“Pink Slime Journalism” Takes Aim at Greenpeace
The Dakota Access Pipeline company just won a landmark suit against Greenpeace worth over $660 million. At the heart of the case is a new and particularly sleazy form of partisan communications masquerading as journalism.
Protesters hold a rally with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in support of a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers and plans for the Dakota Access Pipeline outside the US District Court in Washington, DC, August 24, 2016. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
When copies of an unknown newspaper began appearing in the mailboxes of North Dakota residents in October 2024, sharp-eyed readers noticed something unusual. The Central ND News bore the tagline “Real data. Real value. Real news.” But the paper seemed to have an unreal sense of time.
Instead of covering current news, Central ND News devoted multiple pages to celebrating the oil pipeline company Energy Transfer and the anniversary of the defeat of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests eight years ago. One headline read: “On this day in October 2016: Morton County issues felony arrest warrant for pipeline protestor who charged police officer on horseback,” as if the day a Native American teen on a horse got within twenty feet of armed policemen and was teargassed, tased, and arrested for “instilling fear” was somehow a triumph of justice.
It begged a question: Did an oil pipeline company publish a newspaper? Close enough, said Greenpeace.
The environmental group argued in court that Central ND News was explicitly published to give Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, the upper hand in their suit against Greenpeace for its role in the protests on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that attempted to halt the construction of the 1,170-mile pipeline in 2016 and 2017. The judge in the case agreed that the mailer was part of an effort to sway jurors against Greenpeace but denied a motion to delay the trial.
Not only did Greenpeace lose that particular battle, but it also lost the war. Last week, a jury in Mandan, North Dakota, delivered a stunning verdict against Greenpeace, ordering it to pay the astounding sum of over $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer.
Welcome to the next chapter of pink slime journalism.
Slimy Journalism
“Pink slime journalism” is the term I coined in 2012 to describe a kind of news site that conceals its slanted or misleading information behind the appearance of a traditional local news outlet, much like the gooey filler added to processed meats without a warning label. On an episode of National Public Radio’s This American Life, I blew the whistle on Journatic, a Chicago-based company that attempted to disrupt the newspaper industry by outsourcing journalism to a virtual sweatshop in the Philippines — with some writers earning pennies per story.
Instead of reforming their ways, Journatic simply rebranded, first to Local Labs, Locality Labs, and now Metric Media. Then, Journatic’s CEO, Brian Timpone, pivoted to a business model even more toxic than the original: pay-for-play partisan political news in which politicians or PACs can purchase news coverage and editorials. After all, there was little money to be extracted from the dying local news industry.
Central ND News, the newspaper from the Greenpeace trial, is one of hundreds of pink slime outlets from Metric Media and a handful of similar operations that distribute algorithmically generated articles, a small number of reported stories, and political news stories and editorials that are overwhelmingly biased toward the GOP and corporate power. Those stories can often be weaponized by political actors.
For instance, after Georgia elected Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a narrow margin in 2020, a pink slime outlet calling itself the Georgia Star published a misleading story that questioned the legitimacy of nearly twenty thousand absentee ballots. Trump himself linked to a One America News segment about the deceptive pink slime story and praised the Georgia Star writer, a delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention from Tennessee, for “the incredible reporting you have done.”
During the following election cycle in 2022, political organizations tied to conservative megadonors, including billionaire Peter Thiel, spent $14 million on Metric Media and its related entities, according to a study from the Columbia Journalism Review. Pink slime journalism has only gotten slimier in the two years since then. A shocking analysis by the information reliability site NewsGuard found 1,265 pink slime outlets in the United States as of June 2024, officially surpassing the 1,213 daily newspapers still printing “real” news, as the latter keeps slowly disappearing.
It’s not just conservatives who are turning all the news into thinly veiled “sponsored content.” The Democrats have their own version: Courier Newsroom, founded by Tara McGowan, a Democratic National Committee operative with former ties to Shadow Inc., the tech start-up behind the suspicious 2020 Iowa Caucus results that muddied the waters between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. It spent over $6 million in October 2024 on Kamala Harris Meta ads, the third-highest spender in the election behind the Harris and Trump campaigns.
Before the Greenpeace trial, the print newspapers that made their way to the doors of people in Morton County, North Dakota, appeared tied to the fossil fuels industry. Public records show that Executive Chairman Kelcy Warren, chairman of Energy Transfer, donated $5 million to the Super PAC Turnout for America. A week later, Turnout for America paid $250,000 to Northern CB Corp for “media services.” Metric Media CEO Timpone owns Northern CB Corp.
Deceiving North Dakotans with fossil fuel propaganda cosplaying as local newspapers is a new low for Big Oil, and the jury’s decision against Greenpeace should send chills down the spines of left-wing activists and free speech advocates.
“This was obviously a test case meant to scare others from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful protest,” said Deepa Padmanabha, a legal adviser for Greenpeace. “They’re trying to buy silence; that silence is not for sale.”
But with the rise and triumph of pink slime journalism, buying silence appears easier and cheaper than ever.