Fake ‘Pink Slime’ Propaganda Newspapers Surge Ahead Of Fall Election
For decades, academics have been trying to warn 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-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing 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.
Those same academics will then tell you that the end result is an American populace that’s decidedly less informed and more divided, something that not only has a measurable impact on electoral outcomes, but paves the way for more state and local corruption (since fewer journalists are reporting on stuff like local city council meetings or local political decisions). It also opened the door to authoritarianism.
Every six months or so, a news report will emerge showing how all manner of political propagandists and bullshit artists have rushed to fill the vacuum created by longstanding policy failures and our refusal to competently fund local journalism at scale.
Of particular problem has been so-called “pink slime” newspapers, or fake local news papers built by local partisan operatives to seed misinformation and propaganda in the minds of poorly educated and already misinformed local voters.
Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University studied the phenomenon 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 (on top of the bullshit they already consume online).
And, as expected, the problem is accelerating as we head into another election season. The total of such fake newspapers has tripled since 2019, and now roughly equals the number of real journalism organizations in America. In many instances, these networks are better funded and better organized than real journalism orgs, which find themselves relentlessly under fire by those with wealth and power who’d prefer journalism simulacrum over hard-nosed reporting:
“Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said her research suggests that following the 2022 midterms “a lot more money” is being poured into pink slime sites, including advertising on Meta.
“A lot of these sites have had makeovers and look more realistic,” she said. “I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of that moving forward.”
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 one NPR report indicates that roughly 95 percent of the fake newspapers they tracked were created to aid Republican candidates.
Angry at the factual reality espoused by academia, science, and journalism, the ever-more-extremist U.S. right wing has engaged in a very successful 45+ year effort to undermine U.S. journalism, academia, and even libraries at every turn, and then replace them with a vast and highly successful propaganda and delusion network across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and now the internet.
It’s a massive propaganda ecosystem that extends way beyond fake newspapers. It’s a self-contained participatory alternate reality where ideology is king and facts no longer matter. It’s everything academics spent decades warning us about. And, if you somehow hadn’t noticed in the Trump era, it’s working. Just ask your family members who think a NYC real estate conman is pious.
Democrats tend to be feckless and often incoherent when it comes to coherent and forceful counter-messaging to increasingly radical right wing propaganda. They also haven’t understood the severity of the problem, and have generally avoided having any kind of coherent media reform policies. If they respond to the problem, it will likely involve behavior that looks similar.
Meanwhile many in the academic and journalism industries still don’t seem to have the slightest awareness they’re under systemic, existential attack, often blaming the implosion on ambiguous but somehow always unavoidable market realities.
But the evidence is everywhere you look. Journalists are being fired by the thousands; folks with expertise are being replaced by incompetent brunchlords; and the ad-engagement based infotainment economy continues to shift from real reporting to controversy-churning, distraction-engagement bait.
There’s plenty we could do to address the problem. We could adopt stronger education and media criticism standards like Finland to prepare kids for a world full of propaganda. We could staff outlets with competent leadership and find new and creative ways to fund real, independent journalism. We could adopt media policies that rein in mindless consolidation, which tends to steadily erode opinion diversity.
But we do absolutely none of that because it’s simply not profitable enough. And in a country where mindlessly chasing wealth always takes top priority, you ultimately get what you pay for.