COMMENTARY: Partisan outlets have been around since the advent of the republic. A difference here is that they now may make no disclosure about who’s behind them.
Publications under a variety of names that are all tied to conservative political operative Dan Proft have been mailed to thousands of homes throughout Chicago and the suburbs. The publications appear to be newspapers, but the content they contain has become controversial for pushing right-wing talking points and material that some, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker, decry as racist.
Such Republican-adoring sites don’t monopolize subterfuge, though they are the largest culprits. There are shadowy liberal ones, too. Indeed, NewsGuard, where I serve as executive editor, does nonideological assessments of website and TV news credibility. It cites five large partisan liberal and conservative networks masquerading as legitimate news sites: LGIS, Courier Newsroom, The Main Street Sentinel, The American Independent and Metric Media.
As of November, NewsGuard has identified 1,202 of these so-called “pink slime” outlets across the country, slightly less than the 1,230 daily newspapers left operating in the U.S. The right- and left-leaning sites blossom as traditional newspapers disappear at a rate of two per week, according toWhen I headed to college in 1970, there were 1,748 daily papers in a world of no internet, laptops, cable news, or cellphones.
“Today, everybody has a friend who cites weird theories or outrageous behavior by public figures that never actually happened,” says Tom Kearney, senior editor at VTDigger, a nonprofit that publishes news and analysis of Vermont government and policy, “For our system of democracy to work, the public needs the truth, and it’s unfortunate that slime sites are undermining the fine work of reliable news sources.
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