As Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy came under fire for releasing an attack ad featuring his Democratic competitor’s estranged mother, a mysterious news site was running a Facebook ad boosting the controversial video.
The Buckeye Bulletin, which bills itself as an Ohio-based news platform committed to “reliable journalism” and “strong editorial standards,” popped up suddenly this spring and began pumping out a steady stream of pro-Ramaswamy content.
The publication’s articles have no bylines. There is no list of staff. The website does not feature digital advertisements, nor does it prompt readers to subscribe, but there is also no disclosure of who is funding it.
A closer look at the Buckeye Bulletin’s Meta advertising data shows that its Facebook and Instagram accounts are managed by the Lincoln Media Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Orange County-based Lincoln Club — the oldest and largest conservative donor organization in California. IRS documents show that the club and foundation are associated organizations and share at least two key executives.
Meta’s advertising data shows that the Lincoln Media Foundation manages the Instagram and Facebook accounts for the Buckeye Bulletin.
(Meta)
The Buckeye Bulletin, Lincoln Club and Lincoln Media Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
The Bulletin appears to be a partisan site posing as a local news outlet ahead of the midterm elections, a strategy political scientists refer to as “pink-slime” journalism.
This is not the first time a “pink-slime” outlet has been linked to the Lincoln Media Foundation. In 2024 Max Read, director of civic innovation for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, identified seven such alleged outlets.
With the exception of one Los Angeles-focused site, those outlets all targeted critical states for the 2024 presidential election such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Read reported that the media group had spent more than $63,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads, resulting in up to 18 million impressions during the last election cycle.
“[The sites were] very clearly designed to try to influence the information environment ahead of the presidential election,” Read told The Times. “They had all been started early in the year and used advertising on Meta platforms to juice their engagement numbers.”
When asked by The Times to take a look at the Buckeye Bulletin, Read said it appeared to be “pretty much copy and paste the same tactic that they used in 2024, even down to the aesthetics of the Facebook page and Instagram account.”
“It seems like they realized this worked at some level in 2024 and is worth doing again this year,” he said.
Earlier this year, CalMatters identified another outlet tied to the Lincoln Media Foundation called the California Courier, which had been circulating Facebook advertisements criticizing Gov. Gavin Newsom and the statewide redistricting ballot measure Proposition 50.
Since the Buckeye Bulletin’s Facebook and Instagram pages launched in March, the outlet has shared posts touting endorsements of Ramaswamy — a biotech billionaire and former presidential candidate — as well as his platform for addressing Ohio’s healthcare crisis and his stance on religious freedom in schools.
Simultaneously, the outlet’s social media posts have highlighted the refusal of his opponent — Amy Acton, Ohio’s former public health director — to debate, comments on how she “shut down” the state’s economy during the COVID-19 pandemic and a video with a watermark from right-wing political activist Laura Loomer.
This week, the outlet turned attention to Ramaswamy’s controversial campaign ad featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar and urges voters not to support her.
However, the ad did not acknowledge that Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather, Arthur’s husband, was indicted for raping Acton when she was a child — an omission that drew fierce condemnation from Democrats and some Republicans, including Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Others, including President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, an Ohioan, have defended the ad.
Arthur and her husband fled to Pennsylvania after his 1978 indictment where he died in 2004 without having been brought back to Ohio to face the charge.
Peppered in between political content on the Bulletin’s social media feeds is a smattering of reels related to non-political news, often featuring videos lifted directly from local TV stations. These other posts are used to create a “veneer of genuine local journalism,” Read said.
The language on the Bulletin’s About Us page displays markers of artificial intelligence such as generic mission statements, polished but repetitive phrasing and vague claims about journalistic standards with no details about the publication’s staff.
Of the last 30 posts shared on the Bulletin’s Facebook as of 5 p.m. Friday, 21 were about state or national politics and 10 were about the gubernatorial race. Engagement on the posts dealing with Ramaswamy and Acton is consistently strong for a page with around 5,600 followers.
For example, a Wednesday post on Ohio State Medical Assn.’s PAC endorsing Ramaswamy received more than 770 likes, 260 comments and 150 shares. Another video posted Wednesday with the label “Amy Acton refuses to debate, says mother is lying about her” received more than 4,800 likes, 1,500 comments and 500 shares.
Meanwhile, a non-political Wednesday post on a chemical explosion in Toledo received two likes, no comments and no shares.
The unassuming social media scroller or person who clicked onto the website would have no clue of the Buckeye Bulletin’s apparent connection to a group of wealthy Southern California Republications.
The Lincoln Media Foundation was started by leaders of the historic Lincoln Club, which was founded in 1962 and once counted John Wayne and former President Richard Nixon as members.
Today, the club describes itself as being home to “the most prominent business and thought leaders” in California and says it offers members the opportunity to meet world leaders and “experience their hobbies come to life through a combination of extravagance and leisure.”
The foundation notes that it uses a digital approach to reach communities left out of the national conversation, but its website does not disclose providing funding to any news outlets.
IRS records show that the nonprofit’s financial activities kicked up dramatically in 2024, the latest year for which data are available. The Lincoln Media Foundation reported $3.88 million in revenue in 2024, compared with $738,000 in 2023, $453,000 in 2022 and $415,000 in 2021.
The Buckeye Bulletin’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have spent just over $10,000 boosting posts this year, according to Meta’s ad library.
That’s barely a drop in the bucket in Ohio, where hotly contested races for governor and U.S. Senate have drawn hundreds of millions in spending. But presenting a slanted political view under the guise of local news tends to offer more bang for your buck than traditional advertisements, said Georgia Kernell, an associate professor in the departments of communications and political science at UCLA.
“Voters are so sick of ads; they’re getting tons of clear paid advertisements on the radio, on the television and on their social media feeds now,” she said. “Anything that can kind of look different is going to be more likely to keep their attention.”
Presenting as a traditional news source also increases the likelihood of viewers believing that the information presented is well-researched, she said.
Nik Usher, associate professor of communications at the University of San Diego, said it’s unclear how much influence pink-slime journalism is having on voting behavior, but political strategists are willing to try any new approach to possibly make a difference in tight races.
“This is one strategic effort to throw more spaghetti at the wall, hoping it’ll stick,” Usher said.
Creators of these partisan sites further stand to benefit from the fact that artificial intelligence tools are constantly scraping content from news websites without paywalls.
Researchers at NewsGuard recently found that leading AI chat bots are citing pink-slime websites nearly half the time when users ask questions about candidates and issues in the midterm elections.
Democrats and Republicans have increasingly leveraged pink-slime journalism to influence voters in the past few election cycles.
In 2020, the New York Times identified a network of 1,300 news sites that paid freelance writers to produce biased content for Republican groups and corporate public relations firms. In 2024, the left-leaning Star Spangled Media group used a site called the Morning Mirror to promote down-ballot Democratic candidates, according to research from Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
More recently, the evolution of AI has increased the ease with which these websites can be populated with content, eliminating the need to pay writers and automating the production of social media posts.
Usher described pink-slime websites as “explosive bombs for public trust” that take advantage of the gap created by the loss of independent local papers and further diminish expectations for news to be fairly reported.
“Once these sorts of sites are pointed out to the public it further undermines distrust in political institutions, political parties, the news media,” Usher said, “especially when AI is associated with this kind of stuff.”