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https://www.desmogblog.com/franklin-centre-government-and-public-integrity

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LUKEWARM ON SCHIFF ~ CU 9 25

ENDED UP ON YAHOO NEWS

Lawmakers propose amendment to overturn Citizens United | National | thecentersquare.com

(The Center Square) – Democratic lawmakers in four states have proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

That 2010 ruling allowed corporations, unions and special interest groups to spend unlimited money on political communications, as long as the spending is independent from a candidate’s campaign. Prior to that, such funding was limited.

U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colorado, announced his support for the amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Neguse joined other U.S. House Democrats in proposing the bill "Citizens Over Corporations Amendment."

Supporters of the amendment, which also includes lawmakers in California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, argue the Supreme Court’s decision “unleashed a flood of political corruption.”

“I’m teaming up ... to introduce a constitutional amendment that would overturn this disastrous ruling and get dark money out of our government,” Neguse said.

The bill's sponsors also include U.S. Reps. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, both Democrats.

U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California, proposed the Senate version of the bill.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United opened the door for corporations to pour billions of dollars of dark money into elections,” Schiff said. “This anonymous and unrestricted spending cripples transparency in the political process and weakens our democracy. Our amendment will keep big money out of politics and restore power where it should belong — with the American people.”

The amendment would, among other things:

• Allow Congress and states to set limits on the raising and spending of campaign finances.

• Allow public (i.e. government) financing of campaigns.

The bill is endorsed by a number of groups, including End Citizens United, which has labeled the Supreme Court’s decision “disastrous.”

“Citizens United has turned our democracy into a government that serves the ultra-wealthy,” said ECU Action Fund President Tiffany Muller. “Political spending by billionaires has surged an astonishing 160-fold since the 2010 Supreme Court decision, and working families are paying the price like never before as self-enriching politicians bankroll tax breaks for their biggest donors.”

This is not the first time an amendment overturning Citizens United has been proposed. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010, multiple proposed constitutional amendments have been introduced. While support for those is generally from Democrats, Republicans have occasionally backed the bills.

In general, it is very difficult to successfully pass a constitutional amendment out of Congress, as it requires a two-thirds majority of both the Senate and House. Once it is passed by Congress, it still must be ratified by 38 of the 50 states. An amendment has not done that successfully since 1992 when the 27th Amendment, regulating congressional salaries, was enacted.

Elyse Apel is a reporter for The Center Square covering Colorado and Michigan. A graduate of Hillsdale College, Elyse’s writing has been published in a wide variety of national publications from the Washington Examiner to The American Spectator and The Daily Wire.

-===

BS MOFO

Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter for The Center Square. His commentary and analysis have been published by Newsweek, RealClearPolitics, and the Pacific Research Institute.

Center Square) – The California Public Employees' Retirement System for state employees lost 71% of its $468 million investment in a clean energy and technology private equity fund, state records show, but CalPERS won’t explain how.

These losses are a major problem for California taxpayers, who at least for now are the backstop for underfunded state pensions, but also for state employees who trust CalPERS to responsibly manage their retirement plans.

CalPERS says its pension benefits are only 79% funded, leaving the state, and its taxpayers, on the hook for the other 21%. According to a recent report from Reason Foundation, CalPERS' pension shortfall is approximately $180 billion.

CalPERS’ overall returns for the 2024-2025 fiscal year were 11.6%. While its private equity returns were 14.3%, its public equity investments were 16.8%.

“Returns were similar … so why go through all the trouble — if you can get these kinds of returns on the public markets, why bother with all the complexities and the illiquidity involved in private equity?” asked Marc Joffe, a public finance expert and visiting fellow at the California Policy Center, in an interview with The Center Square regarding the performance of CalPERS' private and public equity investments.

CalPERS committed $465 million to the private equity CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF) in 2007, ultimately paying in $468,423,814.

Since then, the cash out and remaining investment value of the investment fund has declined to $138,045,373, as of March 31,2025.

That’s a loss of 71%, or more than $330 million, for which private equity firms were paid at least $22 million in fees and costs.

CETF losses show "the combined dangers of private equity and ESG investment — you have a very opaque investment choice that appears to have been chosen because of its green credentials, and yet it’s now generated a huge loss for taxpayers and retirees," said Joffe with regards to CETF's losses and focus on "clean" energy and technology. "CalPERs would be better off focusing on a diverse portfolio of publicly-traded equities to get better long-term returns."

In response to an inquiry by The Center Square, CalPERS defended its private equity strategy and shifted blame for CETF's performance on prior management.

"The CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund dates back to 2007, before the pension fund’s board and staff worked together to tightly focus our private equity strategy," wrote CalPERS spokesperson Abram Arredondo to The Center Square. "Since then, we have diversified our investments to reduce risk, selected the highest performing asset managers and lowered fees by entering into co-investments.

"Since that time [2022], we have reduced fees by 10 percent," continued Arredondo. "The private equity class has been our best performer for the past 20 years and we believe our members deserve access to its income-producing opportunities."

To make up for the pension's funding gap, CalPERS has multiplied its investments in private equity, which, at least on paper, have outperformed its other assets.

However, financial experts warn these reported gains are based on "guesstimates." Unlike with publicly traded stocks and bonds that have their prices updated in real-time on the public market, it's not exactly clear how much a private equity investment is worth until it's sold.

In 2021, CalPERS increased its private equity target from 7%, that is the portion of its funds invested in private equity, to 13%, and in 2024 increased the target even higher to 17%.

Unlike public equity investments, which can be made by anyone, private equity involves buying assets that aren't publicly traded. Private equity firms generally buy large portions of or buy entire companies, then try to sell those companies to another, usually private buyer, at a profit by cutting costs and growing revenue.

Private equity managers earn fees, among others, on money managed, and a large share of the profit over a certain level. These fees, estimated to cost CalPERS 6-7% per year on its private equity investments, mean that these private equity investments have to significantly outperform the broader market to overcome the fees, let alone make up for the elevated risk.

The Center Square filed a public records request seeking more details into the fund’s losses, including management contracts with the firms investing CalPERS’ money, and the investments made with CalPERS funding by those firms. CalPERS declined to release the information, aside from sharing already-public records, citing a state law exempting many records for alternative investments — such as private equity — from many public disclosure requirements.

"The public should have a right to know how public money is being invested," said David Loy, legal director for First Amendment Coalition, a government transparency and free speech nonprofit, in an email to The Center Square. "This is a serious transparency concern if the public doesn't have visibility into how public money, especially pension funds, are being invested and to what degree of risk."

For government pensions, where losses are ultimately borne by the state and its taxpayers, public finance experts say private equity is too expensive, too risky and doesn't provide enough transparency.

Had the money put into the CETF been passively invested in an S&P 500 index fund, with dividends reinvested, the fund would have been worth approximately $3 billion.

