Forget Fox News, have you heard about the Kenosha Reporter? If you haven’t, check it out. It is a stagnant-appearing website—the last article posted is from September 3, 2020—that purports to be a local news source for Kenosha, Wisconsin. But its content is a lie.
After Rittenhouse shot into a crowd of people, he walked past local police officers with his hands up but was allowed to exit the scene, casting another shadow on the conduct of the Kenosha Police Department.
Kenosha is a mid-sized city that sits between Chicago and Milwaukee, on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was thrust into the national spotlight in August, when Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, was shot in the back seven times by a white police officer while several of Blake’s children looked on.
The lead article on the Kenosha Reporter website is a shocker, but it’s not about police brutality in the United States, or Jacob Blake’s current condition, or anything else that might be deemed especially relevant or newsworthy right now. Instead, it is a piece that appears to offer a line of defense for Kyle Rittenhouse by claiming that one of his victims was a known pedophile.
Rittenhouse is the teenager who drove to Kenosha from his home in Illinois when protests over Blake’s shooting began in August. Once there, Rittenhouse fired his illegal AR-15-style rifle at a group of people he deemed threatening, killing two people and wounding a third.
He has since been charged with numerous felonies and is awaiting an Illinois judge’s decision about whether or not he will be extradited to Wisconsin to stand trial.
Observers have found much to explore with the Rittenhouse case. For one thing, he was said to be patrolling the streets of Kenosha alongside a self-described militia group known as the Boogaloo Bois. After Rittenhouse shot into a crowd of people, he walked past local police officers with his hands up but was allowed to exit the scene, casting another shadow on the conduct of the Kenosha Police Department.
Given the rise in white nationalist groups and the role they’ve played at protests this summer, in Kenosha, Portland, Oregon, and in the 2020 presidential election, this seems like a significant story to zero in on.
The Boogaloo Bois have also been accused of fomenting violence through social media, which supposedly led Rittenhouse to travel to Kenosha and take it upon himself to defend the streets as some kind of lead up to a second Civil War.
This strikes me as another important storyline worth further scrutiny, as misinformation campaigns continue to pose a threat to our democracy, not to mention our peace and sense of security.
But you won’t find any coverage of these stories in the Kenosha Reporter. I can’t find any mention of Jacob Blake, either. Instead, the lead item on the Kenosha Reporter website is an alarming headline, accompanied by a fuzzy photograph, claiming that Joseph Rosenbaum, one of Rittenhouse’s victims, “raped five boys.”
That’s because the Kenosha Reporter is a sham news agency, one of more than a thousand being run by a shadowy, rightwing PR group known as the Metric Media Foundation.
To be fair, the Kenosha News, the city’s actual daily paper, has also had problems covering Blake’s case. Recently, an editor quit in protest over the way a rally in support of Blake was portrayed in print by colleagues.
Quietly, sites like the Kenosha Reporter have popped up all over the East Coast and the Midwest, but this operation has colonized numerous states. There are seventy-six affiliate websites in Iowa alone, and nearly fifty spread out across Minnesota and Wisconsin.
All of this came to light for me in a recent New York Times report. In a piece published on October 18, Times reporters Davey Alba and Jack Nicas detail how Brian Timpone, a former reporter turned Republican operative, has populated local media landscapes with harmless, even quaint sounding, outlets.
The gist of The New York Times story is that Timpone has capitalized on the rapid downfall of local, independent media sources—more than two thousand have reportedly been lost in the last two decades—by selling article space to right-wing politicians and business owners looking for a PR rescue.
Timpone’s network relies on the labor of severely underpaid freelancer writers who make anywhere from $3 to $36 per article to offer up one-sided puff (or hit) pieces, often without realizing their work has been ordered by a paying customer.
There are other news-like networks out there, Alba and Nicas point out, being run by both liberal and conservative action groups. While troubling, perhaps, these outfits are nowhere near the size and scope of the Metric Media Foundation.
Timpone has raked in substantial sums of money from high dollar conservative donors while also charging potential PR customers thousands of dollars, with a promise that articles and “unlimited news releases” will then be published on the client’s behalf.
This has allowed him to clutter up the shrinking media landscape with shoddy (just take a look at the Kenosha Reporter) websites that claim to be devoted to local news coverage. The Metric Media Foundation crows about this online, declaring that their network is the “largest producer of local news content in the nation.”
Just last week, it was announced that the Southwest Journal will cease publication by the end of 2020. To most people, the name won’t ring a bell, but in Minneapolis, this hyper local news source has meant a lot. It began documenting life in the southwest corner of the city in 1990, but the owners say they can’t afford to keep publishing it.
The Southwest Journal has survived through ad revenue, building a robust digital presence while continuing its print edition. It’s still delivered by kids, and it’s always been free to read. The pandemic has punched a hole in everyone’s budgets, including the contractors and small businesses that once kept the paper afloat.
This loss feels monumental, especially knowing there are sharks like Brian Timpone and the Metric Media Foundation circling the waters. The Southwest Journal has had a full-time staff of reporters doggedly covering municipal meetings, while also providing important stories about events such as George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.
For the last six weeks of publication, they will rely on freelancers before closing up shop for good.