Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

The Tow Center maintains a list of politically backed and partisan news sites here. It includes details of individual networks, copies of physical mailers that have been sent, and existing research about individual networks. If you receive a physical mailer, have examples of similar networks operating in your area, or would like access to more granular data, please get in touch with us here.

A new Tow Center analysis of campaign finance records and nonprofit filings reveals that four political action committees and four nonprofit organizations paid a network of partisan pay-for-play news sites controlled by Metric Media over $14 million in 2021–2022. The investigation demonstrates millions more flowing to partisan “pink slime” news sites than previously reported. The payments can be traced to organizations tied to conservative megadonors, including shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, and oil and gas billionaire Tim Dunn.

The Tow Center has covered pink slime news networks since 2019, using computational methods to reveal the extent of the Metric Media network, which comprised nearly 1,300 websites. Our research has previously traced some of its partnerships as well as its sources of funding. In this report, we look at financial disclosures combined with an analysis of the network’s coverage of the “Big Lie” of election denialism to help illustrate one of the ways in which this influence model is being used by PACs and advocacy organizations.

Local news outlets backed by special interests—including political actors in the United States or abroad—continue to receive attention ahead of the 2024 US general election. Researchers at Clemson University identified a network of local news sites laundering Kremlin-backed narratives largely focused on undercutting the West’s support of Ukraine in 2023. Meanwhile, Semafor reported on Star Spangled Media, “a secretive local media network” tied to a Democratic lawyer. As independent local news is caught in a downward spiral—declining revenues, fewer journalists, and smaller audiences—alternative media and politically backed journalism have found more space to operate.

In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, the Tow Center identified $1.6 million of the transactions by political action committees with various entities directly related to Metric Media and Pipeline Media, but the $14 million traced in our new analysis dwarfs that figure. This sum includes:

• A total of $7.5 million from two PACs and the nonprofit Restoration of America, backed by shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, for research, consulting, and an assortment of campaign-related services (robocalls, SMS messages, websites). The Uihleins were the biggest federal campaign donors to Republican candidates in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, contributing more than $60 million to federal Republican causes. They are also the largest donors to Restoration PAC. According to its website, Restoration PAC “engages in elections, provides support to truly conservative candidates,” and opposes the “woke agenda.”
• $240,000 from the Peter Thiel–funded Saving Arizona PAC, which backed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, for consulting and “printing/postage.” (At least two editions of Metric Media’s Grand Canyon Times were sent by postal mail to Arizonans during the campaign.)
• $57,075 from the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, largely funded by West Texas oil and gas billionaire Tim Dunn. Dunn has spent over a decade building a political apparatus in Texas to push the state further to the right by giving tens of millions of dollars to “ultraconservative movements and candidates.”
• $6 million from three other nonprofit organizations for content development, publishing and distributing, and public relations, including nearly $5 million from the Metric Media Foundation. Both LLCs and the foundation are part of the complicated organizational structure that oversees this network.

About a third of the total sum was paid by the Uihlein-backed group Restoration of America, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, to Salvo Page for “research & consulting” services. The signatory on Salvo Page’s certificate of formation is Brian Timpone, who holds an executive role in numerous organizations that are known to operate the extended Metric Media network. These companies largely share leadership, employees, and technology resources. The number of corporate entities, the different states in which they are registered (or reregistered), and their use of various aliases and rebrands make it difficult to track the full scale of the extended network’s activity.

Among Restoration of America’s many projects is the Voter Reference Foundation (VoteRef), an effort to address “election integrity” by publishing every state’s voter rolls—including names, addresses, and dates of birth—so they can be examined for instances of voter fraud. While FOIA responses are, by definition, public records, privacy experts and many states have raised concerns that making such data public facilitates doxxing. Election officials have also described VoteRef’s methodology as flawed. The Tow Center previously reported that one part of this local news network built the Web application that allows users to browse voter rolls. A recently posted bio of Timpone states that he cofounded this initiative.

Dunn also holds a managerial role at Pipeline Media, another organization responsible for the network. As first reported by the Tow Center, Dunn assumed this role in 2021, while retaining his position on the boards of numerous conservative groups whose initiatives are often promoted across the network. Dunn sits on the board of the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit created to craft policy for a second Trump term that is sometimes referred to as a “White House in waiting.” It is also one of many advocacy organizations that has engaged with election denialism.