As noted by leading pension and endowment managers, compounding interest magnifies both the benefits of good investments and the cost of bad investments. Because negative returns reduce the amount of capital for future investments, future returns have to be even higher than the losses just to break even.

That's why managers of assets like pensions and endowments tend to prioritize low risk over chasing high returns. During one 14 year period, General Mills' pension returns never ranked better than approximately the top quarter, nor worse than the top half, but still came in the top four percent of funds over that period because the investments never lost too much money.

That is not what appears to have happened with CETF.

CalPERS website for CETF listed Capital Dynamics as the fund's manager. Prior interviews with Capital Dynamics staff that reference CETF suggest the fund may have made major investments in American solar power companies in the early 2010s.

"Capital Dynamics plans to invest in, among other clean energy sectors, solar PV (photo-voltaic cell) projects in the US. In October 2010, the firm also assumed responsibility for managing California pension fund CalPERS’ clean energy and technology fund, a $480 million portfolio," wrote PEI in 2011. "That harbours a whole range of different investments from venture capital and private equity fund commitments to direct investments."

"Yet the firm’s initial focus on solar power is interesting for its specificity," continued PEI. "Perhaps a more obvious strategy for a new team would be to pursue a generalist approach within the renewables space, but Scaysbrook insists a narrow focus on solar projects is the right one."

Investments in American solar energy during and around the Obama era resulted in many high-profile failures. The most public of which was Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer. The Obama administration provided a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, to, in part, fund the construction of a now-defunct factory in California. The resulting loss to taxpayers was more than $500 million.

As written in a Capital Dynamics-sponsored clean energy investment book published by PEI in 2012, "Once a rock star in the solar industry, evergreen solar was not able to keep up with the competition from China that was flooding the market with cheap solar cells."

Capital Dynamics did not respond to a request for comment by The Center Square.

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OFF BS 10 25

The Center Square was launched in 2019 to fulfill the need for high-quality statehouse and statewide news across the United States.

The focus of our work is federal, state and local government accountability and economic reporting. A taxpayer sensibility distinguishes our work from other coverage of federal, state and local issues. As a result of this approach, our readers are better informed about the focus of government and its cost to the citizens whose tax dollars fund governmental decisions.

The Center Square is staffed by editors and reporters with extensive professional journalism experience. We engage readers with essential news, data and analysis – delivered with velocity, frequency and consistency.

We distribute our journalism through three main channels at no cost to our partners or readers: a newswire service to legacy publishers and broadcasters, TheCenterSquare.com and syndicated platforms, and social media.

The Center Square is a project of the 501(c)(3) Franklin News Foundation, headquartered in Chicago.

We welcome our readers to share their insights, feedback and news tips at info_tcs@thecentersquare.com.

MORE OFF BS

Our stories reach more than 1,000 local newspaper, radio, and television partners across the United States through our wire service.

In 2024, The Center Square was rated above the New York Times and Washington Post for accuracy and balance on the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. The Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart, which assesses the political leanings and credibility of news providers, consistently places The Center Square in the center of the chart - demonstrating our commitment to reliable, balanced reporting.

AND YET MORE BS

Impact Statement

Since launching in 2019, The Center Square has emerged as a major player in national news coverage. We’re on a mission to inform and empower all readers so they have the resources and information they need to make informed decisions about government actions.

Our approach to the news is different: We fairly present the facts, and allow our readers to decide how the news impacts their lives.

You can read more about our story here.

This real-time reporting on the issues that impact local communities leads to real change.

Pulling back the curtain: How Washington state monitored and censored online speech

Investigative reporting from The Center Square pulled back the curtain on government programs in Washington state that monitor and potentially censor online speech related to elections under the guise of combating “misinformation.” Truthful reporting on the integrity of our elections has been in short supply, but thanks to our team at The Center Square, we are filling the void.

Correcting the record: “Zero-emission” vehicles with diesel engines

The Center Square was the first to reveal that the taxpayer-funded fire truck New Mexico’s Governor Grisham touted as “zero-emissions” actually has a diesel engine for pumping water. Governor Grisham allocated nearly half a million taxpayer dollars for a replacement battery electric fire engine. New Mexico’s environmental department and local news outlets echoed her claim that this was a “zero-emissions” and “fully electric” vehicle. The Center Square investigated the claims and informed the public on what we found: According to the fire truck manufacturer’s website, the vehicle was powered by a diesel engine. After The Center Square’s story published with original reporting, other outlets began correcting their language, calling the fire engine a “hybrid”.

At The Center Square, our reporters augment their daily, state-level reporting by covering the federal government. Our bureau in Washington, D.C., is reporting aggressively on national policies and laws, with a strong focus on how these decisions impact the states, their taxpayers, and job creators.

Honoring the promise: holding leaders accountable to military men and women

In 2023, The Center Square drove national headlines after breaking coverage on the U.S. military’s call for soldiers to use food stamps. We continued this vital reporting vertical in 2024, as our investigative team documented a slew of safety and health hazards—from sewage backups and mold infestations to broken windows and faulty fire alarms inside soldiers’ barracks. These conditions were not just violations of basic living standards; they were breaches of the covenant between a nation and its defenders. In April 2024 our reporting exposed significant oversight issues within the Veterans Administration (VA) that threaten the health and safety of these heroes. Our reporting on these issues led to the overhauling of the provision of food stamps for soldiers, a Department of Defense admission to The Center Square staff that it had failed troops living in DoD quarters, and a vow to overhaul the VA health standards.

Reporting from the border: building sources and exposing the unreported facts

The Center Square’s ongoing border series highlights the severe and escalating border crisis occurring at both the southern and northern U.S. borders. This reporting exposed critical data that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has deliberately concealed from the public – the numbers of illegal border crossers, including the “gotaways” who evade apprehension. By cultivating trusted sources within CBP, The Center Square gained access to closely guarded statistics, shedding light on the true magnitude of the crisis. Though widely reported now, these statistics would be unknown without the investigative reporting of The Center Square.

Whether reporting on state-level budget crises, K-12 education debates, inflation and the economy, or other essential issues, our work appeals to Americans in the broad center – the citizens who overwhelmingly drive electoral and cultural change in America.

Editorial balance in reporting illuminates the impact that government has on taxpayers’ lives, pocketbooks, and individual liberty.

The Center Square’s unique distribution model further separates us from other media. Rather than focusing solely on bringing readers to our website, we work with media organizations who care about delivering unaltered facts to their audiences. What’s more - through our nonprofit efforts, we are doing this all for free.

Unlike newswires like the Associated Press that charge outlets to republish their content, we offer local news outlets a meaningful choice by distributing our content to them free of charge.

