Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Fake Newspapers Are Flooding America

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

From Ohio to North Dakota, thousands of people have suddenly gotten brand new newspapers delivered to their doorsteps out of the blue. These newspapers are fake news outlets created by the oil and gas industry to influence public opinion in key districts, and they're having a major impact.Top investigative journalist Miranda Green has been uncovering these schemes. She joins me to talk about how these shady publications are mimicking legitimate local newspapers to spread propaganda and influence public opinion.​The fake outlets are already playing a major role in influencing public opinion and even jury pools, such as in the recent $666 million judgment against Greenpeace related to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Miranda reveals the oil and gas industry's fake news playbook and how it's eroding our news environment. Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠Subscribe to my YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorLorenz⁠ Follow me on IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz⁠ Follow me on Bluesky: ⁠https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social⁠ 

That's the hardest part. You don't know what you're not being told because they don't have to tell you both sides of the story. They don't follow a journalist ethics code. Imagine waking up to find a new local newspaper on your porch. As you read it, you think you're catching up on community news. But what you might not realize is that this new publication isn't a legitimate newspaper at all. It's a fake propaganda newspaper funded by the oil and gas industry. In recent years, as traditional local news outlets have shuttered across the country, energy companies have stepped in, creating networks of fake newspapers and news websites to influence

political discussions and shape perceptions of clean energy and environmentalism in small towns across America. These developments are particularly concerning, as local journalism plays a crucial role in informing small town communities and holding power to account. But their decline has created a vacuum that companies are exploiting, leading to rampant misinformation and a less informed public. Miranda Green is one of the top investigative journalists in the country. She has exposed dozens of these fake local news websites and papers. Today, she joins me to talk about how the oil and gas industry is fundamentally reshaping our local news landscape, how you yourself might have encountered one of these fake news operations.

And what implications this entire movement has on democracy and the environmental movement? Miranda, welcome to power user. Thanks for having me. All right, so you've been covering the rise of what's called pink slime journalism and basically how the right and oil and gas companies are taking advantage of the decimated local news ecosystem in America. So for people that haven't been following your phenomenal reporting, can you give us kind of the 101 of what's going on? So I have been covering what I like to call media misinformation, basically the rise of local publications, mostly across rural communities,

but also in some cities that are really targeting a subset of individuals who are really disenfranchised or disillusioned with the mainstream media. So essentially what's happening is that as mainstream media is becoming less and less looked to by local communities and people are looking for other places to find their news, there's also been a drying up of local newspapers. So we've seen news deserts across the country. But that doesn't mean that people don't want information. They're still desperate for it. And so what I have found is that a lot of companies, and in particular, the oil and gas industry and utilities, are, buying up papers or influencing papers in order to fill that gap. Yeah. And these kind of fake media

companies or warped media companies that are ultimately kind of fronts for oil and gas companies are known as pink slime. Can you explain what that is? The term pink slime, which is kind of a really gross term, come from the meat industry actually. When you think about chicken tenders, when you think about what is that meat in there, it's a lot of meat buy products, it's real, but it's mushed up and it's put into a different product. You don't really know what you're seeing. And so pink slime, is really similar. It's news like products. They are websites that read like newspapers. They have articles that look like newspapers. They might even be print articles that are sent to your door. But when you look really closely, it's not what it seems. They don't have bylines or

they are one-sided and don't include the other perspective or all the articles are about one topic and you can't figure out where the publisher is or who even sent it to you. And there's been a rise of these pink slime newspapers across the country with the rise of the internet because it's been easier to buy up and create multiple websites that are tied to specific communities. So these could be specific states, specific counties, even specific towns. So that if you are an interested news reader and you want to look up something in your town and you're just doing a Google search, you might stumble.

