By Mark Hemingway, RealClearInvestigations | October 14, 2024
American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20% in one year from 2021 to 2022.
At the same time, the remaining readership expresses a historically low level of faith that the news they are getting is accurate. Just 32% of Americans say they have a “great deal or a fair amount of trust” in the media, according to polling from Gallup.
If there is a bright spot here, polling has long shown that American consumers trust local media more than the national press. “In 2021, Americans were 17 points more likely to say they trust reporting by local news organizations ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ than to trust reporting by national news organizations,” notes a survey done by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. But the rapid consolidation of the news industry has adversely affected the level of trust in the news Americans are consuming.
Local news organizations, however, have been hit especially hard by the decline in readers. Many have folded, cut staff, been purchased by private equity firms, or absorbed by national news organizations, which has diminished their editorial independence.
In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment poured into local media in what appears to be a salutary injection of faith in the power of the community or regional press. However, the lion’s share of these investments is coming from sources some worry will further undermine trust in the media – progressive foundations and left-leaning activists who have overtly ideological and partisan agendas. While conservative donors also support news outlets (including RealClearInvestigations), their contributions are far smaller than those coming from the left – contributions large enough to radically remake the local news landscape. Significant examples of that largesse include:
- The MacArthur Foundation’s launch of its “Press Forward” initiative last fall, which committed to spending $500 million over the next five years to “enhance local journalism at an unprecedented level to re-center local news as a force for community cohesion; support new models and solutions that are ready to scale; and close longstanding inequities in journalism coverage and practice.”
- The National Trust for Local News’ 2021 announcement of its goal of amassing $300 million for a “non-profit newspaper company dedicated to protecting and sustaining community news … [to] publish sustainable community newspapers that safeguard the public trust, elevate the facts, empower communities with solutions, and foster a strong sense of place.” Last year, the National Trust for Local News quietly acquired Maine’s largest paper, The Portland Press-Herald, along with 22 other newspapers in the state.
- The creation of States Newsroom, which was founded just six years ago with the goal of “nonpartisan coverage of state policy,” and has already formed partnerships with local outlets in all 50 states. Its stated mission is “hard-hitting reporting and commentary to change the political debate.”
- The creation of The American Journalism Project, which describes its mission as “venture philanthropy,” has committed $55 million to “rebuilding local news.”
RealClearInvestigations reached out to States Newsroom, National Trust For Local News, American Journalism Project, and Courier Newsroom. None of them responded to a request for comment.
Meet the Funders
While not all the funding sources for these projects are expressly partisan, to the extent the funding of these new local journalism initiatives is publicly known, some of the biggest donors and foundations on the progressive left are closely associated with them. These donors had little previous interest in local journalism and have a track record of supporting initiatives that are ideological or partisan – or both.
The MacArthur Foundation, for instance, in addition to its $500 million Press Forward initiative, also provided funding for the National Trust for Local News and The American Journalism Project. Long known for funding left-wing causes, MacArthur endorsed one of the most politically controversial works of advocacy journalism in the last decade. The foundation awarded one of its generous $800,000 “Genius Grants” to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which claimed that the year enslaved people were first brought to Virginia was the “true founding [date] of America,” not 1776. The 1619 Project received scathing criticism from some of America’s most eminent historians and one of the 1619 Project’s own fact-checkers, and entire essays in the project were so factually incorrect that there were calls for them to be retracted entirely.
The MacArthur Foundation also supports the National Trust for Local News, which has also received financial support from two of the largest sources of left-wing political funding – the Tides Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.
The Tides Foundation, a “donor-advised” fund, allows contributors to direct where the money goes. By acting as an intermediary, Tides obscures the original source of the funds, making it what transparency advocates call a “dark money” group. Tides is one of the largest dark money operations and spent $854 million in 2022 alone. It donates millions in grants to pro-Democrat get-out-the-vote operations, abolishing pre-trial bail even for defendants charged with violent crimes, and pro-Hamas demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel.
The Open Society Foundations network was created by leftist billionaire megadonor George Soros. According to NBC News, between 2020 and 2023, “Soros’ contributions to political campaigns and causes since January 2020 [amount] to roughly half a billion dollars – at the least – most of it steered through dark money nonprofit groups and going largely toward political causes aligned with the Democratic Party.” In addition to funding the National Trust for Local News, Soros also has the power to influence local news consumption after his family office recently purchased a large stake in 227 radio stations across the U.S.