Not only does the Metric Media/Pipeline Media network provide a news platform for campaigns and advocacy causes, it also provides a slew of services: creating websites, running Facebook ads, filing FOIA requests, and other campaign-related services, including robocalling, text messaging, and publishing and delivering physical newspapers in support of specific issues or candidates. In 2024, the network has run more than 150 ads linking to the Uihlein-funded Restoration of America website through its Facebook pages.

One way in which the Metric/Pipeline network has furthered the views of its clients and ideological counterparts is by lending credence to the “Big Lie.” We found more than 2,000 stories relating to election integrity across the network’s 1,200 sites. These included false claims that the 2020 general election was stolen from former president Donald Trump; that mail-in voting is rife with fraud; and that grants from a nonprofit backed by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to aid local election officers led to favorable outcomes for the Democrats. (An APM Reports analysis of three of the five key swing states shows these funds had no clear impact on voter turnout.) Multiple audits of election results, audits of voting machines, and recounts have found no evidence of voter fraud at the massive scale necessary to swing the 2020 election. In Arizona, fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud were identified out of the more than 3 million votes cast.

By piecing together Metric Media/Pipeline Media’s role in building a campaign against voter integrity, we demonstrate how the network’s function extends far beyond publishing.

Local Labs, one of the key companies responsible for the network, committed “thousands of hours” of research to the task, asking the counties for voter data from the 2020 general election. Local Labs made these FOIA requests for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) and Restoration of America’s Voter Reference Foundation in an attempt to substantiate claims of widespread voter fraud. For AFPI, this data underpinned misleading reports about fraudulent ballots. For Restoration of America, this meant continually updating its VoteRef database with the details as and when it received responses from various counties.

The network’s coverage of the Big Lie wasn’t isolated to the efforts by AFPI and Restoration of America. It also highlighted the positions of a number of rich and powerful advocacy groups.

Our analysis shows that the Metric/Pipeline network published hundreds of stories around this topic, citing a handful of think tanks promoting election denialism, including the Heritage Foundation, the Thomas More Society, the Capital Research Center, and the Public Interest Legal Foundation. For these cases, we found no public records showing financial transactions between these groups and the larger Metric Media network.

This network plays a role in the bigger conservative media ecosystem that comprises religious media, talk radio, digital platforms, and the national conservative press. Together, these elements can create a surround-sound effect by echoing the same messaging across different platforms. While the direct impact of each component of this network is hard to assess, with margins being as narrow as they have been in the past few election cycles, influencing only a small percentage of the voting public could swing a race or issue.

Numerous corporate entities operate the core network of publishing sites, including Metric Media, Newsinator (alias Franklin Archer), Local Government Information Services (LGIS), Pipeline Media (formerly LocalityLabs and Journatic), Pipeline Advisors, and Advantage Informatics. Other than Timpone and Dunn, the key executives across these entities are the Illinois-based John Tillman and Texas-based Bradley Cameron.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Cameron and Timpone launched more than a thousand local news websites under the Metric Media banner. The sites were packed with press releases and automated templated stories derived from publicly available data. Interspersed among these data-based stories was political and issue advocacy, along with corporate communications. Cameron, who runs the management consultancy Situation Management Group (SMG), has multiple advocacy groups as clients, many of which have received favorable coverage on this network or have had their positions broadcast.

Cameron, Dunn, and Timpone did not respond to our requests for comment over email.

Key personnel and entities are shown in the network graph below.

The core network of entities operating the Metric Media/Pipeline Media network.

Breaking down the ties and the $14 million

Overall, we identified about 25 transactions from campaign finance records and Form 990 filings that make up this $14 million. Seven entities associated with the network were paid for services including “media consulting,” “content delivery and distribution,” and “printing and postage.”

Campaign finance

2021–22 campaign finance expenditures on the extended Metric Media/Pipeline Media network.

Uihlein’s Restoration PAC paid Pipeline Media and Pipeline Advisors a total of $1.78 million in 2021–22 for production costs, media consulting, and management consulting.

The People Who Play by the Rules PAC, which received $42 million from Uihlein and backed Illinois gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, also paid two companies connected to the network. Pipeline Media and Salvo Page received a total of $1.18 million for services including “website,” “SMS text messages,” and “consulting.” Bailey lost to incumbent J.B. Pritzker.