upon this paper. Or they might do a targeted ad search in your community to make sure that you see this. And it looks legitimate because it looks like a real newspaper has all the hallmarks. But it's really owned by a company that oftentimes is getting paid for that content. And they're not usually very transparent about where that pay is coming from. I think the internet equivalent of pink slime is slop, which is essentially like a word for low quality content that dominates these online news ecosystems. And I feel like a lot of pink slime news is ultimately just slop. It looks like news. It looks legitimate. But like you said, it's low quality. It's ultimately a lot of misinformation. And I feel like we heard a lot about like quote unquote fake news

websites around 2016, especially on Facebook with the rise of Trump. But you've really noticed that a lot of these fake news websites are targeting specific areas. So I think it started with Florida. Can you tell me what you found there? My entire interest in this started. in Florida. I was working for a company, a startup called Floodlight at the time. And my colleague and I were talking to a local publication in Florida about this really weird political campaign that had happened. There was a Democratic candidate who was running on a pro-solar platform. So he believed that there should be easier and cheaper for people to put solar on their roofs. The weird thing that happened is that he actually got a challenger to his campaign with the exact same last name as his.

So his name was Jose Rodriguez, and he got a challenger name Alex Rodriguez. But Alex Rodriguez had no political background. He actually wouldn't give any interviews. And his campaign seemed to be run primarily by his siblings and people that had no connections to the political industry. So local reporters started digging into him because they thought it was really strange and ultimately realized that it was what they call a ghost candidacy. He was a person that was put up by this consulting firm to essentially siphon votes away from the real candidate. What happened is that people went to the ballot box to vote and they voted for the wrong Rodriguez. And enough people did this that he actually ended up losing the election.

What happened during that search, the local papers got sent all of these boxes of random files. And one of the papers that received these anonymous files was the Orlando Sentinel. And they had realized that the consulting firm that had hired the fake Rodriguez, the other Rodriguez, was a consulting firm called Matrix. They realized that because all of these files that they got were internal documents proving how this consulting firm had done this, how they had set up the payments, how they had lowered this man into doing this. And so after the local papers had written about this, we thought it was a bigger story.

We wanted to write it from a national perspective. And so we reached out to them and we asked if we could take a look at the documents and see if we could get more. And they were eager to let us work on a story with them as we started digging and asking people questions and making calls to verify the documents, figure out if the claims in them were real, which is biggest step here. They came from a random person. We wanted to make sure they actually were internal documents from this consulting firm. We got more internal documents, more leaks came our way. And it ended up spiraling into this big story that we realized hadn't been covered, which was that this consulting firm was essentially hatching this elaborate scheme and being paid

for by two major power companies to infiltrate six local newspapers across Alabama and Florida to change the perception of clean energy and to essentially either change their way that they write about clean energy or attack candidates that were promoting initiatives that were against the power company's bottom line. Wow. So what did that ultimately look like? Is this just like oil and gas companies placing op eds or like what when you say they wanted to sort of change the news ecosystem and news environment around clean energy? How did that manifest? Yeah, it actually ran the gamut. And what was so cool from a reporter's perspective is it's so rare that you get a window into how these companies work. They make most of their profits off of rate payers and rate payers very

infrequently have a choice of who they pay for their power. But they don't have to divulge where they're spending, you know, ad revenue. And so one of the places that was receiving money from Alabama power in Alabama and Florida Power and Light, which is the nation's largest power company, was Matrix, and then Matrix was in turn doing some of these, you could say, underhanded schemes to change the narrative. And what we found by tracing these, you know, internal financial statements about where they were sending this money is that Matrix spent nearly a million dollars across these six sites. In some cases, they paid a woman to create a website, was paid by one of these power companies. We found internal emails where they were directing coverage to one of these websites.

