Electric firms in Alabama, Florida fund conservative sites that play the news their way, and sometimes play hardball

Terry Dunn, a Tea Party activist, lost his seat on the Alabama Public Service Commission in 2014 after he was targeted by a smear campaign on news sites funded partly by electric companies. (Floodlight photo by Joe Songer)

"In the Southeast, power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics." That's the headline on a long and complex story by NPR media reporter David Folkenflik and Mario Ariza and Miranda Green of Floodlight, which the story identifies as "a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action."

The story focuses on Matrix LLC, an Alabama consulting firm that has had Alabama Power and Florida Power and Light as clients, and six largely conservative news outlets that received at least $900,000 from Matrix, "its clients, and associated entities between 2013 and 2020. All of the media organizations deny their coverage was shaped by those payments and deny they acted unethically." Matrix founder Joe Perkins said the firm only paid for ads and other standard services; in a lawsuit, he says former CEO Jeff Pitts acted without his knowledge or consent. Pitts has countered that "Perkins knew everything" and he left due to Perkins' "unethical practices," NPR reports.

The story's object example is Terry Dunn, a Tea Party activist who was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission in 2010 after promising "to hold a formal rate hearing at which Alabama Power executives would have to open their financial books and answer questions, under oath and in public. That hadn't happened for nearly three decades," NPR reports. When he pushed for the hearing, "He found himself the target of a political pressure campaign, replete with character assassinations and online smears." In 2014, Dunn lost by 19 percentage points in 2014 "to a catfish farmer who had previously served as a county commissioner. Floodlight and NPR have not been able to independently verify whether Alabama Power directed or had prior notice of the sharply critical coverage aimed at Dunn." However, "Alabama has still not held a rate hearing on electricity prices," and the relatively poor state has some of the highest rates in the nation.

More broadly, readers of the sites "have been unknowingly immersing themselves in an echo chamber of questionable coverage for years," the story says. Matrix shrewdly took advantage of the near collapse of the local newspaper industry and a concurrent plunge in trust in media in propelling its clients' interests. Matrix sought to ensure much coverage was secretly driven by the priorities of its clients. Payments flowed as the utilities in Florida and Alabama fought efforts to incorporate more clean energy in electric grids — a fight they are still waging. . . . An analysis by Floodlight and NPR of the three Alabama news sites with links to Matrix finds overwhelmingly positive coverage of Alabama Power."

UPDATE, Dec. 23: A freelance producer for ABC did dirty work for Matrix, NPR reports.