Media’s political divide plays out in Maine

Local media in the state of Maine has emerged as an unlikely and asymmetric battlefield for big American political money.

Two of the country’s key left-leaning political spenders, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the medical device billionaire philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss, played a central — and previously unreported — role in the nonprofit purchase of nearly two dozen respected local newspapers in Maine, including the Portland Press Herald, the Lewiston Sun Journal and the Kennebec Journal. The July announcement by the National Trust for Local News was greeted with relief by the papers’ management,...