The woman created a website that was like a news website. Yes. And this was an interesting find because they found multiple routes to spend this money to try to get as many different audiences. They invested in established papers, some that had been known for taking play to play money, like FloridaPolitics.com. And pay to play just for people that don't know, it means basically you pay someone and then they write what you want, right? Exactly. Yes. And no legitimate newspaper would normally do that. Exactly. That is the point here. We actually ended up writing a breakout story in Florida politics and it's its founder, you know, Peter Swarsh likes to call it. He basically says that he operates off of a new journalism standard, which is kind of a mixture of advertising and editorial,

which is not really something that legitimate news organizations think about, right? Either you are your editorial room, your newsroom is completely free and does not take requests from people or your advertisers and you do take requests from people. There's not really like a blurriness there. If there is blurriness, then that's concerning. It means that the people are reading it. They don't know why a paper is writing a story in a certain way. But there are increasingly more and more places that are doing that and some aren't apologetic about it. We saw that Florida politics is one of those papers that had taken money. We saw that there were other papers that had taken the capitalist had taken requests from the CEO of one of the power companies to write specific articles that they

wanted. And in one of the more crazy finds, we found that Matrix had paid money to a new online news organization that had started in Alabama. And it was run by a woman who actually a relationship with the partner at Matrix, Jeff Pitts. This was a very respected consulting firm, and yet they were doing all of these shady things, including paying money to people close to them, as the ledger showed. Okay, so you have this Florida power company and this Alabama power company, both paying this consulting firm that's paying off newspapers, dubious websites to run articles that are positive about them. It sounds like they also funded their own news site as well to put up articles that are just complete press releases and promotion of them. In one case, the gas companies

were paying their consulting firm to create a fake reporter or something, right? Yes. So we trace that there was a reporter who was going to several politicians in Florida and she was telling them that she was doing a story for ABC News. In one situation, she even gave them a card that said a reporter at ABC News, but they found out that she was not, that she actually was getting paid by Matrix, this consulting firm, to do this work. And she was having an affair with the partner at Matrix Jeff Pitts. Oh my God, this Jeff man. And I'm assuming that those politicians are only speaking to her because they think that they're there for an ABC news interview. Why would the power companies want these politicians interviewed by this woman? Where did these interviews end up going?

So what ended up happening is that she wasn't quite asking for interviews as much as she was appearing to intimidate them. In a couple of scenarios, she showed up with. with cameras in their faces and said, Wilde claims in one, she asked a politician if he had been responsible for killing gopher tortoises when he was a local politician. And he had no idea what she was talking about. And she still later posted online. And in another, she actually talked her way through a private gated estate, this member of Congress and got to the front door and asked his wife where he was and left her card,

which was the ABC card. and asked him questions about his position on environmental regulations. This was a Trump Republican, but he cared about environmental issues because his constituents in Florida do. Sometimes these things don't fall on political lines. But Matrix was getting paid by the oil and gas industry. The utilities were against any sort of bills that would have to focus on environmental issues because climate change is a concerning issue for these businesses. And so she was trying to nab him on this issue.

What was really interesting is that when the congressman learned that this woman had found her way to his house, his initial reaction is he thought that she was a Democratic operative. So he actually took to his Facebook and he did a sit-down interview with his wife where he blasted the Democrats for sending this operative to his house to do opposition work on him. And he didn't actually even know who she was until we reached out to him for the story and asked him the name of the reporter that had reached out to him. Wow, and she was actually just an oil and gas industry show. She was working for this consulting firm that, and that happened to be one of their clients. And what this congressman was saying didn't work for them.

So these sort of like shady influence operations that manipulate local news are not just happening in Alabama and Florida, right? Tell me about the coverage that you've been doing in North Dakota and what's been going on there. This is now back to the pink slime idea, these papers that that appear to be real. But if you look closely, they seem weird because there is something weird about them. They are one-sided and they're not transparent. And so residents starting last fall in this really tiny county called Morton County in Central North Dakota received this paper called the Central MD News. Out of the blue, they didn't pay for it. They open it up. Kind of looks a little bit legit. There are politicians on the front. It's before the election. It might seem like, okay, this is

