Pink-Slime News Site Pushes Ramaswamy Ad in Ohio

A pink-slime news site is now pushing one of the most talked-about attack ads of the Ohio governor's race, and its Facebook and Instagram pages trace back to a California donor group. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Buckeye Bulletin looks like a scrappy local outlet but has no bylines, no staff list and no disclosed funder.

A "local" outlet with no names attached

The Buckeye Bulletin bills itself as an Ohio-based platform committed to "reliable journalism" and "strong editorial standards." It popped up this spring and started posting a steady stream of pro-Ramaswamy content, the Times reports. Visit the site and there is nobody to email, no writer to follow and no hint of who pays the bills.

Meta's own ad data tells the story the website does not. The Facebook and Instagram accounts are managed by the Lincoln Media Foundation, a nonprofit tied to the Orange County-based Lincoln Club, which the Times calls the oldest and largest conservative donor group in California. Tax filings on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer show the club and the foundation are associated organizations that share at least two key executives. None of the groups answered the paper's requests for comment.

The ad everyone is fighting about

This week the Bulletin turned its attention to Republican Vivek Ramaswamy's controversial campaign spot featuring Democrat Amy Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur. In the ad, Arthur calls her daughter a liar. The ad did not mention that Arthur lost custody of her children after her husband was indicted over the abuse of Acton as a child, an omission that drew fierce condemnation from Democrats and from some Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine.

President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended the ad, and the campaign has put four million dollars behind it, according to the Associated Press. Former President Barack Obama blasted it at a Cleveland rally on Saturday, as CBS News reported. So a pink-slime news site boosting the video is pouring fuel on a fire that was already roaring.

A playbook that is not new

Researchers say this is a rerun. In 2024, Max Read of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified seven alleged outlets linked to the same media group, nearly all aimed at swing states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Read told the Times the Bulletin looks like "pretty much copy and paste the same tactic that they used" last cycle, down to the look of the social pages.

Earlier this year, CalMatters flagged another outlet tied to the foundation, the California Courier, which ran Facebook ads against Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state's redistricting measure. The foundation's revenue jumped to three point eight eight million dollars in 2024, up from roughly seven hundred thousand dollars the year before.

Small money, big disguise

The numbers on the Bulletin are tiny. Its accounts have spent just over ten thousand dollars boosting posts this year, and its Facebook page has about fifty-six hundred followers. Of its last thirty posts as of Friday afternoon, twenty-one were about state or national politics and ten were about the governor's race. A nonpolitical post about a chemical explosion in Toledo got two likes.

That gap is the point. UCLA's Georgia Kernell told the Times that voters are tired of obvious ads, so anything that looks different keeps attention longer. Dressing up as news also makes viewers more likely to believe the information has been checked. Nik Usher of the University of San Diego called these sites "explosive bombs for public trust."

Why this matters for your feed

If you scroll past a slick local-news reel in the next two weeks, it is worth checking the page's transparency tab before sharing. Real newsrooms put names on stories and say who owns them. The Bulletin's About page, the Times notes, shows markers of artificial intelligence, including generic mission statements and vague claims about standards.

Pink-slime networks are not a one-party habit. The Times notes a 2020 New York Times investigation found a network of thirteen hundred sites producing biased content for Republican groups and companies, while a left-leaning group used a site called the Morning Mirror in 2024. NewsGuard researchers also found that leading AI chatbots cite pink-slime sites nearly half the time when asked about midterm candidates. Catch more of this race in the politics section, and stay sharp, because election day is only days away and every pink-slime news site will be working overtime until then.