Is Morality an Existential Threat to Democracy?

Note: This post is long. However, it discusses one of the most important and enlightening broadcast programs that I recall hearing in the last 30 years or so.

The program: A broadcast on NPR entitled Moral Combat produced by the Hidden Brain program discusses what happens when morality is injected into a political issue or tends to be inherent in it. The effects are almost completely socially corrosive and anti-democratic. In essence, most issues can be politically weaponized by moralizing them. Playing on conflicting moral beliefs is an effective way to divide, distract and polarize a population. That affords demagogues and dictators the most common pathway to authoritarian political power.  The 55-minute podcast is here. Several key points of the research the program discusses are summarized below.

Moral certainty neuters facts, truths and reason: Major moralized issues in the US include immigration, same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, police violence, religious dogmas, euthanasia laws, trade policy and even political ideologies, e.g., evil socialism, liberal tyranny, etc. For many people, moralized issues are not generally debatable because the moral issue is clear in their minds. People see their moral belief as obviously correct and therefore not subject to debate or contrary facts, truths or reasoning. People who try to convey moral inconvenience or threat are generally rejected as not trustworthy because they are perceived to be talking obvious nonsense.

The more self-righteous, the more anti-democratic: People who have moderate to limited moral feelings about an issue such as a euthanasia law, tend to accept court decisions about the law without experiencing much positive or negative reaction toward the court. By contrast, when a court decides against people with strong moral convictions, they tend to see the court as less trustworthy, less procedurally fair and less legitimate. A court decision that morally weaponized people agree with tends to foster a perception of trust, legitimacy and fairness. Thus by morally weaponizing an issue and publicizing court decisions on it, both the courts and political opposition can be delegitimized and made to appear untrustworthy and/or illegitimate.

Researchers find similar moral reactions in court cases that decide on cases of vigilante justice. People who strongly morally believe that a person is guilty or immoral tend to be more sympathetic to the vigilantes and less trusting of the court that punishes vigilantes. The lesson is that probably most people with moral convictions about an issue generally do not care a lot how the moral conviction is defended or vindicated, e.g., by legal or illegal means. Moral self-righteousness tends to override concerns that get in the way, including the rule of law. Another cited example of moral self-righteousness justifying the means is Mitch McConnell's refusal to consider Obama's Supreme Court pick in 2016 saying "of course, of course" the people should have a say, but in 2020, simply denying that people do not need to have any say. Lying, cheating and hypocrisy tend to justify self-righteous moral ends over other concerns.

Most people's reaction to institutions that make decisions they strongly morally disagree with is to question the institution, not their own strong moral convictions. Thus by morally weaponizing as many issues as possible, a political group can delegitimize an entire government for reasons that are not objectively reasonable.

The decline in trust, science and experts: Poll data from the last 30 years shows that public trust in various institutions and political opposition has significantly declined. Public trust is one of the glues that holds a democracy together. Public trust is a bulwark against demagogues, tyrants, crooks, liars, lawbreakers and kleptocrats. When distrust is based on moral grounds, evidence is usually not needed to justify what people feel, and thus know, is true. That leads to distrust of (i) science that contradicts moral beliefs, and (ii) the experts who try to convey the inconvenient truth. Feeling or emotion usually overrides facts, truths and sound reasoning when strong moral convictions are at play.

False belief in moral objectivity and its truth = closed minds: People with strong moral convictions tend to believe that their belief is objectively true, like 2+2 = 4 is objectively true. Again, personal moral knowledge is usually certain. But in fact, moral beliefs are usually more subjective than objective. Moral convictions feel objectively true and thus are not open to debate or contrary facts, truths or reasoning. Based on such feelings, people or institutions, e.g., courts, who hold contrary moral beliefs must be objectively wrong. Those feelings are usually objectively wrong because personal moral truths are falsely but sincerely believed to be universal moral beliefs that should apply to everyone, everywhere, always or almost always. 

The problem with this false belief in objective moral truth is that when a person engages with or hears another who has a different moral belief, that person usually concludes that since they believe in something that is immoral or evil, that person must also be immoral or evil. Then, trust usually bites the dust, especially when the "immoral" person tries to explain their belief and its basis. 

Moral conviction and confirmation bias: Another corrosive effect on truth and trust that strong moral conviction tends to have is that it limits or blocks efforts to look for contrary evidence or reasoning that contradicts the moral conviction. Confirmation bias tends to shut down open-mindedness and strong moral conviction tends to create confirmation bias. This is another example of how strong moral and other beliefs tend to shut down open-mindedness and the psychological discomfort that contradictory evidence and/or reasoning can lead to.

