INCUBATORS

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new tag 3 22 incbtr

NO MERRI

see incub 2 7/16

see kochademia

who shall be poster boy? sally?

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-:{bastasch:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/3a/6b8/292

we have a wanker:

putz tip pt aus?! just ticked the boxes!

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-4185

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GGL 6 26

Staff Pipelines: The Koch apparatus acts as a political training ground, with many former staffers and network leaders moving into senior roles on Capitol Hill (such as the Senate Finance Committee) and inside presidential administrations. [1]

===

incubator xian legal klukowski?

jon berry cbg fedsoc liar mofo2025 pjt trmp

blackstone

promo vid MLK change culture i shit younot

b lackstone Legal Fellowship is not a culmination . . . it is a beginning

Blackstone Legal Fellowship is a leadership training program that brings together exceptional Christian law students and prepares them for careers marked by integrity, excellence, and leadership. Since 2000, Alliance Defending Freedom has trained more than 2,600 law students from more than 230 law schools in 30 different countries.

The Fellowship begins with a summer-long leadership training program, which includes three weeks of seminars on topics such as legal philosophy, constitutional law, practicing with integrity and excellence within the legal profession, and career development and cultural engagement. Interns also spend the summer engaged in legal internships across the world, working with nonprofits, governmental entities, and boutique law firms, among others.

The summer program represents a beginning, not a culmination, as Interns emerge with a professional network, enduring friendships, and a foundation of knowledge that will serve them throughout their careers. Those selected to become “Fellows” at the end of the summer also receive ongoing training, resources, and support through an international community.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donors-to-tucker-carlsons-daily-caller-news-foundation-revealed?ref=home

ref roger s 12 22

this reporting is one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of [Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

The non-profit that feeds the conservative Daily Caller website co-founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from entities and individuals who have received favorable coverage, including some who authored opinion pieces, a new filing shows.

The document—the Daily Caller News Foundation’s fiscal year 2021 tax statement—includes for thefirst time a list of donors to the 501(c)(3) organization, a group that is not required by law to disclose donor information. The filing also reveals that Carlson, who in 2020 announced he was leaving the Daily Caller and selling his stake in the website, is still the foundation chairman, and has not cut back on his hours.

When Carlson announced his split with the Daily Caller in 2020, he cited work constraints. “I’m just too absorbed in what I’m doing,” the host told **The Wall Street Journal** at the time, explaining, “I wasn’t helping in any way, because I’ve got an hour to do every night” on his Fox News program. The tax filing, which covers the following year, shows he continued to hold the chairman position and put in the same hours as in all previous foundation filings—five hours a week.

Many of the foundation’s donors are tied to industries and issues that the Caller covers frequently. Most notable is the Ariel Corporation,which manufactures natural gas compressors and gave $135,000 to support the news organization—which has for years been criticized for its pro-carbon energy reporting and financial ties to the Koch brothers, the right-wing industrialists.

Other donors have an even closer relationship with the site, including some who have published pieces in their own names, without a disclosure of their financial ties. That, according to top journalism ethics expert Kelly McBride raises ethics questions.

“With any news organization that solicits donations, you really have to have an editorial policy that articulates how you separate out your loyalty to your audience and to your journalistic mission from your ties to your donors,” McBride, who is senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute, told The Daily Beast.

such a policy, she said, would ideally include an advisement to donors that they can’t influence editorial work, and a promise of transparency whenever there’s a conflict of interest.

“You’re looking for, first of all, separation between fundraising and the editorial product, and you’re also looking for clarity around what donors can expect in exchange for their donation, as well as transparency so the audience understands,” McBride said, adding that “a tagline on an op-ed would be an obvious transparency mechanism.”

The Daily Beast reached out to the Daily Caller and Carlson for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.

The journalistic and ethical standards published on the Daily Caller website don’t mention the foundation or any policy regarding donor influence over editorial content. But some donors have contributed content themselves.

For instance, RightForge, an internet infrastructure provider that caters to conservatives, in 2021 gave the foundation $7,500. In May of that year, the Daily Caller ran an op-ed from RightForge CEO Martin Avila, criticizing what Avila called the social media “witch trial” of former President Donald Trump. Months later, RightForge announced it would host Trump’s new social media network, Truth Social.

Real estate investor Adam Milstein gave the foundation $25,000 in 2021 and published an opinion piece that same year. The piece—titled, “Strategic Active Philanthropy Can Strengthen Our American Values”—includes a brief bio for Milstein, which describes him only as “an active philanthropist, an investor, and community leader.”

While the Daily Caller has been blasted for its affinity for the fossil fuel industry, the tax filing shows the Daily Caller News Foundation received financial backing from conservative green-energy group ClearPath Action, which gave $10,000 in 2021.

ClearPath has received favorable coverage from the Daily Caller, which earlier this year cited CEO Rich Powell in an article about his group, without a disclaimer. When Powell landed a Daily Caller op-ed earlier this month, the outlet added a note to the piece and his contributor page that read, “The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.” But those notes did not mention the financial relationship.

Then there’s Daniel Oliver, a Daily Caller regular contributor who also serves as trustee of the George E. Coleman Jr. Foundation, which gave the foundation $7,500 in 2021. The Daily Caller highlights some of Oliver’s rich experience in his bio—chair of the Education and Research Institute, director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, and former chairmanships of the Federal Trade Commission under President Ronald Reagan and the National Review”—but doesn’t mention his role with the Coleman Foundation, or the donor relationship. (Buzzfeed News reported in 2019 that the foundation was a FDRLST Media investor, citing Oliver’s role.)

An even more influential GOP figure also appears in the filing, in the form of a $10,000 gift from CRC Advisors, a group headed up by arch-conservative megadonor and judicial activistLeonard Leo. The Daily Caller published a piece on Friday based on the results of a CRC poll, without disclosing the relationship. The two groups also show overlap

:{https://www.linkedin.com/in:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{/emma-heussner:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{-9912599a/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

campus reform

John Paul Hasson previously was a contributor for the Daily Caller and a Texas Camus Correspondent with Campus Reform. Currently, he is an Account Executive with CRC Advisors. John graduated from University of Dallas.]

in their employees, including current CRC vice president Kevin Daley, whose LinkedIn page says he left the Daily Caller in 2020 after four years as a reporter.

Power the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for the fossil fuel industry, donated $10,000 in 2021 and appears frequently enough in the Daily Caller that articles about the group have their own tag on the site. Since the donation, Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner has been cited in multiple Daily Caller pieces as an expert voice, without no mention of his status as a foundation donor.

