Commentary: Liberal philanthropists have their sights on local news

Now, more than ever, the news has a credibility problem.

Thanks to the rise of so-called pink-slime news outlets, stories that might read like news reports are increasingly often ideological advertisements rather than journalistic endeavors.

These newspapers and digital outlets present themselves as fact-based local media but in reality are partisan or ideological propaganda mills affiliated with political consultants and funded by ideological donors who sometimes remain anonymous. Perhaps the best-known of these outfits is Courier Newsroom, founded by longtime Democratic operative Tara McGowan and recipient of one of President Joe Biden’s rare one-on-one interviews.

But the growing partisan media sphere is about far more than just “dark money” newsgathering outfits aligned with political operatives. Left-wing institutions are making a major investment to make local news, which public opinion polling shows is more trusted than national news, a font of liberal and progressive messages and opposition research.

Partisan journalism is not new; it’s arguably the American tradition. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and their Democratic-Republican and Federalist parties, battled out the idea war of their day in openly partisan gazettes. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, party-backed newspapers were common, with some bearing their old partisan names to this day.

The post-World War II era saw mass consolidation of the so-called objective mass media. The news was spread on airwaves regulated by the government’s fairness doctrine and in consolidated, citywide newspapers that claimed to be “objective” and not aligned with a political party. This was at best misleading; as conservative activists such as Reed Irvine and Brent Bozell pointed out decades ago, these metropolitan outlets were clearly and consistently liberal and aligned with Democrats.

But changes in the media landscape have diminished the mass media and opened the door to ideological interests backed by big money, especially in local and state-capital news production and distribution. In the state capitals, that big money operation has been boosted by Arabella Advisors, the consulting firm that manages a multibillion-dollar “dark money” network for liberal interests and election campaigns.

States Newsroom, originally created as a project of the Arabella-managed Hopewell Fund, operates a network of outlets focused on state-level politics and policy that includes Maryland Matters in the Old Line State. In 2022, the network reported raising $23.4 million and spending $18.7 million. On its 2021 tax return, States Newsroom declared that its “program service accomplishments” included “hard-hitting reporting and commentary to change the political debate,” indicating its ideological motivation.

But States Newsroom is only the beginning. Last year, a coalition of major liberal foundations including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $500 million Press Forward campaign to strengthen local news outlets. Other participants in the Press Forward campaign include the Ford Foundation, one of the largest left-of-center advocacy philanthropies; the Democracy Fund endowed by liberal eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar; and the left-of-center William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The project will be managed through the Miami Foundation, a provider of donor-advised funds that can obscure the flow of money from institutional donors and foundations to particular projects.

And while the Press Forward foundations, like their predecessors in the commercial mass media, claimed that their intentions were not ideological, there’s good evidence that that is not the case. MacArthur Foundation president John Palfrey said of the project, “The philanthropic sector … is beginning to see that progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.” One can reasonably suspect that the big philanthropic foundations behind Press Forward, which are overwhelmingly left-wing, hope to control “the public’s understanding of the facts” to win on “every other issue.”

And that’s why conservative donors and activists are in danger if they do not engage on the issue of journalistic production.

It falls to conservative consumers to be discerning in their media consumption, but if only the biggest and most progressive names in Big Philanthropy are playing at helping the public understand the facts, it will be harder for the public not to come to their preferred progressive policy conclusions. The conservative donor class ultimately must get off the sidelines and give the movement the tools it needs to fight back.

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Michael Watson (contact@capitalresearch.org) is research director for Capital Research Center, which investigates the role of nonprofits and money in politics.

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