Metric Media 'pink slime' news sent to Ohio voters backed losing effort to make abortion-rights measure harder to pass

Front page of the Buckeye Reporter's 'inaugural print edition'
(Photo by George Shillcock via X and NiemanLab)

Ohio voters rejected the Republican-backed constitutional amendment that would have required a 60 percent vote to pass future amendments and tightened petition requirements for getting them on the ballot. The proposal, which lost by about 57 to 43 percent Tuesday, was intended make an abortion-rights measure on the November ballot more difficult to pass.

In the days before the referendum on Issue 1, many Ohio voters received a newsprint publication called the Buckeye Reporter, which until then had been a partisan information site. The print edition had a Chicago return address and was mailed from Dallas, reports Laura Hazard Owen of NiemanLab, who classifies it as "pink slime," the term for ultra-processed meat filler that has come to describe partisan information masquerading as journalism.

The county-by-county vote showed a significant rural-
urban divide. (NPR map, adapted by The Rural Blog)

The publisher, Metric Media, is a publisher that sometimes turns to print campaigns near elections, Owen reports. It is "overseen by Brian Timpone, a TV reporter turned internet entrepreneur who has sought to capitalize on the decline of local news organizations for nearly two decades," The New York Times reported three years ago. Priyanjana Bengani of Columbia Journalism Review, who has done in-depth reporting on Metric Media, "told The Associated Press that 'Metric Media has printed similar mailers ahead of other recent high-stakes elections, such as a referendum on abortion last year in Kansas'," Owen reports.

Cleveland.com described the mailer as "A motley combination of content. Most of it consists of positive articles about Issue 1 . . . while unsubtly describing the measure's opponents as communists and allies of the LGBTQ community. It also includes calendar listings of unremarkable community events," which were an apparent effort to make it look more like a local newspaper.

States crack down on opioid treatment scams that can kill

An opioid treatment scam is snaring young adult victims across the nation, sometimes leading to patients' deaths after enrolling in programs that provide poor or nonexistent treatment.

"Here’s how the scam works: Seemingly caring people join recovery-related online chat groups, answer addiction hotlines advertised online, or show up at fundraisers for addiction recovery. They typically say they’re in recovery themselves and are therefore uniquely qualified to help," Christine Vestal reports for Stateline. "People with addiction and their families often don’t want to ask their doctors or pastors for help because they’re ashamed and want to hide their illness. So, turning to a stranger can be appealing."

The scammers, who call themselves "patient brokers," usually sweeten the deal by offering free plane tickets and pocket money as well as waiving insurance deductibles. Patient brokers can make as much as $2,000 in commissions per patient, plus extra money when they re-enroll the same patients after relapse, Vestal reports.

"Within two to four weeks of a patient checking into a sober home where treatment is subpar or nonexistent, insurers may stop paying claims under standard protocols for that type of service, and the fraudulent operators dump their young clients on the street, prosecutors say," Vestal reports. Many then begin using drugs again and many end up homeless.

Some get lured into other fraudulent treatment programs, which insurers are required to pay for. "Past cases show that the cycle can continue until the insurance company stops paying on the patient’s 26th birthday, when the Affordable Care Act allows insurers to drop dependent care coverage under a parent’s policy," Vestal reports. In addition to spotty or nonexistent treatment, many of the fraudulent programs make extra cash by ordering excessive numbers of urine drug tests to extract more money from insurance companies.

Several states have enacted laws to outlaw patient brokering and crack down on the bogus treatment programs: Arizona, California, Florida, New York, Tennessee, and Utah. Donna Johnson, who lost her son after falling for a treatment scam in Florida, says she worries scammers are setting up shop in Maryland, and has persuaded state Rep. Karen Lewis Young to draft a similar bill, Vestal reports. Florida officials are talking to advocates in Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania about creating their own laws.

