fredericks, john radio ppr

i might be wrong on rnc $

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10 25

velshi fasc author TO 40 academics fired (diff fields wapo AA woman?) much worse than maccarthy

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fox bs

e president of the Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Chicago wants repercussions for a faculty member who was arrested for suspected violent crimes on Oct. 3 at an anti-ICE rally.

"Professor Eman Abdelhadi’s history of inflammatory and anti-American rhetoric is deeply concerning. Students deserve a safe and open campus environment where they can express their views without fear of intimidation or retaliation from faculty," Tyler Shasteen told Fox News Digital.

Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the school's Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested on Oct. 3 and charged with two felony counts of aggravated battery to a government employee and two misdemeanor counts of resisting/obstructing peace stemming from a rally outside the Broadview, Illinois ICE facility.

A mugshot of Eman Adbelhadi from Oct. 3, 2025. (Cook County Sheriff's Office)

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONDEMNS VIOLENCE BUT DODGES QUESTIONS ABOUT PROFESSOR ARRESTED IN ANTI-ICE RIOTS

Rallies, some of which have turned violent, have been ongoing there for weeks.

"Professor Abdelhadi’s statements, which clearly endorse violence, are unacceptable and undermine the safety and well-being of our community," said Shasteen. "I call on the University of Chicago to review her position and ensure accountability for any actions that violate university policy or the law."

Last week, the school condemned violence, but has resisted answering questions about whether Abdhelhadi has been disciplined.

Abdelhadi has been largely silent, too. However, she thanked her supporters on Bluesky early last week.

"Thank you so much everyone for the messages of love and support," she said on the platform. "I feel fortified by your presence in my life and in the world. I keep thinking about all our neighbors and siblings—hundreds in Chicago alone—who’ve been detained into the unknown of horrendous facilities. We owe them resistance."

Police clash with demonstrators during a protest outside an immigrant processing and detention center on Oct. 03, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. The site has been the target of frequent protests as federal law enforcement agents continue Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area, an operation designed to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants living in the area. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FAR-LEFT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH VIOLENT FELONIES DURING ANTI-ICE RIOTS IN BROADVIEW

Just a day before her arrest, she accused ICE of "terrorizing our communities" on a far-left podcast.

"I mean, in Broadview, ICE has been setting up shop in our backyard. Just brazenly taking up community resources to terrorize this very same community," she said.

She also put out a call for resistance, and lambasted those who she believes aren't taking extreme enough action.

"At this point, you are either on the side of protecting our neighbors and protecting our community, or you’re on the side of this administration. There is no neutral ground in this moment. There’s no center left. You’re either resisting or you’re complicit," she said.

At the Socialism 2025 conference earlier this year, she also slammed her employer.

"F--- the University of Chicago, it’s evil, you know it’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space? I kind of had a little bit of disdain for people who spent their time doing that," she said on a panel during the far-left gathering.

A demonstrator is detained as people protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview facility in Chicago, Ill., Oct. 3, 2025. (Jim Vondruska/Reuters)

LICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP](//www.foxnews.com/apps-products?pid=AppArticleLink)

"Turns out, I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago. I work at a place that is a landlord, a healthcare provider, a police force, f--- that s---, but, they are, and a place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize… actually, this is where I need to build power. That’s possible structural leverage," she said.

The University of Chicago and Abdelhadi did not return comment requests.

Peter D'Abrosca joined Fox News Digital in 2025. Previously, he was a politics reporter at The Tennessee Star.

Follow Peter on X at @pmd_reports. Send story tips to peter.dabrosca@fox.com.

Related Topics

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BS big lie GA amplified by trump and bannon

no lnx twt wonkette

It is September 17, 2021, and former President Babyshits is still whining that he wants back in the White House right now. Just look at this pathetic nonsense.

[trump ltr]

"Large scale Voter Fraud continues to be reported in Georgia. Enclosed is a report of 43,000 Absentee Ballot Votes Counted in DeKalb County that violated the Chain of Custody rules, making them invalid," begins the letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger under a lightly modified presidential seal.

The "report" is an article from the astroturf news site "Georgia Star News." As multiple legitimate news sites have reported, Georgia Star is part of the Star News Network, a group of pro-Trump websites set up to look like local news outlets in 11 swing states. And while Rupert Murdoch's media empire is (at least theoretically) made up of actual journalists, the Star sites are run by political activists with an avowed MAGA agenda.

Naturally Steve Bannon, everyone's favorite chaos monkey, loves this Star Chamber propaganda shit. NPR reports:

Steve Bannon, a former strategist for former President Donald Trump, described The Georgia Star News in a radio interview as content "you can't get anywhere else."

"We're not Conservative Inc.," he said. "It's very populist, it's very nationalist, it's very MAGA, it's very American First."

Laura Baigert, the author of the piece referenced by the former leader of the free world, describes herself as "a senior reporter at The Star News Network, where she covers stories for The Georgia Star News, The Tennessee Star, The Ohio Star and The Arizona Sun Times."

Here's how Snopesdescribed Baigert, who was a 2016 RNC delegate for Ted Cruz:

Laura Baigert, listed as a Tennessee Star "senior reporter," also serves as the treasurer for a group called the Roving Patriots PAC. Her husband, Kevin Baigert, who was at one point also a writer for the Star, is that PAC's director. On their PAC's website, the couple say they "are a couple of Roving Patriots, and when you get one, you get both of us!" No firewall is apparent between the work of the PAC and the Tennessee Star. For example, on 7 July 2017 the PAC shared an article on their Facebook page written in the Tennessee Star about the PAC's launch. "We are grateful for the work they are doing at The Tennessee Star," the PAC said of the media outlet that both members of the PAC currently or previously worked for.

According to their website, Roving Patriots PAC is "focused on achieving, supporting and maintaining a true conservative majority within the Tennessee House of Representatives."

And if that's not the bio of a trustworthy authority on election law, then what is, right? So when this person tells you that there were chain of custody issues with 46,000 drop box ballots, and the law demands that Georgia simply toss out those votes, you can just take her word for it. Never mind that this is an entirely invented remedy that some blogger from Tennessee just pulled out of her ass. And while we're disregarding objective reality, there's no mechanism to determine who those votes were for, even if we did invalidate ballots 10 months after an election — which we do not.

But back to Trump's lazyass letter!

"I would respectfully request that your department check this and, if true, along with many other claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities, start the process of decertifying the Election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner," he whined from the golf course.

He doesn't know if it's true, but, like, if it is, he wants Raffy to do something. He's not sure what, but it will totally involve him winning. And if it's not true, well, whatever because, "As stated to you previously, the number of false and/or irregular votes is far greater than needed to change the Georgia election result."

