of 2018, the organization reportedly had a $10 million annual budget, of which it spent more than 40% on marketing.^[2] In 2019, PragerU raised $22 million and expects to receive $25 million in 2020.^[5][25] PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups.^[26] It ranks among the 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.^[26]

Content

PragerU releases one video per week on various topics from a conservative viewpoint that according to its site "advances Judeo-Christian values". Its videos, although topical, largely avoid mentioning U.S. President Donald Trump.^[5][23][27] As of May 2020^[update], its YouTube channel included 968 videos.^[28] Each video costs between $25,000 and $30,000 to create.^[2]

Videos on PragerU have supported and argued for capitalism, argued against a $15 minimum wage, and that gun ownership is a constitutional right. Dave Rubin stated in a video: "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia" are "meaningless buzzwords". In a video discussing the alt-right, Michael Knowles argues that it is similar to the American Left, saying: "the alt-Right has nothing in common with conservatism, and is in fact much closer to leftism... Except of course, the left is much, much larger."^[2]

PragerU videos have also defended the Electoral College, arguing that "pure democracies do not work" and that the Electoral College thwarts voter fraud.^[7] PragerU promotes fossil fuels and disputes the scientific consensus on climate change; in one of the organization's videos, fossil fuel proponent Alex Epstein promotes misinformation about climate change, including false and misleading claims.^[29] According to Mother Jones, still other videos argue there is no police discrimination toward African-Americans and that the gender pay gap does not exist.^[7]

PragerU has developed two partnership programs to help cultivate relationships with educators. PragerU's Educator Program supplies teachers with lesson plans and study guides that accompany their videos. Secondary school teachers and college professors can register their classes through PragerU's Academic Partnership program, which lets students sign up and allows teachers to monitor their students' progress.^[30]

Reception

According to a 2019 report in the Los Angeles Times, PragerU videos have been watched more than 2 billion times and were becoming a staple on college campuses.^[26] In its 2019 annual report, PragerU stated that its videos have received over 2.5 billion lifetime views.^[25] PragerU has ranked highly in influence compared to other free-market advocacy organizations, such as Reason and National Review.^[31]

Vanity Fair said PragerU "packages right-wing social concepts into slick videos" and that PragerU was "one of the most effective conversion tools for young conservatives."^[32]

Sociologist Francesca Tripodi described the effect of PragerU's videos in a report for the Data & Society Research Institute.^[33] In a 2018 study, Tripodi used Candace Owens and James Damore as case studies in order to demonstrate that there is a YouTube algorithmic connection between Fox News, PragerU, and alt-right YouTube personalities.^[33][34] Tripodi wrote that PragerU relies on "search engine optimization and suggested content to elevate their messaging," and that PragerU's content "allows for those who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic."^[34] On page 36 of her report, Tripodi noted that PragerU was very popular among the respondents who participated in her study. She noted that regardless of age, all participants in her study confirmed either having liked or shared PragerU videos on Facebook. Tripodi also noted: 'Sites like PragerU create an opportunity to dabble in content that seems extremely innocuous, yet makes connections to the same kinds of ‘revelations’ pushed out by the alt-right."^[2] PragerU's videos are often highly visible and accessible, with a report by the Data & Society Research Institute finding that a YouTube search for the keywords "social justice" returned a PragerU video that was highly critical of the concept as the first result.^[35]

A Buzzfeed News article published in 2018 attributed PragerU's success to the quality of its production values compared to similar outlets and to its use of popular presenters with established audiences. The article also noted that it had received comparatively little attention from news and media analysts due to PragerU's lack of coverage of topical issues, such as Donald Trump.^[2]

Reason has criticized PragerU's claims of being censored by big tech companies for being false, as the company's content had not been removed from any social media platforms, and that they indicate a misunderstanding of the First Amendment as protecting a party from any type of censorship, when that law merely protects content from censorship by the government.^[36]

PragerU has drawn scrutiny for platforming controversial figures including the far-right activists Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yiannopoulos and Stefan Molyneux.^[37][38]

Critiques of videos

In a video entitled "Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?", host Carol M. Swain, a professor at Vanderbilt University, argued that the Southern strategy—a historical narrative alleging that the Republican Party purposely exploited racial tensions to appeal to racist white Southerners—was false revisionism. Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University, said that the video presented a "distortion" of history, "cherry-picked" its evidence, and was an "exercise in attacking a straw man".^[34]

Historian and philosopher Paul Gottfried, who has written extensively on the subject of fascism, harshly criticized a PragerU video hosted by Dinesh D'Souza which maintained that fascism was a leftist ideology. D'Souza maintained that Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who influenced Italian fascism, was a leftist, to which Gottfried noted that this contradicted the research by "almost all scholars of Gentile’s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right."^[39]

Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute criticized a 2018 PragerU video by Michelle Malkin as being anti-immigration. Nowrasteh wrote that the video was "rife with errors and half-truths, leaves out a lot of relevant information, and comes to an anti-legal immigration conclusion that is unsupported by the evidence presented in the rest of the video."^[40]

A 2018 video about immigration to Europe presented by author Douglas Murray titled "The Suicide of Europe" drew criticism for purportedly "evok[ing] the common white nationalist trope of white genocide with its rhetoric of 'suicide' and 'annihilation'.^[41] Mark Pitcavage, a fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, said that there was "almost certainly prejudice in the video" and that it was "filled with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric" but that the video isn's facist or white nationalist.^[42][43] Similarly, the Southern Poverty Law Center described the video as a "dog whistle to the extreme right",^[44] while Evan Halper in the Los Angeles Times said the video "echoed some of the talking points of the alt-right".^[45]

The August 2018 video "The Charlottesville Lie" presented by CNN presenter Steve Cortes contested the claim that in the wake of the Unite the Right rally Donald Trump had used the phrase "very fine people on both sides" to refer to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Cortes said in the video, which was later retweeted by Trump himself, that the media had committed "journalistic malfeasance" in reporting it as such.^[46] Tim Murphy in Mother Jones called the video an attempt to "rewrite the History of Charlottesville",^[47] while University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato bluntly rejected Cortes' notion, saying that "Anybody who tries to pretend that [Trump] wasn't encouraging the white nationalists is simply putting their head in the sand".^[48] Dennis Prager himself contended in The Australian that Google placed the video on YouTube's restricted list within hours of it being uploaded in an act of politically motivated censorship.^[49] Cortes ceased working for CNN in January 2020, saying that he was "forced out" of the network for making the PragerU video defending Trump.^[50]

Snopes criticized the video "How To End White Privilege", saying, "In essence, it offers the notion that, because [ex-police officer Brandon] Tatum’s race did not provide any barrier to his successes, white privilege must not be real". The article provided explanations for questions brought up in the video such as white privilege, mortgage loans between black and white people, and black and white rates of home ownership.^[51]

References

External links

• Official website
• PragerU's channel on YouTube