Consider this: When The Center Square launched in 2019, we didn’t have any audience. There wasn’t a single media partner using our content. And we had a budget close to zero.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of The Center Square in May 2024, we now deliver content to more than 1,000 media partners – reaching a combined monthly readership of over 245 million across our distribution network – making The Center Square the second-largest newswire in the country – and the largest newswire doing this for free.

What’s more, as a direct result of your readership, we continue to grow.

Our extraordinary growth is attributable to The Center Square’s level-headed coverage of the many crises of our time.

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https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/washington-state-gets-a-c-on-covid-report-card/article_67705918-b9eb-11ec-9625-9f8faaf84029.html

moore BS covid study

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by staff Reporter

Brett Davis reports on Washington state government for The Center Square. He previously worked for public policy organizations the Freedom Foundation and Washington Farm Bureau, as well as various community newspapers.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/site/about/about.html

bs study

Center Square was launched in May 2019 to fulfill the need for high-quality statehouse and statewide news across the United States.

The focus of our work is state- and local-level government and economic reporting. A taxpayer sensibility distinguishes our work from other coverage of state and local issues. As a result of this approach, our readers are better informed about the focus of state and local government and its cost to the citizens whose tax dollars fund governmental decisions.

The Center Square is staffed by editors and reporters with extensive professional journalism experience. We engage readers with essential news, data and analysis – delivered with velocity, frequency and consistency.

We distribute our journalism through three main channels at no cost to our partners or readers: a newswire service to legacy publishers and broadcasters, TheCenterSquare.com, and social media.

The Center Square is a project of the 501(c)(3) Franklin News Foundation, headquartered in Chicago.

We welcome our readers to share their insights, feedback and news tips at info_tcs@thecentersquare.com.

---

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/06/26/right-wing-network-fights-proposed-wisconsin-minimum-wage-hike/

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ proposal to increase the state’s long-stagnant minimum wage has run into stiff resistance from a well-coordinated influence network funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation.

The proposed increase of 75 cents per year for the next three years would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.50 per hour by 2023 and put more money in the pockets of Wisconsin’s working poor. Evers’ budget would also create a task force to study the feasibility of moving to a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, the deployment of the Bradley Foundation’s right-wing infrastructure against Evers’ proposal has followed the right-wing playbook of “weaponized philanthropy” exposed in a series of 2017 investigative reports by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

Following the playbook, a Bradley-funded “think tank” typically teams up with Koch-funded university programs to publish studies that match the corporate funders’ ideology and policy positions while giving them academic credibility. Those studies are then reported on by Bradley-funded groups’ “news outlets,” latched onto by political advocacy operations like Americans for Prosperity, and echoed by legislative members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

In the current Wisconsin fight, The Badger Institute, formerly known as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, commissioned a “policy brief” through Marquette University’s economics department, “Minimum Wage: The High Cost of Increasing the Minimum Wage in Wisconsin to $15,” warning that the raise would lead to more than 350,000 workers losing their jobs. The report was authored by Badger Institute visiting fellows Ike Brannon and Andrew Hanson.

The Badger Institute has received at least $14,180,000 dollars in funding from Bradley, including $375,000 in 2018. It is an “affiliate” member of the State Policy Network (SPN), the group that The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer called “a coordinated collection of corporate front groups funded and steered by cash from undisclosed conservative and corporate players.” The Bradley Foundation has also gifted millions to Marquette University, and Charles Koch has provided another $100,000.

The Koch-funded Washington Free Beacon and the Franklin News Network (formerly Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity) aided in the report’s rollout. Franklin has been praised by Bradley as an “effective” and “valuable partner” in the state, leading the foundation to give Franklin $975,500 between 2010 and 2016.

From there, the findings were reported by WXPR, the journal Economic Policy, and elsewhere.

Wisconsin State Representative Barbara Dittrich (R-38), Vice-Chair of the Committee on Workforce Development and member of the Committee on Labor and Integrated Employment, took to Twitter, citing the Badger Institute’s research as a cause for concern “about making things worse for workers rather than better.”

During deliberations regarding Evers’ budget before the Joint Committee on Finance (JCF) in April, Republican state legislators argued that the minimum wage increase would hurt the economy, echoing sentiments put forth by the Institute.

This is the second time the Bradley infrastructure has been deployed to oppose Governor Evers’ budget. In February 2019, Wisconsin Republican State Senators Dave Craig, Duey Stroebel, and Chris Kapenga held a news conference to unveil findings that expanding Medicaid in the state (BadgerCare) would cost taxpayers a whopping $600 million. The findings were based on a report by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE) that experts have criticized as biased and based on flawed methodology.

Between 2011 and 2018, WILL has received $5.2 million from Bradley and CROWE $400,000 between 2017 and 2018, a CMD analysis of tax filings and annual reports concludes. Sens. Craig and Kapenga are ALEC members.

Maximum Pressure Against Minimum Wage Raises

This year’s playbook mirrors past campaigns against raising the minimum wage in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Internal Bradley files examined by CMD show that funds went to the right-wing MacIver Institute for a 2015 minimum wage report that spun low wages as somehow good for the working poor.

Nationally, Bradley IRS filings detail more than $4 million to PR spin doctor Richard Berman’s Employment Policies Institute between 2009 and 2017, an organization that spreads misinformation on minimum wage increases. Berman’s Interstate Policy Alliance (IPA), a network that serves as a “discrete channel” for providing customized studies to state groups in order “to achieve maximum credibility in local and state media outlets,” received a dedicated stream of this funding.

Bradley’s 2018 IRS filing is unavailable, but in an interesting twist, Bradley discloses in its 2018 Annual Report $625,000 “to support the Interstate Policy Alliance” through the State Policy Network, not the Employment Policies Institute.

Bradley also funded Independent Women’s Forum to develop a “toolkit” on “economic opportunity for all women (alternative to the minimum wage, deregulation, job creation).”

Badger Institute Report Conflicts with Real-World Experience

The Badger Institute’s report warns that 350,000 people could lose their jobs if Wisconsin doubles its minimum wage to $15 per hour. Leaving aside the fact that Governor Evers budget only sets up a study of a $15 minimum wage while phasing in much smaller annual increases, the experience of other states and cities that have recently increased minimum wages conflicts with that conclusion.

Governor Evers’ proposal mirrors what Wisconsin’s neighbor, Minnesota, has done over the past decades. Under Governor Mark Dayton’s leadership, Minnesota raised its minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 between 2014 and 2017. Yet, an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report finds that Minnesota has outperformed Wisconsin on job growth and that “on virtually every metric, workers and families in Minnesota are better off than their counterparts in Wisconsin.”

The EPI report states that the “proximity and many similarities” of the two states make them “a compelling case study for assessing which agenda leads to better outcomes for working people and their families.” EPI found little evidence in Minnesota that the “decision to raise the state minimum wage… did anything to hamper job growth.”