He stated it previously, you blockhead! Why didn't you overturn the election already?

The letter ends with some more abuse of Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who "are doing a tremendous disservice to the Great State of Georgia, and to our Nation — which is systematically being destroyed by an illegitimate president and his administration," before signing off with "Thank you for your attention to this matter."

Because he is one polite motherfucker.

Well! No doubt Secretary Raffensperger will get right on that.

Meanwhile, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is still investigating whether Trump and his cronies broke the law with their pressure campaign and the infamous phone call where they tried to get Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have" and warned that he was "taking a big risk" by not prosecuting the "criminal offense" which caused him to lose the election.

"What I can tell you is that the Trump investigation is ongoing. As a district attorney, I do not have the right to look the other way on any crime that may have happened in my jurisdiction," Willis told CNN this week. "We have a team of lawyers that is dedicated to that, but my No. 1 priority is to make sure that we keep violent offenders off the street."

And that is not fake news.

tag

no lnx

John Fredericks

Virginia-based radio host

Featured

VirginiaStar_fredericks_10142020

Trump loyalist and radio host John Fredericks is running a hyperpartisan blog disguised as a local news site

10/15/20 4:17 PM EDT

The John Fredericks Show

How one right-wing Virginia talk radio host is fueling backlash against social distancing

05/28/20 4:41 PM EDT

fredericks_2.jpg

Why Does Donald Trump Keep Going On This Local Virginia Radio Host’s Show?

10/06/16 10:27 AM EDT

The Latest

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Vaccine hesitancy

Some states are confronting vaccine hesitancy. These local radio hosts aren't helping.

03/23/21 11:03 AM EDT

Right-wing media infighting in Georgia

Trump repeats an overhyped lie about Georgia runoffs from the dregs of right-wing media

01/05/21 3:50 PM EST

Georgia Star News voting misinfo

A hyperpartisan local news site is throwing everything at the wall to stoke voter fraud concerns in Georgia

12/17/20 2:30 PM EST

Right-wing media infighting in Georgia

Georgia Senate runoffs play out while conservatives in the state are at each other's throats

11/24/20 8:48 AM EST

Fredericks_Bannon_GASTAR

New Georgia partisan news site has close ties to Bannon, Breitbart

11/19/20 3:10 PM EST

The John Fredericks Show

Pop-up disinformation: Pro-Trump radio host to launch hyperpartisan “news” site in Georgia ahead of Senate runoffs

11/09/20 4:06 PM EST

VirginiaStar_fredericks_10142020

Trump loyalist and radio host John Fredericks is running a hyperpartisan blog disguised as a local news site

10/15/20 4:17 PM EDT

The John Fredericks Show

How one right-wing Virginia talk radio host is fueling backlash against social distancing

05/28/20 4:41 PM EDT

fake-news-radio-1.png

Across the country, right-wing talk radio hosts promote local protests against stay-at-home orders

04/24/20 10:27 AM EDT

FredericksLazy.png

Watch Don Lemon kick Trump's VA co-chair off his show after he calls Lemon “lazy”

01/11/18 10:57 PM EST

trump-cpac.jpg

In The CPAC Bubble, “Every Day Is Christmas” With President Trump In Office

02/24/17 3:21 PM EST

Pagination

Current page1

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https://www.mediamatters.org/john-fredericks

real am'a voices war rm bannon

...John Fredericks speaks about the need for another round of ‘Church Committee’ style hearings

John Fredericks speaks about the need for another round of ‘Church Committee’ style hearings

Rep Andy Biggs provides John Fredericks an update on the final stretch of the #AZAudit

see Wisconsin ABC affiliate WISN investigated the claims made in the City Wire article. When reporter Hillary Mintz reached City Wire publisher Brian Timpone,he tried to play it off as an honest mistake. When confronted with the fact that his numbers appeared to be completely invented, he defended the post and said, “The change in the records doesn't change the story's point materially at all.”

see politico baby BB

https://www.mediamatters.org/john-fredericks/new-georgia-partisan-news-site-has-close-ties-bannon-breitbart

As Georgia puts the finishing touches on its hand recount and the state prepares for two crucial Senate runoff elections slated for early January, two talk radio hosts with close ties to Steve Bannon are launching a Breitbart-like hyperpartisan news site in the state.

Georgia Star News, which debuts Thursday, is the latest project of Star News Digital Media, a growing network of partisan websites that dress up right-wing media content and talking points to look like local news. The organization’s explicit aim is to deliver pro-Trump propaganda to residents of battleground states, coating local news in the same grievance- and conspiracy-filled vernacular as is used by outlets like The Daily Caller and Breitbart.

And that’s no surprise, since two of the figures behind the Star News sites — John Fredericks and Michael Patrick Leahy — are conservative talk radio hosts with deep ties to characters throughout the MAGA-verse, including Breitbart and its former executive chairperson, Steve Bannon.

“This is everything right now,” Bannon said on the November 14 edition of War Room: Pandemic, praising Fredericks’ enterprising ways in Georgia. “This is about action, action, action.”

Bannon’s connection to the Star network is disconcerting. Not only did he pioneer the use of hyperpartisan news as a tool of political warfare at Breitbart, but recently he’s leveraged his considerable platform to foment post-election chaos.

John Fredericks and Georgia Star News

John Fredericks rose to regional right-wing stardom as an early adopter of the MAGA movement and as the host of the John Fredericks Show, a daily radio program that was based out of Central Virginia until recently. He also owns three conservative talk radio stations, and he has joined Leahy, who helped found the Star News Network, in expanding its operation to more battleground states.

Since its inception, the Star News network has been an adept misinformer. In recent months, the sites hawked the same bill of goods as national right-wing media outlets: stories that conflated racial justice marches and protests with violence and rioting, every hair-brained conspiracy theory about President-elect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as up-to-the-minute reports on the latest mail carrier to not deliver between one and three mail-in ballots -- ahem, “voter fraud.”

In the last few months, Fredericks and Bannon have formed quite a tandem. Bannon has appeared on Fredericks’ talk show more than a dozen times. Fredericks’ radio network was also the first to broadcast Bannon’s War Room podcast on the airwaves and has continued to amplify the former Trump adviser’s message even as his show has been removed from other platforms for using violent language. (Most recently, Twitter banned Bannon and YouTube and Facebook removed an episode of his show in which he called for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.) Bannon’s show is embedded on the home page of each of the Star News pages.

[grfx all same]

In the past two weeks, Fredericks, who has temporarily moved his operation to Atlanta till after the Senate runoff elections in January, has served as Bannon’s go-to source for the news coming out of Georgia, appearing on nearly a dozen War Room episodes to spread misinformation about the Georgia elections. He has claimed that Democrats, led by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, are encouraging each other to exploit a loophole that would allow them to briefly visit Georgia, register to vote, and vote in the upcoming elections.

