Conspiracy to Commit Journalism: The Media’s Attacks on the Scaife Foundations
Table of Contents:
The Rebuttal
All these networks mostly forwarded White House perceptions of a Pittsburgh-based "Darth Vader" without taking the time to make their reports a broader investigation of the crossroads between philanthropy and politics, or between philanthropy and journalism. No one asked questions offering a challenging rebuttal to the Clintonites’ anti-Scaife charges:
1. How can this be a conspiracy? The Scaife foundations’ donations are hardly secret, with their IRS forms posted on the Internet (at www.scaife.com). The organizations the Scaife foundations have supported are hardly in agreement about wrongdoing by President Clinton. Few of the dot-to-dot conspiracy stories connecting Scaife to The American Spectator magazine noticed Scaife is no longer funding the magazine after it published an article criticizing journalist Christopher Ruddy’s reporting on Vincent Foster’s death. Few note that alleged Scaife pawn Starr ruled the Foster death a suicide. What about the unsubstantiated Scaife-Starr conspiracy? As a February 11 Investor’s Business Daily editorial pointed out, if "this was a conspiracy, it sure was an odd one. Here was Scaife helping fund a new position that tempted Starr — allegedly ‘his’ man— away from the work of probing the president."
2. Who are the real powerhouses in public policy giving? Several large liberal foundations give hundreds of millions of dollars more to public policy nonprofits than do the Scaife foundations, yet only Scaife’s comparatively smaller donations are newsworthy. Reporters also ignore that many of the richest foundations in the United States are distinctly liberal, with the Ford Foundation authorizing grants of $300 million a year, the MacArthur Foundation donating over $100 million, and the Carnegie Foundation over $50 million. The largest conservative foundations, such as Bradley, Scaife, and Olin, each give less than $50 million. Between them, the Carthage and Sarah Scaife foundations give less than $25 million each year. Reporters don't think it's news when, for instance, the Ford Foundation supports such leftist groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Children's Defense Fund. In the 1980s, the Ford Foundation was so far to the left it even funded institutions in the Marxist regimes of Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe, and that never provoked media inquiries or even a mildly liberal ideological description from reporters.
3. Where was the vast left-wing media conspiracy in the Reagan years? With all the focus on Scaife’s now-defunct funding of The American Spectator, one might think that left-wing nonprofit groups had never played a part in the nation’s media system. But in fact, in previous administrations, investigative journalism (much of it wildly incorrect) charging some highly implausible and terrible conspiracies committed by Republican Presidents was funded by liberal foundations without those elements ever being lumped into a "vast left-wing conspiracy" by national media outlets. For example:
The Center for Investigative Reporting was founded in 1977 by a group of San Francisco radicals whose investigative credo was declared by CIR co-founder David Weir in a 1982 Newsweek interview: "We don't consider investigative reporting to be something that includes investigating welfare mothers." Throughout the 1990s, CIR’s financial lifeline has been the PBS series Frontline. Their documentaries included "The Great American Bailout," an investigation into the savings-and-loan scandal, which included a reasonable summary by then-CBS reporter Robert Krulwich, but also insinuated a conspiracy: that the Reagan administration delayed the S&L bailout until after George Bush won the 1988 election. CIR scored investigative deals with the commercial TV networks from the late ‘70s to the late ‘80s. But when network news budgets shrunk as the '90s approached, CIR was left high and dry. Liberal foundations and PBS rode to their rescue.
In a 1991 article in the American Journalism Review, Michael Hudson explained: "CIR recently received $75,000 — its largest grant ever — from the Florence and John Schumann Foundation in Montclair, New Jersey...In the spring of 1989, [Bill] Moyers had helped raise money for the toxic waste documentary and volunteered to serve as executive editor. This year, Moyers became president of the Schumann Foundation and helped CIR win the large grant." Moyers also serves on a board of advisers to CIR (in addition to ex-ABC reporter Sylvia Chase, former Newsweek editor Osborn Elliott, CNN's Judy Woodruff, NPR's Susan Stamberg and CBS’s Mike Wallace.)
The Christic Institute wasn’t a media organization, but its wild allegations were popular with PBS’s Frontline and the CBS program West 57th, among others. The Institute charged in a lawsuit against government officials that a "secret team" ran much of American foreign policy, including drug-running for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters. Their conspiracy theories were the inspiration for two PBS Frontline documentaries in April and May of 1988. In June 1988, Judge James King threw the suit out for "abuse of the judicial process" and awarded 12 defendants $1 million in attorney fees. (PBS never apologized for or retracted their films.) Christic Institute funders included the Arca Foundation, the C.S. Fund, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, and the Tides Foundation, as well as millions from rock stars and movie stars such as Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt, and Kris Kristofferson.
(Three years later, Frontline, which has no private underwriters, profit or nonprofit, ran two hour-long documentaries on the conspiracy theory that the 1980 Reagan campaign delayed the release of American hostages in Iran for political gain. The "October Surprise" theory was investigated by Democratic-led House and Senate committees, which found the accusations groundless. So sometimes the funders of conspiracy-theory journalism against a President aren’t millionaires with an agenda: they’re taxpayers, many of whom involuntarily funded PBS documentaries they found offensive and inaccurate.)