The researcher that was interviewed for this program, Linda Skitka, commented that a person simply looking for reasons or contrary evidence about a genuinely felt moral certainty can lead to social pressure to not even inquire because the moral belief is obviously true and universal. Why question what is sincerely believed to be true and universal? It raises questions about the morality of the person doing an inquiry that could lead to finding contradictory evidence or reasoning. In other words, strong moral convictions can lead to social siloing, along with distrust. 

In addition to potential social ostracism or motive questioning, doing research into an morally-charged issue has a tendency to reduce the intensity of the moral conviction when contrary evidence or reasoning is encountered. That is a socially beneficial impact of having enough moral courage to overcome both confirmation bias and social pressure that tends to keep minds closed and thus usually misinformed. 

Inquiry into a matter of moral certainty also runs the risk of it leading to moral relativism, making everything up for grabs and personal while nothing is universally true. That invites the question of whether there is such a thing as a universal moral truth. 

Disregarding the rules: Experiments have shown that people with a moral conviction tend to break rules more when they have been exposed to court decisions they morally disagree with. There is something about moral disagreement that loosens other glues that holds democracy together, namely respect for the rule of law and simple respect for other citizens. Strong moral convictions can simply destroy those glues and weaken democracy.

In the case of the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown CT at the Sandy Hook elementary school, some gun rights activists claimed online that the parents of children who were murdered were not real and that the mass shooting was a faked conspiracy to foment gun more regulations. Some believed that the parents were paid to stage the gun attack. Some of the parents of murdered children were harassed in real life, not just online. That kind of blind, deranged hate and hideously false belief was grounded in strong moral convictions that guns were good and thus could not possibly have been used to murder 26 innocent people including children in an elementary school. 

Killed compromise: People in disagreement without a moral basis for the disagreement can usually find common ground and compromise far more easily than when strong moral convictions are clashing. In the moral conflict scenario, people have a hard time simply coming to agreement on how to simply talk about the issue. 

Personal observations

This research on the effects of moral belief on politics and political issues makes a lot of sense. It helps explain one of the key bases for how and why the radical right has relentlessly moralized issues in politics and used moral disagreements to polarize and divide American society. This moralization process has been a conscious, sustained effort by the radical right to gain influence and power at least since the mid-1950s. And, since colonial times in the US, various extremist groups also appear to have recognized the power of moral weaponizing to build in-group cohesion, typically by vilifying various convenient out-groups. The in-group extremists are morally good and the out-groups are at least immoral, if not evil.

The decades-long radical right effort to paint reasonable compromise as ideological or tribe betrayal or treason has been successful. The GOP has had RINO hunts for years and the party is now mostly ideologically cleansed. The GOP has become anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian in breaking norms that used to be frameworks for compromise. The party now looks for obedience based on intolerant moral condemnation, not diversity of ideas and moral tolerance. Morally weaponizing politics and political issues has been a major tool that helped sink the GOP into this moral morass that it has become. 

Pragmatic rationalism

The research findings discussed in the Moral Combat program are satisfyingly and fully compatible with pragmatic rationalism (PR) on moral grounds. PR is built on four core moral values: (i) fidelity to trying seeing fact and true truths with less partisan bias, (ii) fidelity to applying less biased or partisan conscious reason to the facts and truths, (iii) service to the public interest based on factors including the facts, truths and sound reason, and (iv) willingness to reasonably compromise according to political, economic and environmental circumstances suggest are reasonable. Inherent in those morals are a strong bias toward democracy, the rule of law, and social trust and tolerance and against authoritarianism, law at the whim of those in power and social divisiveness and distrust.

One of the concerns built into the four moral values is the matter of their universality, not the moral issues that now divide and poison American society and the federal government. As far as I can tell, most Americans would claim that they adhere to all four of those values, especially the first two. Unfortunately, respect for all of those moral values, especially compromise have been under decades of relentless radical right attack propaganda (dark free speech). Those core values are slowly eroding in America. I have argued that this semi-consensus on the acceptance of facts, true truths, sound reasoning (~logic), service to the public interest and compromise constitute a basis to claim high moral authority for them. I believe those values transcend the other moral values (abortion, gun control, etc.) that demagogues, tyrants, special interests and kleptocrats are now using to disinform, distract and tear American society apart.  