something tied to the election. But if you look closely, at the inside, a lot of the articles were tied to something that had happened all the way back in 2016 and 2017, which was the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests. I don't know if you remember them, Taylor, but that was big news back in the day. We had a couple of celebrities who had flown out there. I think Shailene Woodley was out there and actually arrested for protesting. It was when Energy Transfer Partners was a pipeline owner was trying to build this pipeline through North Dakota and a lot of tribal members and tribal communities were protesting it because they were concerned that it would be bad for their water would contaminate their water. And a lot of environmentalists came out and also protested. They

camped out there. They stayed for weeks. They stayed for months. They ultimately lost. The pipeline has actually been built. It's functioning. But energy transfer in recent years decided to put out a lawsuit against Greenpeace and environmental organization. And they are essentially blaming Greenpeace for inciting a lot of these protests. And they are suing them for $300 million. With that context in mind, when residents opened up their papers in this small community in Morton County, which is where the protests had happened back in 2017, all of a sudden they're facing articles that say, on this day back in 2017, and it's articles that remind them of how much of a nuisance these protests were. So these articles are saying protester was arrested.

Protesters said that they were happy about trashing this site. And it reminded people, oh, yeah, that was a really crappy part of our lives that was really destructive. So Greenpeace was really worried seeing these papers that this was jury tampering and that it would reminds people of how bad it was and also that they would link that to Greenpeace, which was really what was at dispute here, whether Greenpeace was responsible for this. So people are seeing these newspapers that look legitimate. I mean, my parents recently in Colorado, I think, got some sort of new newspaper. There's all these new newspapers that are launching local news sites and stuff. And I could see people getting a free newspaper on their doorstep and picking up and being like,

oh, this must be a new like local paper in town. Maybe they're distributing free copies to get attention. But who was behind it? Who was writing the articles for these papers? Like, where did these papers ultimately come from? I think some people saw this paper and they did think it was a real newspaper. And I did talk to other locals who saw it and they knew something was screwy and they said they put it directly in the trash. So I found this news of this paper very interesting because it seemed really similar to what I had been looking into. And I looked at the return address for this newspaper and was able to trace it back to a company called Metric Media, which is based in Illinois. And the company is owned by a former newspaper man named Brian Timponi. Timponi has, or the course of the last couple of years,

set up 1,200 news appearing websites across the country that again, look like real news, but if you look closely, are mostly made up of filler content and one-sided and do not have bylines of real people. Wait, and the company in Florida and Alabama was Matrix Media. I know, similar name, right? Not the same thing at all. Metric Media, yes. But they're totally unrelated and they're both pushing swap, basically. But very innocuous sounding names too, right?

And so I think that is a bit of the part of it. Even if someone were to do the due diligence of looking up this website or looking up this address and seeing who is connected, wouldn't really be clear who they are. If you look at metric media's website, they say that they do consulting, they do online media. It's not really clear what they do. And they're not very transparent about what they do or why they do it either. So Brian Timpone set up this company that, as you say, has published all of these fake news websites. And then he went so far as to actually print fake physical newspapers and deliver them to people in North Dakota.

Yes. It is not metric media's typical motive of operandi to print these. papers, but they have in key scenarios. And typically it's been linked to different clients paying for them. But this was really unique because this wasn't the cost for the eve of an election. This was before a trial. And so looking at federal election commission data, I actually did find a money link. So the president of energy transfer, which is the owner of the pipeline, the Dakota access pipeline, he right before the papers came to people's houses, paid $5 million to a super pack, a super pack that, interestingly enough, largely supported Trump. That super pack a week later

paid another company for media services owned by Brian Tamponi, the same man who owns metric media. And then the paper came to people's homes. That is as close as you sometimes get when it comes to dark money to an open and shut case, you know, because of the money transfer. They also, I think, started writing about you, right? And I feel like that's also validation that you definitely struck some sort of a nerve, right? Because people in North Dakota were getting newspapers with your face on it. Can you talk about that? Yeah, it's still pretty funny to think about. Just a couple days after my story came out that I published with a local reporter in North Dakota, Metric Media owned fake newspaper. The Central ND News published its own story and its own story

