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from Colin LetcherCalMatters
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A conservative organization with decades of influence in California has quietly committed millions of dollars to a national initiative for right-wing news operations, records show.
The Lincoln Club was founded in the early 1960s by a group of business leaders in California. Since then, it has been a quiet but formidable force in state and local politics, pushing right-wing causes and candidates.
But in the past few years, a related organization, the Lincoln Media Foundation, has grown its revenue significantly as it pushes conservative-leaning online content under the guise of local news in markets across the country.
According to Internal Revenue Service disclosuresthe foundation had just over $400,000 in net income for the fiscal year ending in 2021, all from contributions.
By the fiscal year ending in 2024, according to the most recent disclosure available, that revenue had increased nearly 10-fold to nearly $4 million.
!["Lincoln]("https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/IGASr/full.png")
In the same period the Lincoln Club itself grew more modestlyfailing to double its revenue to just over $3 million, according to records.
According to independent research and publicity materials prepared by the club's media foundation, the money went to create a network of websites across the country, hoping to influence the public and attract voters in key states.
Many of the sites, first marked by researcher Max Reid of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, say they are locally organized, with names like The Angeleno and The Keystone Courier. CalMatters and The Markup recently studied another site affiliated with an organization called the California Courier, using the same name as an unrelated Armenian newspaper. The Courier produces a steady stream of often unlabeled articles about political controversies across the state and pays Facebook to promote those posts and videos on similar topics.
Critics say the group is trying to sway the public with the veneer of local news that doesn't offer clear revelations about the messenger.
Kevin DeLuca, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who has studied such news sites, sometimes called "pink slime" news, told The Markup and CalMatters earlier this year that such sites may not be outright lying. Still, the sites often fall short of traditional journalistic standards, failing to properly attribute stories and funding or heavily pulling and slanting press releases.
Jim Miller, a labor activist and co-author of a progressive history of San Diego, called the tactic "a menacing example of the use of stealth."
"If you don't think you can win an argument in a transparent debate in public," he said, "try to cover up the messenger as much as you can."
Neither the club nor the foundation responded to requests for comment or interviews with executives about their work.
Lincoln Club
The Lincoln Club of Orange County was formed in the 1960s by wealthy local businessmen eager to spread pro-business Republican ideas locally and nationally. These businessmen donated generously to sympathetic candidates and causes.
The club became a powerful player in Southern California politics when Republicans had more influence in the Golden State. The group still boasts online that its ranks include prominent California political figures such as Richard Nixon and John Wayne.
A 1972 article in The New York Times described it as a group "made up mostly of millionaires" who "boast that without their efforts and generosity (Nixon) would not occupy the White House today." The Times article described the group as a "very secretive" organization that shuns publicity but successfully influences the political scene.
"I think they were very influential in the 1960s and 1970s," said Steve Erie, professor emeritus of political science at UC San Diego.
By 1996, as reports the Los Angeles Times by this time the group's financial power had weakened in the face of infighting, but the club continued to exert influence.
The group, according to to legal documentspartially financed the 2008 anti-Hillary Clinton documentary that became the subject of the landmark Citizens United A Supreme Court decision that opened the door to unlimited spending by corporations and unions on elections.
In 2012, the group was described as a key architect of Proposition 32ballot measure that would severely limit the power of unions in the state by limiting their ability to raise and spend funds for political purposes. The ballot measure ultimately failed.
Although its light may have dimmed 50 years ago, the Lincoln Club still wields influence in California politics.
"If you look at their website, they don't start talking about helping businesses, about quality of life," Eary pointed out. "They talk about 'preserving the American way of life.' And that is as much cultural as economic.”
A new strategy
Despite its old Republican roots, the group appears to have moved into a 21st-century online influence strategy with the Lincoln Media Foundation.
According to promotional videothe foundation uses targeted web ads to broadcast its message where it can reach key voters in battleground states.
In a recent LinkedIn post accompanying a video explanation of its work, the group says it acts as a corrective to "substantial omissions, alternative sets of facts and outright lies" from the media.
"Our country cannot remain free if we are not informed with the truth," the video reads, describing the group as a "megaphone" for "unbiased truth." Video says it provides this information through 27 publications in seven states, reaching millions through online advertising.
In reality, even the video is far from impartial, with a stream of germ-like images of "DEI" and "Russiagate" swimming in front of the voiceover.
The foundation's launch and revelations that it is well-funded suggest a new twist for the decades-old group, from one that tries to influence politics through candidates to one that wants to broadcast its message directly through online influence.
"Unfortunately, it's a pretty good strategy," Miller said.
Recently, headlines published by websites affiliated with the group criticized everyone from Democratic Orange County school board officials to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, while endorsing President Trump's foreign policy.
The accompanying stories are then pushed on social media platforms to what the video describes as the most influential two percent of voters in the country and a key part of the group's strategy.
Meta, Facebook's parent company, has policies against "inauthentic activity" on its platforms, though a company spokesperson told The Markup and CalMatters that sites affiliated with the organization do not violate those policies.
The Lincoln Media Foundation is not alone in using the strategy to spread its views. Most famously, a right-wing group called Metric Media has set up sites across the country pushing a right-wing message. As sites with murky attribution and sourcing practices proliferate, experts worry that artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT could refine their tactics.
"It's going to make these pink slime sites even harder for people to understand that what they're reading is not human-sourced and not truly local investigative journalism," DeLuca says.
Even with its rapid growth, the Lincoln Media Foundation is just a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent annually on such causes, according to a report by some observers. Not all of these groups use the language of local news to spread their message.
The strategy is working, the foundation's video promises.
"It's advertising truth, vaccinating lies and preserving freedom from the inside out," the video says.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.