Democrats are seemingly embracing the fake news business, as a super PAC called Forward Majority appears to be tied to a faux local “news” website to boost Democratic candidates and causes while posing as a non-political press entity. 

That’s the outlook from a new forensic analysis released Thursday by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which is shedding light on a mysterious website posing as a news source called the “Morning Mirror.” It lists Star Spangled Media as its publisher — a group that previously made headlines in 2022 for operating another secretive “news” website called the Main Street Sentinel, which spent more than $1.4 million to run social media ads targeted at Michiganders that almost exclusively promoted local Democratic candidates, President Biden, and Governor Whitmer, as Axios reported at the time. 

The Morning Mirror’s website is equipped with a vague “About Us” page and a series of posts — posing as local news articles — praising Democratic candidates and abortion rights in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona. The many political posts are mixed with occasional news blurbs about non-political topics such as the weather or fitness trends. 

In July, Semafor reported that a prominent Democratic elections lawyer, Marc Elias,— who served as general counsel for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign and was recently hired by Vice President Harris’s campaign — was backing the mysterious Morning Mirror “news” site. His law firm urged campaign finance regulators in Arizona to treat the site as a “journalist operation, not a political one,” as Semafor’s report put it, and argued that the company shouldn’t have to follow campaign finance disclosure laws. Elias Law Group said that Star Spangled Media is a “for-profit media company that is in the business of publishing and distributing original news stories, commentaries, and editorials.” 

The Semafor report noted that the group was “part of a multi-pronged push by Democrats to counter conservative media across the country through increasingly creative and sometimes opaque digital strategies — ones that blur the line between even the most activist political journalism and paid campaigning for the Democratic Party.”

Now, a newly released analysis published in Columbia Journalism Review, citing a lengthy trail of ads and metadata, indicates that the Morning Mirror and its owner, Star Spangled Media, appear to be connected to “a liberal dark-money group called Forward Majority.” 

Forward Majority, in its “blueprint for power,” openly states its strategy to “reshape local political narratives in our targeted districts,” which has the potential to “influence not only local races, but to seed from the ground-up winning narratives and shifting party affinity that can influence the broader electorate.”

That strategy, once associated with right-wing groups, is now becoming a “growing trend for exploiting the local news crisis by flooding the information ecosystem with quasi-news content that uses the veneer of independent local journalism to propagate partisan political narratives,” Columbia’s investigation notes. 

The groups may be onto something when it comes to focusing on local news and elections: Americans are much more likely to trust local news than national news platforms, Gallup/Knight Foundation polling indicates: 44 percent of Americans surveyed in 2021 said they trusted local news “a great deal” or “quite a lot,” compared to 27 percent who said the same of national news. 

“The challenge is that this is a cheap way to get a message out, and by making it opaque and difficult to track and doing aggregation, as opposed to real reporting, it’s becoming effective, and it’s hard for consumers to be informed about what they are taking in,” the editor-in-chief of the Carolina Journal, Donna King, tells the Sun of the super PACs. She says there’s a stark contrast between think tanks or organizations that report news from a certain perspective but clearly label ties to their news services versus murky political actors masquerading as legitimate, mainstream news sources. 

The trend started with a mistrust of mainstream news and conservative groups trying to get their stances heard, she says, but has since “snowballed,” partly because of the social media’s prevalence.  “I think it’s only going to increase, particularly as we get into November,” she says of the fake news websites. 

Elias Law Group did not respond to a request from the Sun for comment.