Eric Berger at The Guardian:

Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during America’s bitterly fought 2024 election. Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that: “The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.” NewsGuard estimates that there are a staggering 1,265 such fake local news websites in the US – 4% more than the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left operating in the country.

“Actors on both sides of the political spectrum” feel “that what they are doing isn’t bad because all media is really biased against their side or that that they know actors on the other side are using these tactics and so they feel they need to,” said Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, which determined that such sites now outnumber legitimate local news organizations. “It’s definitely contributed to partisanship and the erosion of trust in media; it’s also a symptom of those things.” Pink slime websites, named after a meat byproduct, started at least as early as 2004 when Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who described himself as a “biased guy” and a Republican, started funding websites featuring names of cities, towns and regions like the Philly Leader and the South Alabama Times. Timpone’s company, Metric Media, now operates more than 1,000 such websites and his private equity company receives funding from conservative political action committees, according to NewsGuard.

[...]

The left has also created websites designed to look like legitimate news organizations but actually shaped by Democratic supporters. The liberal Courier Newsroom network operates websites in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada, among other states, that like the conservative pink slime sites, have innocuous sounding names like the Copper Courier and Up North News. The Courier has runs stories like “Gov Ducey Is Now the Most Unpopular Governor in America,” referring to Doug Ducy, the former Republican Arizona governor. “In contrast, coverage of Democrats, including US President Joe Biden, Democratic Arizona Gov Katie Hobbs, and US Sen Mark Kelly of Arizona, is nearly always laudatory,” NewsGuard stated in a report about Courier coverage.

Democratic strategist Tara McGowan founded the Courier Newsroom and has received funding from liberal donors like Reid Hoffman and George Soros and groups associated with political action committees, according to NewsGuard. “There are pink slime operations on both the right and the left. To me, the key is disclosure and transparency about ownership,” said Franklin. While both the left and the right have invested in the pink slime websites, there are differences in the owners’ approaches, according to Skibinski. The right-wing networks have created more sites “that are probably getting less attention per site, and on the left, there is a smaller number of sites, but they are more strategic about getting attention to those sites on Facebook and elsewhere”, Skibinski said. “I don’t know that we can quantify whether one is more impactful than the other.”

[...] Republican lawmakers and leaders of the conservative news sites the Daily Wire and the Federalist have also filed a lawsuit and launched investigations accusing NewsGuard of helping the federal government censor right-leaning media. The defense department hired the company strictly to counter “disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies”, Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher who co-founded NewsGuard, told the Hill in response to a House oversight committee investigation. “We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department.” To counter the flood of misinformation, social media companies must take a more active role in monitoring such content, according to Franklin and Skibinski.

Jen Filfield at The Guardian:

In North Carolina, Local Labs wanted obscure voter records that would take weeks, or even months, to prepare. In Georgia, the company requested a copy of every envelope voters used to mail in their ballots. And in dozens of counties across the US, Local Labs asked for the address of every midterm voter. Local election offices across the country are struggling to manage a sharp rise in the number of public records requests, and extensive requests coming from a little-known conservative effort called Local Labs in at least five states have stymied election officials, according to a Votebeat review of hundreds of records requests, as well as interviews. The requests are broad and unclear, and the purpose for obtaining the records is often not fully explained, leaving officials wondering in some cases whether they can legally release the records. Local Labs is known for a vast network of websites that rely mainly on aggregation and automation, blasting out conservative-leaning hyper-local news under names such as the Old North News, in North Carolina, and Peach Tree Times, in Georgia.

Local Labs’ CEO, Brian Timpone, told Votebeat the company was using records requests in an attempt to expose election fraud that he is sure exists. The company was sometimes getting paid by GOP-backed clients to do so, Timpone acknowledged, characterizing the work simultaneously as both political research and journalism. “We’re just trying to push for more free speech and more transparency,” Timpone said. “And no one else is doing it.” Veteran journalists and those who study journalism ethics say he’s wrong. The Arizona State University journalism professor Julia Wallace – previously the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution – said doing reporting and paid-for work at the same time is not ethical. “That’s not independent, so that’s not journalism,” she said. Timpone is no stranger to journalism controversies: among his previous companies was one that sold cheap content to local news organizations and was ultimately closed after a series of ethics scandals, including plagiarism. To be sure, public records laws exist because the public has the right to know what the government is doing, and ensuring access to records is a critical window into that. Election offices, open records advocates say, should consider proactively and publicly sharing more election records.

But election officials have questions. It’s unclear from the requests when the company is doing the work for a third party or for their news websites, or both, and if the election offices can legally provide the records. One recent Local Labs project offers a clue of what might be to come. After the midterm election, Local Labs was paid by America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a national thinktank that pushes the former president Donald Trump’s agenda, to send public records requests to 100 counties in the US asking for a record of each voter who voted, along with their address and other information. AFPI published the first results of that work in June, in a misleading report that insinuated that thousands of fraudulent ballots were cast in Arizona’s midterm election. “Voter Discrepancies Found in the Arizona 2022 General Election,” the AFPI headline read. But most, perhaps all, of the more than 8,000 discrepancies found were because Local Labs had compared two sets of voter lists from different time periods and including different voters.

Yavapai county officials, for example, showed Votebeat emails in which an elections official tried to convince Local Labs not to publish the broad findings because they were misleading, taking time over days to explain the source of the discrepancies. The warnings went ignored. “They just put the information out, and we are left defending ourselves,” the Yavapai county recorder, Michelle Burchill, said. “Then we are being harassed,” she said, because people believe it.

