Truth or “puffery”?

“Mr. Rense’s description of the scope of his website and internet show is simply advertising ‘puffery’.”
Lawyer for Jeff Rense

Jeff Rense makes several impressive claims about his website, Rense.com:

• world’s #1 alternative news service
• world’s #1 talk radio site
• receives close to 10 million total hits per month
• constantly visited by globalist elite, government agencies, military and intelligence agencies and worldwide defense industry sources[1]

But are these statements truthful, or merely “ad copy” designed to increase readership and sell ad space?



“World’s #1 alternative news service”

This assertion is difficult to prove given its subjective nature. What criteria is being used to make this claim about the website? Most respected? Best original content? Most inspiring? Most visited?

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Rense.com is “#1” in any sense of the word. People will decide for themselves whether or not Jeff Rense’s website is worth visiting; whether or not there is enough useful information amongst all the “Defeatist, Doom & Gloom Miasma“, misinformation (parading as “free speech”), anti-Jewish (not just “anti-Zionist”) propaganda, and strongly pro-white/white separatist slant (eg. his promotion of former KKK member David Duke as both a columnist and radio host, and inclusion of links to articles from sites such as the “we’re not racist, we’re pro-white” tomatobubble.com.)



“World’s #1 talk radio site”

This validity of this claim, like the previous one, is open to debate. Again, no criteria for “#1” is given. Perhaps Rense is referring to the popularity of websites run by those with talk radio shows. If so, then Rense’s claim that his website is “#1” is untrue, as talk show host Alex Jones’ websites InfoWars and PrisonPlanet both rank higher than Rense.com.




“Receives close to 10 million total hits per month”

Here Rense attempts to promote his website by pulling a pretty much meaningless statistic out of thin air and pretending it an accurate measure of the popularity of his website. In fact, the total number of hits that Rense.com–or any other website–receives, is not a true measure of how often it is visited. A “hit” occurs every time an image on a webpage loads, so that image-heavy websites like Rense.com record multiple “hits” every time ONE person visits the site ONCE.[2]

A more accurate measure of website traffic is “unique visitors” per month.

So how many unique visitors does Rense.com get every month? An estimate from Google Ad Planner puts the figure at 380,000 (as at July 2012, down from 470,000 a few months prior). That doesn’t sound quite as impressive as “close to 10 million hits.” For comparison, Alex Jones gets 1,000,000 unique monthly visitors on his website InfoWars.



“Constantly visited by globalist elite, etc”

Rense claims that his website and radio show “are constantly visited by globalist elite, government agencies, military and intelligence agencies and worldwide defense industry sources … all confirmed by electronic monitoring of site visitors.”

Before addressing the truthfulness of that claim, let’s pause for a moment and reflect on this: If Jeff Rense is as concerned about internet freedom and anonymity as he claims to be, then why on earth is he undertaking “electronic monitoring” of his site’s visitors? And are visitors to his website aware of this?

Moving on to claim itself: Without access to Rense.com’s website monitoring records, how could one prove whether or not the statements made about the website’s visitors are true?

As it turns out, the monitoring records aren’t needed. Rense himself has stated under oath that this claim–as well as others he has made about his website and radio show–are not actually truthful, but rather advertising “puffery.”

For evidence of this, we look at documents from a court case filed against Rense and Larry Sinclair in 2010 by Daniel Parisi. Parisi sued for defamation because of statements made about Parisi’s website in a book authored by Sinclair, and to which Rense had written the foreward.

In court documents, Parisi’s lawyers stated the following:

Rense is a citizen of Oregon. He operates a website (www.rense.com) and has a nationwide radio show. Rense writes that:

The reach and impact of the Jeff Rense Program and Rense.com is enormous. The site and program are constantly visited by globalist elite, government agencies, military and intelligence agencies and worldwide defense industry sources… all confirmed by electronic monitoring of site visitors.[4]

But instead of confirming the truthfulness of the above the statement, Rense denied it. His lawyer dismissed Rense’s boasts about his website and radio show as “puffery”:

Plaintiffs have not shown that this “puffery” by Mr. Rense on his website is actually true, as opposed to an “advertising strategy” by Mr. Rense to attract listeners… Mr. Rense’s description of the scope of his website and internet show is simply advertising “puffery” intended to increase listeners…[5]

So it would seem that Rense isn’t too concerned with truthfulness when it comes to making claims about his website.

And that makes Rense sound a lot more like a salesman, and a lot less like someone committed to “honest journalism.”


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Sources:

[1]  The End of the Line. Retrieved 10 April 2012.
[2] Hits vs Unique Visitors. Retrieved 11 April 2012.
[3] Understanding Unique Visitors. Retrieved 11 April 2012.
[4] DKT-69 Plaintiff’s Opposition to Rense’s Motion to Dismiss–29 Oct 2010 (pdf) Retrieved 11 April 2012.
[5] DKT-82 Reply in Support of Rense’s Motion to Dismiss–19 Nov 2010 (pdf) Retrieved 11 April 2012.