Everyday Erinyes #159

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Where do you get your news? I mean, of course, besides here. You may watch MSNBC, or maybe CNN – I assume you don’t watch Fox or Sinclair if you can help it. You may go to websites associated with print news sources, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, et al. You may even subscribe to paper versions of them. Or magazines like Time and Newsweek, and The New Yorker. Or to sources which are online only – AlterNet, Raw Story, Crooks and Liars, Wonkette if you are a fan of sarcasm and adept at translating it. Then there are reader-generated sites such as Daily Kos or Democratic Underground, at which one sometimes needs to follow up a little to be sure the author didn’t fall for a fake story (though the good ones are also good at retractions when necessary.)

Or are you one of the majority of Americans who have more trust in local news sources than in national ones (as surveys suggest)?

If so, this report is for you.

Across the political spectrum, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study, local news is considered more trustworthy than other more national sources. It is perhaps for that reason that an estimated 30% of all links pushed by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency during the 2016 presidential election were to stories on local news websites. In some cases, these Russian imposters created their own fake local news sites.

Acting on an initial tip from a reader, the staff of Snopes launched an investigation into what purported to be a “reliable” local news website, called the “Tennessee Star.” The investigation took weeks (they don’t specify how many weeks) and resulted in uncovering, not just the Tennessee Star, but a number of other “local” websites associated with “Star News Digital Media Inc.” and revealing them as right wing propaganda outlets (more accurately, as branches of the same right wing propaganda outlet.) Some are not yet launched, but the domain names have been purchased for future use.

The video points out that, of the three domains currently active,

only the Tennessee Star runs any commercial ads, and (outside of links to political groups such as the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity or local GOP fundraisers that are clearly political in nature), we found ads for only three companies at the time of this report: car dealer Beaman Automotive Group, local furniture store chain D.T. McCall and Sons, and financial services company Advance Financial 24/7.

This is hardly consistent with the statement of co-founder Michael Patrick Leahy (in an email):

“We are in business to make a profit, and have a number of advertisers to prove it.”

Does it matter?

The owners of these businesses do nothing untoward in supporting candidates and PACs or in buying advertisements in the Tennessee Star. But because Star News Digital Media is neither a candidate nor a PAC, no limit exists on how much these families could spend in supporting the organization’s reporting, which as we have shown blurs the line between journalism and political campaigning….

Based on a Snopes analysis of link posts shared between 6 November 2018 and 5 February 2019, an estimated 30 percent of the linked material that Star News shared on Facebook from their own sites is republished from other sources. Much of this third-party content was published across multiple sites in their network, and many of the sources of that content were either directly or tangentially funded by mega-donors that provided their content for republication free of charge.

So, what’s the problem with third party content? We use quotes here at politics Plus, right? You bet. And we work hard to keep our third party quotes limited to fair use, and also to provide solid links to the original sources (unless it’s from propaganda, in which case we cite, without links, in order to avoid boosting their numbers).

These “local” sites – and their Facebook pages – avoid bylines, and they avoid crediting sources. But Snopes reporter Alex Kasprak, working with reporter Bethania Palmer and ops specialists Vinny Green and Chris Reilly, did some uncovering. Snopes made a chart of where the third party content comes from – including how much comes from where.

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director for the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, was also interviewed for the Snopes story. She had quite a bit to say, including

“Honestly, if you have an organization that is trying to shield the identity of people writing for it, is not straight about its funding sources, [and is] allowing people with partisan points of view to push those points of view and not be upfront about that, I don’t understand how you can call that a news organization.”

I can see how people, particularly Republican people, might tent to trust local news sources more than national or international sources. Republicans tend to be tribal, and it makes sense they would trust their neighbors – their own tribe – more than they would trust outsiders. It appears that both Russian trolls and American trolls have both figured this out, have run with it in the past, and will be running with it as far into the future as they can.

Although I lean on Snopes a fair amount, I was directed to this story through Crooks and Liars, and I think their take on it is worth sharing too:

Of course, the goal from the ratf**kers standpoint is not only to make Republicans look good. If they fail at that, at least they can say they hurt websites like Crooks and Liars, who work hard every day and transparently to hold Republicans and the media accountable. If the average reader throws up their hands because they “can’t trust anything they read online,” that does real damage to websites like ours.

But I think we (those of us who have two brain cells to rub together) can draw some guidelines from this report which may help keep us from throwing up our hands. When looking at a website purporting to provide news,

*   Look for bylines.
*   Look for bios on the bylined writers (they may not be on the same page as the story; some              sites link to them.)
*   Look for clear sources, also linked.
*   Look at any advertising, and even more so on sites purporting to be local.

The big sites which have advertising contract with agencies like Google and AdSources. On them, you may be shown right wing ads (along with straight commercial ads from real for-profit businesses), but you are almost as likely to be shown left-leaning ads. (“Almost,” not “just,” because the right has more money to spend.) I have no specific source for that; it’s based on having done some reading on internet advertising, supplemented by my own experience.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, anything you can do to take down these frauds would be appreciated. But whatever you do, spare some effort for educating us into knowing what we are looking at. Heaven knows we need all the help we can get.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.