PR is not silent about morals related to dark free speech (lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and bogus partisan reasoning), all of which are targeted as detrimental. 

PR is silent about toxic morals such as abortion, gun control or same-sex marriage.  Instead, it depends heavily on respect for facts, truths and sound reasoning. That is focused on the always disputed concept of service to public interest, and to a less extent compromise. Thus, PR inherently is anti-strong moral conviction by virtue of be inherently anti-confirmation bias and anti-motivated reasoning. As the Moral Combat program points out, simply looking for contrary evidence tends to weaken the intensity of moral convictions. Exposure to inconvenient but sound reasoning will have the same beneficial effect. 

A key goal of PR is to open minds to look for all the relevant evidence and apply sound reasoning to it from one or more points of view, liberal, conservative, centrist, capitalist, socialist, cost-benefit, etc.  PR is not a means to get rid of moral convictions, but instead it defines a mindset that should at least partially rationalize their intensity and irrational emotion-generating effects. The goal is to make moral convictions somewhat more compatible with democracy, facts, truths and sound reasoning, without unduly limiting people's ability to act on their personal moral beliefs within the limits of laws. 

Questions:

Can the four core moral values PR is built on be considered transcendent over other moral values, or are all moral values equal?

Is there such a thing as a universal moral value?

Is it a mistake to consider the intellectual framework of PR a moral one, and if so, what should the mental constraints that PR attempts to impose be considered purely secular with no moral component?

(keeping in mind Sisella Bok's view of the immorality of lying in politics)  

Is democracy more inherently moral than authoritarianism?

(that's a core assumption that PR is based on - if authoritarianism is just as good, then why be concerned about facts, truths, sound reasoning, etc., and just accept what the leaders say and tell people to do?)

What Some Voters Think and Why

 

Trump at Day 1374

Some black voters who did not vote in 2016 but will vote in 2020

Jason Hooper of Greensboro, N.C., says that in 2016, 

“I didn’t like either of the candidates” --

He will reluctantly vote in 2020 for Biden

Louis Johnson, New Orleans 

“Even though I have been a registered Democrat my entire life, I am also a conservative Catholic, and I don’t see the Democratic Party as very moralistic. President Barack Obama sank the party when he allowed same-sex marriage. Trump has protected us from that; he has some strong religious views and is protecting the church as we know it. Anyone with Christian values has to vote for Trump, as I will, in person on Nov. 3. Joe Biden is like the Titanic iceberg: I see the tip. I don’t want to see any more.”

Gloria J. Young, Woodbridge, Va. 

“Come hell or high water, I was going to vote this year”

“Come hell or high water, I was going to vote this year: President Trump is incompetent, ignorant, insensitive, racist and disgusting. I feel responsible for not voting in 2016 — like my vote might have made the difference. And I know that by voting this year, I’m honoring my mother, who volunteered for many years as a poll worker in Gary, Ind., before she died in 2013. I haven’t always been focused on the importance of every citizen exercising their rights, even though she always was. But Mom, I don’t plan to make that mistake again.”

Tamicka Lowe, Mableton, Ga.: I don’t like the way Trump addresses people: He says a lot of crass stuff. The simplest way to put it is that he’s politically incorrect. I do customer service, and you have to be inclusive of everybody. You can’t put some people below others.

But, ugh, Biden. It’s a double-edged sword: Who is the worst — him or Trump? But I really don’t want Trump to be reelected. The comments he has made about Kim Jong Un and other countries that threaten the U.S.? Not that I care that they don’t like us, but sometimes you have to be diplomatic. He could cause World War III.

Why some people will vote for Trump in 2020: Jobs & Immigration 

The New York Times writes: 

“I spent 35 years in the steel business and I can tell you unfair trade deals were done by Republicans and Democrats,” Mr. Haines [Bruce Haines, Bethlehem PA] said. Both parties, he complained, had given up on manufacturing — once a wellspring of stable middle-class jobs. “Trump has been the savior of American industry. He got it. He’s the only one.”

Still, despite one of the worst years in recent American history, the issue on which Mr. Trump gets his highest approval ratings remains the economy. It points to the resilience of his reputation as a savvy businessman and hard-nosed negotiator. And it is evidence that his most enduring economic legacy may not rest in any statistical almanac, but in how much he has shifted the conversation around the economy.  

