A question (hopefully not silly) for you Dems and progressives that may be better connected and more knowledgeable than me.

I happened to notice several small-town NC newspapers are owned by "Civitas Media". Civitas Media is a part of a larger company, Versa Capital Management, a private equity firm that is based in Philadelphia.

With the name "Civitas", I was wondering if NC's own Art Pope has anything to do with Civitas Media or Versa Capital Management. At least some of the NC papers I've looked at seem to be fairly conservative, running unaltered and unchallenged op-eds from Pope's think tanks.

I did some digging around the web and didn't see any publicly available info on Pope's ties to the private equity firm or Civitas Media, their newspaper holdings company. However, with that name, which has been so closely associated with Pope's "think tanks", foundations and political action committees, I am wondering if he has some kind of less than public financial interest.