Election Ads Disguised As Newspapers Sent to Wisconsin Voters
The mailers, published by conservative-funded media company, are backed by Richard Uihlein.
The front pages of two election mailers posing as local newspapers, obtained by WPR.
They’re called the Kenosha Reporter. The Fox Cities News. The Chippewa Valley Times.
With the election for a pivotal seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Tuesday, political pamphlets that look like local newspapers have been showing up in Wisconsinites’ mail.
All contain the same articles skewed towards conservative court candidate Brad Schimel and against liberal Susan Crawford.
Their return address is an office building in Chicago.
Isaac Anderson, a letter carrier in the Eau Claire area, has delivered several waves of the mailers. He says people on his route are “not quite sure what to think” of the mailers — but one response stood out.
“I hand it to them, and I say ‘This is a juicy one for you,’” he said.
“They were just like, ‘Yeah, I have no interest in that. This is garbage. This is literally going to go in the garbage,’” he said.
Websites linked on two mailers obtained by WPR say that they are published by a company called Metric Media, which was also behind a fake Catholic newspaper mailed before the 2024 presidential election.
Spending in the race between Crawford, a Dane County judge, and Schimel, a Waukesha County judge, could hit $100 million by election day, one watchdog group estimated. That’d be almost double the previous record, set in 2023’s Supreme Court race.
Conservative-funded media company sends mailers
The mailers do have locally specific — but anonymously authored, and source-thin — content on student athletes, upcoming events and school enrollment numbers between its election-related articles.
The Chippewa Valley Times mailer, for example, features what look like news articles with bylines from “The Sconi” and “Chippewa Valley Times Report.” Mixed in with updates on utility rates and local school enrollment are a series of articles promoting the views of Schimel’s campaign, not to mention those of Republican members of Congress.
The political content is identical in the Kenosha Reporter pamphlet, only it’s interspersed with that city’s school enrollment and an update on a local concert.
But there’s a clue that the mailers aren’t real newspapers, said Dan Roherty, editor of two weekly papers in Oshkosh and Neenah.
“There’s no ads. So there’s no money to be made from these. They’re just spending money,” he said.
Metric Media has received millions from conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, which also named Brian Timpone as one of the company’s key figures. The Chicago-area native also founded Journatic, a company that outsourced U.S. local news reporting to writers in the Philippines.
Fake local newspapers becoming a national trend
Metric Media is part of a larger trend — thousands of mostly-digital media operations that use the aesthetics of traditional newspapers to advance specific agendas.
“They’re fronts for political activists, political action committees, well-heeled individuals who are trying to sway public opinion,” said Tim Franklin, who leads the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Similar operations exist on both sides of the political spectrum, Franklin said. He said the right-leaning versions are more common.
“They primarily surface during election season,” he said, adding that the operations maintain bare-bones digital presences during other times.
Overloaded with information, people avoid news
Mike Wagner, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying how media use relates to political behavior, said mimicking trusted local news is a “pretty sophisticated” strategy — but possibly not for long.
He said his surveys show more Wisconsinites avoiding news and information altogether.
“They’re overwhelmed by the constant din of content, and they seek it less,” he said.
“As newspapers probably continue to decline, the value of looking like a newspaper will also decline,” he said.
Roherty, the newspaper editor, had a similar thought about the mailers.
“They’re probably about as effective as the beating we all have to take from negative TV ads,” he said.
Earlier this month, Wisconsinites reported getting handwritten pro-Crawford mailers with the wrong election date on them, likely due to out-of-state volunteers following a script from an advocacy group.
Election mailers, disguised as local newspapers, sent to Wisconsinites was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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The right wing calls legitimate news sources “fake news”, but they are actually the producers of fake news.
If you can’t earn respectability, I guess you have to pay for it.
Paying money to pedal fake. That’s the Republican way.