Similarly, a University of California Berkeley study concluded that there was “no distinguishable decrease in employment in Seattle” due to the city’s move to a $15 minimum wage. The UC Berkeley report reached similar conclusions about five other cities that raised their minimum wage and is in keeping with a past study on New Jersey and Pennsylvania wage increases.

Approval of Evers’ budget is set to continue as a bitter fight between the Democratic executive and Republican-controlled legislature, with both indicating a refusal to budge on several key issues. Unless they agree on some form of a budget before July 1, base spending levels from the previous year will continue until they do.

---

==

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Franklin News Foundation| [](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Franklin_Center_for_Government_and_Public_Integrity_%28logo%29.jpg) |

The Franklin News Foundation, previously the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, is an online nonprofit news organization in the United States that publishes news and commentary from a free market, limited government perspective on state and local politics.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} The Franklin New Foundation's journalism platform is called TheCenterSquare.com.^[6]

The Franklin News Foundation's stated mission is "to hold government accountable through objective, balanced, citizen-focused public journalism with a taxpayer sensibility."^[7] Chris Krug serves as the organization's president.^[8]

• :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{History:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
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History

The Franklin Center was founded in 2009 with an initial sponsorship grant from the Sam Adams Alliance.^[9] One of its founders was Jason Stverak, a prior executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party.^[10] The organization was originally based in Bismarck, North Dakota, before moving to Alexandria, Virginia.^[11] In April 2017, the Franklin Center acquired the non-profit, non-partisan news service Illinois News Network and its associated assets from the Illinois Policy Institute, with INN publisher Chris Krug being named President of the Franklin Center and the headquarters moving to Chicago, Illinois.^[12][13]

News bureaus and affiliates

In September 2009, the Franklin Center launched Watchdog.org, a network of state-based journalists who investigate and report on state and local government. Watchdog.org covers news that involves "public officials, public programs and the taxpayer money that supports them." The Franklin Center is an associate member of the State Policy Network, a consortium of conservative and libertarian think tanks which focus on state-level policy.^[14] The Franklin Center partnered with the State Policy Network to help establish news websites and hire reporters in each of the State Policy Network think tanks.^[15] Thirty news bureaus were established in the first year and 41 in the second year,^[16] almost all in State Policy Network think tanks.^[17]

In early 2012, the Franklin Center created a platform for citizen journalism under a banner called Watchdog Wire.^[18]

Activities

The Franklin Center provides training for investigative reporters, state-based news organizations, public-policy institutions, and watchdog groups.^[19]

On May 10, 2011, Franklin Center journalist Lynn Campbell of IowaPolitics.com was named moderator for the 2012 Presidential Candidate Series.^[20]

In June 2012 the Franklin Center teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to host the first annual Breitbart Awards dinner.^[21] The awards honored the life and work of the late Andrew Breitbart who "pioneered a new media revolution that transformed journalism and the political landscape."^[22] Syndicated columnist and Fox News Channel contributor Michelle Malkin took home the honors in 2013.^[23]

At Conservative Political Action Conference 2013, Erik Telford of the Franklin Centerserved on a panel discussing "Current trends in technology."^[24] During the two-day conference the Franklin Center ran a promotion using an oversized costume of Ben Franklin meeting and greeting conference participants.^[25] Individuals who had their picture taken with the mascot and tweeted the photo received free drink tickets.^[25]

Awards and recognition

In November 2010, Franklin Center reporters at Marylandreporter.com and Illinois Statehouse News were honored by the National Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors.^[26] MarylandReporter.com editor and publisher Len Lazarick won the first place Cappie award for coverage in the online news category.”^[27] The judges also gave Lazarick a third place award in the category "Online: In-depth." Journalist Kevin Lee of Illinois Statehouse News won the Online In-depth Reporting Award for his investigation into the General Assembly Scholarship Program in Illinois.^[27]

The Franklin Center's Maryland affiliate, Maryland Reporter, has won awards from the Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and from CapitolBeat, the national Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors. In 2012, Maryland Reporter was named Maryland's best political website by Baltimore Magazine. Maryland Reporter was also named one of the best state-based political blogs in the nation by the Washington Post.^[28][29][30]

In August 2011, MarylandReporter.com was awarded a $50,000 grant by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation to provide "in-depth coverage of Maryland state government and politics and to expand capacity by giving those who plan on entering journalism as a career real-world experience in investigative reporting supervised by veteran journalists."^[31]

Franklin affiliates CapitolBeatOK in Oklahoma, HawaiiReporter.com, and New Jersey Watchdog have been presented awards by the respective state chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists.^[32][33][34] New Jersey Watchdog has also won two New York Press Club awards.^[35]

GreenTech Automotive investigation

The Franklin Center published a series of articles that raised questions about GreenTech Automotive and its presumed chairman, Governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe. The investigation exposed the company’s reliance on a controversial fundraising program, EB-5, that has been criticized for its lax oversight and subject to abuse.^[36] The investigation also revealed that McAuliffe’s public projections, starting back in 2010, of how many cars would be built and jobs created had not come to fruition.^[37] In April 2013, it was revealed that McAuliffe had left the green energy car-maker in December of the previous year.^[38]

GreenTech Automotive filed an $85 million libel lawsuit against Franklin Center on April 8, 2013 in a Mississippi court.^[39] Franklin Center described the suit as “intimidation” and pledged to continue investigating GTA and McAuliffe.^[40][41] In July 2014, a federal judge in Mississippi dismissed GreenTech's case. GreenTech filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018, stating that articles from Watchdog.org “negatively affected governmental, investor and public perception of GreenTech” and led to investigations by the SEC and the Department of Homeland Security. GreenTech also blamed U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who had raised concerns about the company's use of a visa program, among others.^[42]

Funding

As of 2012, much of the funding for the Franklin Center came from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two affiliated donor-advised funds^[16] whose funds cannot be traced to individual donors.^[43] In 2011, the two funds granted the Franklin Center US$6.3 million.^[44] The grants were 95% of the Franklin Center’s revenue that year and was the second-largest grant made by Donors Trust that year.^[45] In 2012, the two funds granted the Franklin Center nearly US$9.5 million, more than 80% of the Franklin Center’s revenue that year.^[16] For tax years 2011 through 2013, the Franklin Center received US$22 million from the two funds.^[43]

