How an ex-Florida man is flooding Mass. political news with anonymous, right-wing pink slime
If you take a look at Mass Daily News right now, you’ll see a lead story about nearly $50,000 in campaign donations from Eversource executives to Gov. Maura Healey.
It’s hardly a match for Jordan Wolman’s CommonWealth Beacon story suggesting that Healey’s public criticism of Eversource is just an election-season ploy (he’s got the receipts), and it’s merely a rewrite of a Republican Party press release. But it’s not nothing, either. Some press releases deserve to be amplified.
Other stories on the Mass Daily News homepage feature crime, critical stories about undocumented immigrants and a commentary claiming that Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue bested Healey, a Democrat, during their debate moderated by WBZ-TV’s Jon Keller earlier this week.
So what is Mass Daily News? Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has learned that the man behind the anonymous site is named Simon Pacheco — a former Florida man who registered his company in Wyoming in order to flood the Massachusetts political mediascape with rightwing, AI-enhanced pink slime.
It’s quite a story, and kudos to Ryan for figuring out Pacheco’s role.
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors
Related Knowledge Center: Trust in news media
In ancient media times, when newspapers made money and three network news behemoths roamed the land, a vast majority of Americans trusted what they saw on television and read in the paper. No more: The slide in trust that began in the 1970s continues to this day, with fewer and fewer people believing what they find in the news cacophony.
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The hollowing out of the local news ecosystem has been well documented; in some communities, efforts are underway to reverse the growing news desert.