In March, Congresswoman Diane Black, a top candidate for governor in Tennessee, put out a campaign ad that seemed at first glance to be utterly textbook: a scene of President Donald Trump embracing her played while a quote from a local news outlet is displayed in the foreground: “President Trump to Rep Diane Black: ‘You Came Through’ on Tax Reform,” it read, citing a headline from the Tennessee Star.

Close watchers may have had just one question: What is the Tennessee Star?


Visitors to its website would have had a hard time figuring that out. Though it looks like a normal newspaper site, many — if not most — Star stories lack a byline, and at the time the ad debuted the site had no masthead nor information explaining who owns or runs it. A click on the “Contact Us” tab revealed a phone number, a couple of email addresses, and a mailing address that goes to a UPS store in Franklin, Tennessee. But there was no information indicating that the Star is, in fact, a right-wing site, described by many as a “Tennessee Breitbart.”

Launched in February 2017, the Star is part of a growing trend of opaque, locally focused, ideological outlets, dressed up as traditional newspapers. From the Arizona Monitor to the Maine Examiner, sites with names and layouts designed to echo those of nonpartisan publications — and with varying levels of credibility — have emerged across the country, aimed at influencing local politics by stepping into the coverage void left by the collapsing finances of local newspapers.

The Star has successfully gained traction among the Tennessee political elite, raising questions over whether the current news climate is ripe for these type of Breitbart-like local sites to proliferate across the country.

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Since being contacted by POLITICO last week, the Star has added the names of its top three editors to the “Contact Us” section of its website. The publication, it turns out, is owned and operated by Steve Gill, a conservative commentator and radio host, and Michael Patrick Leahy, a local political activist who also writes for Breitbart, though Breitbart is not itself involved in the Star. The pair write many of the stories on the site, Gill said.

“What we really did is provide something people are just starving for,” Gill said, explaining that he and Leahy started the site last year and that there are no other investors.

He agreed that “Breitbart of Tennessee” would be a fair description of his site, adding that in its year-plus of existence, the Star has garnered more than 7 million page views and its finances are in the black. The site boasts a homepage filled with ads, many of them from political campaigns.

Its coverage goes deep on local political news — with stories on a variety of races as well as legislative minutiae, alongside a healthy dose of commentary — all from an anti-establishment, right-wing perspective. For instance, Randy Boyd, Black’s more mainstream opponent in the Republican gubernatorial primary, has been mocked on the site as “La Raza Randy,” for his stance on immigration. The site has gained attention, in part, because cutbacks at mainstream outlets have limited what they can cover.

“We’re serving a vastly underserved demand in Tennessee,” Gill said. “I think there are probably other states where a version of the Tennessee Star could do very well.”

Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) a top candidate for governor in the state, put out a campaign ad that seemed at first glance to be utterly textbook, except for its mention of The Star. | POLITICO Screengrab

Gill said he and Leahy have ambitions to start similar versions in other states — especially political battlegrounds like Ohio and Pennsylvania. “We could drop another Tennessee Star into other states with $300,000, $350,000,” he said. “We don’t have a big staff, we don’t have printing costs, we don’t have overhead.”

Just days after registering the Tennessee Star domain in January 2017, according to records, Leahy also registered domains for americandailystar.com, minnesotanorthernlight.com, mosundaily.com, newenglandstar.com, thedakotastar.com, themichiganstar.com, thencstar.com, theohiostar.com, thepennstar.com, thevirginiastar.com and thewisconsinstar.com.

But Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin — who spoke to POLITICO before the editors’ names were added to the site — said the issue is not the site’s conservative content, but that a reader, lacking prior knowledge of the Star’s politics, could easily come to the site and think they were getting a nonpartisan presentation. The same goes for a user on Facebook or Twitter, encountering a Star story in their feed.

Culver said she is deeply concerned by the growing trend of ideological outlets that take on the appearance of neutral news sources.

