The U.S. Midterms Were Once Again Flooded By Fake ‘Pink Slime’ Local Newspaper Propaganda

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned anybody who'd listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either news deserts," or local news that's mostly just low-quality infotainment and agitprop.

Despite claims that the internet would fix this," doing quality local journalism just wasn't profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet... didn't. As a result, all sorts of terrible stuff has rushed to fill the vacuum where quality local journalism once existed.

That includes not just your usual collection of propaganda like Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc., but also so-called pink slime" fake local newspapers that try to look like a real local paper, but are basically just partisan agitprop.

Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University did the definitive study on the subject in 2022, and found that there were 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit. In the years since, such fake newspapers have outnumbered real ones. They're often even better funded.

This partisan ratfuckery historically was heavily dominated by Republicans. But in recent years Democrats have gotten in on the action. And increasingly as voters turn to AI to inform them about upcoming elections, AI chatbots are leaning on these fake pink slime newspapers as reliable sources of local information:

As a citation, ChatGPT linked to a website called the Kalamazoo Beacon. The Beacon labels its articles as news articles" in the website's source code. The outlet also describes itself in the site's source code as Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities."

But the Kalamazoo Beacon has only published 16 stories, all about [Michigan Democrat Democrat Sean McCann], his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR's review shows."

When the both sides" press covers this pink slime phenomenon, they sometimes try to imply that this kind of stuff is happening perfectly symmetrically among both major parties (as this Financial Times story does). But NPR's own previous reporting (which this newer piece curiously fails to mention) indicates that Republican pink slime efforts outnumber Democrats by around ten to one.

In this newer case, nobody can actually seem to track this new smattering of pink slime newspapers to an actual source:

It's unclear who operates the websites. NPR was unable to find or reach the site operators. One of the Democrats promoted by the network, JoAnna Mendoza of Arizona, said she wasn't behind the websites and doesn't know who is. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democrats, denied involvement in a phone call with NPR. Other candidates the websites promoted, including McCann, as well as other Democratic super PACs that support the candidates, including American Bridge 21st Century, Tomorrow Together and House Majority PAC, did not respond to NPR's requests for comment."

Regardless of the party of origin, the tactic represents a very ugly problem in a country increasingly being devoured by artifice and disinformation. There's an active extraction class effort to not only undermine sources of expertise (journalism and academia), but to flood the zone with shit" to disorient Americans (or their AI chatbots) that go hunting for reliable information.

The death of local news divides the public, can actively shift electoral outcomes, reduces electoral participation, makes a populace more susceptible to propaganda, and can even increase municipal borrowing costs (less local truth-to-power journalism means less oversight of waste, which results in more waste, which results in higher interest rates for municipal bond lenders).

Journalism ideally is the glue that contributes to a healthy civic nervous system. We've lost that tether, and therefore (quite intentionally) our sense of a collective, shared reality. You may have noticed a few... repercussions here and there.

There are ample paths out from inside the problem (better media literacy training, enforcing antitrust law, funding public media, restoring media consolidation and media diversity ownership requirements, creating better funding models for real journalism). And while there are organizations spending a lot of time working on the problem (see: the creation of state civic information consortiums) they're consistently out-financed and in desperate need of additional support.