Terry Dunn
Part Two
Terry Dunn knows what it's like to be a voice in the wilderness. As a member of the Alabama Public Service Commission (PSC) from 2010 to 2014, he warned the public that regulators' hands-off approach to Alabama Power would lead to escalating power bills in the future. But relatively few Alabamians seemed to listen, and in the process, Dunn learned what it's like to be targeted by the power company's scheme to pay digital-news outlets to attack its critics -- a scheme NPR and Floodlight helped expose in an investigative report yesterday, as we outlined in Part One of our series.
Dunn wound up losing in the 2014 election, but his voice still is being heard. From the NPR/Floodlight report:
Terry Dunn couldn't fathom why Alabama's residents — among the poorest in the U.S. — pay some of the nation's most expensive electricity bills.
So in 2010, Dunn ran for a seat on the state commission that sets energy prices. He promised to hold a formal rate hearing at which Alabama Power executives would have to open their financial books and answer questions, under oath and in public. That hadn't happened for nearly three decades.
After winning, Dunn says, a top lobbyist for the utility took him aside and promised he could hold his roughly $100,000-a-year position on the commission for years — as long as he remained a team player. (Alabama Power declined to make the executive available to address the accusation; the utility and its corporate parent, Southern Company, declined all comment for this story.)
"They didn't take me serious," Dunn says now.
Soon, Dunn learned the kind of price he would have to pay for not playing ball:
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.
Attacks began in online news outlets in 2013. One headline in Yellowhammer News read: "Democrats Embrace Republican Public Service Commissioner Terry Dunn."
In a June 2014 column, Alabama Political Reporter's editor in chief, Bill Britt, cast Dunn as a pawn of his own aide, a Democrat.
"For some Dunn is a populist hero; for others, he's a radical environmentalist," Britt wrote. He saw Dunn as manipulated by those who "find companies like Alabama Power a convenient political target."
These were devastating portrayals for Dunn in a deeply red state.
"Mostly everything was all made up," he says. "You get to thinking, 'Why are they attacking me?' I'm just telling the truth and trying to do what's right for the people."
Was Alabama Power behind the attacks? That remains unclear, but it was clear that Dunn's hands-on approach was not welcome at the PSC:
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.
In 2014, Dunn lost his reelection bid by 19 percentage points — to a catfish farmer who had previously served as a county commissioner.
Eight years after Dunn's defeat, Alabama has still not held a rate hearing on electricity prices. Alabama Power remains one of the most profitable utility companies in the country.
K.B. Forbes, CEO of the CDLU public charity and advocacy group and publisher of the banbalch.com blog, has become one of the power company's most vocal critics -- and like Dunn, he learned that can make you a target.
Alabama Political Reporter (APR) and Yellowhammer News are perhaps the two most prominent news sites in the state that have become part of a network forged by Matrix LLC and its founder, Joe Perkins. Forbes reported that anonymously supplied financial documents show Alabama Power funneled $120,000 in 2020 to APR. The payments appear to have coincided with three hit pieces against Forbes and the CDLU. On top of that, Forbes reports, APR journalist Josh Moon conducted what might be called a "research expedition" targeting CDLU and its CEO.
What about Yellowhammer News? Well, its activities are a little more difficult to decipher, report NPR/Floodlight:
The links to Yellowhammer News are more convoluted. In 2014 — the year Terry Dunn lost his bid for reelection — he faced attacks in the online press, including in Yellowhammer News.
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.
For example, Yellowhammer News runs the Facebook page of a nonprofit, the Alabama Free Market Alliance, which attacks renewable energy. That nonprofit received $100,000 in 2014 from the Alabama Power-linked group, federal tax records show. All the nonprofits were involved in work that furthered the interests of Alabama Power.
"Yellowhammer Multimedia has no relationship, financial or otherwise, with Alabama Political Reporter, Matrix LLC or Alabama Free Market Alliance," Yellowhammer News owner Allison Ross says. She did not respond to questions about the site's relationship with Alabama Power.
As for Matrix, its influence has grown well beyond the boundaries of Alabama:
Florida has stood out as one of Matrix's biggest successes. The firm represented several of the state's largest corporations, including a major fertilizer and sugar company as well as Florida Power & Light.
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.
In May 2020, The Capitolist ran a story mocking a call by the Miami Herald for reader donations. The headline read: "The Miami Herald has turned to begging to support their biased reporting and fear-mongering."
Emails obtained by Floodlight and NPR for this story show that Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy had proposed the story to Matrix employees.
"I would think The Capitolist would have a field day with this one," Silagy wrote to Pitts on May 4, 2020. The story ran three days later. Silagy had also suggested a cartoon of a prominent Herald reporter, Mary Ellen Klas, "with a tin cup on the street corner." The Capitolist blasted to thousands of its email newsletter subscribers an edited image of Klas in which she holds a sign asking for "Spare change for Fake News — Miami Herald reporter needs help."
Journalism relies on a currency of trust: trust that the information provided is fairly presented. Trust that there are no hidden ulterior motives driving those reports, even when news is presented with a point of view.
"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. I mean, that's just a cardinal rule of journalism."
The editors operating the Matrix-linked sites do not appear to be following those rules.
For example, emails show that The Capitolist's editor-in-chief and publisher, Brian Burgess — once a top aide to Senator Scott back when Scott was Florida's governor — asked Matrix executives for permission to write a pro-solar energy story. The story was requested in May 2020 by one of The Capitolist's other sponsors — a public relations company.
"Sachs Media is asking me for coverage on this, but wanted to run it by you first," Burgess wrote to Abigail MacIver, the Matrix employee to whom the site was formally registered. "Need guidance on this ASAP."
One Florida publisher admits he does not play by standard journalism rules:
Of all the leaders of sites with links to Matrix, only one, Florida Politics Publisher Peter Schorsch, acknowledges he doesn't observe traditional journalistic practices when deciding what to cover.
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.
By his own account, Schorsch also was paid roughly $100,000 by Apryl Marie Fogel, the publisher of Alabama Today, another of the Matrix-linked sites. The money went for help with "editorial and digital tech services," he tells NPR and Floodlight. Fogel, who is also former Matrix CEO Pitts' romantic partner, received more than $140,000 from Matrix, the firm's records show. (She declines to comment on her ties to Matrix, saying "not my monkeys, not my circus.")
Meanwhile, back in Alabama, Terry Dunn has a case of "I tried to tell you":
As for Terry Dunn, he now lives more than two hours' drive from Montgomery, Alabama's capital. He left the city for good after he lost his reelection bid in 2014.
"Seeing how dirty everything was, [it's] basically just a cesspool down there," Dunn says. "I was glad to get out."
Despite believing Alabama Power sent Matrix to drag him down, Dunn has trouble separating those who created corporate propaganda from the people who swallowed it — and voted him out of office. He knows that Alabama residents' electricity rates are not appreciably better today than they were before his election. These days, what fight he had has been displaced by resentment.
"Alabamians bitched about high power bills, but when they had someone that would address it, they abandoned me," Dunn says. "So let them struggle to keep the lights on."