The Saving Arizona PAC, largely funded by Thiel, backed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. It ran advertisements in the Metric Media’s Grand Canyon Times, at least two editions of which were sent to Arizonans. The PAC paid Advantage Informatics, another corporate entity that operates the network, just under $250,000, the majority of it earmarked for “printing/postage.” Masters also lost his race to the Democratic incumbent, Mark Kelly.

In Texas we were unable to establish coverage of any of the candidates supported by Dunn’s Defend Texas Liberty PAC except Donald Huffines. We found more than fifty stories promoting Huffines, a primary challenger to Texas governor Greg Abbott, which publicized his position on topics including abortion, election fraud, and border security. Huffines, too, lost the race.

None of the candidates—each further to the right of their opponents—won their respective races, despite the millions of dollars going into their campaigns. However, that tide may be turning this election cycle. During the Texas primaries in early 2024, Dunn (along with his family investment vehicle, Hexagon Partners) contributed almost $2.5 million to the Texans United for a Conservative Majority PAC, a rebranding of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC after the revelation that groups associated with Dunn had ties to white supremacists. Eleven of the 28 House candidates backed by Dunn’s political network won their primaries, and another eight races headed to run-offs. (For comparison, as reported by the Texas Tribune, all but one of the nineteen Dunn-backed House candidates lost in 2022.)

Form 990 filings

 

While campaign finance records are filed in near real time, Form 990s (the tax returns for nonprofits) only become publicly available a year to two years later, which makes it difficult to ascertain and report on financial transactions between parties in or near real time.

In 2021–22, Uihlein’s Restoration of America gave a total of $4.6 million to Salvo Page for “research & consulting.” Salvo Page is a company registered in Delaware with Timpone listed as its “authorized person.” Its address, per 990 filings, matches that of both Pipeline Media and Advantage Informatics and the return address on the physical editions of Buckeye Reporter (a publication printed under the Metric Media banner) that were mailed in July 2023 during Ohio’s Issue 1 referendum on abortion rights. These pages highlighted the GOP’s support of the measure, labeled the opposition “communists,” and attributed a fake statement to a grassroots advocacy group, Red Wine and Blue, that had opposed the measure.

Our review of the 990 filings revealed a further combined $1.3 million from two organizations—the Franklin News Foundation and the Institute for Citizen-Focused Service (ICFS)—for marketing and public relations. While the Franklin News Foundation has ties to the Koch network, the ICFS is a nonprofit incorporated in 2021 and staffed by members of the former Trump administration, at least three of whom have worked in energy lobbying or other pro-fossil-fuel endeavors. Its chairman, Doug Domenech, who was the assistant secretary for Insular Affairs in the Trump administration’s Interior Department, previously ran the Fueling Freedom Project—aiming to push back on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan—for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a nonprofit on whose board Dunn sits.

In October 2023, the Daily Dot reported on a 2021 payment of $187,500 from ICFS to Pipeline Advisors for “public relations.” The following year’s Form 990 shows another payment of $900,000 for “content development and distribution.”

Most of the sites within this network say that they publish under a licensing agreement with the Metric Media Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and rely on the Metric brand for donations. However, its name has changed to Community News Foundation.

Since its inception, in 2019, the Metric Media/Community News Foundation has seen its revenue climb from less than $500,000 to $3.6 million in 2022. When we first reported on the funding of this network, in 2021, we found that Donors Trust, referred to as the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement” by Mother Jones, had given the company $172,500 in its first year of operation and  $1.27 million the following year, but no grants have been given to the foundation since then.

Meanwhile, in 2021 and 2022, grants made to the Metric Media Foundation were largely used to purchase services from three of the numerous for-profit ventures—Franklin Archer, Pipeline Advisors, and Pipeline Media—operating this network. Of the $3.6 million revenue the foundation reported in 2022, $3.4 million was disbursed to Pipeline Advisors and Pipeline Media for “publishing and distributing.” In 2021, $1.39 million of the $1.8 million revenue was paid to Pipeline Advisors and Franklin Archer for “publishing and distributing” and “publishing,” respectively.

Over and above the $14 million spent on Metric Media and its related entities during the 2021–22 election cycle, we found multiple nonprofits associated with Dunn, Cameron, and Uihlein promoted across this network.