The anti-kickback laws work, according to Florida officials. The state enacted the nation's first such law in 2016, which has served as a template for other states' laws, Vestal reports. In Palm Beach County, for example, where fraudulent treatment programs were popular, drug overdose deaths dropped from 647 in 2017 to 400 in 2018, a nearly 40 percent decline.

There's a federal anti-kickback law, but it "only applies to federal health care programs and is not broad enough to address the full range of false marketing, insurance fraud and patient brokering that is occurring in the industry," Vestal reports.

FCC starting outreach tour in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee; calls it Appalachian, but it's mainly not

Representatives from the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau are visiting towns in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee this week to help citizens and their representative groups learn more about issues that affect their daily lives. Representatives will also meet privately with local leaders to discuss concerns.

Topics to be covered in the free and open to the public informational events include:

• Robocalls, spoofing, scam alerts
• Slamming, cramming and other telephone bill related items
• Television broadcast transition: what consumers need to know; how to take action; broadcast TV Stations in your area will be affected)
• Broadband and digital inclusion: encouraging everyone to get online
• Telehealth
• Lost and stolen mobile devices – protecting mobile devices
• How to make your views heard at the FCC
• How to file complaints and comments with the FCC

The first public meeting is tonight at 6 in Bridgeport, W.Va. Tomorrow the team will be in Clarksburg and Huntington; on Wednesday it will be in Elizabethtown and Frankfort, Ky.; on Thursday in Huntingdon and Waverly, Tenn., and Friday in Hopkinsville, Ky. Click here to learn more about the tour, including a schedule of tour stops and private meetings.

The FCC might need a lesson in geography; it is billing the meetings as an "Appalachian Region Outreach Tour," but the only Appalachian locations are in West Virginia.

Be wary of companies selling DirtGlue for road repairs; product cost rural Virginia county big time

If your county government is approached by a company selling something called DirtGlue for gravel roads, what happened in Montgomery County, Virginia, (Family Search map) may interest you and your local officials.

In an attempt to save money from "the usual $1 million per mile cost of building a new paved road, or $500,000 per mile cost of improving one to 'rural road rustic' standards," the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors pushed for a company that uses DirtGlue to pave the mile-long stretch of Old Sourwood Road, Mike Gangloff reports for The Roanoke Times. The polymer was designed to "fuse the road’s unpaved surface into a hard material similar to asphalt." The road "would not be officially classified as paved, but it wouldn’t have the maintenance costs typical of unpaved routes."

The move was approved, and Montgomery County and the Virginia Department of Transportation split the $183,365 cost of the DirtGlue treatment, Gangloff writes. Board chairman Jim Politis told Gangloff, "We invested a little money to see if we could save a lot of money."

Trying to save a few dollars cost the county big time when the gluing didn't take on most of the road, Gangloff writes. "Potholes and washboarding quickly developed. There was heavy dust, according to residents and the highway department. Residents’ complaints set off a round of finger-pointing between company, county and state officials. DirtGlue blamed a contractor for applying their product during a rainstorm and said that VDOT did not prepare the surface properly. VDOT said that a company representative had been present when the DirtGlue was spread." (Times photo by Matt Gentry)

"Residents said that they endured an increasingly bumpy ride to and from their homes as officials wrangled about what to do next," Gangloff writes. "Earlier this year, the company said that it planned to apply more DirtGlue but needed to coordinate with the county." Instead, in August, the county and VDOT split the $16,000 cost to have "the road de-glued, grinding up the remaining DirtGlue and covering it with new stone," returning the road to its original gravel state. (Read more)

Editors should be on the lookout for letter from Alabama inmate claiming to be from their area

The same letter keeps popping up in mostly small-town newspapers throughout the country. Each letter is identical to the others with one small alternation -- the author continually changes his birthplace to match the newspaper's readership. The letters, which caught the eye of Jim Romensko reader Lou Alexander, claim to be from an Alabama inmate who is searching for lost family members, or for anyone at all to contact him. Whether it's a scam, or just a lonely person looking for friends, editors should be on the lookout for the letter. A few examples of the letter can be read on Romensko's blog by clicking here.