References

1. ^ McBride, Kelly; Rosensteil, Tom (July 30, 2013). The New Ethics of Journalism: Principles for the 21st Century. Congressional Quarterly Press. p. 130. ISBN 1-4833-2095-2.
2. ^ Enda, Jodi (July 15, 2014). "At the statehouse, ideological press tries to fill a void in news coverage". Pew Research Center. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
3. ^ Peters, Justin. ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Serious, point-of-view journalism'?". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved October 28, 2012.
4. ^ McDuffee, Allen (May 21, 2012). "Heritage Foundation and Franklin Center team up for Breitbart awards". The Washington Post.
5. ^ Sirota, David (August 1, 2014). "Chris Christie Wins Lawsuit to Exempt Himself From New Jersey's Open Records Laws". International Business Times.
6. ^ Schoenburg, Bernard (May 18, 2019). "Bernard Schoenburg: Glad to see a new name for that organization". State Journal Register. Retrieved June 19, 2019.
7. ^ "About". Franklin News Foundation. Retrieved June 19, 2019.
8. ^ "Chris Krug to lead Franklin Center and Watchdog.org". PR Newswire. Retrieved April 26, 2018.
9. ^ Kosterlitz, Julie (December 12, 2009). "Conservative Watchdogs Awake". National Journal. Archived from the original on September 21, 2014.
10. ^ Metzler, Rebekah (October 2, 2010). ":{':(style="padding-left:0.2em"):}:Watchdog' website puts a new spin on politics". Portland Press Herald.
11. ^ "Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity IRS Form 990". GuideStar. Internal Revenue Service. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
12. ^ Newswire, PR. "Chris Krug to lead Franklin Center and Watchdog.org". Market Source. Retrieved July 2, 2018.
13. ^ "Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity Contact Page". Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Retrieved December 12, 2017.
14. ^ "Directory". State Policy Network. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
15. ^ Fang, Lee (2013). The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right. New York: The New Press. p. 206. ISBN 978-1-59558-639-1.
16. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_News_Foundation#cite_ref-governing201411_16-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_News_Foundation#cite_ref-governing201411_16-2) Vock, Daniel C. (November 2014). "How Political Donors Are Changing Statehouse News Reporting". Governing. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
17. ^ Fang, Lee (April 15, 2013). "The Right Leans In". The Nation. Retrieved February 22, 2015.
18. ^ "Watchdog Wire bets that citizen journalists can investigate, too". Ebyline. Retrieved January 11, 2013.
19. ^ "Franklin Center aims investigative reporters at states". Washington Examiner. November 24, 2010. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
20. ^ "IOWA CAPITAL DIGEST". Quad City Times. May 10, 2011. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
21. ^ Byers, Dyland (June 6, 2012). "Heritage, Franklin to host Breitbart Awards". Politico. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
22. ^ Franklin Center President Jason Stverak Announces 2013 Breitbart Award
23. ^ Michelle Malkin Wins 2013 Breitbart Award for Excellence in Journalism
24. ^ "CPAC 2013 Schedule" (PDF). CPAC 2013 Schedule. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
25. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_News_Foundation#cite_ref-ben_25-1) "ABC News Live CPAC update". Abcnews.go.com. March 14, 2013. Retrieved May 7, 2013.
26. ^ "Congrats to our 2010 Cappie Winners". Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors. November 16, 2010. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
27. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_News_Foundation#cite_ref-cappie_27-1) "Cappie Awards". Capitolbeat.wordpress.com. November 16, 2010. Retrieved January 12, 2012.
28. ^ "Baltimore magazine names MarylandReporter.com best political website". Baltimore Post-Examiner. July 25, 2012. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
29. ^ Cassie, Ron. "2013 Best of Baltimore: News". Baltimore Magazine. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
30. ^ Cillizza, Chris (March 12, 2013). "The Fix's best state based political blogs — extended edition!". Washington Post. Retrieved August 12,2014.
31. ^ "Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation announces $1.6 million in awards". Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Retrieved August 11, 2014.
32. ^ "The City Sentinel wins honors from Society of Professional Journalists; Community publication wins second in Best Newspaper category". City Sentinel. May 1, 2011. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
33. ^ "Star-Bulletin staff earns 30 SPJ journalism awards". Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
34. ^ "Winner, 2013 NJSPJ Excellence in Journalism" (PDF). NJSPJ. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
35. ^ Caruso, Debra (May 13, 2014). "Winners Announced in 2014 New York Press Club Awards for Journalism" (PDF). New York Press Club. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
36. ^ "Judge dismisses GreenTech suit in win for First Amendment: Examiner Editorial". Washington Examiner. July 29, 2014. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
37. ^ Sherfinski, David (August 11, 2013). "McAuliffe's overstated production levels for GreenTech mar business-savvy image". Washington Times. Retrieved August 12, 2014.
38. ^ "Terry McAuliffe left car firm in December". Politico.com. April 7, 2013. Retrieved May 7, 2013.
39. ^ Fredrick Kunkle (April 12, 2013). "Car company founded by McAuliffe files $85 million suit over Web site articles". Washingtonpost.com. Retrieved May 7, 2013.
40. ^ Stverak, Jason (April 14, 2013). "We won't be intimidated". Franklincenterhq.org. Retrieved May 7, 2013.
41. ^ Jason Stverak Blaze Interview
42. ^ Oliver, Ned (February 27, 2018). "GreenTech, the electric car company once led by McAuliffe, files for bankruptcy". Richmond Times-Dispatch. Retrieved July 2, 2018.
43. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_News_Foundation#cite_ref-guardian20150609_43-1) Goldenberg, Suzanne; Bengtsson, Helena (June 9, 2015). "Secretive donors gave US climate denial groups $125m over three years". The Guardian. Retrieved June 11, 2015.
44. ^ Goldenberg, Suzanne (February 15, 2013). "Media campaign against windfarms funded by anonymous conservatives". The Guardian. Retrieved February 16, 2013. Conservatives used a pair of secretive trusts to fund a media campaign against windfarms and solar projects, and to block state agencies from planning for future sea-level rise
45. ^ Abowd, Paul. "Koch-funded charity passes money to free-market think tanks in states". NBC News. Center for Public Integrity. Retrieved March 11, 2015.

External links

• Official website
• TheCenterSquare.com
• "Franklin News Foundation Internal Revenue Service filings". ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.

Categories: 

• American journalism organizations
• Non-profit organizations based in Chicago
• Investigative journalism
• Organizations established in 2009
• Conservatism in the United States

==

NEW

Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity

Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity

Background

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity is a 501(c)(3) conservative media organization located in Bismarck, North Dakota that trains journalists and publishes political news and commentary.  Established in January 2009, The Franklin Center “supports and trains investigative journalists to advance transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility in local government, and to spotlight free-market, pro-liberty solutions to difficult public policy challenges,” according to its website. The Franklin Center obtained non-profit status in June, 2009. [1], [2]

The Franklin Center was originally launched and funded by Eric O'Keefe's now-defunct Sam Adams Alliance (SAA), a conservative think-tank which encouraged “grass-roots activism.” The website was registered by John Connors, who also worked with Americans for Prosperity and was the public face of the dark money group Citizens for a Strong America.

