A company owned in part by billionaire Harris megadonor Reid Hoffman that masquerades as an independent news outlet has begun running ads promoting Harris to voters in key swing states. The website, Courier Newsroom, began running the ads on Facebook and Instagram in mid-July, just days before Hoffman threw his support behind the Harris candidacy and told CNN he was “redoubling” his efforts to support the campaign.
Courier Newsroom was launched in 2019 by the Democratic Party-aligned agency Acronym, and then acquired in 2021 by a company called Good Information Inc., which was launched with a multi-million dollar seed investment that was led by Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn. According to an archived version of its website, Good Information is an incubator that invests in projects to “counter disinformation where it spreads by increasing the flow of good information online.” Besides its flagship outlet Courier Newsroom, the project includes several state-focused offshoots covering political swing states including North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
The news industry watchdog NewsGuard recently called Courier Newsroom an example of a “pink slime” website that presents itself as a politically neutral outlet but is actually backed by a partisan political group. The term “pink slime” refers to the processed meat derivatives that are used by fast food restaurants to make hamburgers. In 2020, NewsGuard gave Courier Newsroom a red rating, warning readers to “proceed with caution” and dinging it for not responsibly handling the distinction between news and opinion, not gathering and presenting information responsibly, and not disclosing its conflicts of interest.
