“I definitely think there’s an erosion of that baseline,” Dutson said during an interview. In an April column in the Bangor Daily News, he wrote that he was “terrified of this new media landscape.” Lance Dutson, who founded the Maine Wire when he served as executive director of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, said while he once railed against the mainstream media, he’s now concerned that people are losing the ability to agree on a common set of facts to serve as a baseline for discussion. But let’s not equate independent journalism with political advertising disguised as news coverage.” And they have a constitutional right to do it. “Those are acutely partisan advocacy groups,” Cliff Schechtman, executive editor of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, said in an email. It’s difficult to gauge the impact of the sites because no unbiased third party tracks statistics about their reach.Ī spokesman for the Wire said the website reaches 30,000 to 50,000 readers a month while the Beacon boasts that, on Facebook, it is the most-shared political site in the state.īoth say they are careful to label their content so readers know where it comes from, but when a story pops up on Facebook or Twitter, it’s often hard to tell the difference between which comes from a mainstream outlet and which doesn’t. The Maine Beacon, which focuses on issues important to the progressive Maine People’s Alliance, began publishing in 2016. The Maine Wire, a product of the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center, has been around since 2011. “A lot of what both of them do is critical journalism, where they are attacking the other side.” Matthew Gagnon, CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, at its offices in Yarmouth. “The people who subscribe know what they are getting,” he said.
“It’s not terribly surprising, but yeah, I think there’s potential for confusion,” he said.įollowing the advent of Fox News and MSNBC, it makes sense that Maine-run sites such as the conservative Maine Wire and progressive Maine Beacon would take advantage of the public’s desire to seek out news that fits with their particular ideology, said Jim Melcher, political science professor at the University of Maine at Farmington. Petersburg, said that while advocacy groups have traditionally issued white papers and lobbied lawmakers, the technology now exists for them to produce news-like content, too. Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. It also increases the possibility that readers scrolling through their social media feeds might not understand that what they’re reading wasn’t produced by a journalist. The difference now, though, is that professional-looking websites and dynamic social media strategies allow such publications to expand their reach far beyond the neighborhood newspaper stand. Professors and pundits say the phenomenon is not new - before World War II, newspapers often had a particular ideological bent. Why the discrepancy?įueled by what they see as gaps in political news coverage by the state’s mainstream media, two advocacy groups with strong interests in promoting their agendas are operating websites that look very much like those affiliated with traditional news outlets. Two were fairly similar: “Partisan sparring in Maine House drags into Thursday morning” in the Bangor Daily News, and from the Portland Press Herald: “From Medicaid expansion to pot sales, partisan stalemate in Augusta leaves key issues unresolved.”īut the other two headlines struck a decidedly different tone: “Adjournment fiasco underscores dysfunctional legislative session” in the Maine Wire and “Republicans shut down legislature in attempt to delay Medicaid expansion, cut minimum wage” from the Maine Beacon. If you scrolled through your Facebook feed in mid-April, you might have seen four different headlines describing how and why the Maine Legislature adjourned without finishing its work.
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