Both the National Trust for Local News and States Newsroom have received funding from controversial Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has spent nearly half a billion dollars on American left-wing causes. Between 1990 and 2006, Wyss gave almost $120,000 to candidates and political committees despite it being illegal for foreign nationals to spend money on U.S. elections. Wyss was never punished because the statute of limitations had passed by the time the Federal Elections Commission investigated his illegal donations.
In 2021, Wyss partnered with another influential Democratic donor, hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr., in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase Tribune Publishing, which then owned the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, and the Baltimore Sun among other newspapers and media properties.
In addition, some of the largest donations to The American Journalism Project are from the foundations of high-profile Democratic megadonors. The Emerson Collective, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of The Atlantic and one of the largest shareholders in Disney/ABC, has given in excess of $5 million. Also, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s The Democracy Fund and the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund of the eponymous Craigslist founder have given The American Journalism project donations somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.
For her part, Powell Jobs has built out a well-funded network designed to explicitly advance the policy goals of the Democratic Party.
In addition to numerous political causes, Omidyar has long funded journalism efforts – he provided the seed money for the left-wing news site The Intercept, and Democracy Fund has given sizable grants to the Defending Democracy Together Institute, which is closely associated with the online anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark.
In 2020, Newmark publicly committed to a $200 million media campaign aimed at swaying the presidential election while alleging that “foreign adversaries” were controlling the Trump White House. Relatedly, Google and Facebook are also major donors to The American Journalism Project, and both companies have received heavy criticism for election meddling and censoring information on COVID and various political topics that later turned out to be accurate.
Ironically, perhaps no single man is more responsible for the death of local media than Newmark, as it was Craigslist that destroyed classified advertising, a major source of revenue for newspapers. “I’m very concerned about jobs for journalists, and the future of local journalism, and had always guessed that Craigslist might have an effect,” Newmark told the Press-Gazette in 2021.
Laundering Political Points of View
Despite the fact that so many partisan and ideological funders are behind these efforts, media critics say that alone is not reason enough to dismiss these initiatives to support local journalism.
Steve Krakauer, a former CNN producer and author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned its Principles and Lost the People,” points to the hypocritical outrage in the national press when a major Republican donor recently bought the Baltimore Sun earlier this year. Although the new owner said he had no plans to politicize the news and wanted “to return the paper to localism,” NPR claimed his purchase of the paper “sparked outrage and bafflement” among “some Baltimore residents.”
Commentary of this sort rarely attends the acquisition or major financial support of a media source by wealthy individuals and outfits on the left. “Just because someone is coming from a political point of view, whether from the right or the left, they shouldn’t be immediately dismissed as someone who can’t have an objective news organization,” says Krakauer.
The infusion of nonprofit money reflects the economic reality that newspapers’ traditional reliance on advertising and subscription revenue has become an increasingly unsustainable business model.
A growing concern is that the content of these new progressive donor-funded local news sites slants liberal in ways that many of the old independently owned regional newspapers that were accountable to their subscribers for revenue did not.
Even the perception that progressive donors with national priorities now control large swaths of local media threatens to erode confidence in the media at a time when there’s too little trust left. And this mistrust has a well-documented and worrisome partisan component documented by Gallup.
Pew also notes that media distrust is “driven by a decline among Republicans” and “the percentage of Republicans with at least some trust in national news organizations has been cut in half – dropping from 70% in 2016 to 35% [in 2021].”
Krakauer notes that when Republican news consumers learn that George Soros was involved in taking control of nearly every major newspaper in Maine – a state with the potential to be decisive in a national election – it is reasonable for them to believe that partisans are taking over a space that “has not been traditionally seen as political and partisan.”
Michael Watson, the author of a report on the left-wing incursion into local news for the right-leaning Capital Research Center, argues that media bias is often exhibited in structural issues that aren’t always obvious from reading day-to-day reporting.
“During the 20th-century heyday of the metropolitan-liberal commercial press, well-resourced regional and local newspapers – through their coverage decisions, investigative journalism projects, and editorial voice – could set the tone for local and state-level policy discussions,” observed Watson. “They had the power to decide what issues were worth considering and what perspectives would be given legitimacy. The fracturing of the media world in the 21st century has given that power to everyone and no one – and it is a power the institutional left is prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to retake.”
