Websites 'masquerading as local news' spread as election draws near, experts warn

(TND) — They've been called "pink slime,""shady" and a "shadowy network." Some call them "propaganda" and say they are "hyperpartisan sites ... masquerading as local news."

Whatever you call them, these locally branded news websites accused of political bias are spreading as we head into the midterm election.

And the public needs to work harder to make sure they're getting unbiased journalism, according to Phil Napoli, an expert who has studied the rise of these sites.

Napoli, a professor of public policy at Duke University, says these websites, which he says can be politically slanted, now number in the thousands.

“Some individual networks are themselves over 1,000 sites,” Napoli said.

Partisan journalism has a long history, but what’s new is how cheap and easy it is to set up vast networks of these websites, Napoli said.

“There often isn’t really much human capital with any one of these individual sites, so they can operate in a very centralized way,” Napoli said.

The names of the sites sound like any other community news site: Auburn Times, The Macomb Digest, or the Bucks County Standard, for example.

And the sites are often targeting people in swing states.

“These tend to be sites where ownership is opaque, where whether there’s any actual staff and where they’re located tends to be opaque,” Napoli described. “Where they rely a lot on content that’s not local at all. And perhaps most important, that these sites tend to have a partisan agenda one way or the other that is often ... that they’re not entirely up-front about.”

The American Independent and its ties to these locally branded sites have been the focus of new reports about these networks.

The American Independent is transparent that it’s a national “platform for progressive news.” It is staffed by folks with ties to the Democratic party and gets funding from liberal groups and activists, such as David Brock and his American Bridge 21st Century political action committee.

What’s less transparent is The American Independent’s connection to dozens of locally branded news sites that also carry political stories from The American Independent writers.

Some of these sites are owned by an entity called Local Report, incorporated last year in Florida, but little else is known.

Local Report sites such as Milwaukee Metro Times, Northern Clark County Herald and The Columbus News have no social media pages and bare-bones templates with no information about their ownership, location or staff other than a generic email address at the bottom of each site.

These sites, and their murky ownership and staffing, caught the attention of Axios, which reports six writers from The American Independent contribute “to most or all of the sites in the network.”

Indeed, The National Desk also found stories on the Local Report sites from The American Independent writers.

Some of the shared headlines include: “Multimillionaire Pennsylvania Senate candidate wants to keep minimum wage at 2009 level” and “Senate Democrats pass historic climate and health care bill over unanimous GOP opposition.”

NewsGuard, which offers “trust ratings” for news sites, reported on another network of websites that are more transparently connected to The American Independent but take a local approach. These sites have names such as The Michigan Independent and The Pennsylvania Independent.

The National Desk reached out to both The American Independent and Local Report.

No one from Local Report responded as of this story’s publishing, but the executive editor of The American Independent, Jessica McCreight, provided this statement via email when asked about the connection with Local Report:

“It’s been widely-reported that where local news outlets shut down, dis- and misinformation grows. To combat this challenge, The American Independent has expanded to bring readers local, fact-based news and information on topics and issues that impact their communities.”

Stories from Local Report sites have also been shared and showcased by Democratic officials.

But the left isn’t alone in their use of these locally branded news sites. They weren’t even the first to really go big with it, according to Duke professor Napoli.

He researched the explosion of similar sites pushing conservative news stories in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

“It looked like, on our end, that first there was a real growth in the number of right-leaning sites that were spreading across the country, and now it seems to be a case where we’re starting to see left-leaning sites emerge in response to that,” he said.

For example, Republican Jim Renacci, a former Ohio gubernatorial candidate, regularly shared news stories on social media that came from “pseudo-news network Metric Media,” according to analysis from Pete Brown, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

Metric Media operates about 1,200 websites “disguised as local news outlets” set up “to promote Republicans,” according to the NewsGuard report, citing research from the Tow Center.

Research shows “there is a large percentage of the population that is not very good at distinguishing between traditional news reporting and editorializing and really using that distinction in how they manage their news diet,” Napoli said.

Napoli also said more research needs to be done to get a firm handle on how prevalent outright misinformation is on these so-called “pink slime” sites (named after the meat filler).

“It’s certainly a fair thing to be concerned about, but we just don’t have a body of data yet to identify how big a problem it is,” Napoli said.

Napoli said there are also concerns that “the same kind of partisanship that has come to characterize our national news sort of trickles down and becomes the norm in our local news.”

Napoli advises the news-consuming public to do some basic research on the outlets and perhaps even use a news-rating tool like NewsGuard.

And look for red flags, like the lack of basic ownership and contact information on the locally branded news website.

“The end news consumer today has to do a lot more work than they used to if they really want to be confident in the news sources they’re relying upon,” Napoli said.