The Center has also been criticized for funding partisan polls, and has ties to the Tea Party training group American Majority. The Center maintains a large and growing number of news bureaus across the United States. [9], [10]

When the Center was created, it started with a budget of zero dollars, which by 2009 had jumped to $2.4 million (this being money from the Sam Adams Alliance, the National Journal reports). “That’s a spectacular leap for a nonprofit, especially in Medora,” Jeff Nesbit writes in a 2016 profile of the Franklin Center in Salon. “It was almost as if someone wished to utilize the charter concept of the Franklin Center—developing individual but interlinked news centers across the United States that would all promote the same messages—for other purposes and therefore infused it with a mountain of funding and network support. Intriguingly, this was a year before the Tea Party movement seemingly sprang from nowhere and spread like a prairie fire to the thirty-nine state capitals where the Franklin Center now operates its news sites.” [34]

From 2007/2008, the Franklin Center rapidly grew to become the largest network of local political reporting in the country with  55 news sites generally “from an antitax, antiregulation, or antispending frame,” reports Nesbit. “While each of the sites has its own team of local reporters, they generally tend to share common themes across the entire network of coverage, recent studies have shown.” It describes its network of reporters as “watchdogs.” [34]

The Franklin Center maintains local sites and reporters which adhere to an overarching platform:

“All publications have a mission and a voice. We are unabashed in ours: to spotlight waste, fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars by state and local governments. We always ask these questions when reporting on events: What does this mean for taxpayers? Will it advance or restrict individual freedom? We look at the bigger picture, provide analysis that’s often missing from modern news stories, and do more than provide ‘he-said, she-said’ reports from the state Capitol. Our journalists look for the back story and offer much-needed perspective on the day’s news.” [34]

Nesbit comments that by maintaining multiple news outlets with the same underlying themes, the Franklin Center can obscure its influence: “The state legislators and local readers also aren’t generally aware that a national center is directing traffic.”

In many states, the Franklin Center is a large source of political news:

“Specializing in state and local government, [the] Franklin Center has focused its efforts on reaching maximum penetration within small and mid-sized media markets—on driving a conversation about transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility at the grassroots level and putting a human face on public policy,” it says. “We specialize in reaching a layman’s audience through local media, coordinating our nationwide network to ensure that we are hitting this audience in every state.” [34]

GOP, Koch, Americans for Prosperity, & Tea Party Connections

The Franklin Center's former president is Jason Stverak, former executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party and former regional field director for the Sam Adams Alliance. [34], [35]

The Franklin Center’s director of donor development, Matt Hauck, worked for the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Its senior vice president in charge of strategic initiatives, Erik Telford, worked for the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity before joining the Franklin Center. The founding board member who set it up was Rudie Martinson, who helped run Americans for Prosperity in North Dakota. Martinson is still on the Franklin Center’s board. One of the founders of the Franklin Center, John Tsarpalas, is a past president of the Sam Adams Alliance and director of the Illinois Republican Party. [34]

Jeff Nesbit reports that “Like the Sam Adams Alliance training sessions that were conducted under the umbrella of Americans for Prosperity in the year or so prior to the Chicago Tea Party event, most of the Franklin Center’s training sessions for citizen journalists are likewise conducted in partnership with Americans for Prosperity.”  [34]

Watchdog.org/Citizen Watchdog

As of 2016, the Franklin Center's public 990 form stated the Center's main program was Watchdog.org with approximately 80% of the Center's budget going to the program, with the remaining 20% going to administrative and operations costs.

Watchdog.org's stated mission is to “restore oversight of our state governments, to hold politicians and bureaucrats at all levels accountable for their handling of taxpayers’ dollars and to promote innovative solutions to public policy challenges.” [57]

The Franklin Center launched its initial “activist training program” in 2012, entitled Citizen Watchdog, with the stated goal of raising “an army of citizen journalists, trained and equipped to serve as watchdogs in their local communities.”  The Franklin Center's Watchdog.org promoted the work of its “affiliates” across the country. [3]

Salon magazine reported on the Franklin Center's program:

“We’re leaders in the new wave of non-profit journalism. We have reporters, news sites, investigative journalists and affiliates across the country—and we’re growing. In addition to our nationwide team of professional journalists, we are expanding our reach into citizen journalism,” the Franklin Center wrote. “We provide training to these citizen watchdogs so that they can better employ journalistic standards as they keep their local governments accountable through their blogs and Web sites. While distinct from our journalism efforts, this new wave of information activism will help fulfill Franklin’s vision of creating a more vibrant democratic society based on accountability and open government.” [34]

Franklin Center Criticism

While the Center projects itself as being non-partisan, a number of groups have criticized the Franklin Center for a conservative bias and The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism ranked the Watchdog.org group as “highly ideological.” It also maintains other ties to the right: Jason Stverak, former President of the Franklin Center was also the past executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party. The Center's current President, Erik Telford, has previous ties to the right-wing  Americans for Prosperity.  [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]

Reporter Gene Gibbons criticized Watchdog.org's journalism quality in the Nieman Reports (a publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard):

“For the most part, the people in charge of these would-be watchdog operations are political hacks out to subvert journalism in their quest to grab and keep power using whatever means they have to do so. […] At the forefront of an effort to blur the distinction between statehouse reporting and political advocacy is the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.”  [11]

When Gibbons interviewed Franklin Center President Jason Stverak in the spring of 2010 for the Nieman Foundation report, Stverak told him that the Franklin Center journalists were held to the same journalism ethics as those from traditional newspapers. They should be judged “based upon the content that they produce,” Stverak said.

However, when Gibbons looked further he found “political propaganda dressed up as journalism.” Jeff Nesbit writes at Salon how four months after the interview Gibbons wrote, “The Franklin Center co-sponsored and played an active role in a two-day conference organized by Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The Right Online Agenda conference included such breakout sessions as ‘Intro to Online Activism’ and ‘Killing the Death Tax’ and featured speakers such as conservative U.S. Representative Michele Bachman of Minnesota and Tea Party activist Sharron Angle, a Republican who was then running against Harry Reid in the election for U.S. Senate in Nevada. No Democratic legislators were included in the program. The finale of the Las Vegas conference was a ‘November is Coming Rally.’ ” [34]

Stance on Climate Change

While the Franklin Center does have an official statement on climate change, its affiliated news outlets regularly publishes articles questioning man-made climate change. Some examples below:

December 10, 2015

According to Roy Cordato, who writes in Franklin-Center-affiliated Carolina Journal, “Warming has actually occurred at a pace far below what any climate models have predicted,” (Citing Anthony Watts citing Roy Spencer.) [45]

Cordato claims there has been a “[…] 'pause' in warming, that is the flat trend in global temperatures over the last 18 — now going on 19 — years […]” (Citing himself, citing Anthony Watts, who reposted an article written by Christopher Monckton that finally cites Ross McKitrick). [45]

Cordato continues, writing that “global warming is not about data points,” but that this is a “a trick pulled by global warming alarmists over the last decade” (citing himself, citing Fred Singer). [45]

2015

“There is a way for Nevada to fight back. Every business owner and electricity consumer in Nevada should encourage both Gov. Brian Sandoval and Attorney General Adam Laxalt to join 27 other states and fight the Clean Power Plan in federal court.” — Michael Schaus, Nevada Policy Research Institute. [44]

2014

“I continue to contend that 'climate change' is a meaningless phrase because the climate obviously changes. But how? To what effect? It’s like saying 'baby change' about an infant. How? Is he well and growing? Is he ill?

