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Outlet profile

Cardinal & Pine (Opinion)

U.S. left / progressive

Owned byOwned by Courier Newsroom, a network of state-focused news sites run by Good Information Inc. Courier has been tied to the progressive nonprofit ACRONYM. The sites are not locally owned.
FundingMainly the Courier Newsroom parent, which is backed by philanthropic and investor money. Reports name donors and investors such as Reid Hoffman and George Soros. Cardinal & Pine also solicits reader contributions, sponsorships and underwriting. It says it takes no money from parties, candidates or campaigns. Some critics describe the money as opaque.
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

Cardinal & Pine launched in 2020 as one of several state-focused sites in the Courier Newsroom network. Courier was built to counter the decline of local news and to reach audiences that its backers saw as under-informed, including Democratic-leaning voters. The network has drawn criticism from media watchdogs and some local-news outlets, which have called such sites 'pink slime' or 'hyper-partisan.' Their complaint is that Courier's sites look like local outlets but are run by a national, politically oriented operation. Courier says it follows journalistic standards, discloses its ownership, and takes no money from political parties or campaigns. Fact-checking and bias raters generally place the site on the left. Its North Carolina coverage centers on state politics, elections, health care, the environment and the legislature, usually from a progressive angle. Readers should treat its opinion content as advocacy and check its factual claims against other sources. I could not open all of the pages cited below, so details such as exact funding figures and fact-check ratings are unverified.

Sources

  1. About Us - Cardinal & Pine
  2. Cardinal & Pine - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact Check
  3. Democrat-tied group's network of hyper-partisan local news sites includes three in NC
  4. Pink-slime journalism comes to North Carolina's Senate race
  5. Cardinal & Pine: Contact Information, Journalists, and Overview

Profile compiled 2026-10-29; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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