The AFPI, the think tank sometimes known as the “White House in waiting,” was established by then-President Trump’s staffers, including Brooke Rollins (director of the Domestic Policy Council and former chief strategist in the White House) and Larry Kudlow (director of the National Economic Council). Dunn sits on the organization’s board.

The AFPI published two reports claiming there were discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted: “National Review of Retaining Election Records from the 2020 Election” and “Voter Discrepancies Found in the Arizona 2022 General Election.” Local Labs (now Pipeline Media) obtained the data used in these reports by making hundreds of public records requests to county offices. According to a fact-check by the Associated Press, election officials and experts voiced concerns that the first study was flawed for having failed to “account for fluctuations in local voter registration numbers as people move in and out of state and from county to county” or for the fact that different counties responded on different dates, which could explain the discrepancies.

Restoration of America’s VoteRef also operates under the mantle of “election integrity.” Its efforts to put every state’s voter rolls online, including personally identifiable information, have largely been successful, despite election officials saying the methodology is flawed and numerous states attempting to restrict republication of these records due to privacy concerns.

VoteRef has sued New Mexico, Maine, and Pennsylvania for the right to publish these rolls, arguing any restriction impinges on its First Amendment rights. As reported by Politico, Maine and New Mexico lost appeals to protect these voter records from republication.

In 2022, we found that Local Labs was responsible for building out the VoteRef website, based on documents acquired by ProPublica. Our new analysis has found that, as with the AFPI, Local Labs conducted many of the public records requests to get the voter rolls on VoteRef’s behalf. Additionally, Timpone was a cofounder of VoteRef, according to a bio published on Liberty Justice Center’s website in March 2024. (In April 2021, Timpone took on the role of secretary at the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit legal center.)

While the extended Metric Media local news network has published hundreds of stories focusing on VoteRef—including numerous stories about its various lawsuits—we didn’t find any that mentioned Timpone’s role.

This isn’t the only lens through which the Metric Media network has covered the Big Lie. There is no simple cohesive narrative, as proponents draw from different parts of the electoral process: dismissing voter suppression concerns, advocating for greater scrutiny of voter rolls to find discrepancies, alleging that mail-in voting enables rampant fraud, pursuing legal actions against offices that don’t concede, or championing more restrictive voting laws. Stories published by the network cover the gamut, often citing the handful of influential conservative think tanks backed by big-money donors who perpetuate the Big Lie.

Overall, our analysis found more than 2,000 stories covering various aspects of voter fraud published across 700 of the network’s sites.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Election Integrity Initiative 

Many of the stories published on voter fraud and election integrity mention one or more of these think tanks. For example: in May 2022, the DC Business Daily story “Cuccinelli: ‘Crowdsourcing going on’ to get voter integrity questionnaires to legislative, secretary of state candidates” referred to the Election Transparency Initiative and Honest Elections Project, while the 2021 East RGV News story “Studies: Zuckerberg-backed nonprofit favored blue counties with election-boosting grants” mentioned the Capital Research Center, Public Interest Legal Fund, and Restoration for America.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a nonprofit initiative funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, provided $350 million in grants to local election offices in the run-up to the 2020 general election. These grants were designed to help ensure elections ran smoothly at a time when there was a tight budget, little help from the federal government, and an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic. Counties requested grants for various priorities including new equipment, PPE, staffing and pay, and vote-by-mail initiatives.

Dark-money groups like the Thomas More Society, Foundation for Government Accountability, and Capital Research Center claimed these “Zuckerbucks” provided Joe Biden with an advantage, even though the CTCL funded every election jurisdiction that applied for a grant. An independent audit found the CTCL financing didn’t skew results, while an FEC analysis found that the “nexus between the donations and any purpose to influence the 2020 election is speculative at best.” Complaints to the FEC alleging that Zuckerberg and Chan had made excess contributions, violating federal campaign finance law, and that one of their nonprofit organizations had failed to register as a political committee were unanimously rejected by the bipartisan FEC.

Nonetheless, these groups lobbied for new legislation to ensure that private financing to aid the electoral process is banned in every state. In April 2024, voters in Wisconsin approved amendments to block outside funding that helps administer elections, despite there being no evidence that CTCL funding had influenced the electoral outcome in the state in 2020.

