Beware The “Pink Slime” Oozing Across Georgia.
A few months ago, I stumbled across the Substack of a group called News Guard. They try to call balls and strikes when it comes to unbiased media coverage and highlight fake news stories. They’ve been writing a lot about what they call “pink slime” websites. They mean websites that present themselves as unbiased but are, in reality, funded by sources on the Right and the Left and exist to advance a political point of view. Many of these pink slime sites operate as local news sites, claiming to fill the gap in local news coverage.
Two years ago, they noted that there are now more pink slime sites than real news sites, proving again that the information age has flooded us with information, but not necessarily the truth.
They wrote on October 9th that pink slime “news” is showing up in Democratic campaign ads in Iowa and Ohio. Is Georgia next?
Earlier today during the Atlanta Press Club debate, Democratic nominee for Attorney General Tanya Miller used a story from Georgia’s pink slime site “Courier Georgia” to attack Republican AG nominee Brian Strickland, claiming he was ramming a data center down the throats of his neighbors. Strickland responded that the claim was false and that it came from a false news site. Miller doubled down on the pink slime story, but she misrepresented the Courier story, since even they admit the data center is not being built.
Beware the politician who uses a pink slime story and can’t even represent that story accurately, and don’t be surprised if Miller uses this fake story in her own ads.
NewsGuard says this about Courier Newsroom, the parent entity of Courier Georgia:
More on the relationship between Courier Georgia and Georgia’s Democratic candidates. Miller, along with Keisha Lance Bottoms, attended a candidate event hosted by Courier Georgia and moderated by Don Lemon. You remember Don Lemon, who blurred the line between journalist and activist when he joined those disrupting a church service in Minneapolis earlier this year. No matter what you think of Lemon, he is certainly a controversial figure — yet top Georgia Democrats happily appeared at a forum he moderated.
A final word on this for now: Courier Georgia uses ActBlue, the troubled Democratic fundraising platform, to accept donations for their “reporting.”
Let the reader beware.