In the process, he scrambled party positions on key issues like immigration and globalization, and helped topple sacred verities about government debt. He took a Republican Party that preached free trade, low spending and debt reduction and transformed it into one that picked trade wars even with allies, ran up record-level peacetime deficits and shielded critical social programs from cuts. 

“He completely moved the Republican Party away from reducing Social Security and Medicare spending,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.   

The Democrats changed in turn. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has positioned himself as the champion of immigrants, pledging to reverse Mr. Trump’s most restrictive policies, while rejecting more radical proposals like eliminating the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

He has also been pushed to finesse his position on fracking and the oil industry, promising not to ban the controversial drilling method on private lands, and trying — with mixed success — to walk back comments he had made during the presidential debate about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Shifts on trade were more momentous. Mr. Biden and other party leaders who had once promoted the benefits of globalization found themselves playing defense against a Republican who outflanked them on issues like industrial flight and foreign competition. They responded by embracing elements of protectionism that they had previously abandoned.

The reshuffling is clear to Charles Jefferson, the managing owner of Montage Mountain Ski Resort near Scranton, Pa. “Those were not conversations we were having five years ago,” he said. “The exodus of manufacturing jobs, that was considered a fait accompli.” 

Mr. Jefferson, who said he voted for Mr. Obama, supported Mr. Trump in 2016. He plans to do so again. 

As a result, in this election, unlike the last, the significance of manufacturing and the need for a more skeptical approach to free trade are not contested.

Mr. Biden, after decades of supporting trade pacts, is now running on a “made in all of America” program that promises to “use full power of the federal government to bolster American industrial and technological strength.” He has also vowed to use the tax code to encourage businesses to keep or create jobs on American soil.

Even voters who don’t particularly like Mr. Trump credit him with re-energizing the U.S. economy.

What does all of that mean?

Some research after the 2016 election indicated that white voter unease with the impending rise of minorities to majority status and accompanying social changes was the most important factor in the president's electoral college win. I suspect it will be the first or second most important factor in 2020. If that is true, Biden is making a huge mistake, possibly a lethal one, by not clearly and repeatedly telling people that (i) he will not tolerate illegal immigration, but (ii) he will humanely deal with the issue. There is plenty of room to deal with the problem of illegal employers and illegal immigration without the shocking cruelty that the president has embraced.

The other big issue seems to be jobs and how to protect US manufacturing. I am not an economist, but from what I think I understand, that will be impossible without massive economic changes that will take years to implement. It will also cause huge increases in the cost of almost everything Americans buy. At the same time, the GOP is rigidly opposed to increasing wages, so the American standard of living will probably have to decrease for most workers.

And there is the federal debt time bomb. The GOP has completely abandoned meaningful concern for the debt. They increase it when they are in power, even in good economic times, but complain vehemently about it when the dems are in power. Sooner or later American debt will come back to haunt us. When investors lose faith in American debt, the mindset change will cause the American standard of living to significantly decrease for most workers. 

The other puzzle is whether free trade has been a net positive or negative for the American economy and standard of living. Some argue that it has been a net benefit, but that policies to deal with job losses have not been effective in the US. GOP anti-domestic spending policies tend to limit or completely block government efforts to support workers who have lost jobs to foreign competition.  

HAPPINESS IS THE WEEKEND

 PUT ASIDE THE GLOOM AND DOOM

Too much Trump, election news and Covid getting you down?

Try discussing something different, like maybe, what is your favorite escape on the weekend?

MUSIC?

A BOOK?

FRIENDS?

OR JUST

IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER

Another anomalous “perfect storm” or an orchestrated, coordinated “rigged storm”?

Consider this: 

Trump and his supporters like to say that if he loses, it’s because the election was rigged.  In light of the latest national polling numbers (and especially the more important individual state polling numbers), I’d submit that if Biden loses, then the election was definitely rigged… but rigged for Trump and against Biden.  How so?  

My evidence:

My evidence is NOT some conspiracy theory made up of surreptitious, under the table, covert tactics. No. I’m talking about right out loud, in your face, takes some major balls of steel, tactics. I’m talking about: 

1. Hacked state/local election systems and “intercepted” ballots by Russia and other foreign actors who favor a Trump presidency 

2. Voter suppression laws

3. USPS antics perpetrated by Trump supporter and contributor, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

4. Limiting of polling places, especially in “blue” areas

5. Fake / limited / set ablaze / other ballot drop-off boxes 

6. Super long voting lines in non-white areas leading to hours of waiting time

7. The threat of militia-type gun-toting Trump supporters at polling places, intimidating prospective voters

8. The status quo of a country now in shambles and disarray (pandemic, economy, political, climate)

Therefore my conclusion:

The current evidence, some 11 days before the election, points to the conclusion that Biden *should* win.  Barring a Trump “ace up his sleeve” in an act of political desperation, how can Biden NOT win?

