Michigan websites latest example of partisans publishing biased content meant to look like local news - Entrepreneur Generations

A conservative group has launched nearly 40 sites masquerading as local news in battleground state Michigan this fall, and aims to eventually launch thousands more nationwide, Carol Thompson reports for the Lansing State Journal.

Matt Grossmann, director of Michigan State University's Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, told Thompson he noticed the sites through promoted posts on Facebook recently, and did some digging after he saw the partisan slant of the stories and the unfamiliar website names. He discovered a "vast network of related outlets" meant to look like local news sites. 

The sites' publisher, Metric Media LLC, says on the pages' "About" section that it aims to fill the "growing void in local and community news after years of steady disinvestment in local reporting by legacy media." Metric Media is run by conservative lobbyist Bradley Cameron, whose "biography also says he has worked for pharmaceutical manufacturers, technology companies, and is retained by national conservative leaders to respond to 'government targeting of their operations and initiatives,'" Thompson reports.

What's happening in Michigan isn't new. In recent years, partisan operatives have been increasingly capitalizing on the "vestigial credibility" readers give local news to publish sites that look like local news but publish highly biased content.

"As local news becomes less profitable as a commercial business (and re-spun as more of a public good) but still retains high levels of trust, some political players see its situation as an opportunity," Christine Schmidt reports for Harvard University's NiemanLab. "Among them has been a series of conservative news sites with opaque funding that focus almost entirely on portraying governments as wasteful and corrupt." The problem isn't so much with politicians promoting an agenda as it is the fact that they're trying to hide their partisan bias and capitalize on the trust earned by newspapers, Schmidt writes.

It's not a new phenomenon, though it's getting more common. And though some liberal operatives are behind such efforts, lately it's been mostly conservatives. "'The Free Telegraph' states nowhere on its homepage that it’s published by the Republican Governors Association. 'The California Republican' sprinkles heroic headlines about GOP Rep. Devin Nunes ('Devin Nunes Exposes Collusion, Left Gets Abusive') until you scroll down to see 'Paid for by the Devin Nunes Campaign Committee' in tiny type at the bottom," Schmidt reports. "Politico and Snopes uncovered a network of sites in key 2020 states (The Ohio Star, The Minnesota Sun, The Tennessee Star) created by Republican consultants and mislabeling people paid to elect a GOP candidate as 'investigative journalists' who were now covering them."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2N1reox Michigan websites latest example of partisans publishing biased content meant to look like local news - Entrepreneur Generations

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