Meanwhile, Fredericks has his own plans to invade Georgia ahead of the runoff elections. Fredericks has recently pitched Georgia Star News -- which changed its name from the Georgia Star after Media Matters reported that the original name was already in use -- as a competitor to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We're launching that so we can combat the fake-news, corporate AJC and the other crap here in Georgia you have to deal with, all of the corporate media,” Fredericks told his audience.

Fredericks has also repeatedly used his own radio program to float inflammatory conspiracy theories about the election and to lash out at Georgia Republicans whom he sees as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump -- likely a preview of what readers can expect from Georgia Star News.

Fredericks has reserved special acrimony for Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger -- whom he calls a “weasel” -- criticizing him for not throwing out thousands of legally cast mail-in votes to help bridge the tens of thousands of votes Trump would need to flip the state. Bannon and Fredericks have also joined a growing chorus of right-wing figures who are criticizing and pressuring Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to not certify the state’s election results.

Michael Patrick Leahy

While Fredericks is the face of the Star’s Georgia operation, the network owes its existence in large part to Michael Patrick Leahy, a Breitbart contributor and host of the Tennessee Star Report.

Leahy co-founded the Star News Network’s first site, the Tennessee Star, in 2017, withtwo fellow tea partyers (one of whom resigned from the company shortly after he was jailed for failing to pay child support to his ex-wife). At first, the operation was purposefully opaque. The Star featured no masthead, its articles often had no bylines, and the company was incorporated in Delaware, a state businesses often make use of to minimize tax burdens and avoid certain legal liability. (The company introduced bylines and a masthead shortly after Politico raised questions about its practices.)

Leahy, who is based in Nashville, has been a player in the constellation of right-wing media figures since 2009, when he helped organize a series of anti-government protests that helped fuel the tea party movement. Leahy has been a Breitbart contributor since at least 2012.

Bannon and Leahy have worked together for about a decade — most prominently at Breitbart. And the association abides. On November 7, Leahy used an appearance on Bannon’s podcast to promotea website that shares aggregate post-election content from various right-wing sites and invites readers to report “election irregularities.”

Bannon, Fredericks, and Leahy -- like many right-wing media figures -- have signaled a desire to become more invested in Georgia. The Star launches today, so readers need to be on guard.

amplify: paper cites congrats from trump:

tenn star

...[no grafic]

“Thank you and congratulations to Laura Baigert of the Georgia Star News on the incredible reporting you have done. Keep going! The scam is all unraveling fast!” President Trump said of her reporting.

Recently, Baigert has been investigating the process of the November 2020 election throughout the state of Georgia. She has uncovered several concerning actions relating the handling of absentee ballots, specifically in Fulton County — a population center of Georgia.

According to her reporting, several months after the November 2020 election and afterfailing on two occasions to produce a complete chain of custody documents for absentee ballot drop boxes, the Fulton County Registration and an Elections official said that they “needed more time” to produce the documents.

Due to her efforts in uncovering the questionable actions, a Fulton County election official told The Star News that “a few forms are missing” and that “some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced.”

However, her analysis demonstrated that drop box ballot transfer forms for absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes provided by Fulton County in response to an Open Records Request [by?] showed that 385 transfer forms out of an estimated 1,565 transfer forms Fulton County said should have been provided are missing – a number that is significantly greater than “a few” by any objective standard. According to a spreadsheet provided by Fulton County, 18,901 absentee ballots that should have been tracked in these 385 missing forms now have no chain of custody documentation.

Many officials have demonstrated concerns over the security of the election in Georgia and other states. President Trump has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to enhance election security measures.

The concerns across the state inspired officials in Georgia to pass new election laws, meant to strengthen the integrity of the election process.

Cooper Moran is a reporter for the Star News Network. Follow Cooper on Twitter. Email tips to cooperreports@gmail.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/22/trumps-baseless-claim-about-ballot-drop-boxes-fulton-county-ga/

debunk fact check 4 pinoccios:

no lnx

wapo

Salvador Rizzo

Reporter

June 22, 2021 at 12:00 a.m. PDT

“Thank you and congratulations to Laura Baigert of the Georgia Star News on the incredible reporting you have done. Keep going! The scam is all unraveling fast.”

— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, June 17

False and misleading claims that cast doubt on Georgia’s 2020 election results continue to pop up seven months after the vote, and Trump keeps promoting them.

wapo

“Thank you and congratulations to Laura Baigert of the Georgia Star News on the incredible reporting you have done. Keep going! The scam is all unraveling fast.”

— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, June 17

False and misleading claims that cast doubt on Georgia’s 2020 election results continue to pop up seven months after the vote, and Trump keeps promoting them.

We have a high bar for fact-checking the former president these days, but this claim about an election “scam” in the Atlanta area carries weight. The state launched an investigation based on the same reports Trump is referencing from a website called the Georgia Star News.

But there is no evidence of a scam unraveling in Georgia, only shoddy record-keeping by local election officials.

The Facts

Joe Biden unexpectedly won Georgia by 11,779 votes of about 5 million cast, according to a hand recount of the votes that was done as part of a risk-limiting audit and that was later confirmed by a second recount.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, election officials authorized the use of ballot drop boxes by emergency rule. County officials had to fill out forms noting the date, time, location and number of ballots collected from each drop box.

The Georgia Star News, a pro-Trump publication,says it filed public-records requests with every county in the state, seeking the chain-of-custody forms that track the movements of all ballots deposited in drop boxes for the November election.

When Fulton County, the state’s most populous, responded to the request months later, the documents were incomplete. After several follow-up requests, Fulton County officials supplied 1,180 of 1,565 ballot transfer forms.

The missing forms accounted for 18,901 ballots, the Georgia Star News said. In a story June 14, the publication noted that 18,901 was “greater than the less than 12,000 vote margin of Biden’s certified victory in the state.” The same story quoted a Fulton County election official acknowledging that the request for records was not completed.

“We noticed that a few forms are missing, it seems when 25 plus core personnel were quarantined due to positive COVID-19 outbreak at the EPC [Elections Preparation Center], some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced,” Fulton County official Mariska Bodison told the Georgia Star News in an email on June 9.

The Georgia Star News said, “This is the first time that any election official at either the state or county level from a key battleground state has made an admission of significant error in election procedures for the November 3, 2020 election.”

Was it an admission of significant error? The county official said only that “a few forms” were missing.On June 16, two days after this story appeared online, the news organization Georgia Public Broadcasting said it had gotten ahold of almost all the missing records.[minus 8?]