If all my evidence is wrong, and if Biden doesn’t win, what can account for the polling discrepancy?  A bipolar electorate? A dishonest polling electorate?  Last minute voter apathy? Incompetent and/or biased pollsters? Can the polling numbers really lie/be skewed to such a degree?

*        *        *

Am I seeing things incorrectly?  Explain it to me.  What am I missing?

(links below)

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7. 

8. (personal opinion)

The Radical Right's Plan for Public Education

Context

In the last year or so, I've started using the labels such as 'radical right' or 'radical libertarian right' to describe the ideology of what GOP conservative ideology has morphed into in recent years. The change has been ongoing at least since a 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that made public school segregation illegal and required desegregation in an attempt to equalize the quality of public education across the entire nation. 

That Supreme Court decision enraged some conservatives who strongly opposed civil liberties and federal government mandated federal or state spending on domestic issues, including public education. That ideology envisioned strong state governments and a weak central government focused on the military and not much else, including civil rights and voting rights.[1] Over the decades since then, that ideology has come to displace the existing conservative ideology. Various events, such as Barry Goldwater's 1964 crushing loss to Lyndon Johnson, spurred the movement and kept it alive. The radical right slowly built influence and power in the GOP over the decades. The final push for power in the GOP was crystallized by the election of Barak Obama in in November of 2008. 

I first became aware of this historical narrative from historian Nancy MacLean's 2017 book, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America (discussed here), and Jane Mayer's 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (discussed here).[2] MacLean described the origins of the radical right movement based on a trove of forgotten papers on a university campus in Virginia. She was given access to those papers without people understanding their content. Mayer's book includes a detailed discussion of how Obama's 2008 election, once again drove the radical right into a rage and finally crystallized GOP radical right resistance to Obama and more generally the democratic party. Among some other very bad things, that uncompromising opposition remains the basis of (i) America's broken gridlocked state of federal governance today, and (ii) America's state of extreme polarization, and its distrust of government, the mainstream media and political opposition.

The public education plan

A long article at Wall Street on Parade, Charles Koch Should Be on the Presidential Debate Stage Tonight, Not Donald Trump, describes the radical right plan like this:

"Koch Industries and Charles Koch have used nonprofit front groups to further their agenda for at least four decades.

And finally, there is billionaire Betsy DeVos who heads the U.S. Department of Education. Sourcewatch reports that the DeVos family fortune, which comes from Amway household and beauty products, funds school privatization projects, anti-union and pro-school voucher groups. ....

One of the seminal books on the Koch agenda is the 700-page tome by Christopher Leonard: “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Leonard was interviewed about the Koch’s view of public education on the Podcast, “Have You Heard.” (We highly recommend listening to it.) Leonard explained the Koch view as follows:

"Know what the blueprint is. Koch’s influence machine is multi-faceted and complex and I am just telling you, in a very honest way, there is a huge difference between the marketing materials produced by Americans for Prosperity and the actual behind-the-scenes political philosophy. There’ a huge difference. And here’s the actual political philosophy:

Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view.

So, the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe, in a sincere way, is better for everybody. Now, whether you agree with that or not is the big question, but we cannot have any doubt, there’s going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, efficiency. At its core though, the network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different."

Thus, if the president gets re-elected, it is quite possible that he will try to set in motion a plan to dismantle public education and replace it with private schools. That is not to say that the president buys into the radical right agenda. But, being a transactional "what's in it for me" kind of guy, he can be conned and manipulated or bribed into going along with it. Trump does not care about education. Trump only cares about Trump.

Footnotes:

1. My read of the situation is that the radical right wants power shifted from the federal government to state governments because it is easier to subvert, corrupt, and then capture state governments than it is to do that with a federal government. Some states strongly oppose the radical right agenda and those states cannot be so easily bought and captured by this kind of radicalism. In essence, the elites in the radical right movement are multi-millionaires and billionaires. They want to re-establish authoritarian autocratic power in the states they can control. They want to be the aristocrats who control the states just like elites who controlled the states and public education before the 1954 Brown v. Board decision.