Justin Olson , an elected Arizona utility regulatorand former Arizona GOP Senate candidate, gave the foundation $10,000 in 2021, listing his role at the time as an officer with right-wing youth activist group Turning Point USA.

The Daily Caller has given TPUSA favorable coverage, including after the donation. It also published an exclusive report in November 2021, the month after Olson announced his bid, revealing that a Scottsdale school board official had access to a so-called Google Drive “dossier” of personal information of vocal conservatives. (Police cleared the official of wrongdoing.) Olson tweeted the article when it came out, and expressed repeated outrage at the story on the platform, while a Twitter search shows he had not tweeted about schools previously.

The filing reveals the names of 2021 donors, but does not indicate whether they had donated before. Some of the contributors who present apparent conflicts of interest have had contributor roles in the publication previously, such as Leo and Adam Milstein, who published op-eds in 2018 and 2019. In 2018, when Power the Future announced its debut, the Daily Caller had the exclusive story.

There are, of course, numerous examples of media companies drawing funding from non-profit backers. But the Daily Caller and the DCNF have a unique relationship.

The foundation was created in 2011, a few years after Carlson founded the Daily Caller with then-partner Neil Patel, who still helms the operation. Thanks to the organization’s non-profit status, the foundation can subsidize not only publication costs, but the production of the actual content—with a built-in tax break.

Part of the foundation’s stated mission is to train young reporters, but its staff also generates content, which the Daily Caller then gets to post to its site for free. And while this content is nominally available to any publication,The Washington Postreported that it’s rarely used by anyone beyond the Daily Caller. A 2017 Center for Media and Democracy report found that the Daily Caller published “virtually everything” the nonprofit churned out.

However, other groups have taken advantage of the arrangement. The fact-checking site Snopes reported in 2019 that conservative political activists appropriated foundation content to populate a number of small-time websites styling themselves as local news outlets to smuggle political content to unsuspecting audiences.

The Daily Caller has also been called out for its financial and political ties to Trump’s campaign, which shelled out about $150,000 for access to the Daily Caller email list in the 2016 election, the Center for Media and Democracy reported.

One of the most familiar examples of a donor-funded news organization would be National Public Radio. While NPR gets some government grants, most of its money comes from private contributors—including from industries it reports on. But McBride noted that NPR puts disclaimers on stories that may present an apparent conflict.

“When you listen to public media, you hear that certain people give money for certain lines of reporting, like for climate change, et cetera. So you can fund a line of reporting, but you get no influence over how that news is presented, and public media also lets the audience know when that funding may intersects with the reporting,” McBride said.

It’s unclear whether any Daily Caller News Foundation donors tabbed their contributions for specific issues or series. But some well-known issues-driven names populate the list, including top GOP megadonor and election-denial enthusiast Dick Uihlein ($25,000), anti-climate change groups the Bradley Foundation ($50,000) and Sarah Scaife Foundation ($350,000), and conservative free-market underwriters Searle Freedom Trust ($230,000).

The source of the biggest donation, however, is still unknown. That would be the $400,000 the group received through DonorsTrust, a nonprofit known as a conservative dark money “ATM,” which allows funders to channel money anonymously to various recipients. The foundation also got a $300,000 injection from someone identified as “anonymous.”

The Daily Caller operation—which has been exposed forties to white nationalists—has been widely criticized on the left for its financial ties to energy interests, most specificallyCharles Koch, who has provided millions in funding over the years, and at one point reportedly accounted for more than 83 percent of the foundation’s annual revenue.

That bankroll swelled between 2020 and 2021. The foundation’s fiscal year 2020 filing shows $1.57 million in contributions, a number thatnearly doubled to $2.8 million the next year, according to the 2021 document. The foundation spent $1.4 million—$254,000 of it on fundraising—which, combined with previous assets, left it with a year-end balance of about $2.1 million.

aha 1/20 new pension tag:

RWI is a [target-] rich ecosystem [JOK seeks targets proxy?]; ideological entre look for niche; revolving door part of this system, also incubator which might expose young ppl to ideas and opportunities/funding otherwise not; pension plan also signals to ideol entre new incubator recruits that it's a hood/smart bet because fail does not matter, we got your back / gig; [fe given mktpklace meritocracy BS]

3/18 update

Development Coordinator

Independent Institute

May 2017 – Present (1 year)

omg 6/16 LI

Kristiana Mork

College Associate at Fox News Channel, Intern Reporter at The Daily Signal

Washington D.C. Metro AreaPublic Policy

Current

Hillsdale College

Fox News Channel, The Daily Signal, The Republican Study Committee

Education

Hillsdale College

290

connectionsSend Kristiana InMailMore options

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristianamork

Background

Summary

My experience at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and positions at Hillsdale College and the Republican Study Committee have honed my communication and public policy skills and make me an excellent candidate for internships where I can continue to improve my skills in public policy research, writing, and communication.

Experience

George Washington Fellow

Hillsdale College

April 2014 – Present (2 years 3 months)Hillsdale, MI

-- developed weekly Facebook Constitution quizzes to market Hillsdale's online Constitution course

-- wrote weekly tweets and Facebook posts to market Hillsdale's Great Books and Constitution courses

-- assisted Journalism Professor John Miller with research for articles published in the National Review and other publications

-- wrote op-eds for Hillsdale's newspaper, the Collegian, every semester

-- edited over 200 pages of Churchill documents for the College's publication of Churchill documents accompanying the official Winston Churchill biography

-- met with scholars, journalists, and visiting politicians including Mollie Hemingway, Stephen Cambone, Joseph Rago, Ramesh Ponnuru, James Rosen, John Davidson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Linda Chavez among others

Student Host

Hillsdale College Advancement

January 2014 – Present (2 years 6 months)

-- welcomed friends of the college

-- explained the unique mission of Hillsdale to guests

-- described student life to donors and guests

-- directed and accompanies guests to college events

Career Services Student Assistant

Hillsdale College

September 2013 – Present (2 years 10 months)Hillsdale, Michigan

-- managed the front desk at Career Services

-- welcomed visitors to the college and Career Services

-- answered questions about careers, internships, majors and professional networking

-- made and kept appointments for staff

-- organized and recorded graduation statistics

-- answered phone calls

-- performing other office duties as necessary.

