A deeper look at how partisan sites that pretend to be reliable local news sources operate

There's a growing trend, especially in election-battleground states, of partisan outfits masquerading as local news websites and delivering highly biased content. In Texas, many of these "pink slime journalism" sites are operated by Metric Media, one of many companies overseen by internet entrepreneur Brian Timpone. With the federal government unlikely to step in, such sites are dangerous to democracy, political science professor Coda Rayo-Garza writes for Route Fifty.

Rayo-Garza provides a deeper look into how such sites mix in credible news with partisan content to pass readers' smell test, how Timpone exploits expanding news deserts with pink-slime sites, and provides updated statistics on how common such websites are.  

"Pink-slime journalism has the potential to exacerbate our already polarized political landscape," Rayo-Garza writes. "Hyper-partisanship has allowed fake news to threaten the underpinnings of our democracy by hampering society’s ability to agree on basic facts. When a society disagrees on what is true and false, achieving consensus on political solutions becomes virtually impossible."