He he he. LOS will never be expanded! I'm staying true to the model.
Okay, so yeah, people will hate your guts. The newspaper won't help your popularity that much, especially if you don't have the EXE I posted last night.
HOWEVER: In that game where I won in 2017, my popularity was 0%. Unless you have a newspaper, you do not care about being popular, you care about public opinion on the issues. Brainwashing high profile people and leaving them in your recruit pool is good -- people do not associate their undercover liberalism with your cause... newspapers will work, but only if you are popular, because people associate your paper with their view on you. I've found kidnappings very efficient, although a paper will work too, if you are careful about being non-violent in front of non-conservatives.
For any crimes that you commit at a site, your approval rating will go up, unless you alienated people. Public opinion on the issues will always go up, unless you alarm the conservatives. In this case, the LSC name gets attached to the media stories surrounding the incident, and the amount that public opinion changes depends on your popularity. As long as no one was alienated, even if you kidnapped people, this is good -- the public sees attacks against extreme targets as salacious news, not as immorality. However, if you alienate the site, the media has lots of negative interviews with regular folks who saw you doing horrible things. Then all of the kidnapping gets an ugly human face, and your popularity goes down.
For instance, in my last game I kidnapped a ton of AM radio personalities... they started influencing opinion, but my popularity was 0%, and the public's view on AM radio was also 0%, because they felt sorry that AM radio was victim to assaults by my extremist organization. The personalities got the rest of the issues on my side though.
Failing to indoctrinate a kidnap victim (hauling them out back and shooting them) also lowers your popularity.