A group closely linked to hard-left conspiracy theorists has been given more than a quarter of a million pounds of public money to promote “trusted, high-quality local journalism.”

Bylines Networks Ltd is the second largest recipient of money from the Government’s new Local News Fund, receiving a total of £266,221 to “fund the future of local news.” Bylines Networks Ltd is closely associated with Byline Times, whose recent output is a mixture of hard-left attack, Jason Arday trutherism and the frankly deranged.

Around the same time Byline also worked with the Hacked Off lobby group

Byline Times and Bylines Networks Ltd are controlled by the same people, Peter Jukes and Steve Colegrave, who are directors of both. Bylines Network describes itself as a “partner organisation to Byline Times” and says that the two organisations “work closely together.“

Byline Times’s frequent investigative fare is to reveal the hitherto unsuspected existence of shadowy “networks,” “linked” to top villains such as Palantir’s Peter Thiel and the editor of this magazine, Michael Gove, all working together to create many things which are bad in the world.

In August, Byline Times purported to show that Arday, the Cambridge academic, had been brought down not through his own dishonesty or academic misconduct (which it denied or minimised) but through “coordinated targeting by an explicitly anti-black race science network” linked to Thiel. It suggested the professor’s claim to have personally raised “just over £5m for charity” was plausible because “a Byline Times analysis of the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with for two decades found that they had a combined gross income of approximately £1.4 billion to £1.5 billion – putting his £5 million collective fundraising claim at well under 1 per cent of their overall income.”

This, as we pointed out at the time, is a complete non sequitur. As the Atlantic’s Helen Lewis put it: “That sensation you can feel is your brain melting out through your ears and trickling down your neck. The same analysis would uphold my claim to have, say, just donated six fighter jets to the U.S. government, because they cost a minuscule fraction of the nearly $1 trillion defence budget.”

Bylines Network runs a series of news websites across the country (Yorkshire Bylines, Sussex Bylines, Bylines Scotland and so on) which include similar content to Byline Times. West England Bylines, for instance, recently published an article claiming that many of the claims against Arday “have now been disproven.” Central Bylines said the plagiarism claims were “largely unsubstantiated.” East Anglia Bylines said the attacks on Arday were “part of a wider campaign directed at Europe by the racist far right.” Other Bylines Network articles could fairly be described as propaganda.

Further back, Byline Times (then known as Byline.com) promoted and defended a number of conspiracy theories for which there was little evidence, including the now discredited claims of a “Westminster child sex abuse ring” involving prominent establishment figures. Byline shared personnel, including Jukes, with Exaro, the “investigative website” that first published false sex abuse claims against the late Lord Brittan, the former defence chief Lord Bramall and the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor.

Around the same time Byline also worked with the Hacked Off lobby group in an attempt to discredit John Whittingdale, then culture secretary, who opposed Hacked Off’s demands for controls on the press. Byline revealed that Whittingdale, who was single, had unwittingly had a relationship with a prostitute, a story rejected by four newspapers as an invasion of his privacy.

Byline claimed it was revealing “blackmail from [the] criminal underworld” and a “year-long relationship between a senior figure in David Cameron’s government and a dominatrix which potentially jeopardised government security”. In fact, Whittingdale was not a minister at the time of the relationship; the affair lasted less than half a year; and the site later admitted that the sex worker’s supposed connections to the underworld were “rumours” which “remain as yet unsubstantiated.”

At the time, as I also reported, Byline was funded by Eric Li, a Shanghai businessman who has said dictatorship works better than democracy and has called for more constraints on journalists in China. Li has said that the West “seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift.” Articles by Li were published on 4th Media, a website promoting anti-Western conspiracy theories and supporting authoritarian regimes. (Jukes took me to Ipso over this story and lost, though it did not stop him claiming that he had won.)

More recently, speaking of attack operations which we can substantiate, Byline Times played a key part in the campaign against the then state-funded monitor of anti-Muslim hatred, Tell Mama, which faced an ultimately successful rival for the funding in a new startup body, the British Muslim Trust. (It has proved a very bad swap, as readers of The Spectator will know.)

Byline Times published a two-part investigation claiming, without proper evidence, that Tell Mama was “widely distrusted” by British Muslims. Byline Times did not declare in these articles that the author, Nafeez Ahmed, is married to Akeela Ahmed – who would shortly become (and remains) chief executive of the British Muslim Trust.

Before joining Byline Times, where he is “head of investigations,” Nafeez Ahmed also had a record as a 7/7 truther, questioning whether the authorities knew the 2005 suicide attacks on the London transport network were going to happen in advance. He claimed the “prima facie case that the government had some kind of dubious relation to the attacks…is almost a foregone conclusion.”

The Local News Fund is part of Labour’s efforts to anoint “trustworthy” news providers to act as bulwarks of truth in a misinformation age. The choice of Byline suggests, however, that broad political sympathy – or at least hostility to the right people – matters at least as much as trustworthiness. So the Government is spending our money as wisely as ever. But if this is the “future of local news,” God help us.