actually challenged the findings of my reporting. It criticized whether we had different reasonings for why we were looking into them. It actually went as far as digging into both of our companies were non-profit news orgs and looking into whether we were taking funding from anti-oil and gas industries, which is an interesting tactic. Neither of us do. Both of us newsrooms that don't take any sort of cues from any of the funding that we get, unlike metric media. But it was a very clear pushback to the reporting that we did. The photo that they used of me was interesting. They took a, like, they like scrolled back through your Twitter, I think, and scrolled by all your professional photos and then took one of you in like a lower cut top,

like taking a selfie. It was the one photo I think I have that's a selfie of me on Twitter too. And it was just me making fun of myself for dressing like a hipster in Silver Lake. And that's the one that they used. I guess if that's the worst photo that they could find, I'll take it. But this is the difference between a real legitimate news organization and journalism ethics at play and a new seeming site. Right. When we were writing that story, we reached out to metric media multiple times. We gave them multiple opportunities to comment.

They knew exactly what was coming. And we said both sides. We tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. But then when that story came out, I had no idea. I was not reached out to. And it just showed up on my feed. And it was completely one side. It was a lot of could this be, could they be taking money? I went through strides to really prove the money trail here. One of the things I really want to drive home, Taylor, is just that some people really don't realize how much work reporters put into to prove the facts of the stories. We're not just highlighting questions. We're proving things before we report them. Well, I think that's the stark difference between. the story that you wrote and then the story that they published that's really just like the smear hit piece in their like fake newspaper about you is that your story so methodically documents these financial ties it tells their side of things i think it's an incredibly fair story but it really lays things out and you can see their scheme and you can see the receipts their story is all pretty much

innuendo there's no sourcing it's a lot of questions being asked but you can see from a news consumers' perspective, because so many people today can't even tell the difference between an opinion article and a fact-based article, you could probably read both and think that you're not credible. If I just came across that article in my feed, I would probably be left with that impression. And I think that's what's so dangerous. And of course, they're not just doing this in North Dakota either. Can you talk about what's happening in Ohio? Yes, you made all great points there, Taylor. And this is happening across the country, actually. What happened in Ohio is an extreme example of what some of these news companies or newslike companies are doing to take advantage of the

increasing number of news deserts out there. And news deserts is a term that we used to describe what's happening to counties, towns, and communities where there are no local papers anymore. And this is happening because newspapers are having a hard time making money. And so people are left this information void. What happens with the Mount Vernon News is it was once a thriving local newspaper in this town in central Ohio. And it was essentially on its last legs. It was holding on the owner of the paper was looking to sell. They wanted to retire. And they had already cut cost significantly. It was, I think, down to two days a week or maybe three days a week at the time. And metric media came in and Brian Teponi decided to buy it. Wow. So what happened after

Brian Tamponi bought it? A lot of change happened after Metric Media purchased the paper. It started slowly and then it changed dramatically. First, they moved all of the reporters onto contract positions offering no more health care. Most of the reporters I spoke to said they quit on the spot, if not soon thereafter. Then they essentially started having content creators, including some reporters from abroad, filling in the content. So there was at the time that I published my story about them, not a single reporter in Ohio writing for this paper. It was all being done elsewhere. then the coverage started changing. This was a local paper that was really known for covering the county fair every single summer

and for writing about the Friday Night Lights football games that were really important to this community. And now everything is mostly made up of press releases and stories about solar. And this is the change. Locals told me it felt like almost overnight the paper became obsessed with writing about solar power and how bad and unreliable it is. So why are they attacking solar now? Was there some sort of solar legislation or project that was happening in town that led them to focus on the specific area of coverage all the sudden? What was happening is that there was a solar farm that had recently been proposed in the community that would take up some existing farmlands. And some people were really

concerned. And the paper very quickly started criticizing it and asking a lot of questions about it. Now, what you need to know is that Mount Vernon is an oil town. The town's largest employer is called the Aerial Corporation and it manufactures methane gas parts. A former executive of the gas parts company created a company that started buying up columns in the Mount Vernon News. And those columns specifically focused on the benefits of gas. And it wasn't long after that some of these anti-Solar farm stories started coming through. What we also found is that this former executive

