Democrats appear to be turning to the fake news business: A super PAC called Forward Majority appears to be linked to a fake local “news” website to support Democratic candidates and causes while posing as a nonpolitical press organization.
That’s the finding of a new forensic analysis released Thursday by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which sheds light on a mysterious website called the Morning Mirror that poses as a news source. The publisher is listed as Star Spangled Media – a group that made headlines back in 2022 for running another secret “news” website called the Main Street Sentinel. As Axios reported at the time, it spent more than $1.4 million to run social media ads targeting Michiganders and almost exclusively promoting local Democratic candidates, President Biden and Governor Whitmer.
The Morning Mirror’s website features a vague “About Us” page and a series of posts – disguised as local news – praising Democratic candidates and abortion rights in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona. The many political posts are interspersed with occasional news stories on non-political topics like the weather or fitness trends.
In July, Semafor reported that a prominent Democratic election lawyer, Marc Elias — who served as general counsel for Secretary of State Clinton’s presidential campaign and was recently hired by Vice President Harris’ campaign — was backing the mysterious “news” website Morning Mirror. His law firm urged campaign finance regulators in Arizona to treat the website as a “journalistic and not a political enterprise,” as Semafor’s report put it, and argued that the company should not be subject to campaign finance disclosure laws. Elias Law Group said that Star Spangled Media is a “for-profit media company engaged in the publication and distribution of original news, commentary and editorials.”
The Semafor report said the group was “part of a multi-pronged offensive by Democrats to counter conservative media across the country with increasingly creative and sometimes opaque digital strategies – strategies that blur the line between even the most activist political journalism and paid campaigning for the Democratic Party.”
Now, a recent analysis published in the Columbia Journalism Review suggests, through a long series of ads and metadata, that the Morning Mirror and its owner, Star Spangled Media, appear to be linked to “a liberal dark money group called Forward Majority.”
In its “Plan for Power,” Forward Majority openly lays out its strategy to “reshape the local political narratives in the constituencies we target.” This will “not only influence local elections, but sow winning narratives and shifting party affinity from the ground up that can influence the broader electorate.”
This strategy, once associated with right-wing groups, is now evolving into a “growing trend of exploiting the local news crisis by flooding the information ecosystem with quasi-news content that gives the appearance of independent local journalism in order to spread partisan political narratives,” the Columbia investigation said.
With their focus on local news and elections, the groups may be on to something: A Gallup/Knight Foundation poll shows that Americans trust local news significantly more than national news platforms: 44 percent of Americans surveyed in 2021 said they trust local news “a lot” or “somewhat,” compared to 27 percent who said the same about national news.
“The challenge is that this is a cheap way to get a message out. By making it opaque and difficult to track and aggregating rather than real reporting, it becomes effective and it’s difficult for consumers to be informed about what they’re taking in,” Donna King, editor in chief of the Carolina Journal, tells the Sun about the super PACs. She says there’s a stark contrast between think tanks or organizations that report news from a particular perspective but clearly label their ties to their news services, and shady political actors posing as legitimate, established news sources.
The trend began with a distrust of mainstream media and conservative groups trying to get their viewpoints heard, she says, but since then it has spread “like a snowball,” partly due to the proliferation of social media. “I think it’s only going to grow, especially in November,” she says of the fake news websites.
The Elias Law Group did not respond to The Sun’s request for comment.