College Associate

Fox News Channel

February 2016 – April 2016 (3 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

-- used iNews to coordinate the DC Bureau Fox News Live guest schedule

-- assisted with seating approximately 15 guests every day

-- arranged guest travel from New York and Washington, DC to the Fox News DC Bureau

-- when no guest greeters were available, I stepped in to manage the DC Bureau's guest schedule and seating, which involved updating guests lists, working with transmission to organize studio space, arranging guest transportation to the Bureau, and ensuring that all guests were seated on time for their segments during 6 different Fox News programs including Fox & Friends, America's Newsroom, Happening Now, Outnumbered, The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson, and FoxNews.com

Intern Reporter

The Daily Signal

January 2016 – April 2016 (4 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area

-- wrote 26 published news stories

-- pitched and published three of my own story ideas - one on coverage of Ohio's vote to defund Planned Parenthood (5.7k shares on Facebook), one on a Michigan woman's lawsuit against Planet Fitness for their transgender locker-room policy (1.2k shares on Facebook), and one on corruption charges against Detroit Public School officials and education reform ideas that would address corruption (1.0k shares on Facebook).

Intern

The Republican Study Committee

June 2015 – August 2015 (3 months)U.S. House of Representatives

-- assembled daily news summaries

-- performed policy research and legislative research on RSC initiatives including the Transportation Empowerment Act (TPA) and the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA)

-- organized talking points on the TPA and FADA

-- attended House hearings and briefings

-- assisted in the preparation and running of weekly caucus meetings

-- wrote legislative memorandums

Student Ambassador

Hillsdale College Admissions

February 2014 – August 2015 (1 year 7 months)Hillsdale College

-- hosted perspective students and their families

-- guided Hillsdale College tours

-- attended Hillsdale College events and receptions where I communicate the purpose and mission of the College and my experiences with guests and perspective students

Operations Intern

Mackinac Center for Public Policy

May 2014 – December 2014 (8 months)

-- interviewed public officials about county and municipal pensions

-- wrote news articles about county and municipal pensions

-- used Raiser's Edge software to maintain and update donor information

-- assisted at Mackinac Center events

Advancement Intern

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy

September 2011 – December 2013 (2 years 4 months)Midland, Michigan

-- used Raiser's Edge software to maintain and update donor information

-- hand-addressed 500 letters to Mackinac Center donors

-- performed donor outreach through mailings, phone calls, conversations, and events.

-- assisted at Mackinac Center events including luncheons, formal dinners, receptions and presentations where I set up events, welcomed and registered guests, and introduced guest speakers

-- worked with grant proposals and reports

-- wrote fundraising letters

-- conducted research and summarized my findings

About the Authors

Amy Binder

Amy Binder is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of "Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public Schools."

http://www.booktv.org/Program/15389/Becoming+Right+How+Campuses+Shape+Young+Conservatives.aspx

www.booktv.org/Series/AW/After-Words.aspx‎

Book TV

:{2 hr. 12 min. "Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives" :{Amy Binder:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Next air time: Saturday, February 22nd, at 7:30pm (ET) Approx. 1 hr.:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

===

COINTELPRO:

The problems extends to campus activism. Accuracy in Academia's "Campus Report" attacked Greenpeace in an April 1990 article headlined "Environmentalism Becomes Radical," and the "1989 Young Americans for Freedom List of Un-American Organizations on Our College Campuses" includes one group opposed to nuclear war, and the respected hunger group Oxfam America. The YAF authors, who warn of "the terrible threat these Hard-Left groups pose to our way of life," boast in their introduction that they have been "able to secretly monitor Leftist groups for the last several years."

http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/greenspy.html

5.3 Academic Units: In addition to bogus conferences and CTT’s with academic trappings but which are actually an end-run around academic rigor, conservative funders such as Koch and Scaife have heavily endowed legitimate universities, such as the University of Chicago, George Mason University and Pepperdine (the latter notably a sinecure for Starr). Koch funds and is on the board of GMU’s Mercatus Center. Re-running a play from the Reagan administration, “In 2001, the Office of Management and Budget asked for public input on which regulations should be revised or killed. Mercatus submitted 44 of the 71 proposals the OMB received .

5.4 Incubators

At universities where the conservative infrastructure cannot simply buy academic units or faculty, they can still have an influence through student organizations, which also serve as a farm team. The College Republicans (CR) group is a hybrid, both a college organization as well as part of the national GOP, which it mirrors in terms of organization and methodology, thus providing training. The group has created numerous successful politicians and political operatives (Abramoff, Atwater, Rove, Stone), as well as some like Norquist and Reed, who have founded important organizations such as Americans for Tax Reform and the Christian Coalition. Norquist in particular is a network hub (38 connections in the network map), and some of his affiliations are themselves hubs such as the Council for National Policy (46 connections). Undoubtedly their network building began in CR.

College Republican organizations are important for the election "ground game" including get out the vote efforts, but they also have traditionally provided dirty tricks. Donald Segretti was a member of USC’s Trojans for Representative Government, a number of whom worked on Nixon’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign and were subsequently hired by H.R. Haldeman to work at J. Walter Thompson (a number of his senior White House staff were PR industry executives). Segretti and colleagues stole stationery and started rumors about candidates’ infidelity and mental illness (or that of their spouses: Edmund Muskie’s denunciation of an attack on his wife ended his career when he was perceived to tear up). Segretti is said to be a mentor of Karl Rove, and Atwater continued his tactics. John Kerry, who would have taken action on climate change, was “Swift Boated” by J. O’Neil (published by Regnery), who was recruited by the Nixon White House to discredit him for his Viet Nam War protests. O’Neil now works with the David Horowitz Foundation, a media “watchdog” group, presumably along the lines of Accuracy in Media to root out perceived bias. Horowitz has also set up groups of conservative students to check the ideology of academics [cf FOIA] in the classroom () . A number of conservative organizations also provide funding to train college journalists and fund their papers (Scaife, for example). William O’Keefe, as noted previously, (arrested for bugging a Congressional representative’s office) was a graduate of such an organization, as well as Blackwell’s Leadership Institute (see Section 2.6.5 ACORN/video).

These organizations share aims and members with college Christian organizations (e.g., the Campus Crusade for Christ has part of its stated mission to train future political leaders). We have noted a number of times that the infrastructure has been carefully and systemically engineered to operate in all aspects of the political “ecosystem,” so we should not be surprised that it has done a sort of supply chain analysis which recruits and trains.

An increasingly important type of front group, as noted briefly above in Section 3, is an artificial grassroots group, thus nicknamed astroturf.

INFLUENCING THE NEXT GENERATION

The Kochs have been involved in influencing higher education for more than 30 years, beginning with what is now called the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, both based at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Between 2007 and 2011, the Kochs gave **$30.5 million to 221 universities**through their charitable foundations. More than half of that giving, roughly $16 million, has gone to George Mason University and its foundation. Recently, however, the Koch brothers’ influence has expanded outside Northern Virginia and created potential conflicts of interest for the universities accepting their donations.

