Pink Slime Never Went Away

A suite of news stories this week has brought political influence in the news media into sharp focus. First, the Murdoch family has finally settled its differences and installed the eldest boy, Lachlan, as Rupert’s eventual successor. Then an incendiary Wired article by Taylor Lorenz caused a stir among left-leaning influencers, revealing that they’ve been receiving payments from a dark-money group; on the other side, Wired also found that right-wing influencers were paid to bolster MAGA foreign policy talking points. Meanwhile, David Ellison’s CBS is considering a hundred-million-dollar deal to bring Bari Weiss and her Free Press newsletter to the network, fundamentally challenging the besieged premise of “objectivity.” All this against the background of a White House that has become its own media outlet, regularly landing articles at the top of Google News as though it ranks as an equivalent source to the most rigorous piece of reporting.

Amid all these national headlines, it’s easy to miss another increasingly noisy source of politically backed journalism: local news outlets. Earlier this summer, Brian Timpone, the founder of a network of politically funded local news sites called Metric Media, sent out more than a hundred Freedom of Information Act requests to public universities asking for details of their course syllabi. Timpone was quoted in the Murray State News saying that he wanted to see how tax dollars were being spent: “We’re very curious, especially state-funded colleges like Murray State…we want to know if they’re actually teaching, teaching you something, or if they’re trying to propagandize you with nonsense.” (The Tow Center has followed Metric Media since 2019.)

Texas Scorecard, another politically aligned local outlet, vigorously covered a story that led to the removal of a professor and a department head from Texas A&M this week. The Scorecard reported on viral video clips that featured an unnamed student challenging a professor over the content of a literature course. In 2020, Texas Scorecard was designated a 501(c)(3) “independent newsroom” by a political consultancy called Empower Texans. The nonprofit is chaired by the conservative donor Tim Dunn, and enforces no separation between its political funding and media ownership. Like Metric Media, the publication uses its nonprofit status to file FOIA requests under fee waivers in order to pursue political targets in higher education. In 2023, Texas Scorecard published stories about the hiring of Kathleen McElroy from the New York Times to Texas A&M’s journalism department that contributed to pressuring McElroy to drop the job. McElroy had given up a tenured position at the University of Texas at Austin to take the role at Texas A&M, and she subsequently sued A&M for a million dollars. Earlier this year, Texas A&M campus newspaper The Battalion ran a story documenting Texas Scorecard’s relentless pressure on campus administration through FOIA requests. It wrote:

“The authors of Scorecard’s posts—often hardline, conservative activists—submitted 94 open records requests to A&M and 23 to the A&M System from late 2022 to 2024, with a majority fueling the more than 100 stories the website has posted referencing the university since 2022. These requests target records of all types, including syllabi, funding numbers, communications containing specific keywords and various statistics.”