“'Climate change' is useful for political activism because, unlike 'global warming,' it can’t be tested.” — John Seiler, CalWatchdog.com. [41]

2013

“There's seemingly nothing anyone can do to appease global warming activists bent on putting the nation’s energy suppliers out of business.” [12]

2012

“Many people will uncritically blame fossil fuel use for recent warm weather. But they are blind to how fossil fuels have reduced climate-related deaths since the 1920s.” —Brian T. Schwartz, Boulder Daily Camera (republished by Independence Institute.org) [43]

2011

“[T]here are rifts in the scientific community – among scientists themselves when it comes to global warming, what — if anything — should be done about it, and a number of climatologists worry their discipline is getting pulled into overtly political directions. “ [13]

“The science is settled? While I got the impression there’s plenty of consensus among the scientists at the Santa Fe conference on a warming planet, there wasn’t much agreement on points beyond that.” [13]

June, 2011

“Hard-nosed physical evidence of man-made global warming has yet to be provided by the promoters of warming, even after a nominal $80 billion dollars have been spent in the attempt to do so.” — Michael Fox, Hawaii Reporter. [42]

Funding

According to research by the Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch,  “Franklin acts as a hub that distributes funding that it receives from right-wing institutions such as the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance.” [17]

The following funding details are based on data collected by the Conservative Transparency Project.  Note that not all of the following funding values have been verified by DeSmogBlog for accuracy. See the attached spreadsheet for more information on the Franklin Center's funding by year (.xlsx). [33]

Franklin Center as Recipient

Donor Total

Donors Capital Fund $33,144,119

DonorsTrust $5,851,973

The Thirteen Foundation $1,309,775

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $885,500

Searle Freedom Trust $812,500

Walton Family Foundation $650,000

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation $357,736

Wellspring Committee $160,000

Dunn's Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking $155,000

Judicial Education Project $100,000

State Policy Network $100,000

Pew Charitable Trusts $80,784

Mywireless.org $50,000

Sarah Scaife Foundation $35,000

Americans for Prosperity Foundation $30,000

Castle Rock Foundation $25,000

Adolph Coors Foundation $25,000

Armstrong Foundation $25,000

Vernon K Krieble Foundation $24,500

Hickory Foundation $20,000

Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice $10,000

Einhorn Family Foundation $6,000

Robert P Rotella Foundation $5,000

National Christian Charitable Foundation $2,000

Joyce and Donald Rumsfeld Foundation $1,000

Grand Total $43,865,887

Franklin Center as Donor

Recipient Total

Government Accountability Institute $2,000,000

Cause of Action $894,000

Hard Boiled Film $556,550

Freedom Through Justice $350,000

Texas Watchdog $322,500

Nevada News Bureau $257,351

Oregon Capitol $250,000

Frontier Lab $235,000

Missouri News Network $200,000

Cowboy State Free Press $156,000

TN Watch $150,000

Foundation for Ethics in Public Service $115,000

Maryland Reporter.com $93,000

James Madison Institute $75,000

Small Business Foundation Hawaii $71,500

Idaho Freedom Foundation $60,000

TNRReport.com $50,000

True The Vote $50,000

Pershing Center $45,000

Lucy Burns Institute $43,412

Pelican Institute $36,000

American Majority $25,000

American Phoenix Foundation $25,000

Citizen Outreach Foundation $25,000

Tennessee Center for PP $25,000

Rhode Island Center for Freedom $7,500

Independence Institute $6,750

Talent Market $6,000

Grand Total $6,130,563

DonorsTrust/Donors Capital Fund

In addition to seed money from the Sam Adams Alliance, The Franklin Center received significant funding from grants channeled through DonorsTrust (DT) over the years, with much of this finding going directly to the center's campaigns against alternative energy and the recognition of climate change. According to the Center for Public Integrity, 95 percent of the Franklin Center's revenue in 2011 came from DonorsTrust. [14], [15]

From 2009 to 2013, The Franklin Center received a total of at least $20,257,169 from Donors Capital Fund (DCF), and an additional $4,224,520 from DonorsTrust.

Mother Jones magazine described DonorsTrust as the “Dark Money ATM of the Conservative Movement.” DT and DCF allow for anonymous donations from individuals and groups that want to conceal their donor information through “donor-advised funds.” [16]

990 Forms

Franklin Center Contact & Location

The first legal address of the Franklin Center was a taffy shop in Medora, North Dakota. Its second address is a post office box in Bismark, North Dakota, which forwards mail to Old Town Alexandria, near Washington, DC. [34]

North Dakota law requires that nonprofits have a “physical address,” not just a forwarding address or a post office box. This was why, for years, the Franklin Center was registered to the taffy shop while the mail was forwarded from the UPS store in Bismarck. [34]

As of May, 2016, the Franklin Center listed the following contact information on its website: [46]

Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity

107 S. West St.

Suite 718

Alexandria, VA 22314

Phone: (571) 384-2090

Fax: (571) 384-2093

Key People

Board of Directors

2012[38] 2015 [18] 2016[37]

Blair Thoreson Y

Doug Loen Y

Ed McFadden Y

Erik Telford Y

Jack Fowler Y Y

Jason Stverak Y

John J. Miller Y Y

Mary Beth Weiss Y Y

Rudie Martinson Y

Leadership Team

2015[19] 2016[39] Description

Erik Telford Y Past President

Mary Ellen Beatty Y Chief of Staff

Nicole Neily Y President

Steve Mullins Y Chief Financial Officer

Will Swaim Y Past Vice President of Journalism

Communications & Outreach

2015[19] 2016[39] Description

Breyana Franklin Y Past Public Affairs Manager

Josh Kaib Y Outreach and Content Manager

Kevin Glass Y Y Director of  Outreach and Policy

Spencer Schwartz Y Outreach & Communications Intern

Victor Nava Y Past Staff Writer

Development

2015[19] 2016[39] Description

Christina Pajak Y Y Manager of Investor Relations

John Courts Y Y Development Operations and Research Manager

Matthew Hauck Y Y Director of Development

Megan Ritter Y Past Grants Manager and Development Writer

Shana Davidson Y Past Direct Marketing Manager

Marketing & Special Projects (2016) [39]