2. Conservatives have heavily criticized the books that MacLean and Mayer wrote. The reasons are self-evident. Also, there are some principled, non-political criticisms, but they do not mostly negate the basic story that MacLean and Mayer tell in their books.

 agPress Freedom

Partisan Websites Fill Media Void

By Alan Greenblatt

https://www.voanews.com/press-freedom/partisan-websites-fill-media-void

WASHINGTON - Headlines never tell the entire story, but they do set a tone. That’s certainly the case with some recent coverage of the U.S. presidential race. Consider these examples:

“Lewis says ‘crazy’ urban liberals are driving Minnesotans to Trump.”

“Suburban Moms Are Channeling Their Collective Frustration to Vote for Joe Biden.” 

“Biden Goes to Michigan, Reminds Voters of Trump’s Broken Promises.”

“You cannot be Catholic and a Democrat. Period.” 

The headlines weren’t written by Joe Biden or Donald Trump’s campaigns, or their political parties, although they might well have been. Instead, they’re products of a new generation of websites that present themselves as local news operations, even as they are run by party operatives.

“These are partisan sites – some on the right, some on the left – that are masquerading as news sites, but what they are putting out is basically propaganda for a candidate or a political point of view,” says William Freivogel, a journalism professor at Southern Illinois University.

In this polarized presidential election year, the number of partisan websites that pose as local news outlets has nearly tripled, to about 1,200, according to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. They are run by activists or political and public relations consultants, and they publish and repurpose content with a narrow partisan point of view.  

VOA attempted to reach several of the sites for interview but only one—the editor-in-chief of a site founded by a Democratic strategist, responded.  

At a time when politicians from President Donald Trump on down disparage mainstream media outlets as peddling “fake news,” media scholars worry that these sites will further pollute the information environment, making it more difficult for voters to tell fact from fiction and spin.

“We have seen in some instances sites pop up and adopt the name of a newspaper that went under in the past,” says Philip Napoli, a Duke University professor who’s written about partisan sites.  “We had a blatant disinformation site here in North Carolina that took stories that happened years ago in completely different states and rewrote them as if they happened here.”

Filling a void

An enormous hole has opened in the U.S. media market when it comes to coverage of local governments and news. More than 1,800 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2004, according to figures from the Pew Charitable Trusts, while many others are shadows of their former selves, with fewer reporters and less coverage. The new sites hope to fill that void – but without the traditional commitment to balance or fairness.

Although there have long been media outlets with an ideological orientation – Mother Jones on the left, for example, and The Wall Street Journal on the right – they make their leanings clear while maintaining independence for news and some distance from political parties.

The new breed of sites do not always advertise their leanings, or sometimes, their true ownership. “If they’re not selling fact-based news, what are they selling?” asks Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. “Do they attempt to represent the other side? Is it fact-based reporting? Do they care about factual errors?”

Researchers at the Tow Center found the majority of these sites are run by networks with conservative ties or leanings, but the left is getting into the game, too. Courier Newsroom, founded last year by Democratic strategist Tara McGowan, runs eight sites, mostly in states considered presidential election battlegrounds.

Lindsay Schrupp, Courier’s editor-in-chief, is upfront about the goal.

“I don’t think a lot of people fully understand that there is now a very robust right-wing media infrastructure filling that [local news] gap and using right-wing propaganda,” she says. “No one else is doing the job of intentionally trying to fight back against the right-wing misinformation.”

Courier's sites are staffed by reporters present in each state that they cover and run only original content. But some of the other sites do little original reporting. These are so-called pink slime sites, meaning part of their content is generated automatically. They reprint press releases directly, without bringing editorial judgment to information from governments or other interested sources.

Although the sites bear the names of the cities or states they are nominally covering, many are virtual clones running identical stories. Others do generate content that is original and quite partisan in nature, featuring stories that are one-sided, cheerleading for one party while routinely bashing the other.  

When Trump appeared in Michigan recently, a conservative site known as Center Square ran a story noting his “avid throng of supporters” and quoting the president touting his own accomplishments while bashing Biden. Coverage of the same event in The Gander, Courier’s Michigan site, criticized Trump for having cut funding for the state’s National Guard that day, while highlighting the coronavirus death toll and noting that Trump supporters were “mostly maskless” and not practicing social distancing.

Center Square is a project of the Franklin News Foundation, which is closely tied to the free-market Illinois Policy Institute. Other sites and networks, including the Local Government Information Services Network and Metric Media have leaders who come from conservative think tanks or Republican Party circles.  

