When ownership of the Birmingham Times changed hands in 2016, it seemed like the future of the city’s only remaining Black newspaper was being put in good hands. Founded in 1964 by Dr. Jesse J. Lewis, the Times covered Birmingham, Alabama’s Black community at the height of the civil rights movement, and continued to highlight Black stories and Black voices for over 50 years.
But with the founding editor in his 90s and the newspaper business at large not exactly thriving, the Times needed to secure its future — and a nonprofit called The Foundation for Progress in Journalism, which purchased the paper from Dr. Lewis, appeared capable of doing just that.
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It turns out the money behind the FPL comes from the Alabama Power Foundation, the charitable arm of the state’s largest public utility.
The company has become deeply enmeshed in local news in the state, having also launched its own newsroom, Alabama News Center, in 2015. According to an investigation copublished by The Guardian and the news nonprofit Floodlight, there’s one subject that does not get covered critically at publications financed by the utility, if it gets covered at all: Alabama Power.
“In the last decade, nearly a dozen local reporters and editors were hired to staff the two Alabama news outlets,” Floodlight reporter Miranda Green wrote. “A Floodlight review of the content since the utility founded the Alabama News Center in 2015 shows it publishes overwhelmingly positive stories about the power company.”
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There are notable omissions too, according to Green, like the pollution in the majority-black Uniontown, Alabama, from a coal-ash dump nearby (which includes waste generated by Alabama Power’s plants), and the notoriously high rates charged to the utilities customers.
While Birmingham Times’ executive editor, Barnett Wright, says the power company “has zero influence in the newsroom,” Alabama Power’s local news holdings certainly appear to be part of a larger effort to shape the narrative around the company.
In addition, Alabama Power was found to have paid local news sites through a consulting firm in order to influence coverage and has spent heavily too to maintain influential relationships with Black civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — which has advocated for reducing federal oversight of the utility. (Both of those investigations were also done by Floodlight and partner newsrooms.)
Alabama Power’s James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant in West Jefferson, Alabama, is the single largest source of carbon emissions in the entire country, full-stop.
There’s nothing secret about the ownership of the Alabama News Center. The website’s “about” page reads, “Alabama News Center is a credible, direct source of the news and information that matter most to Alabama Power customers.”
What matters most to the 1.4 million people in central and southern Alabama who rely on the utility may be subject to debate. Alabama is one of the top coal-producing states in the country, and Alabama Power’s James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant in West Jefferson, Alabama, is the single largest source of carbon emissions in the entire country, full-stop. But stories on the site talk wistfully about coal, like a 2016 piece about the “bittersweet milestone” of an Alabama Power plant making the switch from coal to natural gas “in response to costly mandates set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.”
The Birmingham Times doesn’t make its funding or ownership so obvious, and does have at least some very general coverage of climate-related issues — but not as it relates to Alabama Power. The most recent story about the utility ran last fall, and was about a phone scam targeting customers. More recently, according to Floodlight, the biggest mention of the company was the full-page ad that ran on the back of the weekly print edition.