Reader beware: “Heavily slanted” outlets in NC pretend to be legit news

Why it matters: With the proliferation of news and opinions online, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for regular readers to decipher real news from partisan slant (and even conspiracy theories).

• The existence of such outlets erodes trust in traditional media, experts say.
• What’s more, prominent political candidates and businesspeople — who wield massive influence — have cited such sources recently.

Zoom out: A network of at least 51 locally branded news sites has popped up since last year under names like the Milwaukee Metro Times, the Mecklenburg Herald and the Tri-City Record, our Axios Local colleagues recently reported.

• They’re run by a company affiliated with the American Independent, a Washington-based progressive news outfit that was launched by a Democratic operative.
• The sites put out “heavily slanted political news aimed at boosting Democratic midterm candidates and attacking Republican opponents,” Axios reported.
• There are three in North Carolina: the Mecklenburg Herald, The Piedmont Tribune and Triangle News.

NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalists to rate news and information sites, gave the Mecklenburg Herald a 52/100 on its trustworthiness scale.

• “Proceed with caution: This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards,” NewsGuard wrote on a warning label for the site.

It’s not just progressive outlets. Metric Media runs a network of conservative sites in North Carolina, including the “South Mecklenburg News” which has downplayed the severity of COVID-19 and painted a rosy outlook on the U.S. achieving “herd immunity,” which experts remain skeptical about.

Driving the news: U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley has cited American Independent articles in campaign emails. And in the U.S. Senate debate, she cited an American Independent piece that said that her opponent, Republican U.S. House Rep. Ted Budd, had taken oil industry PAC money a day before voting against a bill to stop oil companies from price gouging.

• FEC campaign finance records show that the Continental Resources, Inc. PAC did report its donation on May 18, the day before the vote. But Budd’s campaign didn’t receive it until June 6, filings show.
• Jonathan Felts, senior advisor for Budd’s Senate campaign, says the campaign records donations the day they are received.
• Beasley’s campaign contends that the details of the story are true. “The bottom line is that while Congressman Budd’s campaign and his allies have parroted repeatedly debunked claims meant to mislead voters, our campaign has relied on the facts to show voters Congressman Budd’s record of extremism and corruption,” Beasley spokesperson Dory McMillan told Axios.

Budd, on the other hand, has repeatedly cited Breitbart, a website known for spreading misinformation.

• For instance, a Breitbart story he tweeted in August includes a misleading claim about Democrats redirecting bulked-up IRS resources and the impact it’d have on middle-class Americans. He referenced the claim about 87,000 more IRS agents during the October debate, too, a claim CBS News has called “outdated and misleading.”
• Of note: The Treasury Department has said the IRS could add 87,000 employees over a decade, but it hasn’t specified the kinds of jobs that could be added (customer service, IT, enforcement, etc.) Further, Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen has said new personnel will not specifically audit individuals who make less than $400,000 a year.
• “Breitbart reported on work Ted is doing in Congress, we shared those articles on social media,” Budd spokesperson Samantha Cotten told Axios.

Flashback: There’s a long history of partisan press in the U.S., notes Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, each party had their own newspaper in towns around the country.

• Difference is, back then people knew they were partisan newspapers, Cooper adds. They had words like “Democrat” in the masthead. Today, it takes a savvy observer to realize outlets like the Mecklenburg Herald are coming from a certain perspective, he says.
• “That concerns me. To see politicians repeating claims from the pink slime outlets tells me that even politicians might not even know where these lines are drawn or why they’re important,” Cooper tells Axios.
• “It isn’t to say you can’t have a partisan outlet. You (just) have to tell people you’re partisan,” he added.

There are plenty of media outlets with a political slant in North Carolina, like Carolina Journal, which is produced by conservative think tank the John Locke Foundation, and NC Policy Watch, part of the left-leaning North Carolina Justice Center.

Yes, but: What makes these new websites different is that they are often founded and funded by political operatives, usually located in swing states, rarely have original reporting, and often don’t have anyone located in the communities they purport to cover, says Philip Napoli, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University.

• “They very often disguise to some degree their origins and motivations etc., and really do try to capitalize on the inherent trust that people have for local news sites,” he says.

Metric Media is a relative newcomer to North Carolina, per the Raleigh News & Observer. Owned by conservative businessman Brian Timpone, Metric Media runs about 48 community “news” publications statewide.

• The community outlets have generic sounding names like “North Mecklenburg News” and “Gastonia Times” and publish evergreen-sounding stories like high school sports roundups.
• But other stories, like those about COVID-19, are slanted.

While Metric Media lacks original reporting — an “overwhelming” number of their articles are autogenerated — and age quickly, the original stories on the site “give an outsized amount of coverage to stories about electoral fraud in states Donald Trump was contesting during the 2020 general election,” Napoli wrote in a report, which examined nearly 1,000 of Metric Media’s websites.

Context: Because the conservative media networks cropped up first, most of the studies have centered on those. But the Democratic sites so far seem to be following a similar playbook.

• “The template has already been fairly well set,” Napoli says. “To me, what we’re watching now is sort of the left playing catch up.”

An Axios review of the Mecklenburg Herald’s website shows that many were a few paragraphs long and written by a “staff writer.” Others had bylines of a writer based in New York and one whose LinkedIn says he is a digital content writer for the American Independent Foundation.

• The publication also used three stories from NC Policy Watch’s Lisa Sorg, an environmental investigative reporter. NC Policy Watch director Rob Schofield said in an email that they have no affiliation and the publication makes its content available for anyone to use.

Of note: Napoli believes the FEC could take a more aggressive role in labeling these publications as political influence organizations rather than news operations, and thus requiring them to file necessary disclosures.

The big picture: The decline of local media has contributed in part to the proliferation of partisan and other alternative news websites.

“As traditional local news sources go away as they have been because of the economics being so challenging, who’s left to fill that void for people whose motivations are not economic, but political?” Napoli says.

Between the lines: Last month, billionaire Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, cited a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi from the Santa Monica Observer, a widely discredited right-wing website known for years for publishing false stories, Axios’ Sara Fischer reported.

• The site “is anything but trustworthy,” according to a NewsGuard executive, Fisher wrote.
• For instance, the Santa Monica site had a story in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was actually dead, and that a body double debated Donald Trump, the Los Angeles Times reported recently.
• Musk eventually deleted the tweet, but not before many of his 114 million followers had seen it.

The bottom line: “It’s scary for people who are concerned about democracy and believe reliable information and sourcing are key to a well functioning democracy,” Cooper, the Western Carolina professor, said.