You may not have heard of Tara McGowan, former CBS News and 60 Minutes staffer and founder of the liberal get-out-the-vote group Acronym. But chances are you will hear about her a lot more following the publication of a Nov. 25 Bloomberg Businessweek article titled, âThe Leftâs Plan to Slip Vote-Swaying News Into Facebook Feeds.â
McGowan, who has the campaign slogan, âYes we canâ tattooed on her left arm where President Barack Obama signed it with a pen, is a 33-year-old Democratic strategist who aims to defeat the âright-wing echo chamberâ in 2020 with a left-wing echo chamber of her own.
To wit, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that she is âraising $25 million from a host of wealthy liberals to establish a for-profit media company, Courier Newsroom, that has already started rolling out digital newspapers with local reporters and editors in six key swing states â Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin â to fill the news deserts, deliver the facts favorable to Democrats that she thinks voters are missing, and counter right-wing spin.â
The report adds:
McGowan is going to use her war chest to pay to have Couriersâ ânewsâ stories appear on the Facebook feeds of users in crucial swing states. The data collected from those users’ responses will then be used to target new users, and so on, all of it with the intention of searching out and influencing getable swing-state voters.
âEverybody who clicks on, likes, or shares an article,â McGowan said, âwe get that data back to create a lookalike audience to find other people with similar attributes in the same area. So we continually grow our ability to find people.â
Amazingly, the part where she brags openly that she plans to assist the Democratic Party in the 2020 election by publishing left-wing agitprop on propaganda depositories designed to look like authentic news websites is not even the most disturbing part of the Bloomberg Businessweek article.
The most disturbing part is when it reports: âMcGowan â a former journalist herself, who worked at 60 Minutes and CBS News â says she sees Courier Newsroom as a continuation of that work.â
Oh. The Democratic Party’s allies in the media sometimes say the quiet part out loud, don’t they?
âDespite her obvious political motivations, she says that her newspapers will supply objective, fact-based reporting no different from what appears in mainstream outlets,â Bloomberg Businessweek reports with what I presume is a straight face, âand that a firewall between Acronymâs political staff and Courierâs journalists allows the newsroom editorial independence.â
Sure.
Hilariously, the report adds that McGowan’s claims of editorial independence âwill almost certainly inflame those on the right and left who already believe that much of what passes for news, especially on social media, is driven by political agendas intended to manipulate unwitting readers.â
McGowan, naturally, already has a preemptive defense ready to go for her new media venture.
âA lot of people I respect will see this media company as an affront to journalistic integrity because it wonât, in their eyes, be balanced,â she told Bloomberg. âWhat I say to them is, Balance does not exist anymore, unfortunately.â
Indeed.
