Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
The upstart conservative network One America News is trying to build a business model as a Fox News alternative. Publicly, that means begging President Donald Trump to tune in. But behind the scenes, someone is spending decent sums of money to convince boomers to “make the switch.”
A pair of Facebook pages have popped up in recent weeks that exist for no reason but to encourage older Americans on the platform to drop Fox in favor of OANN. The pages, titled “Informative Tips for the Community” and “American Voices Today,” have together spent more than $70,000 since last month on Facebook ads pressing for Fox viewers to tune into OANN instead. All of the ads target people over the age of 55.
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It’s not immediately clear who’s behind the two pages, which haven’t posted anything on their actual pages beyond identical profile photos of bald eagles. But they come in the midst of a sustained OANN campaign to poach viewers from Fox by simultaneously promising more conservative and more fact-based news broadcasts.
The Epoch Times is a bit more upfront about its advertising strategies, but it too is trying to court an audience with generically named Facebook pages that woo conservative readers without prominently disclosing their affiliations with the newspaper.
Like One America News, The Epoch Times has worked to establish itself as a go-to news source for pro-Trump Republicans. It’s done that in part by dropping huge sums on digital ads through channels that include one Facebook group devoted solely to the paper’s fawning coverage of the president.
Two new Epoch Times-affiliated pages, though, take a more subtle approach. Nowhere do the Facebook pages “Honest Paper” or “Pure American Journalism” disclose that they are affiliated with The Epoch Times. Indeed, the pages routinely share news reports from other media organizations on their public-facing pages. Only in their paid advertisements is The Epoch Times’ link revealed.
Together, the two pages have spent about $36,000 on ads directing users to websites such as truthandtradition.org and genuinenewspaper.com, where visitors are prompted to subscribe to The Epoch Times with appeals to the paper’s Trump-friendly coverage of the Mueller investigation.
Facebook ostensibly requires advertisers to disclose the name of the entities that actually pay for the ads that run on its platform. But none of those Epoch Times ads say they were funded by the newspaper itself. Instead, the ads disclose funders with obscure names such as MarketFuel Subscription Services and Perpetual Market.
The layers of obfuscation ironically accompany ads that promise, in one instance, “honest news without hidden agendas.”
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