New John Mark Dougan's fake media network
Introduction
On January 27, 2025 John Mark Dougan participated in a round table in Moscow House of Nationalities organized [1] [2] by “EEU Civic Chamber” and “International Union of Free Journalists“ (IUFJ).
IUFJ is headed by another round table participant (through a video call) - Nikolay Kostyrkin, who is allegedly also a press-secretary for “EEU Civic Chamber”. He was briefly arrested in 2022 as an editor of Gagauznews for pro-Russian propaganda. Allegedly, he is no longer working with Gagauznews, but they continue to share his materials. IUFJ was one of the media partners of “anti-fascist” conference in 2022, which was likely the one funded by “pravfond“, a “foundation” backed by the Russian State.
Dougan’s speech sounded almost like a business pitch and was focused around his “achievements”, which include:
“Disinformer of the Year” award by NewsGuard
Over 150 of websites with “news” written by AI which were read by more than 40 million people
Amplifications of “news” with AI and laundering of news narratives
How narratives published through his websites infected mainstream LLM chat offerings, which was previously discovered by NewsGuard
His server at his home writing almost 90 thousand articles every month
He also complained about having a “small budget” and lack of success in cooperating with Russian media. At the very end of the recording, another participant - Sergey Demensky raised his interest “as a representative of TV BRICS” in the technologies described by Dougan.
Sergey Demensky is a director of “Eurasian Media Group”, which controls zarubejom[.]ru and eurasia[.]today. He is also involved in TV BRICS as a Member of the Board of Directors.
Dougan also participated in another event organized by “EEU Civic Chamber” on April 9, 2025 with a lecture. It was co-organized and hosted by “Institute of World Civilizations”.
New fake media network
It is not clear whether Dougan reached an agreement with Demensky or any other person in presence, but just a few days after, on January 29, 2025, 35 domains were registered:
wdmdtv[.]com
allstatesnews[.]us
walx[.]news
wktv[.]news
wtat[.]news
wval[.]news
ksfo[.]news
klas[.]news
kphl[.]news
ksmo[.]news
klax[.]news
kmia[.]news
kpbi[.]news
flga[.]news
kjfk[.]news
dailyweekly[.]news
txdaily[.]news
fldaily[.]news
sfreport[.]news
lareport[.]news
lachronicle[.]news
capitoldaily[.]news
usatimes[.]news
metroreport[.]news
windycitytimes[.]news
silvercity[.]news
bayoucitytoday[.]com
windycitymirror[.]com
windycitycrier[.]com
bayoucitycrier[.]com
twincityreport[.]com
goldengatedaily[.]com
capitalcitydaily[.]com
alohadigest[.]com
steelcitydaily[.]comAll domains were registered within minutes from each other and use the same CloudFlare NS pair: gordon + macy.
Another domain - citylinenews[.]com, was registered on February 15, 2025. It’s using emerie+konnor CloudFlare NS pair, which is typical for Dougan’s personal projects.
Associated campaigns
These campaigns seem to be a Dougan’s personal campaigns, rather than a externally ordered campaigns.
Telegram publications with a possibly accidental links to the new network
On February 10, a publication was made in Dougan’s personal channel, which included a link to a publication on capitalcitydaily[.]com. At a later point, the post was edited to exclude the link.
Shortly after this post, another one was made with a link to a publication on kpbi[.]news, which was shortly taken down and replaced with another one about the same story without a link.
A smear campaign against Catherine Belton and Volodymyr Zelenskyy
On March 11, “The American Majority” Telegram channel made two publications with links to an article published on usatimes[.]news on March 6, which belongs to the John Dougan’s fake media network. The story was also published on most of the websites from the new network and on some of his older websites on the same date.
Publication claims that Zelenskyy issued an official order to smear Donald Trump, who was recently inaugurated as U.S. president and that Zelenskyy chose Catherine Belton to do it. It’s likely that campaign was inspired by a rather catastrophic meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump in Oval Office at the White House on February 28. Catherine Belton is also not a random pick here: in November 2024, she made a publication, which exposed Dougan’s relationship with the “Center for Geopolitical Experise” (CGE) and GRU (Russian military intelligence agency) unit 29155, which is responsible for sabotage in foreign countries.
A “whistleblower” claiming that Ukraine sells supplied weapons on the black market
This episode was previously partially covered by NewsGuard, but it only mentions publications in his old network. The campaign promotes a clip from RedPill78 podcast from April 14 with a “whistleblower”, who claims that Ukraine sells weapons received from U.S. on the black market. A similar pattern was used by Dougan in a period before US presidential election in a complex campaign to smear Tim Walz, this time Dougan himself wasn’t on the podcast. Story was published on both old and new networks around April 17.
Setting eyes on Africa
On March 7, Dougan registered another domain: truefact[.]news. While the root domain remains inactive to this day, it’s subdomain africa[.]truefact[.]news contains a fake media outlet in Swahili.
We have not observed any campaigns associated with it and it seems to remain currently under the radar. It is also not clear whether it’s associated with potential Storm-1516 campaigns, which are ordered by CGE and GRU.