Pink slime
Let’s suppose — for quirky, possibly psychotic reasons —you wanted to know how much money was spent in Franklin County on women’s collegiate football in 2023. Only one Maine media outlet has dared to reveal this shocking statistic. Not the Portland Press Herald. Not the Bangor Daily News. Not a single one of the state’s TV stations.
According to a website by something called Metric Media, the answer is zero dollars. And it was zero the year before. And, although the website doesn’t say so, it will continue to be zero for the foreseeable future because the University of Maine at Farmington, the only college in Franklin County, doesn’t have a women’s football team.
In the journalism biz, this is what’s known as non-news. It reports something unimportant that nobody (except quirky psychotics) cares about. But at Metric Media, no editor tells reporters not to post such drivel, because there aren’t any editors and there aren’t any reporters.
Metric Media, which operates (using the term loosely) at least 11 websites in this state (nearly as many as the largest mainstream media outlet), dozens more across New England and hundreds in other parts of the country, is what’s known in the industry as “pink slime,” named after the filler in cheap ground beef. Metric uses an algorithm to cherrypick data from online sources and insert it in templates that make its factoids appear to be local news stories. Gas prices (from GasBuddy.com), the decrease in the number of local lawyers (from state listings that don’t change much) and the price of assorted college sports that nobody in some counties plays all clog up these sites. Metric also scooped everyone else by discovering that nearly all college students in nearly all-white Maine are white.
That still leaves plenty of room for pink slime’s real purpose: publishing right-wing propaganda. In among the sludge, there are anti-vax stories (“In Maine, 51 people have died after receiving Covid-19 ‘vaccine’”), anti-trans articles (“Analysis: Maine among 25 states that allow boys to play girls’ high school sports”) and attacks on the integrity of the voting process (“Maine among 24 states associated with ‘hyper-partisan’ voter data group”), all of them lacking significant amounts of accuracy.
So, who’s churning out this crap and why?
According to media watchdogs such as the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and NewsGuard, as well as coverage in the Boston Globe and New York Times, Metric Media is being fronted by Brian Timpone, described as a conservative businessman, former TV journalist and manager of Pipeline Media LLC and Pipeline Advisors LLC, both major contractors with Metric Media.
In Massachusetts, Metric has spent heavily on online advertising to promote its sites. In Maine, there’s no evidence of similar expenditures, but the results are about the same. Hardly anybody reads the worthless stories and political pus. Studies indicate less than 4 percent of the public has even encountered pink slime. So, why bother to mention these turd piles?
Because Metric Media is trying to fill the holes in news coverage caused by the retreat of mainstream media organizations that have left thousands of Mainers without a reliable source of local daily news. Except Metric is doing it without regard to quality. As Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy told the Globe, the sites consist of “a bizarre amalgamation of irrelevant press releases.”
The collegiate sports story about Franklin County was posted on a site called “Maine Lakes News.” Franklin County does have lakes, but as anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the region would tell you, it’s mostly known for its mountains. Makes one wonder if anybody from Metric has even visited this state.
That doesn’t mean Metric Media should be ignored, because every now and then, it spits out something toxic. In the Chicago area in 2022, it ran a story that claimed the city’s schools were using different standards to grade white students and those of color, with preference being granted to the latter group. There was no truth to this slop, but it did earn Metric some rare attention. The New York Times found that Metric coordinated with advocacy groups in “pay for play” schemes, some of which may have been funded by organizations such as the National Christian Charitable Foundation. There’s certainly a danger something similar could occur in Maine, particularly in the closing days of an election cycle when there might not be time to refute an outrageous smear.
Metric Media isn’t the only pink slime outfit trying to skew coverage by taking advantage of the erosion of legitimate news outlets. There are also left-wing sites elsewhere in New England, but they seem to be less numerous and less well funded.
Meanwhile, Metric continues to ooze along, causing whatever disruption it can in hopes it’ll convince the news-deprived masses it has something factual and relevant to say. Seems as if real journalists should be concerned enough about the news deserts they’ve left for the slime to fester in to do something about it.
Got slime? Send it along to aldiamon@herniahill.net.