“After GPB News asked the county Monday about the forms not included in the Georgia Star’s records request, elections staff locatedall but eight of the more than 1,500 forms, sent them to state investigators [raff? ] and provided them to GPB News on a flash drive,” the broadcaster reported, adding that “GPB News has obtained records for all 123 counties that used drop boxes, countering claims among some pro-Trump media outlets that there are more than 300,000 ballots’ worth of forms ‘missing’ statewide.”

By the time that fact check appeared, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) had announced his office would investigate the “revelations” from Fulton County.

“New revelations that Fulton County is unable to produce all ballot drop box transfer documents will be investigated thoroughly, as we have with other counties that failed to follow Georgia rules and regulations regarding drop boxes,” Raffensperger tweeted June 14 in response to the Georgia Star News story. “This cannot continue.”

When we asked whether Fulton County records were indeed missing, a spokesman for Raffensperger, Ari Schaffer, said: “The investigation is still ongoing. The investigation is of Fulton’s statement that they were missing forms, not any other claims made by the Georgia Star.”

After the state conducted a hand recount of its election results in November, Biden’s lead dropped from 12,670 to 11,779, apparently from a revision in Fulton County. The recount showed 880 fewer votes there.

Gabriel Sterling, a state elections official in Georgia, called the Fulton County discrepancy “a little worrisome” but said it was a big county with a history of managerial issues. He also noted the difference in vote totals was not enough to change the outcome in Georgia, according to the Associated Press.

Raffensperger has been critical of Fulton County’s election management and has suggested several changes, although he also has defended the integrity of the county’s vote results in 2020.

The county, covering much of metro Atlanta, was in short supply of trained poll workers last year and had long lines because of a shortage of voting machines, among other issues. An audit of Fulton County by a nonpartisan monitor appointed by the state elections board found “persistent chain of custody issues throughout the entire absentee ballot processing system” and blamed bad management.

The auditor said “the fact that ballots were being delivered to State Farm Arena in unsecured mail carts is very concerning. Protocol for securing ballots exists not only to protect the ballots themselves but also to ensure that no ballot box stuffing occurred.”

The auditor also reported: “From October to January, I spent nearly 270 hours at various locations observing every aspect of Fulton County’s election processes. At no time did I ever observe any conduct by Fulton County election officials that involved dishonesty, fraud, or intentional malfeasance. During my weeks of monitoring, I witnessed neither ‘ballot stuffing’ nor ‘double-counting’ nor any other fraudulent conduct that would undermine the validity, fairness, and accuracy of the results published and certified by Fulton County.”

Fulton County officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Raffensperger has ruled out Trump’s claims of election fraud in Georgia. Trump called the Republican secretary of state a “complete disaster” and falsely claimed his brother “works for China.” This year, Raffensperger is running for reelection and facing a primary challenge from Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), a Trump ally.

The Georgia Star News has been publishing regular updates of how many counties have supplied chain-of-custody documents for their drop boxes, keeping up the pressure on those that delay, as we found in this fact check.

The Georgia secretary of state’s office issued a news release in April debunking the implication that something mysterious was taking place besides tardy replies to a publication.

Of the 123 counties that used drop boxes, “120 have confirmed they filled out and retained ballot transfer forms in accordance with Georgia rules,” the statement said. The other three counties, Coffee, Grady and Taylor, were referred for investigation.

The Pinocchio Test

Despite Trump’s latest claim, there is no evidence of an election “scam” unraveling in Georgia.

In response to a request for public records made by a pro-Trump website, Fulton County officials failed to supply all the forms that track the movements of ballots submitted by drop box.

A Fulton County official acknowledged that the chain-of-custody records it provided to the Georgia Star News were incomplete. Days later, Fulton County provided almost all the records to Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Sloppy? Yes. But shoddy record-keeping by itself does not constitute evidence of election fraud.

We will keep a close watch on developments in Raffensperger’s investigation, and it bears keeping in mind that Fulton County has a history of election management issues, including an audit that found problems with keeping chain-of-custody records for ballots in last year’s election at the same time that it affirmed election workers’ integrity.

For now, without evidence to justify accusations of an election “scam” in Fulton County, Trump earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

(About our rating scale)

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/trump-election-claims/

Since the 2020 presidential election, conservative news outlets have been popping up in droves to continue circulating former President Donald Trump's big lie about the election.

So how are outlets continuing to do this? According to NPR, it is more of a trick of the eye. The publication https://www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1011916687/how-pro-trump-local-news-sites-keep-pushing-2020-election-misinformation.

While the publication appears to be just a local news outlet, NPR reports that it is actually flagship of a news syndicate, known as The Star News Network, which consists of several pro-Trump sites. Like The Georgia Star News, the network has created similar sites for states like Arizona, Ohio, and Florida.

Per NPR:

"Its part of the Star News Network - an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida."

By focusing on states where Trump is still heavily favored among voters, the network can continue to circulate misinformation since the audience is still focused on what transpired during and after the election.

During a rally in Ohio Las weekend, Trump also added more fuel to the fire with more dangerous claims of voter fraud.

"The biggest tragedy of all is millions of Americans have lost confidence in their vote," Trump said." We can't let that happen. And that's why I say you have to know what took place in 2020 before you can vote in 2022 or 2024."

To name mafter worse, conservative publisher John Fredericksdefended defended sites and the information they share.

"We work very hard to fund our operation through legitimate advertising of all kinds, people that want to reach our expanding audience," he said. "And if somebody needs to reach informed, motivated readers that want the truth, advertising is a great opportunity for them, is a great [return on investment] potential."

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Michael Patrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) | Twitterhttps://twitter.com › michaelpleahy

The latest Tweets from MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy). Breitbart Contributor, host Tennessee Star Report radio programweekdays 98.3 and 15...

Kevin Baigert, Laura Baigert, and former State Rep. Joe Carr

Veteran grassroots activists Kevin and Laura Baigert are joining The Tennessee Star as political contributors and “grassroots pundits.”

The Baigerts worked together at the 3M Company in Connecticutfor a combined 37 years.

When they retired in 2012, they were drawn to Tennessee by the wonderful people and the cost of living, and they quickly became two of the most well-respected and reliable conservative grassroots activists in the state.

The team of two handled operations and logistics for theBEAT LAMAR project in 2013 and 2014, in 2015 co-founded Sumner Taxpayers Alliance with well-known activist Ben Cunningham, in 2016 handled the merchandising for WWTN radio host Ralph Bristol’s The 2nd Amendment is Homeland Security Tour, and have added “critical mass” to numerous conservative causes under the moniker “Roving Patriots.”

https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/03/04/activists-setup-local-news-sites/

no lnx

U.S. Politics

Hiding in Plain Sight: PAC-Connected Activists Set Up ‘Local News’ Outlets

Star News Digital Media, Inc. may look like a media company that produces local news, but a Snopes investigation reveals deep, undisclosed connections to political activism.

Alex Kasprak

Bethania Palma

Chris Reilly

Vinny Green

Published 4 March 2019

Editors’ Note

Some stories practically write themselves, the details simple and clear. This investigation, spurred by a reader’s tip, was no such story. In collaboration with reporter Bethania Palma and operations staffers Vinny Green and Chris Reilly, lead reporter Alex Kasprakspent weeks untangling the reality behind a group of entities posing as newspapers in key battleground states going into the 2020 election. Even if you’re jaded by the torrent of daily headlines, including Russian meddling in U.S. election processes, you will want to spend some time with this story. Please let us know what you think and what more you want to know. All tips and feedback are welcome here.

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”:

SOURCE: Google Search

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.

The closest thing we could identify to a physical location for anything related to Star News Digital Media was a Tennessee address listed in their terms of service as a contact for copyright takedown requests.This address is the location of a company called Political Financial Management (PFM), which manages finances for political campaigns. Objective journalism does not typically participate in political campaigns, but PFM “provides the peace of mind of knowing that your campaigns [sic] financials are compliant with all the latest laws and regulations while you focus on what matters most to you — connecting with voters.”

Following Politico’s report, writers who produce original content show up with their own byline more frequently. These authors, though, have ties in many cases to several influence groups, political candidates, or PACs. Despite these conflicts of interest, The Tennessee Star fails to disclose the deep connections between editorial staff and the political entities they cover. When we first contacted Leahy, we asked him if it would be more accurate to describe his company as “a conservative activist group looking to sway public opinion in battleground states,” i.e., coveted states that could conceivably be won by either a Democrat or a Republican in the upcoming presidential election.

Leahy disputed that characterization, but in a somewhat counterintuitive defense against this claim, told us a story about how successfully they had swayed political discourse in Tennessee:

Our reporting on GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Boyd’s contributions of $250,000 to a Nashville non-profit organization operated by the former national Chairman of La Raza — Renata Soto — and our giving him the nickname “LaRaza Randy” created a political perception of him among Republican voters, which he was never able to overcome. He spent $20 million and finished second to Bill Lee in the August 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary in Tennessee.

Chris Butler, listed as the Tennessee Star‘s investigative journalist, covered the Lee campaign and administration for the Star. But just before joining the Tennessee Star as an “investigative journalist,” he served as a media spokesperson “for a political PAC to help elect Bill Lee governor in 2018” between May and August 2018. Though he authored a few posts for the Star toward the end of May 2018, Butler’s first credited byline as a Tennessee Star “investigative journalist” was on 8 August 2018.

His second report that day was critical of Lee’s general election opponent, Karl Dean. Butler disclosed nowhere in that or any subsequent articles that he had been employed as a media spokesperson for a PAC supportive of the other candidate in that race. In Leahy’s view, this is not a problem. “If you had done your homework, you would have seen that Mr. Butler did not write for us between May 31, 2018 and August 8, 2018 during the period of time he was working for that PAC,” he wrote to us in a follow-up email.

SOURCE: LinkedIn

Butler’s coverage of Lee in the Tennessee Star, following Butler’s work as a media spokesperson for a pro-Lee PAC, was criticized in media reports as overtly political. In one notable instance, Butler authored another nickname-motivated story on 3 October 2018 titled “Bill Lee Strong in Gubernatorial Debate with Karl ‘Marx’ Dean,” referring to Lee’s Democratic opponent. In response to that story, Ken Paulson, dean of Middle Tennessee State University’s College of Media and Entertainment, told the Memphis Commercial Appeal that although he had not heard of the Tennessee Star, the Marx reference suggested it was “clearly a political vehicle.” (The Appeal also reported the Star story referenced questions never asked or answered in the debate). We reached out to Butler but received no response.

Laura Baigert, listed as a Tennessee Star “senior reporter,” also serves as the treasurer for a group called the Roving Patriots PAC. Her husband, Kevin Baigert, who was at one point also a writer for the Star, is that PAC’s director. On their PAC’s website, the couple say they “are a couple of Roving Patriots, and when you get one, you get both of us!” No firewall is apparent between the work of the PAC and the Tennessee Star. For example, on 7 July 2017 the PAC shared an article on their Facebook page written in the Tennessee Star about the PAC’s launch. “We are grateful for the work they are doing at The Tennessee Star,” the PAC said of the media outlet that both members of the PAC currently or previously worked for:

SOURCE: Facebook

According to their website, Roving Patriots PAC is “focused on achieving, supporting and maintaining a true conservative majority within the Tennessee House of Representatives.” In 2018, they supported four candidates who ran in GOP primaries or the general election for Tennessee state House seats: Justin Lafferty, Mark Hall, Scott Cepicky, and Clay Doggett. Both Cepicky’s and Doggett’s campaign launches received coverage in the Tennessee Star.Doggett defeated incumbent Republican Barry Doss, a man the Tennessee Star had been regularly critical of, in an August 2018 primary. “We … reported on the way State Rep. Barry Doss jammed through an unpopular gas tax increase — giving him the nickname ‘Boss Doss’ — reporting that was influential in his defeat at the polls in the August 2018 Republican primary,” Leahy bragged to us in one of his emails.

Based on their Facebook page, the PAC has been around since 22 June 2017. In November of that year, the Tennessee Star reported in glowing terms that Roving Patriots PAC would be lending financial support to Doggett without disclosing in that story the PAC’s conflict of interest with the Star. Another story, written by Roving Patriots treasurer and Tennessee Star reporter Laura Baigert about the Doss-Doggett race, is highly critical of Doss but lacks disclosure of her ties to a PAC invested in that race. We reached out to her via the Roving Patriots PAC email address but received no response. Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University specializing in election law and governance issues, called the Star‘s activities vis-a-vis political candidates and PACs “ethically problematic.”

“When it comes to the voters, they need to be able to evaluate messages, and one of the ways to evaluate them is to figure out who is actually speaking to them,” Levinson told us in a phone interview. “That’s why in campaign finance law there are disclosure rules. People evaluate things differently based on whether the source is a PAC or candidate’s own campaign, or the New York Times or Washington Post, for example.”

Perhaps more concerning is the potential role Gill’s consulting company, where he serves as CEO, has had in driving political coverage on the Tennessee Star website. Gill Media, Inc., as described on an archived website, “counsels companies, individuals and organizations on development and implementation of marketing, media and grassroots-oriented communications strategies.”

SOURCE: Facebook

Publicly available campaign finance disclosures indicate that Gill Media provided services to several clients during the time he was political editor of the Tennessee Star while they also received coverage on that site. In a second follow-up email from Leahy, who again spoke on behalf of Gill and Botteri, he told us that, “Gill Media, Inc. is a separate entity from Tennessee Star” but that “as a media buyer [Gill Media] has occasionally purchased advertising on the Tennessee Star.”

