Universities across the country have been hit with Freedom of Information Act requests from a large national media company, all part of an effort to bring attention to the “propaganda” pushed in public universities.
On Aug. 6, the Jackson Purchase News announced it was sending an open records request to Murray State asking for all course syllabuses information for the spring 2025 semester, including course and instructor names, department and delivery format. The University complied with the request, leading departments to work over the summer to pull together course information.
The Jackson Purchase News is a local news site owned by Metric Media LLC, a national news network which owns over 1,200 news sites across the country. Universities all over the nation have responded to similar requests from Metric Media-owned news outlets. According to the company, this is all part of a report exposing the kinds of ideas being taught in public universities.
“We want to know what colleges are teaching these days to our young people,” said Brian Timpone, co-founder and owner of Metric Media. “We’re very curious, especially state-funded colleges like Murray State … we want to know if they’re actually teaching, teaching you something, or if they’re trying to propagandize you with nonsense.”
Timpone criticized public universities for teaching inane and unimportant concepts, as well as working to “politicize” children. He said schools have traded teaching important subjects like writing and arithmetic for an emphasis on less-important subjects, like women’s history and “homosexual history.”
Timpone said the results of the records requests will be published verbatim by Metric Media, and that the agency wasn’t looking to spin them. Timpone said he wanted to make sure parents and taxpayers knew what public universities were teaching their kids.
“People haven’t been paying attention, because we trusted and thought it would be absurd that a professor would try to teach, say, gay history to a bunch of students or ‘trans’ history to a bunch of students,” Timpone said. “But actually it’s not. It’s actually happening everywhere, so we’d like to know where.”
Timpone, a businessman and former TV reporter, founded Metric Media in 2019. The network, which says it produces over 5 million articles a month over its 1,200 local news sites, has been criticized for engaging in “pink-slime journalism,” a tactic where news sites rely on poor-quality, often computer-generated, news stories that masquerade as local news.
The news network has been profiled numerous times by the Columbia Journalism Review, a magazine for professional journalists published by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961. Their initial report on the network after its establishment in 2019 found that out of the network’s thousands of published stories, only a few hundred had authors credited in the byline. Many of their articles are generated through consumer price reports and press releases.
The records request sent to Murray State was written by Jules Goonewardena, who said he was a news reporter for the Jackson Purchase News. Despite claiming to be a media professional and employee for the new site, Goonewardena is not listed as a reporter on the Jackson Purchase News website, nor does his name appear in the byline of any articles on their website. The Jackson Purchase News does not have any listed employees, and few credited authors.
While he doesn’t appear on the news’s website, Goonewardena’s name does appear in a LinkedIn search as a data manager for Local Labs LLC. Local Labs describes itself as a “leading publisher of community news and events,” and works to collect and publish public records obtained through FOIA requests. Timpone founded the company in 2006.
When asked about this issue, Timpone said it was the network’s practice to not put writers’ names in articles or on their websites for privacy reasons. He said the decision was also guided by a belief that news should stand on its own and not need credited writers.
“We don’t feel compelled to put their names on the website, because when our reporters put their names on a website, people attack them,” Timpone said. “Crazy left-wing lunatics try to attack them and call their parents and harass them.”
Investigations into Metric Media by the Columbia Journalism Review also found the network had received millions of dollars in support from right-wing nonprofit organizations and political action committees. This included a $7.5 million investment by two PACs and the nonprofit Restoration of America. These three organizations are backed by billionaire shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein. According to a ProPublica article, The Uihlein family is a large donor to the Republican Party.
According to the report, Metric Media also received $240,000 from the Peter Theil-backed Saving Arizona PAC. During the state’s 2022 midterm election, the PAC paid Metric Media’s Grand Canyon Times for consultation as well as “Printing/Postage.” According to the report, the newspaper shipped at least two editions of its paper to Arizonans during the election.
Metric Media’s records request was done in partnership with another nonprofit, the Coalition Against Government Secrecy. The coalition is a Missouri-based non-profit with the mission to “aid and encourage citizen participation in government and the political process.” It does this often through FOIA requests, as well as finding lawyers to manage lawsuits for public access.
Timpone said this coalition was another agency he helped found. He said he realized that to get access to many public records, he would need lawyers behind him to compel the government into releasing certain information.
“We’ve had a lot of success with the coalition opposing government secrecy and getting local governments to actually give out information they should,” Timpone said.
Ray Horton, associate professor of English, said criticism and attacks on education like this aren’t new. Horton said higher education has served as a target for conservative movements since the Red Scare, where they were often considered a “den of reds.”
Horton said University departments had still been quick to comply with the records request. While Horton said some of his colleagues found the need for extra work over the summer annoying, the request hadn’t created too much trouble for faculty and staff.
Horton said he was glad to see the University comply with the request quickly, as records requests are important for public accountability. He also said, however, that this request had contributed to a growing concern among his colleagues over political attacks on education. These concerns have grown sharper since the passage of Kentucky House Bill 4, which banned teaching of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in the classroom.
“I think everybody’s kind of on edge right now after HB 4, because in Kentucky, we don’t exactly know how certain things are going to be interpreted and enforced, what kind of chilling effect on speech and discussion in the classroom,” Horton said.
Horton said initially, after the request, there had been concerns over the possibility of the information being used to dox and attack professors. He said those fears were abated slightly by the realization that this was a national occurrence, and not just the University being singled out. Despite this, Horton said incidents like this may discourage professors from teaching controversial topics in classrooms due to fear of reprisal.
This article was originally published by the Murray State News.
