By Colin Lecher, CalMatters
Earlier this year, as the political battle over Congressional redistricting brought California into the national spotlight, Facebook users were shown a curious series of ads.
The ads, from a straightforward-looking news site called the California Courier, often felt a lot like campaign commercials, linking to articles hammering Democrats in the state, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Few punched in the other direction, toward Republicans. One said “California Democrats just rewrote their gerrymandering plan so voters will see their partisan map on the ballot this November.” Another called Proposition 50, which passed in November, “a scheme critics say is meant to undermine voter-approved protections and entrench one party rule in California.”
A reader who clicked through to the Courier’s website would find stories that largely align with a conservative view of the news, like a video of a child “riding a scooter through San Fran’s drug-ravaged streets,” or an anonymous piece that cites “confidential sources” cautioning against a “left-wing educator” running for a position with an Orange County school district.
What a reader would not find is any disclosure of the Courier’s ownership or funding, including what appear to be ties to a network of conservative organizations in California that, according to one researcher, scaled up a series of right-leaning news sites in three other states just ahead of the 2024 election.
The Courier has money to spend. According to a review of the ad library maintained by Facebook’s owner, Meta, the outlet has spent more than $80,000 since 2021 promoting its stories on social issues and politics, potentially reaching tens of thousands of users on the platform each week.
Critics say the California outlet is part of a growing, nationwide ecosystem of innocuous-looking, cheaply-produced news publications that publish and advertise biased articles in an attempt to surreptitiously influence elections. They worry the practice could mislead voters and corrode trust in nonpartisan news providers.
“I think we are in an era where people are consuming so much content online without knowing the source of it,” said Max Read, who has studied the network apparently behind the Courier at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit that works to counter political polarization. “And for well-funded organizations to contribute to that by disguising what they’re doing online just helps exacerbate that problem of people not trusting what they come across.”
At a glance, the Courier does not necessarily look right-leaning. A handful of stories seem like straight news echoing press releases, such as one announcing new affordable housing units. But even those that seem relatively neutral may have a right-leaning spin, like one describing speeding fines tied to income as a potential “woke penalty loophole.”
The outlet also shares a name with a 67-year-old California-based publication serving the Armenian diaspora. One of that Courier’s founders won acclaim from his peers for his tenure as dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school.
When The Markup and CalMatters contacted the publisher of the Armenian Courier, he said he was unaware of the other site. He told a reporter he was opening it for the first time.
“I’m definitely not conservative,” said Harut Sassounian, who owns the Courier, where his regular editorials appear online and formerly in print. “The two publications have nothing in common. Neither politically nor ethnically nor anything like that.”
Although it lacks the pedigree of its Armenian twin, the right-leaning Courier has shown it is well-immersed in today’s social media. A video it made suggesting Newsom flip-flopped in his view of President Joe Biden’s mental acuity generated thousands of reactions.
The publication also shares some of the murky citation practices of contemporary social media. Almost all of the stories on the site are unattributed, or simply attributed to “the California Courier.”
A few, however, include author names. One of the named writers describes himself on social media as a “content creator” for the Lincoln Media Foundation, a conservative group, and links to Courier articles. Another shares a name with a Republican strategist based in Orange County, and a third lists a resume with conservative organizations in a short bio.
The Lincoln Media Foundation is tied to the Lincoln Club, a group based in Orange County that bills itself as “the oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California.” The club funnels anonymously-donated money to conservative candidates and causes.
The Lincoln Media Foundation’s Facebook page recently said it was “proud to present” a new documentary purporting to reveal “the untold truth about the Pacific Palisades fire,” the natural disaster that tore through the state this year and increased political pressure on Newsom.
One hour later, the Courier’s Facebook page promoted it as well, not mentioning the Lincoln Media Foundation but describing the documentary as “much anticipated.”
Neither the Lincoln Club, Lincoln Media, the California Courier, or the Courier writers responded to multiple requests for comment about the origins of the site, either through email, phone, or social media messages.
That silence, and the lack of information about ownership on the Courier’s website, comes despite the outlet’s chief goal, as outlined on its Facebook page.
“California Courier offers statewide and local news,” the page’s description reads. “Our mission is transparency.”
The Lincoln Club has previously been linked to “local” websites around the country, spreading stories with a distinctly conservative tint.
Last year, Read’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks disinformation and extremism online, found a handful of such sites that noted deep in their privacy policies that they were projects from Lincoln Media. Those outlets had names like The Angeleno and the Keystone Courier, and stretched from California to Pennsylvania, although a resulting report didn’t name the Courier.
Many of the sites used Facebook and other social media tools to press a conservative agenda, the report found. Meta has rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” but it’s not clear whether Lincoln Media’s websites would cross that line.
‘Pink slime’ news
Researchers have taken to calling sites like those operated by Lincoln Media “pink slime” news, a name coined after a meat-industry additive. These sites don’t produce outright false news, like others, but they do not meet basic journalistic standards. That often means low-quality content and failing to disclose associations with outside organizations.
The sites generally aren’t designed to generate revenue, but to sway public opinion. The majority, according to researchers, lean toward a conservative agenda, and if the site’s stories gain traction on social media, they can travel widely. “If they place an ad well or if they just get the right pickup from the right influencer, these things don’t really have a limit on how far they can go,” Read said.
While it’s not clear how many sites the Lincoln Club might fund, it isn’t the only group that has used the strategy.
In 2020, the New York Times reported on Metric Media, a group that created nearly 1,300 sites around the country with names like Maine Business Daily and the Ann Arbor Times. At a glance, these could pass for simple local news operations. But the Times report found they took money from public relations firms and Republican operatives to produce stories beneficial to those groups, a massive journalistic red flag.
Ethical or not, the strategy can be effective for lending credibility to a particular viewpoint. Kevin DeLuca, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who has researched pink slime websites, conducted an experiment that showed subjects both real unbiased news sites and others produced by Metric Media.
Some subjects in the study were given a tip sheet that asked them to examine the sites closely, looking at whether they included information like credible mission pages and other details. But even with the tip sheet, the study subjects said in interviews that they didn’t strongly prefer the truly local over the manufactured sites.
DeLuca says these sites are now in place around the United States, and news consumers have little idea when they’re running into them. The problem may only get worse with the spread of generative AI, since that technology further reduces the cost of creating such sites.
Researchers who study these sites say it’s never been easier to produce them. Local news, for one, has faced a years-long financial crisis that’s wiped many once-robust operations off the map.
While it can’t be said whether any one publication uses AI-generated content, the wide availability of tools like ChatGPT, capable of producing at least a semblance of a passable news story, have also made it easier to build up such sites.
“It’s going to make these pink slime sites even harder for people to know that what they’re reading is not from a human source and not really local investigative journalism.” DeLuca said.
Sassounian, for his part, doesn’t think there’s any risk the two California Couriers would ever be confused with each other. He took over the paper in the 1980s, and his columns, which he describes as “hard-hitting editorials that defend the rights of the Armenian people worldwide,” have been translated into languages around the world.
“It’s not pleasant to have our name used by someone else,” Sassounian said. “I prefer that they don’t, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”
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