Daily Fact Check from NewsGuard AI
Did Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese collapse and fall off of a stage while visiting Fiji?
By Sam Howard
What’s happening: In yet another indication that partisan “pink slime” news sites are seeping into the political discourse and media ecosystem, candidates and political action committees are citing these secretly partisan sites as if they were independent sources in political ads ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
A closer look: NewsGuard this week identified seven video ads for key races in Iowa, Ohio, and Alabama featuring on-screen citations of pink slime websites — evidence that these sites push a shared agenda with like-minded candidates. The ads benefit from the sites’ innocuous names, which make them sound like non-partisan local publications, lending a false sense of objectivity and authority to the ads’ claims.
In fact, the publications are “pink slime,” a term that refers to sites that present themselves as professional news outlets but are secretly backed by partisan groups with a clear though undisclosed agenda.
Zooming in: For example, the liberal Government that Works PAC released an adattempting to link U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, a Republican in Iowa’s U.S. Senate election, to policies that threaten Iowans’ rural way of life while promoting her Democratic opponent, state Rep. Josh Turek.
Near the end of the ad, a caption appears on-screen stating: “‘Josh Turek...
Daily Fact Check from NewsGuard AI Did Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese collapse and fall off of a stage while visiting Fiji? Midterms Watch: Pink Slime Sites Ooze Into Political Ads By S...