The Pipeline Media/Metric Media network published more than 650 stories on 380 of its websites discussing Zuckerberg’s initiative, with headlines like the Bridgeport Times’ “Electoral Interference: Democrats in Bridgeport see 4.6 change in votes after private funding given to voting officials” and South ABQ News’s “After Zuckerberg donations, Democrat support in Torrance rises 4% in 2020 election.”

These stories appear to be templated and seem designed to push the narrative that Democrats benefited more than Republicans. For example, in Jasper County, South Carolina, support for Trump increased by 4 percent as Republican turnout increased by 36.5 percent, while Biden saw a drop in support. It appears that the templated story assumed that the Democrats would have an advantage in Jasper, leading to a Hilton Head Reporter headline with a negative number: “After Zuckerberg donations, Democrat support in Jasper rises -3% in 2020 election.” The first line of the story highlights how Democratic turnout increased by 20.6 percent from 2016 to 2020, while Republican turnout increased by “only 36.5%.”

Even in the instances where Republican turnout had increased after CTCL funding, we found 47 Metric Media headlines that mentioned electoral interference and coupled it with the change in Democratic votes—even when that change, like the above example, was negative.

That said, we found more than 100 stories published on 90 sites that highlighted Republican candidates who saw their biggest gains after their districts received grants from the Zuckerberg nonprofit.

Foundation for Government Accountability

The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) was added to Cameron’s management consultancy’s client roster in late 2021 or early 2022, according to snapshots captured by the Internet Archive. In 2021, the FGA added “election integrity” to its list of initiatives.

In March 2024, CNN reported that the FGA “has played a key role in the push to advance voting restrictions and other legislation pitched as promoting election integrity in Republican states—claiming more than 70 such policy wins across the country in 2022 alone.” The FGA has  received $17.6 million from Uihlein’s foundation since 2014. The organization campaigned to ban private funding in elections; 25 states, all with Republican-controlled state legislatures, have introduced some form of ban or restriction on private financing, even as multiple reports have underscored the towering costs required to modernize and run elections.

We found 250 near–identical stories about “Facebook-funded progressives” providing grants to individual counties published on 220 Metric Media websites in June and July 2021, all using the same quote from FGA’s data and analytics director.

Meanwhile, after Texas came under criticism for the proposed new laws, multiple stories citing the Heritage Foundation, Election Transparency Initiative, and Texas Public Policy Foundation (whose board includes Dunn) were published on Texas-based sites owned by Metric Media/Pipeline Media.

The Austin Journal ran articles headlined “Panelists back Texas voting laws, say states lead way on ‘voter integrity’” and “Heritage Foundation analyst: Media all wrong on new Texas election law.” The First State Times ran “Atlantic editorial: Biden’s criticism of election reform bill ‘smacks of hypocrisy,’” while the Houston Daily published “Anderson: Texas is ‘latest pawn’ of Democrats’ goal of fabricating an election integrity crisis that ‘doesn’t exist.’” The Lone Star Standard ran multiple stories, including “Conservative analysts defend Texas’ proposed voting changes,” “Texas House and Senate pass anti-fraud legislation amid ‘astounding amount of disinformation’ about proposed laws,” and “Hughes: Goal of election security legislation is so ‘Texans can feel confident that their elections are fair, honest and open.’”

While the Texas case focused on rallying support for new legislation, Ohio’s was also calling out legislators for failing to pass proposed electoral reforms. Fourteen cookie-cutter stories were published with headlines like “Ohio legislature does not advance election reform legislation, Plummer declines to comment”; “Ohio legislature does not advance election reform legislature, Cupp declines to comment”; and “No response from Creech on election reform prospects this year.” All cited the Election Transparency Initiative.

As we approach the 2024 general election, these holistic campaign networks that merge advocacy and political campaigning under the banner of news are likely to continue, on the left and the right—and also possibly by foreign actors. It’s impossible to assess the role these networks will play on their own in the election cycle, but with the surround-sound approach of simultaneously hitting voters with the same pieces of information on multiple platforms, perhaps they don’t really need to make a national impact—just sway small pockets of voters in strategically important counties.

The Tow Center maintains a list of politically backed and partisan news sites here. It includes details of individual networks, copies of physical mailers that have been sent, and existing research about individual networks. If you receive a physical mailer, have examples of similar networks operating in your area, or would like access to more granular data, please get in touch with us here.

Priyanjana Bengani is a senior research fellow (Tow Computational Fellow) at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.