[...]

Local Labs slam county offices with requests

North Carolina and Georgia election officials say they are frustrated by Local Labs’ broad requests because the company often fails to answer any questions that would make them easier to understand. “I am reaching out for the third time to clarify your records requests to our county boards of elections,” Pat Gannon, spokesperson of the North Carolina state board of elections, wrote to Espinoza on 17 August, asking him to call him. “Obviously we will respond to all public records requests as required by law, but this is immensely frustrating to busy elections officials trying to ensure that all eligible individuals can vote and have their vote counted,” Gannon said.

Records provided by Gannon show numerous Local Labs requests across the state in recent months, for broad information that would take weeks to gather such as all documents with information about election hardware and software, and all absentee ballot applications. These add to outstanding Local Labs requests, including for all absentee ballot envelopes cast in the midterm election, which would take weeks to scan and redact. In Wake county, North Carolina, it took a team of election workers three or four months to respond to a similar request for the envelopes from a different requester – there were more than 40,000 absentee ballots cast in the midterm election there. Danner McCulloh, who processes records requests for Wake county, said each envelope had to be scanned and redacted individually, and then reviewed by a legal team. The result was just envelopes with the voter’s name and address, since state law required the redaction of signatures and other identifying marks.

David Folkenflik at NPR: 

Since late summer, many Illinois residents have been receiving newspapers that they haven't paid for nor, in many cases, even heard of.

Each paper bears a clear-cut tagline: Real data, real news.

And each publication that shows up in driveways and mailboxes carries a partisan punch that's blatant, but not formally disclosed.

"They present a strongly one-sided view of things," said Bernard Schoenburg, who covered Illinois as a journalist for decades.

Schoenburg retired as a columnist for The State Journal-Register in Springfield in December 2020, 44 years after walking into his first job out of college at the Bloomington Pantagraph. In the intervening decades, traditional newsrooms throughout the state have withered, from the Pantagraph right up to the once-mighty Chicago Tribune. Some have shut down.

That erosion of local news has created an opening for these newer publications, which lie dormant and then spring up at election time. They look a lot like hometown newspapers — nothing flashy, just long, printed broadsheet pages with color photos and graphics — but without any real interest in local news.

"You get these glaring headlines of ... what's so terrible about our tax system right now or what's bad about a Democratic governor," Schoenburg said.

All signs point in one direction

The coverage all points in a single political direction: hard right.

Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.

"In this age, with so many kinds of media that hit people," Schoenburg said, "people don't know, necessarily, what's real, if they're not sophisticated in this way."

This fall, readers encountering the Sangamon Sun or Chicago City Wire or the Dupage Policy Journal or their sister publications will find coverage uniformly beating up on the policies and persona of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who happens to be up for reelection.

The West Cook News splashed an incendiary quote across the top of its front page recently: "It's going to be literally the end of days."

A two-page spread inside presented a vivid display of photographs of 36 men who were charged with violent crimes — but had not been convicted. They would all be released to Cook County's neighborhoods, the accompanying headline said, under legislation signed into law by Pritzker last year that eliminates cash bail. (Actually, judges will retain discretion to determine whether people facing serious charges pose a threat, according to reporting by WBEZ and other news outlets.)

All but four of the 36 men in the photos were people of color.

"This is Republican propaganda and, in some instances, just outright lies," said Pritzker campaign spokeswoman Natalie Edelstein. "The information being presented is intentionally being set up to mislead people. It looks like it's independent, local news. But in reality, when you read the content, it's playing on people's emotions and fear."

A GOP candidate says papers are filled with "fact and truth"

Among the people quoted in that front-page story in West Cook News: conservative talk show host Dan Proft.

Proft runs a political action committee called People Who Play By the Rules PAC that has spent millions aiding Pritzker's Republican opponent, state Sen. Darren Bailey.

"These newspapers that are circulating the state are full of fact and truth — and Gov. Pritzker has the gall to call it a lie," Bailey said on Proft's radio show in early September.

Proft's PAC also helps to underwrite the papers, which he conceded on the air recently.

Yet nowhere in the publications themselves is there any disclosure of the papers' pro-Republican agenda, its source of funding, or even its point of view — except, of course, in the relentless punching of hot-button issues for the right, including trans rights, COVID restrictions and taxes.

Proft did not respond to NPR's efforts to seek comment, nor did cardboard shipping magnate Dick Uihlein, a major party activist who falsely argues that the 2020 presidential race was fixed and who has financed the PAC with more than $40 million this year, according to the Center for Illinois Politics. He did speak to the Chicago-based NewsNation television broadcast, telling anchor Leland Vittert that his readers do not trust mainstream news organizations.

"We provide angles to stories and information that you don't get from left leaning or left — or not so leaning, just hard left — news outlets," Proft said on NewsNation. "They're all sharing a brain and we're providing a different perspective on some of the issues that are salient in people's lives."

In Proft's recounting, the Illinois papers put out by the Local Government Informational Services -- their publisher — sound like a throwback to an earlier age, when papers were openly partisan and ideological on their news pages as well as their opinion section. And there's a school of thought that that's a more intellectually honest way than reporters saying they shelve their own points of view.

Right-wing fake news purveyors owned by LGIS, such as Chicago City Wire, DuPage Policy Journal, Metro East Sun, and Will County Gazette, are sending out newspaper copies to Illinois voters that are full of disinformation, especially about the SAFE-T Act and sex education.