The May-June 2012 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, focused on corporate influence in higher education. Kent Miller and Ray Bellamy wrote about the Koch influence in theFlorida State Universityeconomics department. The Charles G. Koch Foundation offered to give the university $1.5 million to hire two assistant professors and fund fellowships and undergraduate curriculum on free-enterprise topics. The foundation appointed an advisory board that would award money to faculty and make sure that the work they completed fit with the foundation’s mission. Miller and Bellamy wrote, “In exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”

It’s not just at Florida State, which was a high-profile case, but also at other universities where the Kochs and John Allison, retired chairman and CEO of the financial institution BB&T, have donated money. Allison is on the board of directors at the Mercatus Center, which is funded by the Kochs, and following an intense fight in which the Kochs backed him, is now the president of the Cato Institute. BB&T sponsors chaired professors, typically in economics departments, and the universities where they sponsor a chaired professor often line up with where the Kochs donate.

An Investigative Reporting Workshop analysis found that the Kochs had donated to 10 universities where there wereBB&T-chaired professors, including West Virginia University, Clemson University and smaller universities, such as Hampden-Sydney College and Barton College. According to Inside Higher Ed in 2011, Clemson “spent several years cultivating the Charles G. Koch Foundation to support its Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and has received $1 million thus far.”

At the core of the Kochs’ philosophy are the works of Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher and author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” (Rand’s writings are also emblematic of the readings recommended to students by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University). The new course that the Charles G. Koch Foundation wanted approved at Florida State was called “Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues, and Values of Capitalism,” featuring the work of Rand as required by the memorandum of understanding. Through their charitable foundations, the Kochs gave $100,000 to the Ayn Rand Institute from 2009 to 2011.

And in the interest of full disclosure, in the course of this investigation, we discovered that American University, where the Investigative Reporting Workshop is based (within the School of Communication), received $17,500 in two separate grants from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. The university’s Office of Special Programs (OSP) reports that both grants are for a program called “Lectures in Classical Liberalism,” which is under the direction of Tom Merrill and Alan Levine. Both professors are in the School of Public Affairs.

OSP said the following language describes the program that the grants supported:

“We seek to build on and expand the program of lectures in classical liberalism funded by the Koch Foundation to date. At least two of these lectures would be designated “Koch Lectures on Classical Liberalism”; all of the funded lectures, however, will discuss some aspect of classical liberalism whether in its theoretical and historical roots or in its contemporary applications. This series of lectures is primarily designed to encourage our students to have a sustained engagement with the ideas of classical liberalism, and secondarily at presenting an opportunity for classical liberal ideas to be heard in the larger university community and the D.C. policy conversation. To that end, we also require our speakers to meet and take questions from our students in an informal session separate from the public lecture, either in one of our classes or in a breakfast or lunch session during the speaker’s campus visit.”

Top recipients

Koch foundations donated to 221 universities during the 2007-2011 period, giving as little as $1,000 to Wisconsin Lutheran College and more than $16 million to George Mason University. The Kochs donated to 89 nonprofits and one annual conference, all of which have public policy and educational missions synchronous with those of the Koch corporation — deregulation, limited government and free markets.

Top 5 college and university recipients

Top 5 nonprofit recipients in millions of dollars

Source: Research by Eric Holmberg, :{graphic by

Cristina Keane, }:Investigative Reporting Workshop

jack miller center

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22conservative.html?pagewanted=print

September 22, 2008

Conservatives Try New Tack on Campuses

By PATRICIA COHEN

COLORADO SPRINGS — Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.

They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.

These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, Austin, or a project at the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, to publish a book of classic texts, are mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors. But they have a decidedly nonpartisan and nonideological face.

Their goal is to restore what conservative and other critics see as leading casualties of the campus culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s: the teaching of Western culture and a triumphal interpretation of American history.

"These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general,” he said.

The programs and centers differ in emphasis, with some concentrating on American democratic and capitalist institutions and others on the Western canon, the great books often derided during the culture wars as the history of “dead white men.” They sponsor colloquia, seminars, courses, visiting lecturers and postdoctoral students. At Brown, the Political Theory Project even put on a play by the capitalist heroine Ayn Rand.

Some, like the effort in Colorado Springs and the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia focus solely on exposing freshmen to classical thinkers. Others favor a return to a more traditional teaching of America's past, featuring its greatest accomplishments instead of the history of repression and exploitation that had been the trend.

And this week, Cornell is negotiating the final details of a $50,000 grant from Veritas that will be used to create a Program on Freedom and Free Societies.

According to a list drawn up by the National Association of Scholars, a group created in 1987 to preserve the “Western intellectual heritage,"37 of these academic centers exist; 20 were created in the past three years.

Many of them have received donations from a handful of relatively new organizations, including Veritas, which was created in 2006, and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. Mr. Miller, a Chicago entrepreneur, established the center as an independent nonprofit last fall after first collaborating with the 55-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on campus.

Now, thanks in part to years of intensive lobbying by the National Association for Scholars, these projects may soon receive federal money as well. The new Higher Education Act, signed into law last month, provides grants for “academic programs or centers” devoted to “traditional American history, free institutions or Western civilization.”

The provision was “fashioned with this movement in mind,” Stephen Balch, a Republican and the founder and president of the association, said after the bill passed Congress, and “will help it gain even greater momentum.”

It is up to Congress to decide whether to finance the effort, and how much to put toward it.

Mr. Piereson previously served for 20 years as the executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, one of the largest financiers of the intellectual right before it closed. “I would have to say in all that time, from 1985 and 2005, when we wound down, I’m not sure we made a lot of progress” on the undergraduate level, he said.

Decades of money from Olin and similar foundations helped create a kind of shadow university of private research institutes on the assumption that conservatives could not find a berth in an academic system dominated by liberals. They have been so successful, though, that they might have helped siphon like-minded thinkers off campus, creating a kind of right-wing brain drain.

Now, Mr. Piereson said, “what we’re trying to do is actually go onto the campus and fund professors who have the support of their deans, provosts and colleagues and try to influence the undergraduate curriculum.”

That may be easier to do now, since the fevered pitch of ideological battles on campus has quieted in recent years. Supporters have still tried to keep a low profile, though, to avoid arousing potential liberal opponents, Mr. Piereson added.

Veritas has spent $2.5 million to support existing centers or create new ones on 10 campuses. In April, it received a $1 million matching grant �� the final donation Olin made before zeroing out its bank balance.

Colorado Springs used its $50,000 grant to publish “A Free Society and Its Challenges,” a collection of classic writings including Plato’s “Apology” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” Every incoming freshman last fall and this fall was assigned readings from it.

