It's a sad day for America.
The sites rank on search engines as legitimate news sites when you do a news search.
The sites are funded by the Koch-founded Americans for prosperity. None of the sites say how they are funded or that they're political propoganda, they masquerade as legitimate local news sites. They pretend to be journalists.
The fake news sites masqueraded as local newspapers online for the states of Tennessee, Ohio, Minesota, Missouri, New England, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
The "writers" all work for political action committees some are previous campaign workers. They don't disclose this on their fake news sites.
Roughly 40 percent of the sites content comes from prominent conservative news sites like the Daily Caller and the Daily Signal. The rest is promoting local Republican candidates and content from conservative think tanks.
The Snopes article below is extremely in depth and long I highly suggest giving it a full read. Only PART of the article is pasted below.
Hiding in Plain Sight: PAC-Connected Activists Set Up ‘Local News’ Outlets
On 6 February 2017, a website of uncertain origin named “The Tennessee Star” was born. At the time, it was unclear who funded or operated this “local newspaper,” which was largely filled with freely licensed content from organizations tied to conservative mega-donors. After some prodding by Politico in early 2018, the Tennessee Star revealed its primary architects to be three Tea Party-connected conservative activists: Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill, and Christina Botteri.
Now, a Snopes investigation reveals in detail how these activists used the appearance of local newspapers to promote messages paid for or supported by outside or undisclosed interests. Gill, for example, is the political editor of the Tennessee Star, but he also owns a media consulting company that at least one candidate and one Political Action Committee (PAC) paid before receiving positive coverage in the Tennessee Star. Several Star writers have in the past or currently work for PACs or political campaigns that they write about, without disclosing that fact. Though its owners claim that the Tennessee Star is funded by advertising revenue, it appears to be supported by wealthy benefactors. Whatever the Tennessee Star is, it is not a local newspaper producing transparent journalism.
But this story is about more than just the Tennessee Star. Leahy, Botteri, and Gill have been expanding their version of journalism to other battleground states in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. They are, they say, co-founders of a new, Delaware-registered company, Star News Digital Media, Inc., whose explicit strategy is to target battleground states with conservative news. So far, Leahy, Gill, and Botteri have added The Ohio Star and The Minnesota Sun to their network of purportedly local newspapers. These papers are effective carbon copies of the Tennessee Star.
If you were to search for these three “newspapers” in Google, they would each show up described identically as the “most reliable” newspapers in their respective locales, providing “unbiased updates on Investigative Reports, Thoughtful Opinion, Sports, Lifestyle”:
Across the political spectrum, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study, local news is considered more trustworthy than other more national sources. It is perhaps for that reason that an estimated 30% of all links pushed by the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency during the 2016 presidential election were to stories on local news websites. In some cases, these Russian imposters created their own fake local news sites.
While Star News Digital Media does have actual ties to Tennessee politics, that company’s incursion into Ohio and Minnesota may be more about the appearance of being local. They don’t always nail it, either. For instance, The Minnesota Sun website, when we first began reporting this story, displayed a local weather bar on its home page. Its default location was Columbus, Ohio, likely because it is an incompletely altered clone of the Ohio Star website. The Ohio Star website, purportedly local to the state of Ohio, reproduced a “Letter to the Editor” titled “If You Want to Change State Politics Then Support Bill Lee for Governor.” Bill Lee is the governor of Tennessee.
An August 2018 press release in The Ohio Star announced the formation of the new, multi-region company, Star News Digital Media, Inc., listing three people who have either described themselves as conservative activists or have been described that way by their peers as founders:
Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill, and Christina Botteri are the co-founders of Star News Digital Media, Inc, a for profit corporation based in Nashville, Tennessee. Leahy serves as CEO and editor-in-chief. Gill serves as vice president and chief marketing officer, as well as the political editor for The Tennessee Star and national political editor for The Ohio Star and The Minnesota Sun. Christina Botteri serves as vice president and chief technology officer, as well as managing editor of The Tennessee Star and executive editor of The Ohio Star and The Minnesota Sun.
The issue is not the creation of conservative content. The issue, according to Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director for the Center of Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is disguising conservative activism as journalism. “I have no problem with advocacy organizations creating content that reinforces the positions they take on public policy issues on the left, right or center. The issue comes in when they’re not transparent about that advocacy,” Culver told us via phone. “In this case, if you have a conservative take on a policy issue and you want to promote that take, go ahead. But just claim it for what it is.”
We reached out to all three individuals for this investigation but received a response only from Leahy, who spoke on their behalf in a series of emails.
The Tennessee Star’s Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest
When Politico first reported on the Tennessee Star in April 2018, the Star was even more opaque with regard to content authorship than they are now. In that piece, Politico argued:
Though it looks like a normal newspaper site, many — if not most — Star stories lack a byline, and at the time [of their reporting] the site had no masthead nor information explaining who owns or runs it. A click on the “Contact Us” tab revealed a phone number, a couple of email addresses, and a mailing address that goes to a UPS store in Franklin, Tennessee.