Editors and managers at these sites and others did not respond to VOA requests for comment or interview.

American tradition

For a century after the nation’s founding, most American newspapers were partisan, accepting patronage that included government printing contracts and sometimes displaying the words “Republican” or “Democrat” as part of their titles.  

The rise of the penny press newspapers in the mid-1800s and eventually wire services such as the Associated Press had the effect of pushing journalists onto more neutral ground, since they were tapping bigger markets that could be served by not appealing exclusively to partisans.

Over the past 15 years or so, partisan actors have sought to revive the old model.  

During his tenure as Indiana governor, Vice President Mike Pence flirted with launching  a state-run news site but backed down amid criticism. While Republican Bruce Rauner was governor of Illinois, his allies ran a network of news sites and radio stations that backed his politics while presenting themselves as independent. (Rauner eventually split with the group.)  

Half of the country’s 3,143 counties now have only one newspaper, according to the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and 200 have none. That’s created so-called “news deserts” and a sense of “desperation” in the journalism business, author Nelson says. The partisan sites are looking to fill the resulting vacuum.

The partisan sites say they are trying to fill the resulting information hole. Metric Media, for example, states that it aims to address the “growing void in local and community news after years of steady disinvestment in local reporting by legacy media." 

Nelson, however, says such sites are seeking more to exploit than fill such voids.

“The problem is that people in these towns who may not want to pay for news may turn to them and be misled about the kind of information that they’re getting,” Nelson says. “If you only use the partisan lens, it doesn’t necessarily give you the full picture.”

In some cases, the sites engage in a sort of propaganda laundering. A story might be barely a rewrite of a politician’s press release. That story, in turn, will be cited by the same politician in a tweet or ad, giving the position credence from a legitimate-sounding news outlet.

For partisan actors, running news sites also gives them a way to potentially skirt campaign finance restrictions and put money into consultant’s pockets. A nonpartisan group connected to Nevada’s former Republican attorney general has called on the Federal Election Commission to brand Courier as a political committee, which would subject it  to greater scrutiny.  

Courier labels itself a progressive news organization but says it does not carry water for any party or candidate. Its majority owner, however, is a digital political consulting group called ACRONYM, which boasts on its website about helping elect 65 progressive candidates in 2018. The group’s political arm is running an anti-Trump digital ad campaign in battleground states.

“They [ACRONYM] are a majority owner of us, but that’s as far as it goes,” Schrupp says. “They have absolutely no editorial influence.”

Although the number of partisan sites is larger, their audiences, in most cases, remain small. The most successful may be The Tennessee Star, a pioneering site on the right, which received more than 2.2 million engagements with readers during the first half of the year, according to NewsGuard, a media watchdog. The Tennessee Star was launched by Michael Patrick Leahy, who helped form the Tea Party movement and is a majority owner of Star News Digital Media, which runs several state-focused sites.

Engagements may include not just a direct visit to a page, but a “like” or share or comment. By rough comparison, large established news sites such as The New York Times and Fox News receive roughly 70 million unique visitors each month.

Local journalists that VOA contacted aren’t giving much thought to these sites as real competition. Several newspaper editors in markets with partisan sites said they weren’t even aware of their existence until contacted for this story.

“I’ve heard of Alpha News, but I don’t know the first thing about it,” says a reporter with the Minneapolis Star Tribune, referring to a local site that receives relatively large traffic for a partisan site. “Never visited the site or seen their coverage.”

Business filings link the site to Alex Kharam, the executive director of the conservative Minnesota Freedom Club, the Tribune has reported previously.  

Credibility and the vote  

Dubious websites and social media misinformation campaigns largely flew under the radar in the 2016 election. Authorities say this year’s presidential vote is no less at risk.

“People are not tied down to a few sources that they find credible,” says Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. “They’re willing to go in whatever direction their social media feed moves them, and that can be in a pretty partisan direction.”

Another problem: Some voters may become so mistrustful that they won’t believe what any traditional news sites report.

“If people are constantly questioning the motives of the information they encounter, we don’t want them to be so distrustful that they won’t accept legitimate information from reputable sources,” says Brendan Nyhan, who studies media at Dartmouth College.

“[Misinformation] sites weren’t a big concern until almost after the [2016] election, when people realized how much reach they had,” he says. “We don’t want to make the same mistake in 2020.”