Amid the get-to-know-one-another barbecues and field trips to Pike’s Peak during orientation last month, the college organized freshman seminars devoted to the readings.

At first some faculty members were suspicious of where the idea and financing had come from, said Robert Sackett, a history professor who publicly voiced his concern. Yet he added, whatever the back story, who could object to teaching Dr. King or Plato?

“An assignment that I initially had some doubts about has turned out better than I expected,” said Mr. Sackett, who points out that he is not a conservative. “I could see using it again.”

Although a few critics have accused these programs of having a right-wing agenda, many administrators and faculty have embraced the extra resources.

“The kind of thing that we’re proposing and developing transcends all those political differences whether you’re right, left or center,” said Robert Koons, the director of Texas’ program, who describes himself as a run-of-the-mill Republican. “It's not the answers, but the questions” about ethics, justice and civic duty that are being discussed, he said.

Ideas for the new strategy began percolating in 2005 when the Philanthropy Roundtable, an association of foundation officials and big donors, met and shared their complaints about higher education. A few months earlier, Mr. Piereson wrote an article in the roundtable’s magazine warning donors not to endow university programs or faculty chairs. “Once the endowment check is written, the donor loses all control over the program he has funded,” he advised.

Conservatives have begun to realize, said Peter Wood, the executive director of the scholars’ association, that their contributions to colleges and universities frequently pay for what they see as left-leaning academic programs that run counter to their world views.

Instead of making no-strings-attached donations, he said, conservatives started asking ��ought there not be some way that we could reach the donors and convince them that their donations to higher education could be more wisely spent?”

Although there are no formal links between the organizations, an informal network of advisers and activists work to bolster each other’s efforts. The Jack Miller Center spent $3.6 million in the past year to create, among other things, a civics center at Florida Atlantic University and summer programs at two other colleges for professors. Several summer attendees, like Michael Poliakoff, the vice president for academic affairs for the University of Colorado system, also received grants from Veritas.

The Thomas W. Smith Foundation, dedicated to supporting free markets, has started paying for scholarly centers on campuses as well, said Mr. Piereson, who is on its board of trustees. Last year the foundation gave $1 million to the Political Theory Project at Brown, which also received money from Veritas and the Jack Miller center.

“There’s a network of institutions out there” that know the academic landscape, said David DesRosiers, the executive director of Veritas. “We came in as venture capitalists, and they picked the stocks we invested in.”

Peg Bacon, the provost at Colorado Springs, said she was already interested in having the entire campus read the same book when Mr. Poliakoff suggested using the “Free Society” collection. Ms. Bacon said she first checked out the Center for American Universities at the Manhattan Institute, which runs Veritas.

“I saw it does a lot of things around civil rights,” she said. “It looked like they had a variety of perspectives,” and “they weren’t controlling” the specific assignment, which was decided by the faculty. She asked a handful of professors to review the book, which also included the United States Constitution and writings from Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Douglass. None detected any particular bias.

The faculty was so pleased with the way the program turned out in 2007, Ms. Bacon said, that they unanimously agreed to repeat it this year.

Asked about the possibility of establishing a center at Colorado Springs, Mr. Poliakoff said, “I have no set road map.” As for other plans within the university system, like endowing a chair in conservative thought on the Boulder campus, Mr. Poliakoff said there was no connection. “There is no vast right-wing conspiracy,” he said with a smile.

Elsewhere, proponents have had a bumpier road.

In 2006, at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., opposition from the faculty forced the administration to withdraw its support of an alumni-financed center focused on capitalism, natural law and the role of religion in politics. Many faculty members questioned if Hamilton would have sufficient oversight of it. At the time, the chairman of the faculty assembly, John O’Neil, was quoted as saying, “There are people on the faculty who think this center has an explicit, right tendency.”

The alumni donors and professors ended up opening the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization as an independent entity in 2007.

E. Christian Kopff, a professor who helped found the Center for Western Civilization at Boulder in 2005, said the initial reaction on campus had “ranged from enthusiastic agreement to critical questioning.” But the splits were more likely to be between those in engineering or science and those in the humanities, or between traditionalists and postmodernists, rather than between left and right, he said.

The Veritas Web site states the goal of the fund is not to topple the “Left University” and replace it with a “Right University,” but to “encourage universities to embrace a broader range of thought.”

Yet whatever unspoken message some advocates might hope to send, what transpires in a classroom is never predictable. During a freshman orientation seminar run by Harriet Napierkowski at Colorado Springs — which Mr. Poliakoff, the Colorado system vice president, was observing — she pointed to a section in Plato’s “Apology” where Socrates describes himself as a gadfly, whose role is “to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth.”

Who is a contemporary gadfly, she asked, someone who questions the established order even if he is unpopular? The students stared back silently.

After a few moments, she asked, “What about Ralph Nader?” the longtime consumer advocate and third-party presidential candidate who has infuriated both liberals and conservatives.

At the mention of Mr. Nader, a puzzled look swept across Mr. Poliakoff’s face, but he did not say a word.

koch incubator/poster boy

Trained on Koch: Daily Caller Claims Fake Rebuttal of CMD on ALEC Role Promoting "Stand Your Ground" Laws

by Lisa Graves [1] — June 18, 2012 - 10:54am

Topics: Corporate Campaigns [2], Crisis Management [3], Right Wing [4], Third Party Technique [5], Corporations [6], Democracy [7], Propaganda [8], Public Relations [9]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [10]

Tucker Carlson's website, the "Daily Caller," recently posted a story claiming [11] that a Florida state legislator had rebutted a purported claim by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that the American Legislative Exchange Council [12] (ALEC) "drafted" Florida's "Stand Your Ground" (SYG)/"Castle Doctrine" law. But we did not make that claim.

Unfortunately for the Daily Caller's Investigative Researcher Michael Bastasch, CMD has not argued that ALEC drafted that law. Had Bastasch done any original research about CMD's actual original reporting on SYG, he would have seen that CMD is the research organization that documented how ALEC "ratified" the Florida SYG bill after it was signed into law, as noted here [13] and here [14] and here [15].

The NRA's lobbyist, Marion Hammer, at SYG bill signingAnd despite efforts this week by Florida state Senator David Simmons to manufacture history in asserting that the NRA did not help draft the bill, the NRA itself took credit [16] for conceiving of the Florida law, as CMD found in contemporaneous news [17] reports.

Bastasch's piece raises a question about how Daily Caller fact-checks its stories. If undocumented assertions like those about CMD are passed off as news, the Daily Caller could be said to be acting with reckless disregard for the truth.