had financial ties to a quote unquote grassroots company that had also popped up in the community that was opposing the solar farm. Grassroots I use with air quotes because I would really say it was an astroturfing group. Astro-Turfing is a term that's used to describe a group that looks like it's grassroots, but really it's not created by locals and it gets money financially from other interests. In this case, we were able to tie this grassroots astroturfing company to getting money

from this former executive. What was interesting is that the Mount Vernon News started quoting this group heavily in its opposition to the solar farm. That's crazy. So basically, metric media, which we know is a digital. dubious fake news organization that will take money from kind of anybody to promote political views is now taking money from this former gas executive in this town and suddenly the paper starts coming out against this solar project. And the residents aren't really privy to any of this,

right? I mean, if you're just a normal news consumer, all you're seeing is, wow, the newspaper really seems to be publishing a lot of articles that are negative about this new solar farm, right? Yeah, I mean, most of the residents didn't know what to make of it. I think that's that's kind of what you have to think about at the end of the day here. This paper was a normal paper that had real news and real reporters. And then all of a sudden, like that, it was writing mostly stories opposing the solar farm. Most of these residents had never really thought about solar. They'd never faced a solar farm before. It's not something they had seriously considered. And it's all that they're reading about in this paper that they relied on. And now they can't

get any other kind of news. So not only did it kind of taint their positioning on this, it took away from a resource that they really relied on. And I will say, we are still waiting to hear if that solar farm will ultimately be approved. They were supposed to rule at the end of last year, but we still haven't heard any decision. And what that paper put out might ultimately change whether the siting board, whether the local community and those regulators decide to approve. it or not, which could actually have really negative impacts for some of the locals there who could make money off of those solar panels on their dying farmland. It seems like all of this is

happening in such a large part because of the news desert problem like you mentioned before. You gave this that somewhere that newspapers are down 75% in circulation from 2005, more than half of the counties across the United States have one or no local news sources. What is the scale of this problem because it seems like as we're decimating local news, it seems like there's no one stepping in. In some regions like Alabama, Florida, North Dakota, Ohio, we're seeing these like fake newspapers backed by oil and gas or utilities companies prop up. But is there any evidence that all of these different state efforts are connected? Is this part of a broader movement? Yes, there is some evidence that there's some connection. There's some evidence that at least in the

metric media organizations, they're taking money from Coke industries, which largely has money that came from the oil and gas industry. We are seeing the state policy network organizations, which is a network of right-leaning think tanks being quoted across some of these news appearing websites. And then we are also seeing evidence that some of these websites that actually don't have anything to do with one another financially are taking cues and learning from one another and building up their business models based off of the success that they are seeing from each other's versions of these new sites. Wow. So they're not even financially related, but because they're competing, they're helping each other optimize each other's businesses. Maybe not even competing.

I think that they think of each other potentially as being on the vanguard of this new way of getting their messaging out there. And so they're learning from each other's successes, whether it is creating a new site from scratch and building an audience or buying a former newspaper and capturing their built-in audience. And they are often bragging about it. I actually found this connection from a podcast of one organization in Alabama started saying that they got the idea to create and launch a website from Chevron in California. And what did Chevron as an oil and gas company do in California? Chevron a decade ago launched a newspaper in Richmond, California, which is a large county just outside of San Francisco in the Bay Area. It took advantage of a news desert there.

