The new media landscape is wild.
Newsrooms across the country have shuttered or reduced their staff dramatically in the past 13 years. Newspaper employment has dropped by roughly 57% since 2008, according to the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, an estimated 300 newspapers have closed altogether, while print newspaper circulation has declined by 5 million, according to a report by the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
At the same time, a new breed of journalism has appeared. It is one that is fueled by political organizations and public relations firms — one that operates under an apparent pay-for-play model.
The “public relations industry has been booming,” the Washington Post noted. “PR specialists now outnumber journalists more than 5 to 1, according to 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics data. And the relationship between PR and news has grown hazier.”
Indeed.
Take, for example, the Checks and Balances Project, a small Virginia-based outfit that bills itself as an independent “watchdog blog that blends investigative reporting, legal action and a campaign focus to achieve real results.”
At first blush, the Checks and Balances Project appears to be an independent news outlet. However, a closer look reveals the group is tied closely to a Virginia public relations firm called Tigercomm.
And it’s no exaggeration to say the two organizations have close ties.
For starters, the Checks and Balances Project claims on its website that it receives “strategic support” from Tigercomm and was co-founded by Tigercomm President Mike Casey. Tigercomm owns the trademark for the Checks and Balances Project. Moreover, it is backed financially by a 501(c)(4) advocacy group called Renew American Prosperity, which likewise has ties to Tigercomm.
Renew American Prosperity paid Tigercomm roughly $1.2 million for “management” services in 2015, 2016, and 2018. In fact, Renew American Prosperity, which has no employees, spends nearly all of its money paying Tigercomm’s management fees.
Further, according to publicly available documents, Tigercomm, the Checks and Balances Project, and Renew American Prosperity all share the same business mailing address.
It’s also worth mentioning here that Tigercomm’s chief financial officer, Gretchen Casey, who is married to Tigercomm’s president, is listed on Renew American Prosperity’s 990 tax filings as the “person who possesses the organization’s books and records.”
In other words, there doesn’t appear to be any sort of meaningful separation between Tigercomm, the Checks and Balances Project, or even Renew American Prosperity. Indeed, based on a review of their public filings, they’re all one and the same, almost as if the Checks and Balances Project was created to benefit Tigercomm’s business interests and Renew American Prosperity to legitimize the Checks and Balances Project.
If you can believe it, the Checks and Balances Project is not the first of its kind with this type of business arrangement to crop up in recent years. There’s also Metric Media, which oversees some 1,300 websites disguised as genuine news outlets. The group is funded and directed by public relations firms and conservative political groups.
On the other side of the aisle, there’s Courier Newsroom, founded by former CBS News and 60 Minutes staffer Tara McGowan. After the election of former President Donald Trump, McGowan, who has the Obama-era campaign slogan “Yes, we can” tattooed on her left arm, raised an estimated $25 million from liberal donors to launch a series of websites disguised as genuine news sites to promote Democratic talking points. Until April of this year, Courier Newsroom was funded by McGowan’s get-out-the-vote nonprofit organization Acronym.
In the case of the Checks and Balances Project specifically, being tied so closely to a public relations firm is one thing. Being tied to one that appears to play both sides of the issues is another.
Tigercomm characterizes itself as a “cleantech” firm, specializing in renewable energy. It claims on its website it represents the interests of several major environmentalist groups, including the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. Tigercomm also boasts on its website that it works with several clean energy organizations, including Trina Solar and the American Wind Energy Association.
However, notably absent from the group’s list of clean energy accomplishments are mentions of the fact it pocketed a cool $90,000 in 2018 to “provide communications services in support of the State of Qatar,” according to Foreign Agents Registration Act filings.
Perhaps more disconcerting than the “cleantech” group’s willingness to accept nearly $100,000 from an oil-rich Arab nation is that the Check and Balances Project has a history of withholding relevant disclosures from its readers.
As detailed by the Washington Post, the Checks and Balances Project last year “started publishing dozens of stories about Norfolk-based Sentara, including one asking whether the hospital system’s proposed expansion could hurt another institution based in the same city: Eastern Virginia Medical School.”
