from the the-best-ass-kissing-money-can-buy dept

Back in 2016 we noted how U.S. power utilities like Florida Power & Light created entirely fake consumer groups to try and derail legislation that would have brought more competition to market. Six years later and the company has again found itself in the middle of another scandal, this time for buying favorable news coverage from local news outlets across the Southern U.S.

A new investigation by NPR and Floodlight News found that Florida Power & Light and Alabama Power used a company named Matrix LLC to pay numerous Florida and Alabama local news outlets in exchange for favorable local coverage.

It worked: over seven years and for less than a million bucks, local outlets often took advice on stories, softened coverage on demand, targeted political opponents, or ran press releases disguised as news stories on behalf of industry. And it worked because U.S. local news has been so eviscerated there’s not a whole lot of ethical guardrails or competent local reporters left in many (especially marginalized) communities:

“The reduction in just the size of the press corps covering state government has created a vacuum that I think tends to be filled by people who have agendas beyond serving the public interest,” says former Miami Herald executive editor Tom Fiedler.

Most of the reporters and editors either deny these relationships existed (despite email and other evidence presented by NPR), or try to flimsily justify the dodgy behavior by claiming to be a “free market based” news outlet:

“The Capitolist stands by the accuracy of every story it has published and openly acknowledges that we bring a center-right, pro-free market editorial viewpoint to our work,” Burgess writes in response to questions from NPR and Floodlight.

A similar recent report by NPR showed how political operatives have also taken advantage of the death of local news reporting to flood Americans with political propaganda.

Nobody’s doing much about any of this because nobody wants to do anything about any of this. There’s very little actual money to be made in local news and quality reporting (aside from hedge funds buying the stumbling corpses of local papers then stripping them for parts).

So instead of doing things like shoring up media regulatory oversight, trying to find creative new funding sources, or developing firewalled public funding options for local reporting, in many instances we’ve just ceded the entire local news industry to charlatans.

Charlatans that are producing something that resembles local news, but is really just propaganda for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. And despite the fact that researchers have shown this erosion has left us less informed and more divided than ever — and in many instances sways close elections against the public interest — very little has been done to change the trajectory we’re on.

In fact, despite the fact that the United States is swimming in propaganda pretending to be news, there’s very little effort to even include this fact as essential context when reporting on why U.S. voters often act as if they have a head full of pudding and routinely cheer against their best self interests.

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Companies: florida power and light, matrix llc


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