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Spin Class Case Study: I Caught POLITICO and the New York Times Laundering Pink Slime "News"
How the sexist backlash to AOC and Gretchen Whitmer at the Munich Security Conference led me to a scammy "local news" outlet pushing a coordinated right-wing narrative
....
I had indeed missed something: over the long President’s Day weekend, a phalanx of right-wing actors launched a coordinated attack on AOC and Whitmer, driving inflammatory, often sexist social media content that was then amplified by more palatable MAGA and Republican voices until it broke into the mainstream.
...
Those two hyperlinks direct to tweets from Eric Daughtery, a right-wing troll whose X bio reads in part “Charlie Kirk: ‘Men Must Vote.” Asking this gentleman what he thought of AOC’s foreign policy comments is like asking Harvey Weinstein what he thought of your daughter’s school play.
But it’s the second POLITICO hyperlink, which was also included in the New York Times’ post-Munich AOC story, that first confused and then alarmed me:
...
But what’s important for our purposes is that the Midwesterner, the pink slime website pumping out anti-Democrat content, was apparently created and owned by a known associate of the Republican candidate who lost to Gretchen Whitmer in 2022? That… seems relevant.
https://spinclass.substack.com/p/spin-class-case-study-i-caught-politico
....
I had indeed missed something: over the long President’s Day weekend, a phalanx of right-wing actors launched a coordinated attack on AOC and Whitmer, driving inflammatory, often sexist social media content that was then amplified by more palatable MAGA and Republican voices until it broke into the mainstream.
...
Those two hyperlinks direct to tweets from Eric Daughtery, a right-wing troll whose X bio reads in part “Charlie Kirk: ‘Men Must Vote.” Asking this gentleman what he thought of AOC’s foreign policy comments is like asking Harvey Weinstein what he thought of your daughter’s school play.
But it’s the second POLITICO hyperlink, which was also included in the New York Times’ post-Munich AOC story, that first confused and then alarmed me:
Link to tweet
...
But what’s important for our purposes is that the Midwesterner, the pink slime website pumping out anti-Democrat content, was apparently created and owned by a known associate of the Republican candidate who lost to Gretchen Whitmer in 2022? That… seems relevant.
https://spinclass.substack.com/p/spin-class-case-study-i-caught-politico
tl:dr : a right-wing fake news site (ie it just exists to spread RW opinion and propaganda, dressed up as a regional news site) was picked up by both Politico and the New York Times, and its opinion repeated uncritically, with no indication of its real status. And that "legitimised" the (bogus) argument that AOC and Whitmer were failures in Munich.