Floodlight Investigates Political Pressure to Protect Civil Liberties: A NPR’s David Folkenflik Report of Terry Dunn in Alabama
NPR’s David Folkenflik reported this story with Mario Ariza and Miranda Green of Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.
Eight years after Dunn’s defeat, Alabama has still not held a rate hearing on electricity prices. Alabama Power is a profitable utility company.
Dunn, a Republican and Tea Party conservative, plowed ahead. And soon enough, he found himself the target of a political pressure campaign, replete with character assassinations and online smears.
Online news outlets started to be attacked. One headline in Yellowhammer News read: “Democrats Embrace Republican Public Service Commissioner Terry Dunn.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143753129/power-companies-florida-alabama-media-investigation-consulting-firm
Floodlight and NPR Reveal a Matrix-Like Story: When Tim Perkins Meets William P. Dunn
“Mostly everything was all made up,” he says. “You get to thinking, ‘Why are they attacking me?’ I’m telling the truth and trying to do what’s right for the people.
Floodlight and NPR have not been able to independently verify whether Alabama Power directed or had prior notice of the sharply critical coverage aimed at Dunn.
Allison Ross, owner of Yellowhammer News states that Yellowhammer Multimedia has no financial relationship with the Alabama Free Market Alliance. She didn’t discuss the site’s relationship with Alabama Power.
In the early days, Matrix quietly sought to influence decisions over matters like who was eligible to win contracts with the Alabama teachers pension fund. There was a firm that established presence in 10 states.
The sites are still functioning and have a total audience of 1.3 million unique visitors each month. Many of their consumers are political professionals, business leaders and journalists — people who help set the agenda for lawmakers and talk radio shows in both states.
The Matrix had the chance to take advantage of the collapse of the local newspaper industry and a plunge in trust in media to propel its clients’ interests.
Tom Fiedler, a former executive editor of the Miami Herald says that the reduction in the press corps’ size has made it harder for people to serve the public interest.
Journalism relies on a currency of trust: trust that the information provided is fairly presented. Trust that there is no hidden ulterior motives behind the reports, even when news is presented with a point of view.
For this investigation, Floodlight and NPR drew upon hundreds of internal Matrix documents and public records, more than three dozen interviews, a review of social media postings, and an original analysis of coverage.
Matrix, its clients, and associated entities gave six outlets $900,000 over the course of two years, according to the accounts.
Perkins pledged to one day pass on the company and he was described by some as akin to father and son. Multiple people that have worked with the man agree that he has an ability to instill fear and loyalty in those around him. Most Matrix associates did not want to be talked about the story due to the influence the two men have in their professional circles.
Power Companies & Florida Power & Light: The Case of a Coal-Field Power Plant in Alabama, a Public Interest Research Firm
Additionally, Matrix’s clients took a strong interest in who wrote the laws and enforced the regulations. Last year, Florida Power & Light wrote a bill that was passed by the Florida Legislature and that would have gutted the ability of homeowners to make money off solar panels. Gov. Ron DeSantis ultimately vetoed it.
A coal-fired power plant owned by Alabama Power is the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
The former Alabama political reporter reporters explained that their articles about Alabama Power received a lot of scrutiny from editors. In one case, the story was never published. Its proprietor denies any such influence on the site.
The lights are on for 7.5 million businesses and households. Since consumers’ payments contribute to much of the two utilities’ profits, much of the money that the companies spend effectively derives from consumers’ bills.
Joe Perkins was interested in the power of the media. He was a PhD student at the University of Alabama and he wanted to know how journalists’ choice of sources affects public sentiment.
He argued that a minority opinion may be perceived as more pervasive than it actually is by gaining access to the news media multiple times.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143753129/power-companies-florida-alabama-media-investigation-consulting-firm
A story about a nonprofit run by an Alabama businessman, Matrix, Florida Power & Light and its publication with floodlight and NPR
The Alabama Political Reporter posted a story about the retirement of Alabama Power CEO Mark Crosswhite. It reproduced the company’s press release, verbatim.
Floodlight and NPR were able to document a complex stream of transactions between a nonprofit run by an Alabama Power contractor and a series of nonprofits linked to Matrix and Yellowhammer News.
The Alabama Free Market Alliance is a nonprofit organization which attacks renewable energy. Federal tax records show that the nonprofit received $100,000 from the Alabama PowerLinked group last year. All the nonprofits were involved in work that furthered the interests of Alabama Power.
Documents obtained for this story show executives at Matrix and Florida Power & Light dictated some coverage at The Capitolist after a Matrix employee purchased an option to buy the publication in 2019 through a limited liability company.
The Capitolist ran a story in May 2020 that was cruel to the Miami Herald. The headline read: “The Miami Herald has turned to begging to support their biased reporting and fear-mongering.”
“If you are paid for copy, then you can’t be fair,” says Chuck Strouse, the former editor in chief of Miami New Times. “You have to acknowledge and be upfront with your reader about what exactly is happening. It’s just a rule of journalism.
“Sachs Media wanted to run it by you first, so I’m writing to you to tell you about the situation,” Burgess wrote in his letter. “Need guidance on this ASAP.”
According to emails, the Matrix executives agreed to let Burgess write the story because he would make them look bad for Florida Power & Light. (The executives were among those Matrix later sued.)
” The Capitolist acknowledges that it brings a center-right, pro- free market editorial viewpoint to our work and that the accurate publication of each story it has published has been a standard practice for it,” wrote Burgess in a response to questions from NPR.
The Wall Between a Publisher and a Reporter: A Times-Review of the Florida Politics Editor Peter Schorsch (@Fla.ps.com)
Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics, admits he doesn’t observe traditional journalistic practices when choosing what to write about.
In an interview, Schorsch stated that he practices combined journalism and that Florida Politics’ coverage isn’t dictated by advertisers, but gives them favorable coverage. He gives them more coverage sometimes.
“As long as they’ve developed a relationship with us, they will be at the front of the daily line against a national advertiser who I’ve never dealt with before,” Schorsch says. There is a big wall between advertisers and coverage.
A 2021 invoice shared by Schorsch shows that Florida Power & Light paid the site $43,000 for advertising, enough to cover the cost of a full-time reporter. Schorsch says his reporters do private research for clients too, though he would not specify what that entailed.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143753129/power-companies-florida-alabama-media-investigation-consulting-firm
Kristen Overdorf, the Matrix Project Coordinator, confronted a Florida legislator on a July 28, 2018 surf day in Stuart, Fla.
“I’m not trying to pretend that I’m an angel or anything like that,” Schorsch says. “But … man. If I go, there’s nothing left in this f***ing space. There’s like the Tampa Bay Times, the Miami Herald, and you’re down to nothing.”
As for him, Terry is more than two hours’ drive from the capital of Alabama. He left the city after losing his reelection bid.
Despite his belief that Alabama Power sent the Matrix to drag him down, and despite the fact that the people who voted him out of office were those who created corporate propaganda, he still has trouble differentiating those who created it from the people who swallowed it. He knows that Alabama residents’ electricity rates are not appreciably better today than they were before his election. What fight he had been fighting has been displaced by resentment.
Television news producer Kristen Hentschel was doing precisely what journalists should do on a searing hot day in Stuart, Fla., in July 2018: She confronted a politician.
The candidate recalls that before the debate, Hentschel rushed up to him with a microphone and a business card and asked him about the dead tortoises at the construction site. The species is threatened by Florida.
And he would have known. Overdorf was the wildlife consultant for the construction project. Hentschel was told by Overdorf that he didn’t know what she was talking about.
Floodlight and NPR have not been able to independently verify whether Florida Power & Light or Florida Crystals knew about Hentschel’s video. Florida Power & Light did not respond to the story. Florida Crystals’ lawyer Joseph Klock says the company “was not involved in any way, nor was anyone acting on its behalf, in any negative attacks in any form, directly or indirectly.”
Both companies could have benefited from her efforts to undermine Overdorf and his promises to resolve environmental issues in the district he was vying to represent. Florida Power & Light has pushed back against efforts to bring solar panels to the Sunshine State, while runoff from the sugar industry is a major source of water pollution in Florida.
“It was an attack ad against my livelihood, my family,” Overdorf says. It was something that could last far into the future, and that’s because I was running for office.
The ABC News Investigative Report: Investigating a News Producer Associated with the ABC News Network, Southern Company, and the Alabama House of Representatives
Hentschel got a second gig. She joined ABC News as a news producer. As of publication, she still does work for the network, ABC News confirmed. The network declined to comment for this story.
Westin, the president of ABC News from 1997 to 2010, didn’t think there was a instance in which a journalist was doing advocacy and also working for the network.
Westin said people no longer have the same trust and confidence in the news media as they used to. “For it to actually go on confirms their suspicions, since they suspect this is happening anyway.”
The former girlfriend of Southern Company’s CEO says he cozied up to her over the past year. The companies are similar to Florida Power & Light. A private investigator was hired by Matrix in the summer of last year to watch over Fanning, according to a report.
In recent months, Matrix has also been accused of interfering in the workings of democracy in Alabama and Florida by seeking to influence ballot initiatives, running ghost candidates and offering a lucrative job to a public official if he resigned. As Floodlight and NPR have revealed, Matrix secretly maintained financial ties to a half-dozen political news sites and tried to ensure favorable coverage for clients.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
Kristopher Hentschel: A New Bachelor with a Double Standard and a Stranger in the News – Her Story with Chris Hansen
“Many people think that the television business looks Hollywood-esque,” Hentschel told Baldwin Park Living. “I made $8 an hour [at] my first job, laid on couches and had to move around literally every one to two years.”
Her career foundered in 2011 when the National Enquirer disclosed a romantic relationship between her and a married man: Chris Hansen, the former host of NBC’s To Catch a Predator.
Subsequent stints in Las Vegas, Seattle and Orlando, Fla., proved brief. “A double standard is an understatement as to what happens in this industry,” Hentschel told RadarOnline.com in an interview about her relationship with Hansen. “The women get fired and the men keep going.” She had been using the name “Kristopher Caddell” in her career but changed it to her family name “Kristopher Hentschel” in late 2015.
Good Morning America is where he did most of his work. Her assignments included helping with segments on the Tom Brady and the disappearance and death of a young Florida woman, who documented her trip on social media.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
ABC News: An ABC Reporter Meets Phil Pitts at the Miami Mayor’s Office in August 2018. After Working with the Stoddard Families, a Newman-Lawsuit Attorney’s Dilemma,
Pitts could be a charmer. He was known to have a personal connection with his corporate clients by emphasizing long meals with free flowing red wine. In an email exchange with a vice president of the energy company NextEra, Pitts wrote, “Talk tomorrow but miss you.” She said the note was a nice surprise. “You told me to be more open,” he replied.
On her show, Fogel compared her relationship with Pitts to that of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife.
“You check it at the door,” Fogel says. “You may be somewhat, in a fuzzy way, aware of what the other person is doing. You want them to be successful, but you shouldn’t assume that everything is running in lockstep.
Shortly after Hentschel started working for Pitts at Matrix, the two began an affair, associates say, though it is not clear how long it lasted. Hentschel bought a home close to Pitts’ apartment in West Palm Beach, Florida, public records show.
Hentschel called Phil Stoddard, then the mayor of South Miami, in August 2018. He says she identified herself as an ABC reporter and asked him about an upcoming press conference likely to bring unflattering publicity. The parents of a teenager who was hospitalized after attending a party thrown by Stoddard’s teenage daughter had filed a wrongful death lawsuit. The suit was settled in the end.
The press conference turned out to be a sham. It had been orchestrated by Joe Carrillo, a private detective, and Dan Newman, a political operative with financial links to Matrix, according to Matrix documents and a copy of the press release obtained by Floodlight and NPR.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
The Number One Biologist Who Goes Against Florida Power & Light: Brian Mast’s Water Laws in Lake Okeechobee
The interest in Stoddard, a biologist, seems easy to discern. Stoddard had clashed with Florida Power & Light over transmission lines, a nuclear power plant and policies on residential solar panels.
“I thought, ‘No good’s gonna come of this,'” Stoddard recalls. He shut down her requests for comment at the council meeting. He continued battling Florida Power & Light even after he left office in 2020.
Brian Mast, a conservative Republican from Florida, established a record as an advocate for improving the water quality in Lake Okeechobee. He has introduced four pieces of legislation to address toxic algal blooms there.
His work puts him at odds with Florida’s sugar interests. Okeechobee is kept artificially full for that industry and other corporate use. Mast’s bills could be used to cut into their profits.
“They’ll do anything that they can to hold on to that grip of controlling water in the state of Florida,” Mast says. I’m the number one person who goes against them.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
Why Did Mast Chase Him Before Running For Elections? An Interview with Mast and the ABC News Producer, Analyzing a Matrix Scenario
In the heat of the 2020 election season, Hentschel chased down Mast at a fundraiser featuring then-President Donald Trump. She told Mast’s aides she wanted to ask him about messages he wrote nearly a decade earlier, before entering politics. He made jokes about rape and sex in posts to a friend. He apologized after they came out publicly. The aides didn’t bite.
Hentschen rang the doorbell in Mast’s gated community and told Mast’s wife that she was reporting for ABC, even giving her a business card, according to Mast’s account in an interview for this story.
The election was just two months away. Mast criticized his opponent for sending Hentschell to his door in a video he posted on Facebook. Mast said that he wanted to talk about something that was simply BS.
Hentschel’s employer, Florida Crystals, rejected Mast’s allegations of a attempt to intimidate him.
Klock himself was a minor figure in a Matrix scandal involving a Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners race revealed by the Miami Herald. He did not respond to requests for comment on that link.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
A New Surprise: Did Tanaka Know that Tom Fanning had Surveilled for Matrix Five Years Prior to the Breakup of Their Company?
Mast says there’s an appropriate way to affect official duties of a representative. Someone came and made threats to my family. That is very serious to me. It’s a very serious line that was crossed.”
This past June, fitness instructor Kim Tanaka was sitting poolside at an upscale hotel in Atlanta when a reporter for Bloomberg News called with a startling question: Did Tanaka know that she had been spied on five years prior?
Tom Fanning, the CEO of Southern Company, a direct competitor of Florida Power & Light, was a partner of Tanaka during that period. The couple separated in late 2017.
Bloomberg never published a story. A private investigator said that he surveilled the two for Matrix five years ago. The founder of theMatrix says that Pitts ordered the operation without his knowledge. Perkins knew, says Pitts.
There was a new shock in the report. It didn’t just contain old information pertaining to Tanaka — it contained recent and sensitive information about Fanning’s wife, whom he married after breaking up with Tanaka. To Tanaka, it meant the spying had continued as recently as this year.
Even though there’s no record of Hentschel residing in Georgia, she had hired Tanaka at an Atlanta gym to be her personal trainer. The two became close, even vacationing together.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
The Capitolist, Matrix, and NPR: A Center Founded in Alabama to Investigate the Nature of Gopher Tortoises
While Hentschel was questioning Toby Overdorf about gopher tortoises in Stuart, Fla., the Matrix-backed news site The Capitolist was also writing critical articles accusing Overdorf of being a hypocrite. The site said his environmentalism masked his financial reliance on “numerous sugar daddies and mommies in the agriculture business.”
She put her segments on Overdorf onto the website of the center. She is listed as the organization’s media contact. Matrix had paid the center at least $55,000 through a related business, according to the consulting firm’s ledgers.
The organization presented itself on Facebook as a nonprofit. Floodlight and NPR could not find any records for that nonprofit in any place. The company with the name exists in Alabama.
The center’s website was deleted after NPR contacted the center’s founder. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation
Comments on Overdorf’s ‘Tortoises are not a Lie’ campaign’ by Bjorken Overdorf, and Yvonne Hentschel
Overdorf won his third race in a row. He says people still dredge up the accusations — including in October in a local anti-development Facebook page. Hentschel highlighted someone who lodged a baseless complaint about tortoises.