Between 12 December 2017 and 11 January 2018, Joe Carr, a Tennessee state Senate candidate in the GOP 14th District special Republican primary election held in January 2018, paid Gill Media nearly $32,000:

SOURCE: Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance

Beginning on 6 December 2017, the Tennessee Star began reporting on Carr’s race with a story (“State Senate Candidate Joe Carr Launches Radio Ad Campaign”) announcing his candidacy, primarily by publishing a verbatim transcription of his first radio ad. (“The Tennessee Star obtained an advance copy of the ad,” that story noted.) From that point on, until his loss on 26 January, the Tennessee Star posted at least nine either positive stories on Carr or negative stories about his opponent, Shane Reeves, and provided space for Carr to write one commentary piece. Levinson told us the fact that the Tennessee Star printed a transcription of Carr’s campaign ad, rather than writing an objective news story, “makes it look like this is not an independent media organization.”

Some of these stories noted that “Both the Shane Reeves for State Senate Campaign and the Joe Carr for State Senate Campaign are Tennessee Star advertisers.” It is unclear what the Tennessee Star is referring to when they say both candidates are advertisers on the Star, or if the “ads” perhaps are the stories that appear on that site. We asked Leahy for clarification on this point, but he did not respond to that request for comment. Either way, such a disclosure does not reflect the fact that Carr paid almost $32,000 for media consulting to a company whose CEO was the editor of the paper covering his race. Similar payments have been made to Gill Media from groups like “Tennessee Jobs Now,” who later saw positive coverage on the site.

Leahy contends that the payments to Gill Media from Carr were unrelated to the Tennessee Star.“Gill Media placed radio spots during Joe Carr’s special election candidacy for the State Senate,” Leahy told us. “During that same time period both Carr and his opponent placed ad buys with the Tennessee Star.” Via email, we asked Carr if the services he paid to Gill Media resulted in coverage by the Tennessee Star. In response, he said: “I will not discuss the details of any business arrangement I had with any of my vendors while running for office,” adding that his disclosure of such actions would not be unethical but would also not be “honorable.”

Steve Gill’s media career has long existed in a nebulous space between political activism and commentary. In 2015, then-U.S. Representative Diane Black filed a complaint with the FEC against an “organization led by conservative activist Steve Gill that has bankrolled a series of negative ads targeting Black in her race against primary challenger Joe Carr.” This was an earlier Joe Carr race that predated the 2018 special election that saw coverage in the Star. According to the Commercial Appeal, in July 2018 the Tennessee Star “published a story that took verbatim lines from an email sent out by a campaign staffer for Randy Boyd, who challenged Lee in the primary, without attribution.” Levinson, the law professor, told us “the idea that campaign material is being hidden as news is really problematic because it robs the public of the ability to evaluate messages.”

Journalism professor Culver echoed similar concerns as Levinson: “Transparency is a critically important element in journalism,” she said via phone. “When you are opaque about funding sources and their influence, when you don’t disclose to readers where the money is coming from and where the conflicts of interest may be, you are robbing those people of important information that they need to judge credibility.” This is an issue not only for the content being published on the Tennessee Star, but a potential issue for Star News Digital Media as a whole. Gill, Leahy told us, will be “national political editor” for any new Star News sites moving forward.

Who is Paying for Star News Digital Media’s Activities?

Leahy, in an email to us, said, “We are in business to make a profit, and have a number of advertisers to prove it.” Despite this claim, only the Tennessee Star runs any commercial ads, and (outside of links to political groups such as the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity or local GOP fundraisers that are clearly political in nature), we found ads for only three companies at the time of this report: car dealer Beaman Automotive Group, local furniture store chain D.T. McCall and Sons, and financial services company Advance Financial 24/7.

All three are owned by prominent Tennessee conservatives who have donated significantly to conservative candidates, causes, and PACs in the past. Lee Beaman, owner of the eponymous automotive group, and A.J McCall, owner of the furniture store, for example, were both named as individuals in an 11 December 2017 Nashville Post story as part of a Tennessee-based effort to support embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in his race against now-Sen. Doug Jones:

Prominent Middle Tennessee conservatives have not been shy about their support for Moore. Lee Beaman, the Nashville auto dealer, contributed $2,700 — the maximum allowed per campaign — to Moore just three days after the Washington Post broke the story alleging sexual misconduct by Moore.

A.J. McCall, president of regional furniture store chain D.T. McCall & Sons, and his wife, Beth, contributed a combined $5,400 to Moore before the allegations were made public. But when reached by the Nashville Post after the Washington Post story broke, A.J. McCall stood by Moore.

Advance Financial is owned by Mike Hodges, who serves as the company’s chairman. During the 2018 election cycle, Hodges was the 175th most significant individual contributor nationwide to political campaigns, parties and/or traditional PACs. In Tennessee, he and his wife, Tina Hodges, donated at least $16,000.00 to the Bill Lee for Governor campaign between 28 July 2018 and 25 August 2018.

We reached out to representatives for all three companies but heard back only from Advance Financial. Via email, we asked Hodges why his company picked the Tennessee Star as an ad venue. He replied, “We chose the TN star as they are largely read online by Tennesseans and they have a strong social media push that introduces AF to consumer that may not see our ads on other mediums.” Hodges declined to answer how much Advance Financial paid for ads but told us “both the price and renewal terms are in market with our many outlets.”

Despite claims of a “strong social media push,” the Tennessee Star at the time of this reporting has a modest social media presence, with just over 11,000 followers on Facebook and 1,867 on Twitter. (For comparison, The Tennessean had 223,769 followers on Facebook and 278,000 Twitter followers at the time of this report.). Furthermore, the ads sold to Advance Financial and the other two prominent companies do not work like modern online advertising. Online advertising for publishers is typically a complex web of programmatic processes that connects advertisers to online advertising space. Most important, the process imparts easily identifiable code on web pages that tracks the success of a brand’s marketing efforts and prevents businesses from spending money on ads being shown to non-local consumers.

This calls into question several elements of the Tennessee Star advertiser story, including claims that the ‘newspaper’ is a for-profit, advertising-supported venture, and that the companies that advertise do so to tap a local audience to benefit their brand. Is it possible that the Tennessee Star has a few high-profile benefactors who support the company’s mission financially and in return see their family businesses promoted on the site? Would such an arrangement be considered advertising? Potentially, but this type of advertising arrangement would be an outlier when compared to virtually any other internet media outlet.