It's a Koch-Fueled World for Some Given Megaphones on the Right

The author of the piece was given the title of "Investigative Researcher of the Daily Caller News Foundation" based on his experience in the following internships and gigs at Koch-funded operations, according to his own LinkedIn [18] profile:

Koch Internship Program at Charles Koch Institute
Government Relations Intern at The Heritage Foundation [19]
Koch Summer Fellow at Institute for Humane Studies
Research Associate at Cascade Policy Institute [20]
Public Affairs Intern at ALEC [21]

In fact, Bastasch's online resume makes it look as though his post at the Daily Caller News Foundation since January of 2012 overlaps with a Koch Internship that began in 2012. Are they one and the same? Regardless, this recent college grad has already garnered months of experience nursing at the teat of Koch money through multiple right-wing groups.

Paging ALEC?

Interestingly, the author did not disclose to readers his past internship with ALEC, the subject of the article. Some Daily Caller readers might have considered that credential a feather in his cap; other readers on the world wide web, however, might consider that a potential conflict of interest worthy of disclosure, especially after the whipping [22] some on the right tried to give NPR's Peter Overby for daring to report on ALEC after working for Common Cause almost two decades ago. Meanwhile, Bastasch's internship helping ALEC with its PR spin officially ended less than two years ago. But, he promptly tweeted his Daily Caller "news" article about ALEC to allies over at his former internship, as captured in this screenshot, and ALEC staff promoted his claim/story about SYG too:

Tweet by Daily Caller "reporter" to fomer employer

Of course, Bastaschconveniently omits ALEC's well-documented role supporting the proliferation of "Stand Your Ground"/"Castle Doctrine" laws across the country, which is not the same as having absolutely nothing to do with these laws. ALEC's own reps used to boast [14] to the NRA and others that "Some of the things that we were pushing in states was the 'Castle Doctrine,' we worked with the NRA on that. That's one of our model bills we have states introduce...." ALEC's PR team also claims the charity does zero lobbying, despite admissions like these of senior staffer Michael Hough [23] and other evidence.

Unraveling the Web of Koch-Fueled Interest Groups and Internships

Let's review. The Charles Koch Institute (CKI) was founded last year in Wichita, Kansas, where one of the world's richest men, Charles, and his global mega-corporation, Koch Industries, are located. As a new non-profit organization, CKI's income and expenses for internships are not yet publicly available. Bastasch is one of hundreds of interns who have been funded by Charles's newest enterprise to help turn their ideological affinity with Koch "into careers [24]." Koch interns are paid $10 an hour to work at Koch "partner organizations," such as the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Humane Studies, the State Policy Network (which includes the Cascade Policy Institute), and the American Legislative Exchange Council -- all of which the Daily Caller's staffer has done time at.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the non-profit corporate-funded think tanks, or really "stink tanks," that has received millions from Koch family coffers [25], according to GreenPeace. Heritage is one of the federal arms of the policy creation network that puts the talking points funded by global corporations and right-wing ideologues into the hands of federal lawmakers and gets their claims aired on FOX, CNN, and other stations through its media outreach operations.

The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) is also a pet project of Charles Koch. IHS had revenue of almost $10 million last year, largely from his foundation, and spent almost $9 million to advance Charles' ideological agenda through projects like the "Koch Summer Fellowship."

IHS is also part of Koch's homage to F.A. Hayek, whose "Road to Serfdom," has been extolled by right-wingers who claim America is on that "road" and who have drunk the Koch Kool-Aid on what it calls the "free market" but what is really a corrupt form of crony capitalism that has undermined the U.S. economy. Some followers of Hayek and of the immorality of Ayn Rand [26] have absurdly claimed that everything from Social Security to public schools to taxpayer-funded firefighters are signs that the U.S. is on the brink of communism. Such wild-eyed condemnations of American institutions might sound eerily reminiscent of big daddy Fred Koch's irrational screeds advancing the paranoid worldview of the John Birch Society, which in some ways has been re-born in the "Tea Party," with the help of two of Fred's sons, apples that did not fall far from the tree.

If only people who blindly claim they are defending "free markets" when they defend ALEC had read all the way through Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." Smith cautions against trusting policies proposed by business tycoons. Smith said legislative proposals of such men "ought always to be listened to with great precaution.... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

The State Policy Network/ALEC Love Affair

The Cascade Policy Institute (CPI) in Oregon, where the Daily Caller's Bastasch also interned, is also one of the state stink tanks helping to advance ALEC's agenda. CPI is subsidized in part by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation through its Koch internship program. That foundation is run by its namesake and his confidante Richard Fink. As a charity, Charles can claim donations to his family foundation as an offset against income taxes; in 2010, the CGK Foundation received $42 million from Charles and had income of almost $10 million on various investments and transactions.

And then there is ALEC. As CMD has documented [27] extensively [28], the Koch brothers have a long relationship [29] with Bastasch's other past internship supervisor, ALEC [12]. Some State Policy Network (SPN) groups and their reps are also members of ALEC task forces -- voting behind closed doors with elected officials on templates to change our laws -- alongside the Heritage Foundation and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP), according to task force minutes. Oregon's CPI, which is part of SPN, has ties [30] with AFP and has produced numerous articles promoting ALEC's agenda in the state.

With all that Koch-funded training on how to advance the Kochs' ideological agenda, should readers be surprised when someone with a byline on a site like the Daily Caller writes a story that helps ALEC?

ALEC "Hearts" the Daily Caller's Founder

Tucker Carlson told the Washington Post that his Daily Caller is "not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone." It merely hires the ideologically orthodox, such as a Koch acolyte who then writes favorably about a Koch-funded group he recently worked for and unfavorably about its critics.

But the Daily Caller doesn't just hire young true believers. As CMD has reported [31], Carlson is beloved by ALEC. He was a featured speaker at ALEC's meeting in New Orleans last summer. And, in 2009, he received ALEC's "Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism" at its meeting in Washington, D.C., where he talked about how much he loves corporate lobbyists and thinks they know best, a position not inconsistent with ALEC's effort to give lobbyists easy access to lawmakers and an equal vote on model legislation to change our rights. Included here is a video of part of Carlson's speech accepting this ALEC-created award, which is named for a newspaper columnist who was a harsh critic of laws to protect our environment.

Who Funds the Daily Caller?