The National Security Archive was another popular liberal media resource. Founded by former Washington Post reporter Scott Armstrong and other liberal activists in 1985, the Archive has been dedicated to using the Freedom of Information Act to secure U.S. government documents on foreign policy adventures, beginning with a heavy emphasis on the Iran-Contra affair. Among their books is White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy. The Archive, now based in the nation’s capital at George Washington University, explains on its Web site that "The Archive’s $1.5 million per year budget comes from publication revenues and from private philanthropists such as the Carnegie Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation." Another donor is the radical-left Arca Foundation, whose Web site explains they gave "to support the Archive's research into the connections between the CIA, covert operations and drug-trafficking in the 1980s." Isn’t this an exercise in "Reagan-hater" philanthropy?
4. If foundation money and journalism are a toxic mix, how do media outlets explain their own foundation receipts? Millions of liberal foundation dollars are currently being spent in the news rooms of "objective" national media outlets for projects that have included supporting Clinton policy initiatives and attacks against press coverage of Clinton. Why hasn’t that attracted all the outlets who’ve spread the accusations against Scaife? If media outlets suggest that little-known millionaire "Goldfingers" are altering the political scene through unexamined contributions, then how do today’s for-profit national media outlets explain their own financial infusions from charitable foundations, and what agenda do those dollars fund? For example:
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation placed five fellows on Hillary Clinton’s secret health care task force, and when that secrecy became an issue, the foundation doled out a half million to put on four town meetings with the First Lady to create the appearance of a public dialogue. The foundation also funded polls for the White House and studies for pro-Clinton groups like Families USA, including one that doubled the estimates of uninsured Americans. But media outlets raised little fanfare when the Johnson Foundation paid NBC News $3.5 million in 1994 for a two-hour, commercial-free special on health care titled "To Your Health."
The main attraction of the foundation-funded NBC special was Hillary Clinton, who referred repeatedly to NBC’s taped horror stories of uninsured sick people as proof of the need for the Clinton plan. The program opened and closed with tributes to Mrs. Clinton for bringing this important issue to public attention. The other speakers also suggested a pro-Clinton tilt: on-stage panelists leaned two-to-one in favor of the Clinton plan or a single-payer plan. Speakers from the audience also leaned to the liberal side by two to one. The audience clapped loudly at declarations in favor of socialized medicine. The media did not warn the public of conspiracies of collusion between "Clinton-lover" foundations and journalists.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation was also active in the fight for the Clinton health plan, at one point sponsoring a television ad generically promoting "managed competition" with the League of Women Voters. The foundation had fellows on Hillary Clinton’s secret health care task force, and foundation head Drew Altman was a familiar pro-"reform" talking head on television before the Clinton plan failed. The foundation also operates a media fellows program on health care policy advised by, among others, former U.S. News & World Report economics writer Susan Dentzer and ABC medical correspondent Dr. Tim Johnson. In their publicity materials, the foundation underlines the political impact of the fellowships: "The impact the media has on the decisions our country makes in health is evident. The media plays an important role in shaping the debate and helping to determine the choices policymakers and the public make when it comes to health care." Media fellows have included reporters from National Public Radio, PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
The Kaiser Family Foundation also funds special partnerships with media companies. In February, it announced a teen pregnancy prevention project in cooperation with NBC. (It has a partnership with the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the National Press Foundation to investigate reproductive health "problems" such as Catholic hospitals’ failure to perform abortions.) It has also announced a new partnership with U.S. News & World Report "to monitor Americans’ experiences with the changing health care system." It has a three-way partnership with Harvard University and The Washington Post to "design and analyze surveys examining public knowledge, perceptions, and misperceptions on major issues. The Post then reports the results as well as the facts to dispel myths and correct misperceptions." The Post’s most recent project was a four-part series on the changing roles of women. No one in the media has questioned whether this foundation’s support for health "reform" or abortion rights presents an agenda to the journalists they fund.
The Pew Charitable Trusts are credited on the Internet as the funder of the Committee for Concerned Journalists, the organization of current and former "objective" media personalities that recently presented a study attacking the use of anonymous sources in the first days of the Monica Lewinsky story. In an analysis for the Capital Research Center, journalist Alicia Shepard found: "Since fall 1993, the foundation has pledged at least $19.7 million to various media enterprises, $10.7 million of it to support civic journalism…The overarching goal of these activities is to use the ‘extraordinary power’ of the media to stimulate the public ‘to participate in community life.’"
Pew is supporting National Public Radio’s reporting on culture, the environment, and religion. Since federal law makes it difficult for foundations to donate money to for-profit organizations, such as newspapers, the Pew trusts make donations to the liberal Tides Foundation, which in turn funds the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, which pays the newspapers. Pew has given millions of dollars to media outlets and groups like the Citizens Election Project (run by liberal former Time Washington Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud) to cover the 1994 and 1996 campaigns. If Scaife’s contributions are so questionable, have any networks asked any questions about the ethics or agenda of these donations?
