Courier Newsroom, an organization largely funded by billionaire George Soros, is ramping up in Nevada, where its local news website has been boosting coverage through digital advertising to push back against former President Donald Trump and other Republicans.
In 2023, Courier, founded by former journalist and Democrat operative Tara McGowan, added The Nevadan to its roster of local websites, The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday.
Its offerings, highly publicized through ads on social media, include stories such as an incorrect claim that Trump would bring back a military draft. Trump has rejected that possibility, speaking out after a Washington Post article that made similar claims.
McGowan, when starting Courier, said the network has a goal of combating disinformation, but The Free Beacon pointed out that The Nevadan has been placing "deceptive" ads on Facebook to attack Republicans and to prop up Democrat nominee Kamala Harris and Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev.
The Courier and its 11 local newsrooms are all located in swing states.
In 2020, media watchdog NewsGuard referred to Courier as a "clandestine political operation" that has "deceived" voters, and McGowan, in a leaked 2019 memo, according to the network In Nevada, said readers signed up for the outlet's newsletter believing that they were getting local news coverage, but instead, soon found they were getting political content.
The networks' former employees say that the tactic is by design to spread Democrat propaganda during election years.
"The goal was to get persuadable voters engaged with unassuming content, then feed them political persuasion content, using underwriters who would pay Courier to come up with the content," a former Courier employee told NOTUS, a Washington publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute, in March.
Meanwhile, the Federal Election Committee ruled in 2022 that Courier was exempt from requirements to reveal financial disclosures because it has qualified as a news organization. However, the company reportedly has spent millions of dollars since 2020 on Facebook ads to promote coverage of vulnerable Democrats.
Courier had originally been owned by Democrat dark money group ACRONYM, an organization backed by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Tim Jobs.
ACRONYM divested from Courier in 2021, the same year McGowan launched Good Information Inc., with seed funding from Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman and from Soros, who reportedly contributed $20 million to Courier through his Open Society Foundations, starting in 2021.
Courier also netted $100,000 in 2022 from the Hopewell Fund, a nonprofit run by Democrat dark-money giant Arabella Advisors.