Watson also says it’s hard to deny that progressive funders of these local news initiatives see journalism as a vehicle to achieve their political goals. “The philanthropic sector recognizes the need to strengthen American democracy and is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts,” said the president of the MacArthur Foundation in the press release announcing their $500 million Press Forward initiative.
“When you read that, you think ‘Aha!’” says Watson. “Because if I may be aggressively cynical, if you control the public’s understanding of the facts, you control every other issue.”
Courier Newsroom: A Case Study
Courier Newsroom provides a case study of this phenomenon. For years now, Courier has been running ersatz news websites in swing states with the intent to manipulate voters. At first glance, one of its publications, the “Virgina Dogwood,” could easily be mistaken for just another local news website. With headlines such as “Inside scoop: 10 unique VA ice cream shops to visit for National Ice Cream Month” and “Get nimble with these adult gymnastics classes in Virginia,” it seems like a fairly innocuous source of information for residents of the Old Dominion.
A closer look, however, reveals something else. At least half of the stories on its homepage recently were about national politics and had little or nothing to do with local Virginia issues. With headlines such as “Trump’s policies would cause inflation to surge, economists say” and “Allegations of sexual assault, animal cruelty emerge in new RFK Jr. report,” the majority of the stories are obviously calculated for the electoral benefit of the Democratic ticket. Unlike a traditional publication, the website is very sparse, has no logo or illustrated masthead, its graphic design is an afterthought, and there’s almost no advertising.
On Sept. 23, two X accounts affiliated with Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign – “Kamala HQ” and “Kamala’s Wins” – reposted a headline from another of Courier’s regional outlets, “Keystone Newsroom,” asserting that the Polish community of Pennsylvania had endorsed her campaign – the implication being that Harris had broad support from a prominent ethnic group in a crucial swing state. In reality, the article was just touting an endorsement letter signed by a number of known partisans.
Courier Newsroom describes itself as “a pro-democracy news network that builds a more informed, engaged, and representative America by reaching audiences where they are online with factual, values-driven news and analysis.” In addition to Virginia and Pennsylvania, Courier runs similar misleading websites in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire.
Courier’s real plan isn’t necessarily building “a more informed, engaged, and representative America.” According to a 2019 Bloomberg profile, since its inception five years ago, Courier has been instrumental in “the left’s plan to slip vote-swaying news into Facebook feeds.”
Courier Newsroom was created specifically to blur the line between political advertising and journalism. Unlike campaigns and political action committees, media outlets aren’t subject to Federal Election Committee rules and reporting requirements – in 2020, the FEC dismissed a complaint against Courier alleging that it should be forced to register as a PAC. Many social media platforms also have rules restricting political advertising, rules that Courier can get around by presenting itself as a for-profit media outlet.
“Courier publications aren’t actually traditional hometown newspapers but political instruments designed to get them to vote for Democrats,” observes Bloomberg. “And although the articles are made to resemble ordinary news, their purpose isn’t primarily to build a readership for the website: It’s for the pieces to travel individually through social media, amplifying their influence with persuadable voters.”
Courier has hired ex-Facebook employees and spent millions of dollars promoting its stories on Facebook and Instagram feeds using targeting tools with the goal of effecting specific election outcomes. According to Wired magazine, one metric Courier relies on to gauge success is how much they spend on Facebook ads per vote gained.
“Hyperlocal Partisan Propaganda”
Courier Newsroom is the brainchild of Tara McGowan, a former journalist who worked at 60 Minutes and CBS News who went on to work on Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. In 2017, McGowan founded Acronym, a digital political strategy firm that’s been a major player in liberal politics and is responsible for incubating Courier.
Acronym was the sole investor and shared an office with another digital firm known as Shadow, which developed the vote-counting app used by the Democratic Party in the 2020 Iowa caucus. The app crashed as they were counting votes in the caucus, and after days of uncertainty, future Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg emerged from the Iowa caucus with more delegates than Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders won the popular vote.
Those doubting the results quickly pointed to some major conflicts of interest. McGowan was married to Buttigieg strategist Michael Halle, and Shadow had recently been paid to do work for both the Biden and Buttigieg campaigns. The fiasco led the chair of the state party to resign and many prominent Democrats to openly question the results of the caucus, and the defeat of Sanders, a candidate disfavored by the Democratic party establishment, helped Biden come from behind to beat his chief rival in the primary and eventually win the presidency.
