Dems Reportedly Use 'Opaque' Media Outlets For Partisan Messaging Ahead of Mid-terms

The looming mid-term elections will take place on 8 November and a recent ABC/Washington Post poll has indicated that the Republicans are gaining momentum. Only 39 percent of US citizens approve of President Joe Biden's performance as president and the GOP holds a sizable advantage on issues such as the economy and crime.

In a bid to sway voters ahead of the forthcoming November mid-term elections, Democrats have been employing a network of local news outlets in key swing states to churn out party-aligned content, American news website Axios reported.

Partisan messaging is purportedly being covertly injected into the stream of content by a squad of writers employed by a Washington-based media operation. The prominent Democratic operatives employing the tactics ensure that the network of at least 51 locally branded news sites carefully disguise the "slanted news content", the website claimed.

Local News Ploy

Lurking under innocuous local names such as Milwaukee Metro Times, the Mecklenburg Herald, or Tri-City Record, the news outlets have cropped up in the past year across 10 battleground states - Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin - Axios says.

All of the aforementioned outlets ostensibly aggregate stories about sports and local news and inject political content intended to prop up Democratic candidates while lambasting their Republican opponents.

The news sites are purportedly run by a company called Local Report Inc, according to the “About Pages” section of each outlet. Furthermore, their mastheads indicate possible involvement of The American Independent (TAI), a Washington-based news outfit, the report adds. At least six writers from that outlet have contributed content to the Local Report sites, Axios claimed.

The American Independent was launched by Democratic worker and fundraiser David Brock, who also founded media watchdog Media Matters for America. Matt Fuehrmeyer ,TAI president, is a former director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and senior aide to the late former Democratic senator for Nevada, Harry Reid.

According to the report, although Local Report's stories are neither boosted by digital ads nor receive any particular promotion from the sites themselves, their reliable stream of "friendly" narrative is touted to advantage by political allies. Thus, such content has ostensibly emerged in communications from Stacey Abrams' Georgia gubernatorial campaign, the Democratic Parties of Georgia and Michigan, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Michigan's Democratic secretary of state, and independent political groups such as Color of Change and the Democratic Coalition.

When asked to elaborate on the relationship between The American Independent and Local Report Inc, Jessica McCreight, TAI's executive editor, called it a "co-publishing agreement".

Spokesmen for Local Report have summed up their goal as “sharing local news and providing readers with fact-based coverage of their communities”, adding:

“We are proud to collaborate with partners like the American Independent that are also committed to bringing the public reliable information that they can trust,” as cited by Axios.

The report comes in the run-up to this year’s high-stakes mid-terms on 8 November. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the 100-member Senate are being contested. There are also elections to 36 state governorships, and three US territory governorships, numerous city mayorships and local officials.

With the vice-president, Kamala Harris, as a tie-breaker, the Democrats have the slimmest majority in the Senate at present. Meanwhile, Republicans need to flip just five Democrat seats to retake the House majority.

A September poll by Washington Post-ABC News showed that 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the job being done by Democratic President Joe Biden and 51 percent of independent voters said they want Republicans in charge of Congress next year. Historically, the party of the sitting POTUS nearly always loses House seats in the mid-terms.

According to our forecast, Democrats have a 30% chance of keeping control of both the House and the Senate. Meanwhile, Republicans have a 33% chance of winning both chambers. That means there’s a 63% chance one party controls both chambers of Congress. https://t.co/rUZY1N1USS pic.twitter.com/GQ8VE6myhe

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) October 7, 2022

In the race to control the House of Representatives this November, FiveThirtyEight's polling average shows that the Democrats have a 30 percent chance of retaining control of both the House and the Senate whereas the Republicans have a 33 percent chance of winning both chambers.