Maybe the Daily Caller's readers should just be expected to take a "buyer beware" approach. On the other hand, who is actually bankrolling the Daily Caller's news site and funding the Daily Caller News Foundation [32], a non-profit charity? Are there big undisclosed benefactors behind the scenes, beyond the company's online ad revenue? Does the Daily Caller benefit from perks such as interns subsidized through Koch largesse? Maybe Bastasch will turn his attention to that question for the sake of the transparency? Probably not.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation [date unknown], the ISI President, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr, stated "We must...provide resources and guidance to an elite which can take up anew the task of enculturation. Through its journals, lectures, seminars, books and fellowships, this is what ISI has done successfully for 36 years. The coming of age of such elites has provided the current leadership of the conservative revival. But we should add a major new component to our strategy: the conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus...We are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming." [2]

In a Speech in 1996 Cribb optimistically reviewed the impact of groups such as ISI, the Young America's Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Claremont Institute and the Acton Institute. "...An infrastructure now exists that was but a dream even three decades ago. Scholars, books, journals, seminars, reprints, tapes, fellowships, and similar resources are now available in abundance to provide intellectual substance for young minds. The plenitude is so great that the main problem is organizing what is available and bringing it to bear where needed," he said. [3]

EPIGRAM

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intercollegiate_Studies_Institute

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

$75,000 received from Koch foundations 2005–2008

[Total Koch foundation grants 1997–2008: $408,000]

ALEC is one-stop shopping228 for elected officials interested in perusing the wares of an

array of Koch-funded opposition organizations including IER, ACCF, Mercatus and other sources. ALEC publishes its own

materials as well, including a “Climate Change Overview for State Legislators”229 which downplays the science and risks of

global warming and exaggerates the costs of addressing it. The Overview was written by Daniel Simmons, who moved from

ALEC to become AEA’s Director of State Affairs. Simmons was at the Mercatus Institute before ALEC and is a graduate of

the George Mason University School of Law.

GP 2010 koch:

top google ad on cpac search: make your passion your profession

http://www.cgkfoundation.org/internship-program/?gclid=CI_mpKCZ3aUCFQcPbAodWx1q2w

Media fairness

From SourceWatch

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"Media fairness" is a public relations catch-phrase for the common desire that polluting and harmful industries have for a compliant media which publishes only non-critical material on big corporations.

In 1996-97 Burson-Marsteller promoted the idea to Philip Morris that it lead an industry attack on the credibility of the media using such things as the recent outrage over paparazzi after the death of Princess Diana. It sought to use the credibility of some media watchdog organizations for lobbying purposes, suggesting:

...[T]hose we feel should be targeted for a potential partnership are starred on the chart on the following page. The characteristics these organizations share is a credible mainstream ideology, high-profile presence, and history of working on corporate-funded projects.^[1]

The days when the popular media were seen as allies of tobacco in support of the Freedom to Advertise campaign, were long gone, and, as B-M explained, "the vexing question is not IF there is a need for greater media fairness, but rather HOW we will achieve this goal."^[2]

Contents[hide]

Media surveys

In the late 1990s, Phillip Morris(PM) had funded a Louis Harris poll of 3004 adults, which found that only 51% of adults think the media "usually get the facts right." PM saw this as an opportunity to get into bed with Press Clubs and journalistic schools, which were also becoming highly critical of the media moguls and the tabloidization of the American press. They identified a number of possible targets:

Denver Press Club, for instance, was seen as being "receptive to partnerships, sponsorships and exhibits for all of its activities," while the
Milwaukee Press Club - "has periodic civic/social dinners, holds an annual meeting and awards scholarships to journalism students. Sponsorship opportunities may exist for one of these events."
New York Press Club - "holds numerous business and social events including monthly meeting, debates, seminars, an awards dinner, a holiday party and a summer boat trip. These events offer a plethora of opportunities to propose speakers and sponsorships. [S]ponsorship is solicited for the annual Christmas party and for the annual Installation Awards Dinner held in May."^[3]

Favored Media Watchdogs

National News Council: In 1973, the National News Council was formed with a $100,000 grant from the Twentieth Century Fund to counter the "unfair reporting" of the Nixon Administration.^[citation ^needed] The council, however, never enjoyed the support of the journalism establishment. It lasted only a decade because of opposition from prominent journalists like Walter Cronkite, and the two key publishing groups, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.^[citation ^needed]

Philip Morris's strategy document for December 1997 list seven media watchdog groups which it viewed as potential partners in "media fairness initiatives during 1998" (e.g. establishing a study of the "liberal media") to cost $20-30,000. The study was to be conducted in "the top 10 media markets (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Atlanta)."

Their list including:

The Annenberg Public Policy Center (at the University of Pennsylvania);
The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy (Harvard University);
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (University of Connecticut);
Center for Media and Public Affairs - (supposedly non-partisan, but took money from PM to run Louis Harris survey) ^[4]

CMPA has shown an interest in investigating issues of media fairness, and has done so at the request of Philip Morris in the past.

The Media lnstitute - This was the outfit of Republican right-winger Leo Brent Bozell III (See below)
The Twentieth Century Fund - supposedly a nonpartisan foundation involved in "progressive public policy". But also the fund which, In 1973, gave the the National News Council $100,000 to counter the "unfair reporting" of the Nixon Administration.^[citation ^needed]
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward press, politics and public policy issues. The Center conducts regular national surveys which measure public attentiveness to news stories, as well as general trends in values and political and social attitudes. The Pew Center is sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Since the Pew Research Center is fully funded by a Pew Charitable Trusts grant, the possibility of a direct corporate donation is unlikely, although the company could publicly support Pew initiatives.^[citation ^needed]

Credibility is the key

This shows the way in which the lobbying industry chooses to use a highly credible organization as its front. Those watchdogs with the most credibility,(according to B-M) were The Pew Center, followed by the Center for Media and Public Affairs and the Roper Center, and:

In addition, the modus operandi of these three organizations most closely parallels the objectives of this strategy, in that they are all oriented towards research in the public interest.^[citation ^needed]

In this case, Philip Morris was not intending to use corrupt intermediary institutions at all, but to turn to their own advantage those with high credibility. The manipulation would come after the survey, when they planned to control the promotion of the findings:

Once the study is completed, we recommend holding a C-SPAN televised press conference at the National Press Club to announce the results and the call to action.

PM's sponsorship of the study and press conference should be fully disclosed, with the disclaimer that the company is taking a totally hands-off approach to the study and initiatives stemming from it.

