Billboards such as this one caught Kyle Cook's eye and prompted him to write an article for Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver, Colorado.
Fact Check AZ: The Epoch Times
If you've driven on Interstate 10 lately, particularly between Tucson and Phoenix, you may have noticed billboards proclaiming The Epoch Times as "#1 Trusted News".
Or perhaps you've noticed their articles popping up in social media and in local newspapers.
Arizona is not the only place seeing traditional and gorilla advertising from The Epoch Times. Their billboard have been seen in battleground states including Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota. They even pop up in places that are not thought of as being in play this election cycle, such as Oregon and Florida
Physical copies of the paper also pop up occasionally in public spaces. We've even seen one in our break room at AZPM, which is on the University of Arizona campus.
The publication's issues go deeper than that its large-scale, occasionally guerrilla marketing. The organization has opaque ownership, and its reporting will push debunked conspiracy theories and anti-Western medicine rheotric.
Kyle Cooke wrote about these issues earlier this year for Denver's Rocky Mountain PBS, where he is the digital media manager.
Read the full episode transcript here:
As we mentioned, some traditional news outlets have carried stories from the Epoch Times. Among them, for a time, was the Sierra Vista Herald and some of its sister newspapers in Cochise County. They carried those stories for a few months earlier this year.
We asked Herald Managing Editor Matt Hickman about that. He said the newspaper was offered a free trial of the stories from the Epoch Times, and decided to try it out as a counterpoint to some other free-use content providers, who he said tend to be left-leaning.
But Hickman said he soon noticed the content the Herald was offered by the outlet was a more sanitized version of what was being posted on Epoch Times' website, which had suspect journalistic quality, so they stopped carrying the stories.
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