“In general, when people try to adopt the forms of journalism without the norms of journalism, we really do have to be concerned that they’re trying to put one over on people,” Culver said. “It makes it very hard for citizens. It makes it very hard to navigate this information environment and find credible sources that you can rely on.”

Gill, who serves as the site’s political editor, while Leahy is editor-in-chief and CEO, said their intention had not been to deceive readers by not having a masthead. “It hadn’t come up before,” he said. “Well, if people think it’s an issue, we’ll address it, boom.”

Originally, he argued, their names weren’t listed as a way to make the site “not about us.”

“It’s not a ‘Hey, look at me,’ ego site,” he said. “Steve Bannon was Breitbart. The Tennessee Star is not Michael Leahy or Steve Gill.”

There is still no acknowledgement on the site that it is coming from a right-wing perspective, but Gill believes the Star’s outlook should be obvious.

“If anybody reads two paragraphs into our stories and doesn’t figure out we’re more conservative than liberal, they probably aren’t reading it right,” he said.

The site doesn’t have the traditional separation of editorial and business interests—a sensitive topic, especially when many advertisers are the campaigns that the Star is writing about. Gill, who is also a local talk-radio host, said that advertising does not affect the site’s coverage.

“Look, people bought radio ads during my show, that doesn’t mean we were going to talk about them or not talk about them,” he said.

Gill said neither he nor Leahy takes a salary, and the site has just a handful of other employees and freelancers. It’s a “hand-to-mouth” operation he said, dependent on getting this quarter’s advertising checks to make sure all the bills get paid.

The Star fills out its story lineup with national articles republished from other conservative sites, like The Daily Caller and LifeZette. (The umbrella republishing agreement the Star has with a group of those sites will come to an end soon, Gill said, but he added that he and Leahy would be pursuing new arrangements with individual sites.)

It may not be a bonanza business proposition, but for someone looking to influence the local political debate, it’s high leverage at low cost.

Mark Braden, a Republican political strategist in Tennessee, said, “The top terra firma of political class either read it or lie about reading it. They either read it, or they tell their friends they don’t read it and they’re lying. It’s certainly impactful and, especially during a legislative session, I know that a lot of legislators read it.”

“You’ll hear or see something in the Star and somebody will regurgitate it back to you,” said Braden, who has had clients who advertise on the site.

The Star has proved more interested in internal Republican debates — such as the gubernatorial primary, which pits Black, who is closely aligned with Trump, against Boyd, considered more establishment — but that doesn’t mean Tennessee Democrats haven’t taken notice.

That the Star is often referenced in other publications — including The Hill, Fox News and Tennessee Journal — without acknowledgment of its obvious bias and lack of transparency, represents a source of concern.

“The way I look at this is, it’s another way in which the Republicans get their narrative out, which we have been really fighting against for decades now,” said Mary Mancini, chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party. “The conservative, small-town radio, the conservative small-town newspapers that don’t give us the opportunity to be a part of their op-ed pages — that actually is more of an issue than this sort of gossip rag, I would call it.”

But a staff member for one Democratic officeholder from the state said that though his office is not overly concerned with the Star, it is certainly aware of it. “On the one hand, no, we’re not worried about it, on the other hand, we don’t want to be targeted by them,” the staff member said.

Culver, the journalism ethics professor, said one of her concerns is that, when politicians like Black legitimize outlets like the Star, it drags down other, more transparent publications, making it more difficult for readers to know what to trust.

“When a candidate uses one of these sources in an ad and makes it appear like this is an independent news organization, it just muddles things further,” she said.

“That’s very confusing to people.”

But Chris Hartline, a spokesman for Black’s campaign, rejected any concerns over such distinctions.

"We're always happy when news stories highlight Diane's conservative record of working with President Trump to move America and Tennessee forward,” he said.

For his part, Gill said, he is also unconcerned with comparisons to more established outlets, like the state’s major daily, The Tennessean.

“Our goal,” he said, “is to pass them and let them follow the other dead media.”



CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this article, the Nashville Post was incorrectly included in a list of media outlets that reference material in The Tennessee Star without explaining the site’s political leanings.