Their assumption that, following the "independent survey" there would necessarily be a "call to action", suggests that they had no intention of "taking a totally hands-off approach". They then planned to spend another $75-100,000 to:

... launch a roadshow of the study in these markets. The goal of the roadshows would be to create the want for news councils in targeted communities and gain buy-in from local business leaders and media organizations [using] several press/business clubs that would be ideal partner for PM in this initiative, they include: The Atlanta Press Club; City Club of Cleveland; Denver Press Club; Economic Club of Detroit; Milwaukee Press Club; New York Press Club; and the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania;

They clearly expected to see business-oriented conservative forces controlling these new local News Councils, and, in Stage 3, they would move into journalism training:

Journalism schools are not only the training ground for future reporters, they also have the potential to serve as hotbeds of controversy regarding stories that appear in campus newspapers. In order to lay the groundwork for the understanding of the importance of a fair and accountable media among the journalists of the future, we recommend working with a professional news organization to establish a scholarship contest for student-designed media fairness programs.^[citation ^needed]

Other Watchdog Organizations

These were media watchdog groups that seemed to be rejected as a suitable partner for the survey project, probably because they were too obviously partisan.

The Media Institute (TMI) is a nonprofit research foundation specializing in communications policy and the First Amendment.<http://www.mediainstitute.org/>. Burston-Marsteller points to the value of the tobacco industry maintaining its contact because:

TMI hosts a Communications Forum luncheon series with luncheons held eight times per year. Attendance at the luncheons is by invitation only, but Philip Morris is a sponsor of the Forum and could potentially place a speaker in the future. Also, the luncheons are not planned far in advance so next steps could be rapid. The next series will be held November 20, 1997 and will feature panelists discussing copyright protection policies. No series are planned beyond that date.^[^citation needed]

Communications Research Corporation (CRC) - a daughter organization to TMI, which is actually a:

...private consulting practice which provides advice, strategic planning, and implementation services for a wide range of communications issues from the standpoint of policy and public affairs. TMI also links to the Freedom of Expression Foundation and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, of which Robert O'Neil is the director. Both groups seem to have purposes similar to that of The Media Institute.

Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Enterprise. (See above.)
Freedom of Expression Foundation (See above.)
The Media Research Center was established by Leo Brent Bozell III with Scaife, Carthage, Olin and other right-wing foundation money. B-M says that this is a:

... conservative watchdog group which attempts to promote political balance by exposing liberal biases that exist in the media. While MRC does accept corporate donations and thus, could be eligible for a grant from the company, their credibility is suspect due to their obvious bias.

Accuracy in Media (AIM) This is another Scaife funded anti-journalism organisation run by Reed J. Irvine. B-M points out that it:

... is a conservative media watchdog organization which seeks to make the public aware of the liberal bias which exists in all types of media. AIM hosts a speaker's bureau program in which various members can be scheduled for appearances to address the issues of media unfairness. In addition, AIM offers internship opportunities and schedules panel discussions.

AIM hosted a panel discussion on October 18, 1997 which was carried by C-SPAN. Discussions covered topics such as the death of Vince Foster, the crash of TWA Flight 800 and campaign finance reform.

While AIM's speaker's bureau program and panel discussions offer avenues for corporate donations to fund media fairness initiatives, the group's obvious bias may affect their credibility as a research organization.^[citation ^needed]

Media Training Organizations

The tobacco industry was deeply involved journalism training:

National Journalism Center (NJC) - Philip Morris regularly funded this Center.^[citation ^needed] It held 12-week, "scholarship-type" training courses for selected students (often promoted by politicians -- usually Republican) -- and it ran what amounted to a job-placement agency with the media establishments for its graduates. It started journalists like Michael Fumento on their careers as corporate media lobbyists. PM consultantRichard T. Hines suggested that PM should fund a journalism internship program here to produce a stable of journalists sympathetic to tobacco issues.^[5]

International Journalism Center - Philip Morris was planning to establish, along with the London-based Adam Smith Institute and the Krieble Institutes (plural), an international version of the National Journalism Center. ^[6] Richard Hines (who supported all right-wing causes: Oliver North; the Confederacy; segregation, and white supremacy, [1] while working as a consultant to Philip Morris) was behind the idea, and he had many possible contacts with think-tanks in Europe who could be used to hide the tobacco connection.^[7]

Foundation for American Communications (FAC) was a journalism training group which kept itself pure by not accepting corporate funding, except from the major media organisations. B-M dismisses it because:

...FACS seems more concerned with improving the technical content of media reports than with improving ethical issues of fairness or accuracy. As such, a general operational grant is unlikely to foster such ideals, except in an abstract way.

Western Journalism Center - This organization was owned and operated by Joseph Farrah (Executive Director) and financed by John Smith. ^[8]It was supposedly:

...dedicated to the ideals of "free enterprise, limited government and American values [as a] nonprofit, conservative organization which aims to be "a vehicle for changing the culture of America's newsrooms and for returning the press to its traditional role as watchdog of government."

Farrah and his associate Christopher Ruddy were the fanatics behind the claims that the Clintons had murdered Vince Foster.^[9] As the B-M document says:

Recently the WJC has been involved in investigative projects surrounding the deal of Vince Foster and the Lippo Group financial controversy.

WJC does accept corporate donations, and the company (ie Philip Morris) could benefit by being involved with a forum, seminar or internship sponsorship. The company has already donated over $100,000 in unrestricted grants over the past three years. However, the fact that the WJC does exhibit a conservative bias could affect the credibility of its research^[citation ^needed]

This [2] only tells a fraction of the story. As part of the Arkansas Project Philip Morris passed extra money via its think-tank paymaster Roy Marden, to the Pacific Legal Center, then to the Western Journalism Center, and on to the journalist Ruddy.

Freedom Forum - a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to free press, which:

...does not accept unsolicited grant applications, and does not solicit or accept financial donations. It is funded entirely through an endowment established by Frank E. Gannett in 1935 and has assets totaling nearly $900 million. {[fact}}

Washington Institute for Policy Studies, which B-M describes as:

... a conservative, nonprofit organization which seeks to further the principles of "individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise" by combating the liberal media bias.

Recently, the WIPS broke into two separate groups. WIPS continues to study policy oriented issues such as electric utility deregulation, the "Three Strikes, You're Out" law, workers' compensation and public subsidies to private corporations.

The other half of the WIPS is the CounterPoint Center for ReMediation which publishes CounterPoint. The CounterPoint Center is a new nonprofit corporation which focuses on the role and performance of the mass media in American democracy. John Hamer is its President. In a letter to Burson-Marsteller on November 4 1997, John Hamer stated, "if Burson-Marsteller would be interested in having us speak to your colleagues or perhaps prepare a report on media performance, we'd be happy to discuss it with you. In addition, one of the services we now offer is detailed media content analysis, which specific clients might find very helpful in deciding how to respond to unfair or inaccurate coverage."^[citation ^needed]