The major paper there had shuttered and whittled down. There were only small local papers covering the news and they saw an opportunity. It just so happened that Chevron was also one of the largest employers in the town. And they launched a paper called the Richmond Standard. It's crazy how all of these papers have such innocuous sounding names. Like when you say the Richmond standard. I would never think that that is a Chevron-backed fake news outlet. What were they covering? I mean, did they cover oil and gas? Was it a similar situation to something like Ohio and all these other states? How did coverage change? You know, it's funny you say that, Taylor, because it is innocuous until you think about the history of Chevron. Chevron used to be called Standard Oil. It was one of the

largest oil companies in California. So it actually was a bit of a nod to that paper. What's different about the Richmond standard is that the Richmond standard has been transparent from day one that it's owned by Chevron. If you go to its website and you look at its homepage, it does say Chevron across the top. But as you and I know, most people don't get their news from going to their website. So if these articles are shared or people are texting them around or they tweet them out, the difference is that they don't say on each article that this is run by Chevron that the people who wrote these articles are actually part of a PR company and that is the case chevron hired a PR company based out of the bay area to run and write articles for this website now granted the articles are important to the community they do a great job

of writing community profiles they sometimes highlight crime in the area they highlight jobs but what they don't highlight critically are themselves specifically looking at the articles you notice that chevron is only written about in a positive light which is really interesting considering that chevron is the job creator in the community of Richmond. And oftentimes, it is a source of major pollution. For example, when we went out there to report this story, Chevron had just gotten a major fine. It was actually one of the largest fines that the California Air Board had ever given to an oil and gas company for air pollution. It was such a big story that other Bay Area newspapers and radio stations covered it, and they made it out to what it was. They said this was a multimillion

fine. It was a big slap on the risk for Chevron and it means there's going to be big changes at the refinery in terms of they are going to have to, you know, clean the way that the refinery operates to make it safer for the community. The Richmond Standard couldn't avoid this article, though it has avoided writing about similar articles in the past. So instead, it wrote an article that said Chevron has decided that it's going to reinvest in the community. This is a great opportunity for everyone here. And they really flipped it and made it seem like it was something that they had decided on out of the goodness of their heart, not something that had been forced upon them. So really just completely flipping the narrative and making it seem like it was their choice,

which is just really not true. So you can really see the shift in coverage compared to the traditional papers that were there that were employing actual journalists and likely would have covered that quite critically. Across the board, all of these papers decide to cover the news in different ways. They fill their content differently. Some of them use PR teams, some of them use AI, some of them actually hire former reporters, some of them actually buy up real newsrooms and keep the reporters. But I think the uniform messaging change that we're seeing here is the lack of transparency or the decisions they make about what they do or do not cover, especially when it comes

to themselves and the industries that matter most to them. What's so interesting to me is that you've done all of this reporting showing this massive influence of the oil and gas money on our news media climate and how they're taking advantage of news deserts and decimation of media. And obviously when you look at the Koch brothers and all of this, like they're doing all of these new media projects. I think they sponsored a Mr. Beast video recently. They've definitely got their hands in the media ecosystem. As a tech reporter, I feel like I've even seen parallels of this. I remember a decade ago, back in 2014, Verizon actually tried to launch their own tech news website called Sugarstrip.

Do you even remember this? No, but that sounds right. That makes a lot of sense. I remember it because it was this time when a lot of traditional tech journalism places were shuddering. This is the rise of digital media and the internet. A lot of people, journalists are getting laid off, tech reporters included. And I had a couple of friends that went to go work for this tech news site. Now, if you went to SugarString, it looked like a traditional tech news site.

And I think they hired legitimate journalists that were laid off tech journalists from other legitimate outlets. The one thing that they would not cover, however, is net neutrality, which is obviously this big sort of tech policy debate that Verizon is heavily involved in. Verizon has incentive to fight against net neutrality, which are basically laws that sort of help cap Verizon's business, to put it very simply. And it's just interesting because I remember talking to friends that went to go work there and they're like, well, where else am I going to work? Journalism has been so decimated. And I guess when I, I don't know if you had the chance to talk to anybody that's like worked to any of these fake news outlets. But I guess I can kind of

understand how people end up working for them. Did you talk to anybody that ended up working there? Yeah, I talked to reporters that many of them. And there were a lot of similarities to what you just described. Reporters who had been laid off and they had no other option, reporters who didn't realize how biased it would be until their own stories were being edited in a way that they felt uncomfortable with. Reporters who were sold a different story, and then once they got there, realized, okay, actually we're getting money from someone I don't feel comfortable taking money from. And I think that it's this double-edged sword here where the media and the internet has created an opportunity for anyone to have a platform. Businesses

are saying, why go with traditional media when we can just create our own media? but there's no vetting. And readers might be getting more news and they might be getting direct messaging from these companies, but those companies have their own interest at heart. And readers don't necessarily know what they're missing. That's the hardest part. You don't know what you're not being told because they don't have to tell you both sides of the story.