The owners of these businesses do nothing untoward in supporting candidates and PACs or in buying advertisements in the Tennessee Star. But because Star News Digital Media is neither a candidate nor a PAC, no limit exists on how much these families could spend in supporting the organization’s reporting, which as we have shown blurs the line between journalism and political campaigning.

After we reached out to the Star‘s three primary advertisers, Leahy told us via email that he was “aware that snopes.com has contacted several of our advertisers,” suggesting that at least one of the entities we reached out to ran our questions by Leahy before not providing a comment to us.

Beyond these issues, we find the broader business strategy of Star News Digital Media is simple: fill pages with content that costs nothing. Such a strategy may be no surprise to those familiar with Leahy, whose 2009 book Rules for Conservative Radicals includes the statements “it is better to be 85% right and quick than 100% right and slow” and “use free and cheap technologies at every opportunity.”

Based on a Snopes analysis of link posts shared between 6 November 2018 and 5 February 2019, an estimated 30 percent of the linked material that Star News shared on Facebook from their own sites is republished from other sources. Much of this third-party content was published across multiple sites in their network, and many of the sources of that content were either directly or tangentially funded by mega-donors that provided their content for republication free of charge.

How Do So Many Stories Appear on These Small “Local News” Websites?

Leahy told us in an email that Star News Digital Media is focused “on local, fact-based, news that provides readers information from a center right perspective as an alternative to the mainstream media outlets that are increasingly moving further to the Left.” Despite being hailed by Leahy as “local” and described in Google search text as “unbiased,” Star News websites offer a good deal of content sourced from conservative national sources who are funded by dark money — funds raised for the purpose of influencing elections by nonprofit organizations who are not required to disclose the identities of their donors.

Using the analytics tool Crowdtangle, we developed a historical dataset of all link posts appearing on the Facebook pages of Star News websites that pointed to content published by the Tennessee Star, the Ohio Star, or the Minnesota Sun between 6 November 2018 and 5 February 2019.Nearly a quarter of the Tennessee Star’s link posts we analyzed pointed to third-party material, and the percentages of third-party content were even higher in the case of the two newer sites, the Ohio Star and the Minnesota Sun:

Third Party Content

Our dataset shows the extent of the relationship that Star News has with third-party content providers.

Third-Party Content by Site

We estimate that 24%, 39%, and 41% of content we analyzed on the Tennessee Star, the Minnesota Sun, and the Ohio Star, respectively, came from a third party during the period our dataset covered.

Nearly 40 percent of this third-party material, we found, comes from the Daily Caller News Foundation. Sludge, a media outlet that funds investigative journalism into political donations and lobbying efforts, reported in November 2018 that “83 percent of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s annual budget” in 2017 came from either the Charles Koch Foundation or the Charles Koch Institute.

In a 2015 opinion piece published in The Chattanoogan, Gill wrote that “While Koch brother-funded [Americans for Prosperity] activities are taking place throughout the country, their repeated, tangible successes in Tennessee are increasingly attracting national attention.” Several prominent links to the Koch-founded and -funded Americans for Prosperity, or articles about it, appear in material found on all three Star News websites.

Other notable sources of Star-published material include The Daily Signal, a publication of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank; The Daily Torch, a publication of the Koch-linked Americans for Limited Government think tank; and the conservative Center for American Greatness. The right-leaning Conservative HQ website and the non-partisan, government-run Voice of America network are other common sources of third-party material:

Sources of Third-Party Content

The most common source of third-party material during the period our dataset covered is the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Furthermore, all of the websites share their (frequently outsourced) content extensively, and the home pages of all three sites are barely distinguishable from each other. Here we visualize our sampling of posts shared by those sites on Facebook, showing that much of the underlying content is likely identical on two of the sites, or all three:

Overlapping Content Across Star News Digital Media Sites

Our dataset reveals significant overlap in content between the three Star News sites. In the above figure, 237 entries appear to be exactly the same on all three pages during the period we investigated.

In his email to Snopes, Leahy compared his websites to Gannett media, the umbrella company that publishes legacy newspapers such as USA Today, the Tennessean, and the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Will Snopes ‘out’ Gannett for the exact same practice that other national and regional publications utilize and which has apparently raised concerns about the Tennessee Star by the liberals who operate Snopes?” Leahy asked us, while pointing to the fact that the Gannett network of websites shares stories and posts wire articles from the Associated Press.

Among the many differences between Gannett publications and the sites operated by Leahy is that Gannett papers have rules against conflicts of interest. Michael Anastasi is editor and vice president of The Tennessean newspaper and vice president of news for USA Today, both of which are Gannett papers. We asked him by email if The Tennessean would employ a political editor who concurrently served as a media buyer that placed ads for political entities covered in The Tennessean, and he told us “no.” Asked if The Tennessean would ever allow a political editor to buy ads through their personal media company for candidates that The Tennessean covered, Anastasi told us “hell no,” adding that “if we discovered someone ever engaging in such blatantly unethical behavior, they would be terminated immediately.”

The Big Take-Aways

Star News Digital Media has been inconsistent in how they refer to themselves. Sometimes they have suggested they are “unbiased” local news, and at other times they told us they provide a “center right” perspective. Sometimes they claim to be profit-driven, and at other times they claim to be a “hand-to-mouth” operation of true believers. One thing they have consistently claimed to be, however, is a network of local newspapers that practice transparent journalism.

Culver, the journalism professor, views it differently. “Honestly, if you have an organization that is trying to shield the identity of people writing for it, is not straight about its funding sources, [and is] allowing people with partisan points of view to push those points of view and not be upfront about that, I don’t understand how you can call that a news organization.”

Leahy defended his organization and its practices: “Snopes.com is fully aware that Star News Digital Media, Inc. is a legitimate news organization and any statement made in print by your organization that we are a ‘political advocacy group’ rather than a legitimate news organization is one that you know to be false,” he said to us in an email, adding that they would “vigorously defend our reputation as a news organization, and will particularly not tolerate false statements made about us.”

The Tennessee Star is an example of a strategy — repackaging free conservative content alongside campaign- or PAC-sourced material as local news — that appears to have seen some success locally and seeks to expand on a national scale. The strategy that gave birth to the Tennessee Star may be identically employed in politically important regions under the aegis of Star News Digital Media Inc. This new venture would follow “the exact same plan we used to launch in Tennessee,” Leahy told us via email. Leahy, Politico reported in April, purchased several newspaper-sounding domain names in battleground states for future use:

Just days after registering the Tennessee Star domain in January 2017, according to records, [co-founder Michael] Leahy also registered domains for americandailystar.com, minnesotanorthernlight.com, mosundaily.com, newenglandstar.com, thedakotastar.com, themichiganstar.com, thencstar.com, theohiostar.com, thepennstar.com, thevirginiastar.com and thewisconsinstar.com.

