The Mills administration has paid $120,000 to the Maine Trust for Local News (MTLN), the nonprofit that owns the Portland Press Herald and the Lewiston Sun Journal, to publish state-sponsored articles praising the Mills administration’s use of federal education dollars.
The articles are intended to bolster “goodwill” toward the state’s public school system and the Maine Department of Education’s (DOE) use of federal funding, according to state records reviewed by the Maine Wire.
[RELATED: Five Months Later, “National Trust” Won’t Say Who Funded Takeover of Maine Newspapers…]
According to the document, which disclosed the no-bid contract awarded to the nonprofit on Friday, Sept. 20, the Maine DOE will pay the “trust” a total of $117,300 for what the government described as a “marketing campaign.”
The payment will cover the publication and promotion of six articles portraying the Maine DOE in a flattering light. It’s unclear whether the state-sponsored “news” content will be written by someone from the Maine DOE or employees of the Maine Trust for Local News newspapers.
The taxpayer-funded “marketing campaign” will highlight the Maine DOE’s “use of federal emergency relief funding,” and will aim to “promote the best learning opportunities for all Maine students” and to “inspire ‘trust in our schools,'” according to the document.
The Mills administration described this initiative as a way to leverage the credibility and reach of the Maine Trust for Local News and their network of news outlets to generate “goodwill” toward Maine’s public school system.
“This campaign will utilize the authority of Maine Trust for Local News, which carries with the DOE’s constituents, to achieve these goals, resulting in an increase of goodwill for Maine’s public school system,” the Mills administration wrote in the procurement form.
The state-sponsored media will describe Maine as a “great place to teach and learn,” and will share the “success stories of Federal Emergency Funded programs.”
Neither the state nor the Maine Trust for Local News has disclosed the schedule for publishing the six “sponsored articles” online and in their publications, which include the Portland Press Herald, the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Waterville Morning Sentinel, and the Kennebec Journal.
In addition to the sponsored articles, the newspapers involved will also run paid advertisements to promote them on their websites. The contract runs from mid-August until the end of December.
Per the contract form, the Maine Trust for Local News is uniquely suited to be a purveyor of media favorable to the state government.
In fact, the nonprofit is so peerless in their role as the Mills administration’s de facto public relations team, according to the Maine DOE, that although they do not plan on running another similar marketing campaign, if they were, there “would be no one to compete” with the trust for future state-run media projects.
“Its 19 publications cover more areas than any other news organization and, combined with its three websites, have a larger Maine-based audience than any comparable outlet,” the Maine DOE wrote. “There is not another organization in Maine that can create a campaign of this size or nature.”
The Maine Trust for Local News, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News, is the nonprofit trust that last summer acquired several of Maine’s oldest news brands and daily newspapers, including the Portland Press Herald, Lewiston Sun Journal and Kennebec Journal.
On their website, under an “Our Guiding Principles” heading, the Maine Trust for Local News boasts that their local newsroom staff “are the only people who decide what stories to pursue, the timing of those stories, and their content.”
However, in this case, it appears as though the nonprofit is taking payment and direct instruction from the state government on what stories to publish, and the content of those stories.
At the time of the National Trust’s acquisition of the Maine news outlets, the nonprofit promised to disclose the funders behind the acquisition, a pledge that has yet to be fulfilled.
A report from digital media outlet Semafor suggested that left-wing billionaire George Soros and Swiss foreign national Hansjörg Wyss were key financial backers of the acquisition.
Both men are known for their significant contributions to progressive political causes in the U.S. Soros, through his Open Society Foundations, has a long history of funding liberal advocacy groups, including some in Maine.
[RELATED: Shadowy Left-Wing Group Spends Big on Maine Politics…]
Wyss, who is not a U.S. citizen and cannot vote, has nonetheless taken a keen interest in shaping American politics, particularly in Maine, where he has reportedly also funded the progressive blog Maine Morning Star — an affiliate of the nonprofit “States Newsroom” network.
The Maine DOE reports that they have received over $1 billion in federal emergency relief funding since March of 2020, funds meant to address the impacts on students caused by the disruption and shutdown of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.
[RELATED: Maine Education Chief: “Academic Learning” Takes Backseat to Social-Emotional, Gender, and Race…]
According to the Maine DOE spending dashboard, the department has already allocated almost $575 million of those federal funds “to address diverse needs arising from or exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, or to emerge stronger post-pandemic, including responding to students’ social, emotional, mental health, and academic needs.”
The funds for the Mills administration’s “marketing campaign” themselves are being taken from pandemic-era relief funds.
The Maine DOE’s procurement form indicates that the $117,300 award to the Maine Trust for Local News comes from American Rescue Plan Act funds, a COVID-19 stimulus package signed into law by President Joe Biden in early 2021.
While the Mills administration touts its marketing campaign as a way to rebuild trust in Maine’s public education system, recent data paints a less optimistic picture.
Despite Maine’s historic reputation as a national leader in education, the state has, in recent years, experienced a steep decline in academic performance.
[RELATED: New Report Analyzes the Decades-Long Decline of Maine K-12 Education…]
A report published by the Maine Policy Institute earlier this year found that while Maine consistently ranked first or second for math in reading in the 1990s, by 2022 the state’s ranking had fallen to an average of 36th nationwide. (Disclosure: The Maine Wire is a project of the Maine Policy Institute.)
This decline in math and reading proficiency among Maine’s public school students was concurrent with a 20 percent increase in the average inflation-adjusted amount Maine schools spent on each pupil from 2006 to 2022.