The report added, “The stories began publishing shortly before EVMS made its first payment to Tigercomm for work that would total $150,000, according to an invoice obtained by The Post. An EVMS spokesman said the school hired the firm for ‘crisis communications counsel and community engagement support.’ Yet the financial arrangement between EVMS and Checks and Balances’ founder was never disclosed in the stories.”
Following the publication of the Washington Post’s investigation, the Virginian-Pilot reported Eastern Virginia Medical School is on track to pay Tigercomm approximately $500,000 for its services, as opposed to the $150,000 reported earlier by the Washington Post.
The Checks and Balances Project similarly went after an Arizona-based utility regulator in 2015 after the so-called investigative watchdog received money from a rival solar energy company. The financial relationship between the Checks and Balances Project and the solar energy group became known only after the solar group admitted to it. It failed to disclose the payments in its reporting on the utility regulator.
There’s a pattern of obfuscation here, which is why some critics, perhaps correctly, argue that the Checks and Balances Project and Renew American Prosperity are little more than front groups for Tigercomm.
“They’re all the same entities,” Michelle Kuppersmith, the executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, told the Washington Post.
A cynical person would say Tigercomm uses the Checks and Balances Project and the nonprofit organization that funds it to launder carefully crafted PR messages disguised as “investigative news reporting and journalism.”
Casey, for his part, is dismissive of questions about his company’s links to the Checks and Balances Project.
“We keep books, records for [Renew American Prosperity],” he told the Washington Examiner. “Totals cited include disbursements, including in management [Renew American Prosperity] hires us to do.”
Elsewhere, in a previous blog post written after other newsrooms asked similar questions about Tigercomm’s influence over the Checks and Balances Project, he said, “As I said half a decade ago, we were then providing C&BP with a physical office for their occasional use in our Rosslyn location. We moved offices just before COVID, and the Project worked virtually. During the pandemic, we had to duct tape logistics, even using my home address as the ‘location’ for an operation that was working virtually while we figured out what the future would hold for office space for our firm.”
Casey also referred to the Washington Examiner’s characterization of his group’s previous work for Qatar as “Glenn Beck-worthy,” adding that the Washington Examiner’s ownership by energy tycoon Philip Anschutz could just as well cast doubt on the independence of its reporting.
The Tigercomm president passed along a statement from the Checks and Balances Project’s Ray Locker, who said, “I’m proud of the work we do at Checks and Balances Project. It’s fair and accurate. If anyone has a complaint about the accuracy of our work, they should say so and cite specifics.”
The Checks and Balances Project did not reply directly to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Casey insisted the blog’s “writers have the say-so over coverage” and that the “accuracy of their [coverage is] unquestioned.”
“They bring facts to otherwise-ignored stories. Have you spotted anywhere they’ve gotten a story wrong?” he asked. “In their 10 years of reporting, I haven’t seen their coverage accuracy challenged.”
As it turns out, some have challenged the accuracy of the blog’s reporting.
You have been “persistently and consistently inaccurate in your coverage” of Sentara, spokeswoman Danya Bushey told the blog in March. This quote appears in a Checks and Balances Project story in which it’s strongly suggested a Virginian-Pilot columnist who authored an opinion article defending Virginia’s Certificate of Public Need program may be on Sentara’s payroll.
Asked whether the columnist wrote the op-ed “at the behest of Sentara,” Virginian-Pilot Editor-in-Chief Kris Worrel told the Checks and Balances Project the columnist “didn’t mention Sentara because he has never worked for Sentara. And he didn’t write a column at their behest as that is not how it works in our (and most) editorial boards.” Bushey also said the columnist has never been under contract with Sentara. The Checks and Balances Project published all of this anyway, providing no evidence linking the columnist to the healthcare group.
There’s a lot of talk in the press these days about fake news, bias, misinformation, and disinformation. And while many reporters choose to focus on bad tweets, Facebook posts, and message boards, others have recognized correctly that the problem goes much deeper than that.
In the wake of newsroom closures and mass layoffs, a void has been created. That void is filling fast now with a brand of journalism that has blurred the line so badly between independent reporting and corporate and political messaging, and what is genuine and what is merely pay-for-play, that it’s practically impossible to tell the difference.
This story has been updated to include additional information on Eastern Virginia Medical School’s contract with Tigercomm. It has also been updated to reflect Sentara’s criticisms of the Checks and Balances Project’s reporting.