These websites may amplify partisan voices in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, and if they follow the Tennessee Star playbook, may publish politically or financially motivated content created by authors with undisclosed ties to PACs, lobbyists, and politicians.

“The information sphere is so polluted right now that the average citizen has trouble telling what is real and what is not,” Culver told us. “I find that very troubling within a democracy.”

Alex Kasprak

Bethania Palma

Chris Reilly

Vinny Green

Published 4 March 2019

campaign finance

conflicts of interest

Journalism

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19 November 2018.

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24 July 2018.

ChrisButlerWriterJournalist.com. “My Extended Resume.”

Archived on 11 January 2019.

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Nashville Post. 1 June 2018.

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Archived on 11 February 2019.

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Accessed 26 February 2019.

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15 November 2017.

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bob Enyart interviews Laura Baigert, the journalist who broke the story that an Atlanta election official admitted some missing "chain of custody" documentation for mail-in ballots. Since the Star News published the story, Georgia Public Broadcasting claims to have received the custody documentation and analyzed (with miraculous speed) the 1500+ files, concluding that none of the relevant records are missing....

Join Bob Enyart as he explores God's Principles of Government. From Against Democracy where we look at the biblical principles related to the idea of majority rule, to a Representative Republic and its similarities with democracy, to a real Alternative to Democracy, to what a Bible-based Constitution actually looks like, after this series, the Scriptures' principles of governance will permeate your thinking like never before! Or your money back. (Really.)

lnx:

Days later, county officials were able to find all but eight of those forms, said all the ballots were accounted for — and noted that Georgia's votes were counted three different times in November.

"The most explosive thing"

From there it ricocheted across the pro-Trump mediasphere to TV networks like One America News and conspiracy sites such as The Gateway Pundit.

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/trump-loyalist-and-radio-host-john-fredericks-running-hyperpartisan-blog-disguised

mma

rump loyalist and radio host John Fredericks is running a hyperpartisan blog disguised as a local news site

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**John Fredericks, one of Virginia’s most**influential talk radio hosts with close ties to President Donald Trump, is using a hyperpartisan blog masquerading as a local news site to solicit support for Trump’s reelection campaign and spread right-wing narratives while promoting his own radio program.

The Virginia Star, which was launched this summer, is the latest addition to Fredericks’ budding media empire and is also a part of the hyperpartisan right-wing Star News Digital Media network. At first glance, the site looks like an ordinary, low-budget local news site. Its Facebook page describes the site as a “NEW source for investigative news, thoughtful opinion and more.” On its Google search landing page, the site is billed as “Leading the Way in News and Education.”

But in reality, The Virginia Star contains little more than partisan bile.

A quick scroll through its home page reveals headlines making dubious claims about voter fraud and criticizing local leaders for spending tax dollars to remove Confederate monuments. Scroll further and find the podcast of Steve Bannon, former executive chairman of Breitbart News and a Trump ally, embedded along the sidebar. That’s the same Steve Bannon who has used his platform in recent months to spread xenophobic conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and has long been a white nationalist idol. [pix]

This conservative framing continues among The Virginia Star’s articles. One recent “news” story, for instance, mocked a “racially equitable” fair-housing initiative put forth by Mayor Levi Stoney of Richmond, Virginia, writing that in the wake of the summer “riots,” the mayor “continues to propose measures other than improving law and order in his city, including legalizing marijuana and removing Confederate monuments.” Another recent article shamed Democratic legislators for appropriating funds for a text messaging service that allows teens to ask questions about sexual health and discreetly find medically accurate answers. The only person quoted in the article is a Republican state senator who proposed a failed measure to eliminate the educational service, calling it “a sex to text talk line.”

The Star has also begun publishing semi-daily updates from the Trump campaign trail. The site’s “Trumpdate" missives solicit political donations to a limited liability corporation registered to Fredericks (through a link that appears to be broken) and also direct readers to the Republican National Committee’s “Trump Victory” page, encouraging readers to volunteer for the campaign.

The Star is just the latest addition to Fredericks’ budding media empire. In addition to hosting his own show, Fredericks owns three conservative talk radio stations in central Virginia. In recent months, he has used his platform to sow distrust of measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Fredericks is also a close ally of Trump, serving as the Virginia co-chairperson of the president’s 2016 campaign and as an advisory board member of the Trump 2020 campaign. He's interviewed Trump upward of a dozen times and sometimes serves as a surrogate for the president on CNN.

Though The Virginia Star lists Fredericks as its CEO and editor-in-chief, the site is operated by the Star News Digital Media network, a journalistic organization of dubious origin that was founded in 2017 bytea party-connected conservative activists Michael Patrick Leahy, Steve Gill, and Christina Botteri. The company runs similar pages in Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, and Minnesota, and The Virginia Star seems to be the only publication in the network that doesn’t list Leahy on its masthead.

The Star News network is but one example of thousands of mostly conservative partisan media outlets that have swept in to fill the nationwide void in coverage by masquerading as local news. Although right-wing media such as the National Review have attempted to suggest that a scourge of liberal-leaning partisan news pages are aggressively targeting voters on Facebook, internal research from Media Matters and reporting from Nieman and Columbia Journalism Review have confirmed that nearly all of the networks pushing partisan content online have a conservative bent. Such sites have been around for nearly a decade, but their numbers have grown exponentially since 2016. Recent reporting suggests that in key swing states, partisan local websites “masquerading as traditional local news outlets” are deluging voters with right-wing talking points at an increasing rate as the election nears.

In 2018, Politico dubbed the Star News network’s sites “baby Breitbarts”for their similarity in tone and demeanor to Breitbart News. In fact, Leahy, who manages the other Star network sites (except for the Virginia outlet), is a regular Breitbart contributor. Like its swing-state peers, The Virginia Star mixes original content with articles it reprints from right-wing media outlets like The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, American Greatness, and others.

Indeed, this seems to be the standard way the Star network sites operate, producing a mix of original content and reprints from right-wing outlets that promote conservative viewpoints -- and sometimes misinformation. Although The Virginia Star emulates many of the same practices as other pages in the network, Fredericks’ influence appears to have resulted in more original content about Virginia politics.

Fredericks also appears to be cross-promoting his content between the site and his own radio network. His radio show's websiteruns ads for The Virginia Star, while the Star prominently features an advertisement for Fredericks’ show on its home page.

According to social media analytics tool BuzzSumo, roughly 40% of the links Fredericks shared with his almost 20,000 Twitter followers since July go to The Virginia Star. But Fredericks doesn’t list his association with the network or The Virginia Star specifically in his Twitter bio.

With its slanted coverage disguised as local news, The Virginia Star appears to be another example of right-wing radio hosts exploiting a media platform to promote conservative misinformation to their impressionable audiences.