Columbia Journalism Review Examines AIM’s Undercover DEI Investigations
July 30, 2026
How a Network of Pink-Slime News Sites and Conservative Activists Went After Campus DEI
Using FOIA requests and hidden-camera videos, the groups targeted universities, leading to the firing of faculty and staff.
July 30, 2026 | By Miranda Green
In February of 2025, as college students across the country settled into their spring semesters, administrators at four major public universities in the Midwest received public records requests about their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which arrived on the same day from a network of sites that looked like local news outlets, asked for all emails employees had sent the previous year containing the words “BIPOC, Indigenous, Latinx, Diversity, and Non-white.”
The requests, from sites owned by a paid partisan network called Metric Media, were part of a strategic, ongoing effort to expose and castigate public universities for teaching with an eye on diversity. Around the same time, a nonprofit called Accuracy in Media began uploading gotcha-style hidden-camera videos to YouTube of school administrators talking about their continued efforts to foreground diversity and equity. The videos sought to highlight the contrast between those efforts and school rules that, in some cases, ban educators from talking about gender and identity. And last summer, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sent FOIA requests to the North Carolina public university system, seeking all syllabuses that contained any of a long list of terms, including “gender identity,” “racial equity,” “white privilege,” and “restorative justice.”