The newspaper’s motto reads “Real data. Real value. Real news.” But there is nothing real about it.
The Central ND News has many of the hallmarks of a legitimate news source — headlines, infographics and 12 pages of newsprint. But the newspaper mailed to residents of one North Dakota county this October were uniformly right leaning, largely lacked bylines identifying the stories’ authors and in some instances had a clear target — the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
“When I got it, I thought, ‘Well, this is weird. Number one, it’s coming from out of state. Number two, it looks like a newspaper.’ That was the big thing that was weird to me, and how much it looks like a newspaper,” said Tavi Leier, a Mandan resident who works for the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives…