A new report reveals that a Democratic operative involved with multiple leftist media organizations has made nearly two dozen visits to President Joe Biden’s White House.
Political strategist Tara McGowan has been behind the network of organizations “masquerading as ‘independent’ local news outlets” and “has maintained access to the upper echelons” of the White House, according to Fox News Digital.
McGowan, the founder and publisher of Courier Newsroom, has reportedly “visited the Biden White House nearly 20 times,” according to a review by the outlet.
A photo posted on her Instagram account that appears to be from November 2022 shows the longtime Democratic operative with the president and first lady.
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The 39-year-old is the CEO and founder of Courier Newsroom’s parent, Good Information Inc., and has “participated in several one-on-one meetings with top White House aides,” Fox News Digital noted, pointing to at least six meetings between October 2022 and October 2023 with Jordan Finkelstein, chief of staff to one of Biden’s senior advisers.
Patrick Stevenson, whose LinkedIn page describes him as “Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor for Digital Strategy,” was also a name listed on the White House visitor logs for McGowan. One of her visits with him occurred in November 2023 after Courier Newsroom scored an exclusive interview with Biden.
“Stevenson’s role in helping lead the White House’s digital strategy could raise questions about coordination between McGowan’s network of media outlets and the White House due to Courier Newsroom’s business model revolving around online engagement and messaging on social media,” Fox News noted.
The review found that visitor logs between April 2022 and August 2022 showed that McGowan met several times with Madeline Strasser, a former adviser to then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, as well as Nina Srivastava, another adviser to Klain.
“McGowan, who worked on former President Obama’s re-election campaign and later for Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC that backed Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential candidacy, launched Good Information Inc., in 2021 to counter ‘fake news’ and disinformation,” according to Fox News. “As part of its operations, Good Information acquired Courier Newsroom, which McGowan also founded.”
Left-wing mega-donors such as the George Soros-bankrolled Open Society Foundations have reportedly poured millions into the organization, One of the Soros nonprofits is the Fund for Policy Reform which, according to a review by Fox News Digital, gave Courier Newsroom three grants for a total of $5 million in 2021 and 2022 to “support its non-partisan journalism, which aims to further the common good and general welfare of U.S. communities by providing access to information.”
“Open Society is proud to be among several funders who support Courier Newsroom, which is responding to the disappearance of so many trusted local news organizations across the United States to provide quality, local, values-driven journalism and to meet readers where they are — online,” a spokesperson for Open Society Foundations told Fox News Digital.
According to its grant database, one of the grants was marked as going toward supporting “journalism on democracy and voting rights issues.”
When asked about the meetings at the White House between top Biden aides and McGowan, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital that they are “proud to have restored White House press briefings and to engage with a wide range of media.”
Courier Newsroom launched “a seven-figure ad campaign to boost Democratic politicians during the 2020 elections, and some of its news pieces mirrored the politicians’ own press releases,” Fox News noted.
A 2020 piece by Politico asserted that Courier was “blurring the lines between campaign advocacy and a newsroom.”
The news organization “acts like a loose arm of the Democratic Party,” the report stated at the time, noting that its “seven local news-focused verticals are strategically focused on major presidential swing states.”
“Experts in media ethics and misinformation worry that the advocacy-cloaked-in-journalism tactic is pouring gasoline on a raging fire of consumer trust and online disinformation,” Politico reported at the time.
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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