(This article first appeared in Broad & Liberty.)
A Potemkin news site less than a year old is promoting nearly a dozen Democrats running for the Pennsylvania General Assembly using paid social media posts apparently designed to give the viewer the impression the message came from an authoritative news source rather than a partisan political committee.
Additionally, a recent report from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) constructed a rugged argument that the online-only “news” site, the Morning Mirror, was connected to a national political action committee, Forward Majority, that backs state-level Democrats across many states.
Morning Mirror began running the Instagram and Facebook ads for the Democrats on May 23, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, using generic positive messages with uncontroversial, feel-good political positions. For example, a message will say a candidate is “working to lower costs for Pennsylvania families,” or the candidate has a “campaign priority for Pennsylvania: good-paying jobs.”
(Recent examples of Morning Mirror ads for down-ballot Democrat candidates.)
Yet a check of the Morning Mirror’s homepage clearly shows the site does not strive to create original news content in any meaningful sense. On Sept. 12 this year, the most recent “stories” posted on the site’s homepage all dated back to August, meaning no contemporary content had been created in two weeks. Although fall was beginning, the site’s “lifestyle” section was inviting readers to “Celebrate Spring at the 2024 National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC.”
As CJR has reported, the web URL themorningmirror.com was first purchased in March of this year, and Facebook and Instagram accounts for the site were created about the same time. The Morning Mirror had published a total of 119 articles by August 20 this year, also according to CJR. As of this publishing, its Facebook page has fifteen followers.
The content on the site also does not contain author bylines or author email addresses, two key indicators that can be helpful in sorting real news sites from fake.
According to a Broad + Liberty analysis of the Meta ad library which archives ads purchased on Facebook and Instagram, Morning Mirror has spent somewhere between $57,000 to $70,000 on the Pennsylvania ads, creating between 3.1 to 3.6 million viewer impressions across those two social media platforms. (The Meta ad archive produces ranges of money spent and impressions, so exact figures are not available.)
The candidates receiving the boost include:
Jim Wertz (Senate District 49, Erie)
Elizabeth Moro (House District 160, Delaware/Chester)
Hadley Haas (HD 44, Allegheny)
Anna Thomas (HD 137, Northampton)
Eleanor Breslin (HD 143, Bucks)
Anand Patel (HD 18, Bucks)
Sara Agerton (HD 88, Cumberland)
Anna Payne (HD 142, Bucks)
Nicole Ruscitto (SD 37, Allegheny)
Rep. James Haddock (HD 118, Lackawanna)
Rep. Brian Munroe (HD 144, Bucks)
Four of the eleven candidates are running for seats in Bucks County, widely considered the most “purple” county in the commonwealth.
Late Tuesday, the Morning Mirror launched its first negative ads of the season against eight Republicans. Unlike the ads boosting Democrats, the language is slightly more targeted by referencing policy votes.
For example, one of the new ads said, “Sen. Devlin Robinson voted to send taxpayer dollars to private schools.” Robinson is the incumbent in Allegheny County’s SD 37, in which he’s being challenged by Ruscitto.
The Morning Mirror is putting far less money into the negative posts, however, with most of them only receiving about a $100 budget to reach about 1,000-5,000 people per post.
The Republicans being targeted by the negative ads are all incumbents, and match up to the same districts as the Democrats that the Morning Mirror has been promoting for months. They include:
Sen. Devlin Robinson (SD 37, Allegheny)
Rep. Craig Williams (HD 160, Delaware/Chester)
Rep. Shelby Labs (HD 143, Bucks)
Rep. Joe Emrick. (HD 137, Northampton)
Rep. Sheryl Delozier (HD 88, Cumberland)
Sen. Dan Laughlin (SD 49, Erie)
Rep. Valerie Gaydos (HD 44, Allegheny)
Rep. K.C. Tomlinson (HD 18, Bucks)
In its brief existence of less than eight months, the Morning Mirror has spent over $172,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads spanning Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all swing states.
The Pennsylvania Department of State declined to say whether the Morning Mirror’s activities might violate the commonwealth’s campaign finance laws.
“The Department of State operates on a complaint-driven process. The Department does not offer interpretations of the campaign finance reporting law,” DOS spokeswoman Amy Gulli said.
All of the ads say the Morning Mirror is owned by Star Spangled Media, a business entity registered in New York. Star Spangled Media has not answered requests for comment from several media organizations including Axios, and CJR.
In 2022, Axios outed Star Spangled Media as the engine driving a “massive network of social media communities in political battleground states that can activate ahead of elections and policy fights[.]”
The CJR hypothesis that Morning Mirror is really an extension of Forward Majority makes sense. According to Forward Majority’s website, it “has been leading the [Democrats’] fight back to power in state legislatures, mobilizing more than $50M and helping to flip 65 seats and 2 chambers,” since it was founded in 2017.
CJR also pointed out that while Morning Mirror articles may not contain explicit bylines, there is author metadata for most articles, and that “the three initial posts made to the Morning Mirror were authored by someone named David Cohen.” Forward Majority’s website, meanwhile, lists someone named David Cohen as a co-founder and co-CEO of the PAC. Whether the two references are for the same David Cohen is not clear at this time.
Requests for comment from Broad + Liberty sent to the Morning Mirror’s one locatable email address, and also to Forward Majority were not returned. Additionally, emailed requests for comment to all eleven of the candidates receiving the advertising support did not respond.
UPDATE: This article originally stated that the Morning Mirror was not running negative paid posts against any candidate. That changed just as this article was going to publication early Wednesday morning when the publication purchased the eight ads against Republicans. The article has been updated to reflect that new information.
