A new report covered by Axios developed by a misinformation tracking company, NewsGuard has identified a disturbing national trend that has dire implications for San Francisco voters.
The number of dark money, politically motivated outlets misleadingly posing as local news (1,265) has now outpaced the number of legitimate and ethical local newspapers in the United States (1,213), according to the Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative.
The study’s authors referred to these types of publications as “pink slime” media that present themselves as “independent” but are instead funded by partisan groups.
In 2024, misinformation will likely come more from one of these outlets than AI and deep fakes, which get the lion’s share of the attention.
If that statistic does not send shivers up your spine during election season, it should, regardless of your political affiliation.
Why is it dangerous?
Many of these dark money websites have received hidden multimillionaire- or billionaire-backed funding from both sides of the political aisle and sometimes major corporations. Their credibility is equivalent to political advertising, and the intention is to swing election outcomes, but they appear to many readers like legitimate sources of third-party reporting.
For four years, I have been warning that layoffs at ethical nonprofit journalism outlets like KQED and others will lead to a disinformation crisis, with bad actors taking over — just in time for the 2024 election.
How do I spot it?
Signs of a pink slime or dark money website include accepting money or engaging in other conflicts of interest that are not fully disclosed publicly. Ethical journalism relies on disclosure as a core concept.
These sites use misleading terms like “nonprofit,” “community-driven,” “investigative journalism,” or “independent” when they are anything but that. They sometimes prey on people taking comfort in the past journalism experience of those involved, but fail to make explicitly clear that once they start operating in the dark money space, they are, by definition, no longer working in journalism but political advocacy.
The term nonprofit is misleading because it is simply a tax code and does not make an organization accurate or concerned with public interest. The 501(c)4 is a tax code specifically intended for dark money outlets to engage in partisan political activism, which is never a source of news.
Another flag is that they will have undisclosed ties to specific partisan political organizations, efforts, or even candidates.
For example, a website that popped up this year in the Bay Area called Phoenix Project, a 501(c)4 dark money organization supposedly aiming to expose dark money, raised several flags. After much public pressure, the Phoenix Project finally “released” their donors, months later after already influencing the primary election, and it confirmed my worst fears.
The website listed a bunch of individual donor names but didn’t connect the dots that many of those people were leaders of other 501(c)4 political organizations, including San Francisco Berniecrats and Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco. Many involved in the Phoenix Project have directly worked for Supervisor Dean Preston, including the executive director, Jeremy Mack, who was Preston’s Community Outreach Coordinator, but doesn’t make that noted anywhere on the website. Others like Kyle Smeallie served as Preston’s chief of staff for four years. The conflicts of interest are not noted.
We have no idea if that is all their donors and how much they donated. What we do know is that Dean Preston has been using claims from this website in fundraising campaigns.
In other words, this checks all the boxes of a pink slime dark money website masquerading as unbiased information about a cause when it is actually a dishonest campaign to reelect Supervisor Dean Preston. Meanwhile, Dean Preston is a multimillionaire posing as a socialist who has engaged in this behavior with dark and gray money in the past.
Another example of pink slime on steroids already influenced the 2020 election. It was called the San Francisco Independent Journal. Again, it was operated by the Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco falsely claiming to be an independent news organization, but the real motivation was to run articles thinly veiled in favor of local politician Dean Preston.
The credibility of dark money websites is equivalent to political advertising, and the intention is to swing election outcomes, but they appear to many readers like legitimate sources of third-party reporting.
It is the same tactic that organizations like the Heritage Foundation, another 501(c)4, use to promote Donald Trump and Project 2025. But in that case, they are at least transparent that it is an initiative of the Heritage Foundation. The San Francisco Independent journal made no attempt to note it was an initiative of the Democratic Socialists of America, and many of their members were on Dean Preston’s key leadership staff.
Having watched the Democratic Socialists of America San Francisco in 2020 write fabricated resolutions and then push them to publications like 48 Hills, Mission Local, and The Intercept, this is the third time I have seen Dean Preston at the root of a media disinformation campaign.
What can we do about it?
Those behind the Phoenix Project should fix these issues immediately. For instance, The San Francisco Standard originally started as a dark money media outlet 501(c)4 nonprofit under a different name, Here/Say Media. After criticism from industry observers, however, they transitioned to an LLC funded with $10 million in seed money from tech billionaire Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman.
Ethical journalists in the Bay Area need to stop ignoring the problem. The only outlets that seem to cover it are Marina Times and the Voice of San Francisco. Professional journalism organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists-NorCal need to stop encouraging it when granting awards to “journalists” who accept undisclosed money from sources.
This is the tip of the iceberg of my concerns and guidance for upholding the integrity of press ethics at risk from fake news websites. You can learn more on my nonpartisan media literacy Substack and my politically focused Medium page.
Updated 7/16/24 to clarify corporate category of The San Francisco Standard.