They don't follow a journalist ethics code. They don't feel the need to be transparent. about why or why not they're covering a topic. It's also just so scary when you look at the national news climate because we see, of course, the news deserts across America with local news. And then you see more corporate control or billionaire control over traditional media with people like Jeff Bezos, tightening the reins at the Washington Post, where I used to work, declaring what can be covered, what can't be covered, how things can be covered. The LA Times as well, that billionaire owner has also sought to exert unprecedented editorial control over the newsroom.

It just seems like it's harder and harder for average people to get actually fact-based unbiased news. You know, I want to say that I think that the reporters at both those publications you just mentioned still say strongly that those initiatives by their owners are not bleeding over into the newsroom, that they still are trying really hard to be as unbiased as possible. And a lot of them are quitting if they feel like that is happening. I do truly believe that, you know, traditional news and whatever capacity that looks like these days, real journalists are still trying to, you know, uphold those standards of transparency. I do think that there are a lot of factors making it really hard for them to do that. And I do think that it's even harder for reporters that have been laid off to find jobs at places that uphold those same ideals. I guess like to counter it, what people would say is like, well, what's the problem? Maybe I want more progressive news organizations to cover things through my lens.

Or maybe I'm a conservative and I'm sick of the mainstream media not covering things from a conservative standpoint. So I guess in that sense, like what is the problem if so much of this is shaped by the right politically, I guess. But if you're conservative in Alabama, maybe that's what you want. I think that's different. And I think that that is an okay perspective. I think that's different than these fake news, pink slime organizations that we're saying because there's no transparency. You're reading the free press or you're watching Fox News. You kind of know where that money is coming from.

You know their perspectives. You know those reporter's backgrounds. You know who wrote the articles. There are bylines. There are faces. That's not what you're seeing across most of these papers that I've been reporting on. You don't even know who's written this content. You don't even know if they're an American citizen.

They could be AI. And sometimes you know the publication who owns it. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you don't know what that organization. is and you don't know what those interests are. They're not transparent. They're not open and they don't feel like they have to be. And I think that is the difference. When you look at these efforts in certain states, I mean, I'm thinking of Alabama, Florida, North Dakota. These are kind of red-leaning states. Like, what demographics are most subject to this sort of fake news information ecosystem? Oftentimes, it's Republicans themselves. These fake newspapers are frequently being sent to conservative households because it's, it's a bit of a culture war topic. They are advocating for like-minded people to help push them over the edge potentially to align on certain issues. So some of these papers include topics like pro-life issues and school choice, and then they bury and they also be anti-solar.

They're really trying to get a certain ideology to kind of circle the wagons on these issues that these papers are trying to idealize because they're taking money from oftentimes conservative candidates or conservative organizations that feel this way. They're not necessarily trying to redo the wheel. They are not trying to turn liberals towards these conservative ideals. What they are trying to do is change minds enough to vote a certain way or think differently about a topic that they like solar that they might not have been thinking critically about before. All right, Miranda, well, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people

continue to follow your reporting? Thanks, Taylor. I really appreciate you having me. They can find my reporting on my website, Mirandacgreen.com and on my Twitter and blue sky pages. Is it green with a E? No, green like the color. Perfect. All right. Thanks, Miranda. Thanks, thanks, Taylor. All right, that's it for this week, you can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag at Usermag.com. For more information on this story and more, that's usermag.com. If you like this show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Every single rating makes a difference.

Thanks for watching and see you next week.