We are at the confluence of two disquieting events. The first is that local news remains the only form of journalism voters still largely trust, a sharp contrast to the public’s very dim opinion of newspaper and television reporting. This is good for local journalism, especially amid its national gutting. But it is not particularly healthy that the national press — supposedly our most powerful watchdogs — are so widely distrusted. The second is the little-noticed expansion, over the last two decades, of the pink slime economy. Taken together, the two suggest we are heading for a genuine information crisis.

For the uninitiated, NewsGuard describes “pink slime” as “sites that present themselves as professional news outlets but are secretly backed by partisan groups with a clear though undisclosed agenda.”Along with phony stories and websites, the operators behind these schemes often pay Meta large sums to advertise their “reports” across users’ newsfeeds, generating millions upon millions of impressions.

The stories — generally low-quality, low-effort, and often misleading, either directly or by omission — exist to target specific voter demographics, swing states and candidates. The result is an audience tricked into mistaking political advertising for honest reporting, with voters’ preferences subtly influenced.

Social media is positively lousy with these reports. And unfortunately, the problem has only worsened in recent years, according to a recent study by Carnegie Mellon University.

The number of these pink slime sites ballooned from roughly a handful in 2006 to an estimated 1,200 today.

The practice dates to at least George W. Bush’s first term, with the appearance of the Madison County Record in Illinois, which presented itself as a genuine news organization despite its undisclosed ties to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And by “ties,” I mean the Record was wholly created by the Chamber.

Then, in 2018, the left-wing States Newsroom launched, eventually establishing operations in all 50 states and earning a pink slime designation from NewsGuard. States Newsroom disputes the label.

By 2019 there were an estimated 450 such sites, “each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories,” according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Of these sites, at least 42 percent belonged to the right-leaning Metric Media, which had launched that same year.

The left-leaning Courier Newsroom also launched in 2019, founded by former CBS News and 60 Minutes staffer Tara McGowan. McGowan, who has the Obama-era slogan “Yes, we can” tattooed on her left arm, raised around $25 million from left-wing donors to produce several of these phony news websites after President Trump’s first election. The explicit purpose was to pass off Democratic Party propaganda as genuine reporting. McGowan’s get-out-the-vote nonprofit, Acronym, funded Courier Newsroom through April 2021.

As of this writing, the largest pink slime network belongs to Metric Media. It boasts an estimated 1,100 standalone websites, dwarfing the approximately 130 combined left-wing sites run by groups such as Courier and States Newsroom. But a numbers advantage does not necessarily mean a spending advantage. Where Metric Media outnumbers left-leaning pink slime operations in standalone sites, Courier outstrips everyone in money spent promoting content on Facebook, netting millions of impressions.

Since its founding, Courier Newsroom has spent an estimated $8 million total on Facebook ads — the most of any network by a large margin, according to the CMU study. Metric Media has spent only $2 million on Meta ads during the same period. A newer left-leaning entity, American Independent, has spent an estimated $813,000 on its Facebook presence since its launch in 2022.

These website and spending figures don’t even account for the smaller pink-slime pop-ups — entities that appear practically overnight to influence a single election cycle and then disappear. This includes the left-leaning Main Street Sentinel, created in February 2022 and inactive after February 2023 after spending roughly $1.4 million on Meta advertising during the midterm elections. This also includes the left-leaning Morning Mirror, which materialized suddenly to disseminate pro-Democratic propaganda in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It spent up to $381,000 on Meta ads and then ceased meaningful activity immediately after the 2024 presidential election.

Regardless of which ideological cohort spends more, one thing is clear across CMU’s data: pink slime ad spending has increased steadily across the board, with brief but sharp spikes in election years. Total Facebook ad spending for all pink slime organizations in 2018 was just $21,713. In 2024 the combined total was $7.9 million.

The pink slime journalistic economy, then, has grown exponentially in the last 20 years, not only in number and spending but in reach beyond social media. Its fruits are visible even now on the 2026 campaign trail, with pink slime stories appearing in certain campaign ads. In Ohio, for example, a PAC ran an ad against Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio), quoting the Ohio Capital Journal’s negative characterization of him as the energy companies’ “golden boy.”What the ad does not disclose is that the Ohio Capital Journal is not an independent news organization, but part of the left-leaning States Newsroom’s pink slime network.

In Alabama’s 2nd congressional district, an ad in support of Republican candidate Rhett Marques (R) cited Yellowhammer News to credit the candidate with creating “$1.5 billion in tax relief.”The ad failed to mention that Yellowhammer is co-owned by a conservative political consultant whose clients include the Marques campaign.

There is a reason these groups disguise themselves as legitimate local news organizations rather than national news outlets. Although major media continue to suffer an existential credibility crisis, voters still largely trust local journalism. More specifically, 70 percent of U.S. adults say they have “a lot of” or “some trust” in local news, according to Pew.

Pew also found that 88 percent of U.S. adults now say they get their news “often” or “at least sometimes” from digital devices. Meanwhile, the preference for getting local journalism online versus on television has increased in recent years.

In other words, the place where voters increasingly get their news has been infected by propaganda cleverly designed to imitate the one tiny space within journalism that they still trust. It is as simple and as devious as that.

When we talk about electioneering and dirty tricks, this is not primarily about foreign online bots. Pink slime is far more intelligent, targeted, dedicated, complex, and, for all we know, better funded than any goofy meme.

Much more dangerous than memes or dimwitted podcasters are the complex networks of partisan agitprop worming their way into the newsfeeds of unsuspecting voters — networks that combine the journalism know-how of their founders with keen algorithmic tools to game social media feeds and prop up or attack political candidates, all while trading on the good name of the last form of trusted journalism.