As President Donald Trump’s campaign sponges up grassroots donations for his reelection bid, it’s leaning on a largely unnoticed pool of support: a network of pro-Trump media organizations that lure in readers with splashy, ideologically driven content, harvest their email addresses, and then sell them back to the Trump campaign.
News outlets such as Trump Train News, American Action News, UnitedVoice, and RightWing.org appear on their face to be standard—if occasionally unpolished—conservative media operations. They largely aggregate reporting from other news organizations, put a pro-Trump spin on the stories, and top them with clicky headlines geared to catch the eyes of social media users and email newsletter recipients.
Few if any of the websites are up-front about the companies running them: digital marketing firms that use the sites and the lists of email subscribers they build to sell paid advertising space to political campaigns and interest groups—often the same political interests the sites routinely and favorably write about under the pretense of news coverage.
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The phenomenon shows how politicians and the operatives that support them have leveraged a fragmented and divisive media environment in support of outright partisan politicking. And it illustrates the pitfalls that await digital news consumers who are bombarded with information from often suspect news sources that can obscure potentially problematic financial and political motivations.
At the same time, it raises difficult questions about the future of digital news media. The sites at issue, while not forthcoming about their financial ties to political candidates, are at least up-front about their ideological leanings. All news organizations rely on ad revenue, they point out in their defense; the political list-building model is at most marginally distinct from traditional digital media advertising. The only difference, they insist, is that their support for Trump draws the ire of antagonistic political reporters.
Experts on media and technology have a different view: that the model that these firms have built are, by their very nature, opaque and ethically problematic.
“When people think of misinformation, they often think of information that's verifiably false,” said Gabby Deutch, a Washington correspondent for NewsGuard, a media watchdog group that scores news outlet trustworthiness and seeks to weed out misinformation. “But websites like these, which have hidden profit motives and hidden political motives that are not disclosed to readers, are also dangerous.”
American Media Source, the Republican digital vendor that runs American Action News and Trump Train News, is up-front in its client pitch about the services its news properties provide. It offers a detailed breakdown of the fees it charges political campaigns to send emails to lists associated with its 15 different news sites, most of them political in nature.
“With access to millions of recent donors, American Media Source is the rocket fuel your cause or candidate needs,” the firm boasts. “We publish and share news and content across multiple media properties, giving your cause, candidate, or campaign the ability to reach the right people at the right time.”
It’s not just email advertising that the firm offers. It also gives clients the opportunity to place ads directly in stories relevant to their particular issue, cause, or election. American Media Source and a sister firm, Political List Brokers, “are able to provide a sponsored link alongside articles that are relevant to your efforts—giving our readers what they want, and giving your efforts a much needed boost—all at no up-front cost.”
AMS bills its business model as a way to reach readers with ads that are relevant to their interests. But it also makes it more likely that its news properties will be writing about people and organizations that are paying those sites’ parent company. American Action News, Trump Train News, and the other news sites in AMS’s portfolio routinely write about their clients, and do not disclose the financial relationship.
AMS is run by David M. Keene, the son of veteran Republican consultant David A. Keene. The younger Keene created AMS last year, and it appears to have subsumed a predecessor that operated under the Political List Brokers moniker. Shortly after PLB filed termination paperwork with corporate regulators in Virginia last year, AMS assumed Political List Brokers as a trade name, and has since run the news sites that previously operated under the PLB umbrella.
Keene defended his company’s business model in emails to PAY DIRT on Wednesday. “We are an openly, proudly ideological news/media organization—we see value in providing our readers, who share our ideological views, with a means to take action on the issues they care about,” he wrote.
Asked whether he felt that AMS’s primary business was in news or political advertising, Keene said, “It's not an either/or scenario. As a news/media firm, we provide news and information to our readers—and we also run advertisements.”
Keene did not respond to follow-up inquiries asking whether he felt stories on AMS websites about the firm’s clients constituted conflicts of interest or merited disclosure of the relationship.
Among its clients this year has been the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee benefitting the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, as well as the National Republican Congressional Committee. Both have sent fundraising emails through lists associated with American Action News and another of AMS’s news properties called GOP Presidential, according to emails received by PAY DIRT.
Neither committee, though, has reported payments to AMS or its Political News Brokers arm to the Federal Election Commission. Keene said the actual purchases of his firms’ lists are handled by “a number of different agencies,” so his companies are effectively sub-vendors for the firms that the Trump campaign and other clients pay to acquire email list space.
As a result of such arrangements, the public is generally unable to see just how much revenue firms like AMS are bringing in from their political clients. But money does find its way from those clients to AMS and similar firms, in exchange for the large lists of email addresses they’ve built up. And while Keene’s firm’s news sites routinely cover Trump and other Republicans in a favorable light—and even brand their coverage to align with AMS’s clients, in the case of Trump Train News—those sites don’t disclose to readers that they’re drawing income from the very subjects of their political coverage.
“The opportunities to blur the line between journalism and political propaganda today are just immense,” according to Phil Napoli, a public policy professor at Duke University who works with the school’s Center for Media and Democracy. “And I think it really is telling how central the appearance of being a legitimate news site is to these strategies. That really matters in terms of reach and potential impact.”
AMS’s news sites are just a few of the media organs whose lists of readers the Trump campaign is hitting up for cash. It’s also rented lists owned by Breitbart News, the stridently pro-Trump outlet previously run by former White House strategist Steve Bannon, and Big League Politics, a far-right conspiracy site owned by operatives who worked on the Republican Senate campaigns of Alabama’s Roy Moore and Virginia’s Corey Stewart and the Wisconsin House campaign of white nationalist Paul Nehlen.
Those websites, at least, can make more credible claims to being in the news business, even as they draw revenue from list rental sales and other more traditional advertisements. Many of the sites in AMS’s portfolio, in contrast, do little but aggregate content from other websites, frequently putting little effort into even the appearance of a news-first media organization. Some AMS websites including American Action News and American Update are more robust in the content they offer. But others—like GOP Presidential, True Daily, and Your America—are simply bare-bones aggregators that appear to exist largely to build up their parent firm’s advertising resources.
Other Trump campaign email fundraising vendors have similar structures, with aggregated content supplemented by original writing, but they are clearly geared more towards building content for an advertising business than using that business to support a news operation. The RNC joint fundraising committee that rents AMS lists has also blasted out dozens of emails this year on lists owned by a firm called Beachside Media. Unlike AMS, that firm appears to have little ideological affinity with its political clients and is more focused on them as a business opportunity.
“Beachside Media works in close coordinated partnership with professional advertising agencies to bring their clients value added conversion optimizations, split testing and actionable feedback,” the firm’s website says.
Beachside’s principals, Rob Greenstein and John Valenty, also work at an affiliated digital marketing firm called Earnware, which hawks many of the same news websites as Beachside in purely apolitical terms. “The Earnlink team runs and grows websites with millions of subscribers and tens-of-millions of visitors,” its website says.
Like AMS, Beachside details its email marketing offerings on its website, breaking down the various lists available to clients through its media properties. Lists associated with Beachside-run news sites UnitedVoice and RightWing.org—both of which the Trump Make America Great Again Committee has employed this year—consist largely of men over the age of 61, with household incomes of over $100,000, according to breakdowns on the Beachside website.
RightWing.org claims to be “the mortal enemy of misinformation, extremes, corruption, fake news, racial division, environmental assaults and the disarmament of Americans.” And it gathers its information by curating and summarizing and fact checking “the day’s hottest news and views giving people a source of real American news that’s easier to trust.” But news coverage by Beachside news sites faces the same ethical issues as the ones run by AMS. It focuses intently on the 2020 presidential race, without ever noting its financial ties to the Trump reelection effort.
Beachside didn’t respond to questions about whether it felt that constituted a conflict of interest or merited disclosure on its news sites.
One UnitedVoice email sent this month led with a link to an anti-Biden story on that site, which prominently featured an RNC video attacking the Democratic presidential candidate. Immediately below that link, the email featured a full-length fundraising appeal, in Trump’s voice, from the joint fundraising committee for the RNC and the Trump campaign. “I've asked my team to send me a list of every Patriot who chooses to step up today,” the Trump appeal declared. “I'll be looking for your name, Friend. Don't let me down.”
Throughout the 2020 news cycle, partisans have found innovative new ways to employ ostensible news content to promote political candidates and causes. The phenomenon is not confined to the political right either. The most prominent example of this cycle has come by way of a company called Courier Newsroom, which has set up a network of state-specific local media outlets backed financially by one of Democrats’ most prominent digital advertising vendors.
The trend has forced companies like Facebook to reassess how they define and treat self-described news organizations that have ties to, or seek to advance, explicitly partisan political actors and agendas. It recently stripped its “news” designation from pages that are, on their face, journalistic enterprises but which have deep ties to or financial backing from more overt political actors.
News organizations like those operated by AMS and Beachside “strike at the fundamental notion of journalism as the 4th estate, operating at a critical distance from government,” Napoli, the Duke University professor, said in an email. “Obviously, that model is breaking down dramatically, given the economic damage that has been done to the traditional journalism business model; the massive distribution platforms operated by social media companies that can’t begin to provide effective gatekeeping at the scale at which they operate; and, of course, the political polarization that is both cause and effect of the growth of hyper-partisan media.”
Keene, though, expresses high-minded sentiments about his line of work and the business he’s built, describing it as a fulsome expression of American political and media freedoms, and working in the service of Americans’ fundamental rights.
“We enable Americans in the exercise of their most fundamental of rights: The First Amendment,” Keene writes on his LinkedIn page. “We market ideas, we build lists of people interested in those ideas, and we ensure that those who are defending those ideas are able to connect with the right people.”
“This is a process fundamental to our modern political system,” he insists. “Freedom of association, right to petition, and freedom of speech—these are the rights that make the American system fundamentally different from other systems.
