Carolina Public Press
By Jon Elliston:
Rep. Tim Moffitt, the second-term Republican state legislator who represents parts of Buncombe County, has long maintained that conservatives don’t get a fair shake in the press. So he created his own media company, InTouchNC, in December 2012.
The company has provided “a new level of constituent service,” he said in a recent interview.
InTouchNC conducts online operations for about 30 of Moffitt’s House Republican colleagues, running websites and social media for them.
The company’s extensive content addresses North Carolina legislation, politics and history, emphasizing the GOP’s perspective on things.
So far, InTouchNC has made an occasional splash and some money, while mostly sidestepping concerns about how much state legislators can and should forge business relationships with their colleagues.
And aside from an initial burst of publicity after the company’s launch — and a publicized spat over a print insert the company commissioned in the Asheville Citizen-Times — Moffitt’s side project has received little media attention.
Now, a Carolina Public Press investigation has documented a new level of detail about InTouchNC. Campaign finance reports, along with interviews with Moffitt and others, reveal much about the company’s scope and operations.
Among our findings:
• InTouchNC has received more than $55,000 in payments from the campaign committees of dozens of state legislators.
• The company’s top client has been Moffitt himself, with the legislator paying his company $9,500 from his own campaign funds.
• According to Moffitt, he did not vet the idea of establishing the company with the State Ethics Commission, contradicting an early media report that said he had done so.
• A number of legislators who have received the company’s services have listed no expenditures to InTouchNC in their campaign finance reports. Moffitt said they are paying by other means.
• The company’s print project — a tabloid-sized newspaper called The Raleigh Digest — will continue despite the dispute that occurred after it appeared as an insert in the Asheville Citizen-Times last November. In addition, InTouchNC recently diversified, taking on some non-political clients as well.
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