McGowan no longer works at Acronym, though she has remained the publisher of Courier Newsroom after Acronym divested its stake in Courier in 2021. As for what McGowan is doing with Courier, media critics do not mince words.
“Tara McGowan and Courier are not trying to have an objective news organization, play it straight, and serve the people of whatever local audiences that they’re trying to serve,” says Krakauer. “They are trying to launder political points of view into what is perceived as an objective news organization, which is about the worst thing you can do.”
There have also been other ethical questions raised about Courier’s funding. Despite a lengthy “Ethics & Standards” statement on all of its publications that notes, “Our coverage is not determined by our funders,” NOTUS reports that from 2021 to 2022, Courier received $250,000 from Planned Parenthood at the same time it was “promoting content about what the election means for abortion access.”
Acronym and Courier have also attracted the financial support of the familiar roster of liberal players. Along with George Soros, Acronym has been supported by billionaire Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a prominent Democratic donor.
In 2018, Hoffman publicly apologized after it was revealed that he funded a firm, New Knowledge, which spread misinformation that may have helped Democrats narrowly win a senate race in Alabama. According to the New York Times, New Knowledge “created a Facebook page intended to look like the work of conservative Alabamians, and used it to try to split Republicans and promote a conservative write-in candidate to take votes from [Republican candidate Roy] Moore.”
New Knowledge also created fake social media accounts to make it appear that Moore was supported by Russians – a ruse that the Times notes “drew broad news media coverage.” After his funding of New Knowledge came to light, Hoffman declared, “I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election.” His subsequent funding of Acronym and Courier suggests that his disavowal isn’t so categorical.
It has been widely reported that Laurene Powell Jobs, through her Emerson Collective foundation, has funded both ostensibly legitimate local news initiatives as well as Acronym and Courier. Powell Jobs, who owns The Atlantic, one of America’s most influential magazines, is best friends with Kamala Harris, according to the New York Times. Nonetheless, she has received fawning coverage for her media investments. One CNET article declared, “Laurene Powell Jobs invests in news because she worries about democracy,” and a New York Times profile was headlined, “Can Laurene Powell Jobs Save Storytelling?”
The right-leaning website The Free Beacon was almost alone in running a critical column about her funding of Acronym and Courier. “The state of Powell Jobs’s investments – media properties faltering as a fake news operation takes off – flies in the face of her carefully curated image as a friend to the free press,” observed Charles Fain Lehmann.
But if disguising political ads as news stories seemed like a novel, if troubling, approach when Courier launched five years ago, now it’s become standard operating procedure. Just last month, Axios reported that “the number of partisan-backed outlets designed to look like impartial news outlets has officially surpassed the number of real, local daily newspapers in the U.S.,” and 45% of these publications “are targeted to swing states – a clear sign that they’re designed to influence politics.” The article did not note that Powell Jobs, who is a major Axios investor, has funded such operations.
Axios did note that progressives are not alone in creating deceptively partisan news sites. “The vast majority of the [partisan] sites observed are backed by Metric Media, a conservative network traced back to media entrepreneur Brian Timpone, who has links to conservative donors,” reports Axios. “Most of the Metric Media sites don’t include much information about the sites’ funders or management. The stories typically lack bylines and many are outdated or marked as ‘press release submissions.’” Though Metric Media tries to fly under the radar, it was the subject of a critical New York Times investigation in 2020.
By contrast, McGowan has been the subject of numerous media profiles in glossy magazines that flirt with promoting her work. Fast Company praised her as the “Democratic operative who beat Trump” and declared that boosting deceptively labeled news in front of voters is “an idea that will outlive Courier, despite the criticism.”
That was written four years ago, and it appears Courier’s pioneering work in using deceptively branded news to influence elections has proven stubbornly influential. As recently as July 7, Semafor reported that Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias – famous for his significant role in paying for the “Steele Dossier,” which launched thousands of erroneous media reports claiming President Trump was compromised by the Russian government – was fighting off attempts by Arizona regulators to require a pro-abortion news site run by a Democratic front group to be subject to campaign finance laws. It appears partisan sites masquerading as journalism are going to be part of American elections for the foreseeable future.
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