That’s a spectacular leap for a nonprofit, especially in Medora,” Jeff Nesbit wrote in a 2016 profile of the Franklin Center in Salon, excerpted from his book “Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP”: “It was almost as if someone wished to utilize the charter concept of the Franklin Center—developing individual but interlinked news centers across the United States that would all promote the same messages—for other purposes and therefore infused it with a mountain of funding and network support. Intriguingly, this was a year before the Tea Party movement seemingly sprang from nowhere and spread like a prairie fire to the thirty-nine state capitals where the Franklin Center now operates its news sites.