Who’s Behind the Portland Post?

Guest post by Bethany Reynolds.

An unfamiliar “media” organization called Portland Post has been turning up in my Facebook feed during this election cycle, offering a steady stream of anti-Troy Jackson posts.

One recent post features Steve Robinson of The Maine Wire addressing Aroostook County genealogy, always an issue of great importance to Maine voters, so I figured this Portland Post outfit was part of the right wing echo chamber.

But who was behind it? I haven’t seen anyone address that question yet, so I did some digging.

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The Portland Post is a project of the Lincoln Media Foundation (LMF), an Irvine, CA based 502c3 nonprofit.

The Lincoln Media Foundation website claims they are “Empowering communities with information that matters.”

If you’re wondering what communities they are empowering, and what information matters, you won’t find out much from the website. The Content tab features links to six blog posts from March and April 2024, about anodyne topics like search engine optimization and a new video feed featuring on LinkedIn.

The About page doesn’t offer much clarity about their mission:

“Studies show traditional media is failing to reach our nation’s diverse communities. Our mission is to empower the common person with the truth to hold the powerful accountable. Breaking down the barriers of disinformation and helping to level the field. Using an entirely digital approach allows us to reach the diverse communities left out of the national conversation.”

If any of this content speaks to you, there’s a convenient donation page, with a suggested donation of $1000 a month. But if you’re a little short on cash, no worries.

The Lincoln Media Foundation is pretty flush.

According to Charity Navigator, their funding is 99% grants and gifts from a web of right wing donor organizations.

One is the Bradley Impact Fund, which also helps fund Turning Point USA, Project Veritas, and the State Policy Network.

Per Wikipedia, “The Bradley Impact Fund operates as part of a broader network of conservative philanthropic organizations. As a donor-advised fund, it provides donors with anonymity while allowing them to recommend grants to specific organizations.”

In other words, dark money. So we’re probably not going to find out whose deep pockets are funding the Portland Press.

But according to the IRS Form 990’s (for tax exempt 501c3 organizations), the Lincoln Media Foundation has been around since the early 2020’s.

It’s an offshoot of the Lincoln Club of Orange County, CA, an organization that’s been a power and money hub for SoCal conservatives since the 1960’s.

According to their website, the Lincoln Club is the “oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California. We are the business minds - the builders - creating pioneering political infrastructure to preserve America.” The Club is unabashedly pro-business, anti-union, anti-regulation, and very well funded.

The club’s Lincoln Media Foundation had a fairly modest budget until 2024. Then their revenue jumped from $737,000 to over $3,882,000. According to the filings, the original CEO, Lincoln Club president Seth Morrison, turned the reins over to a new CEO named Alex Avetoom in 2024.

And the Lincoln Media Foundation was off and running, turbo-charged on its mission to “empower communities with information that matters,” transparency be damned.

The independent California news site CalMatters has an in-depth look at the operations of the Lincoln Media Foundation.

“According to independent research and promotional material produced by the club’s media foundation, its money has gone toward creating a network of websites across the country, with the hopes of influencing the public and swaying voters in key states…

“Kevin DeLuca, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who has studied similar 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.

What and who is the pink slime1 for?

According to a colorful post from an annoyed observer in Orange County, Avetoom excels at creating phony news sites for a particular payoff.

Targeted populations believe what they see, and then both share with their friends (also members of the targeted population) and use the information to vote accordingly.

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 publicly,” he said, “you try to disguise the messenger as much as you can.””

CalMatters journalist Colin Lecher provides a good background on the Lincoln Club, and the Lincoln Media Foundation. A linked LMF video boasts that they’ve got 27 publications in “7 key states”. Maine isn’t on their map yet in this video from 6 months ago, but now it is, in the guise of the Portland Post.

The story notes:

“As sites with murky attribution and sourcing practices proliferate, experts worry that artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT could supercharge their tactics.

“It’s going to make these pink slime sites even harder for people to know that what they’re reading is not from a human source and not really local investigative journalism,” DeLuca says.”

So that’s where my adventure down the rabbit hole of the Portland Post led.

Nowhere in this journey did I see any legitimate journalistic connection to Maine. But I’m sure the well-heeled donors at the Lincoln Club of Orange County would love to see Sen. Susan Collins continue to serve their interests.

Unlike the Portland Post hit jobs, this piece was written entirely by a human. Bethany Reynolds is a lifelong Mainer, currently living in exile in a blue state after working in the trenches of Maine Democratic politics for years. She’s worked on three previous campaigns against Susan Collins, and hopes this will be the last one.