Name Description

Andrew Collins Digital Media Manager

Kristen Hawley Digital Marketing Manager

Scott Kocen Technology Adviser

Operations/Administration

2015[19] 2016[39] Description

Alyssa Viscomi Y Past Executive Assistant

Becky Wessels Y Y Director of Operations

Watchdog Arena (2015) [19]

Name Description

Jackie Bastasch Managing Editor, Watchdog Arena

Josh Kaib Outreach and Content Manager

Watchdog.org

2015[19] 2016[39]

Amelia Hamilton Y

Andrew Staub Y

Arthur Kane Y

Bruce Parker Y

Chris Butler Y

Deena Winter Y

Eric Boehm Y Y

Evan Grossman Y Y

Heather Kays Y

James Wigderson Y

Jason Hart Y Y

John Bicknell Y Y

John Trump Y

Johnny Kampis Y Y

Jon Cassidy Y Y

Kenric Ward Y Y

Mark Lagerkvist Y

Mark Lisheron Y Y

Mary Ellen Beatty Y

Matt Kittle Y Y

Moriah Costa Y

Paul Brennan Y

Rob Nikolewski Y

Steve Wilson Y Y

Tom Steward Y

Tori Richards Y

Will Swaim Y

Past People

Advisory Committee (2012) [40]

Tucker Carlson — Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Caller.

Jack Fowler — Publisher, National Review.

Ashley Landess — President, South Carolina Policy Council.

Joseph Lehman — President, Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Mark Tapscott — Executive Editor, The Washington Examiner.

Staff (2012 - Partial List) [20]

Jason Stverak — President. Past Field Director, Sam Adams Alliance.

Gwen Beattie — Executive Vice President. Former Director, America's Future Foundation.

John Connors — Director of Special Projects.

Steven Greenhut — Vice President of Journalism.

Erik Telford — Vice President of Strategic Initiatives & Outreach.

Development and Outreach

Alicia Barrett — Manager of Investor Relations

Shana Davidson — Direct Marketing Manager

Matt Hauck — Director of Development. Former Associate, Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Christina Pajak — Manager of Investor Relations.

Megan Ritter — Grants Manager and Development Writer.

John Courts — Development Coordinator.

Kathy McDonald — Senior Director of External Affairs.

Actions

July 12, 2016

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, represented by Nicole Neily, was among 22 groups represented in a “Coalition” open letter pushing back against what the Heartland Institute describes as an “affront to free speech.” The groups are responding to the recent Web of Denial Resolution brought up in the Senate, calling out fossil fuel industry-funded groups denying climate change. [53]

According to the Climate Investigations Center, all but one of the open letter's signatory organizations have taken money (totalling at least $92 million since 1997) from the “climate denial web” including Koch Brothers' various foundations, ExxonMobil, and two “Dark Money” organizations, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. [56]

Championed by Senators Whitehouse, Markey, Schatz, Boxer, Merkley, Warren, Sanders, and Franken, the resolution condemns what they are calling the #WebOfDenial — “interconnected groups – funded by the Koch brothers, major fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal, identity-scrubbing groups like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, and their allies – developed and executed a massive campaign to deceive the public about climate change to halt climate action and protect their bottom lines.” [54]

The open letter addresses the senators, calling them “tyrants”:

“We hear you. Your threat is clear: There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And, we reject it.” [55]

The full list of signatories and their respective organizations is as follows:

Grover Norquist — Americans for Tax Reform

Lisa B. Nelson — American Legislative Exchange Council

John A. Charles, Jr. — Cascade Policy Institute

David Rothbard — Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

Kent Lassman — Competitive Enterprise Institute

Nicole Neily — Franklin Center for Government and Policy Integrity

Benita Dodd — Georgia Public Policy Foundation

Bridgett Wagner — The Heritage Foundation

Fred Birnbaum — Idaho Freedom Foundation

Joseph Bast — The Heartland Institute

J. Robert McClure III — James Madison Institute

Brett Healy — The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy

Kory Swanson — John Locke Foundation

Dave Trabert — Kansas Policy Institute

Jason Hayes — Mackinac Center for Public Policy

Brent Mead — Montana Policy Institute

Sharon J. Rossie — Nevada Policy Research Institute

Sally Pipes — Pacific Research Institute

Kevin Kane — Pelican Institute for Public Policy

Paul J. Gessing — Rio Grande Foundation

Lynn Taylor — Virginia Institute for Public Policy

Carol Platt Liebau — Yankee Institute for Public Policy

June 13, 2016

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity was listed as a creditor in Peabody Energy's 2016 bankruptcy filings, reports the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD/PRWatch). [47]

While the available bankruptcy documents do not list the scale or dates of funding, they outline Peabody Energy's financial ties to a large network of groups promoting climate change denial. [48]

Prominent individuals appearing in the documents include climate deniers Willie Soon, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer and Richard Berman. The long list of organizations also includes groups such as Americans for Prosperity, American Legislative Exchange Council, CFACT, Institute for Energy Research, State Policy Network, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and dozens more. [49]

The Guardian also analysed and reported on the Peabody bankruptcy findings: [50]

“These groups collectively are the heart and soul of climate denial,” said Kert Davies, founder of the Climate Investigation Center, who has spent 20 years tracking funding for climate denial. “It’s the broadest list I have seen of one company funding so many nodes in the denial machine.”

The company’s filings reveal funding for a range of organisations which have fought Barack Obama’s plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and denied the very existence of climate change. […]

Among Peabody’s beneficiaries, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has insisted – wrongly – that carbon emissions are not a threat but “the elixir of life” while the American Legislative Exchange Council is trying to overturn Environmental Protection Agency rules cutting emissions from power plants. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity campaigns against carbon pricing. The Oklahoma chapter was on the list. […]

“The breadth of the groups with financial ties to Peabody is extraordinary. Thinktanks, litigation groups, climate scientists, political organisations, dozens of organisations blocking action on climate all receiving funding from the coal industry,” said Nick Surgey, director of research for the Center for Media and Democracy.

“We expected to see some denial money, but it looks like Peabody is the treasury for a very substantial part of the climate denial movement.”

Notable organizations listed in the initial documents include:

60 Plus Association

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity

American Energy Alliance

Alliance For Energy And Economic Growth

American Energy Alliance

American Legislative Exchange Council

Americans For Prosperity Oklahoma

Atlas Economic Research Foundation

Berman And Company, Inc

Consumer Energy Alliance

Center For Clean Air Policy

Center for Energy and Economic Development

Center For The Study Of Carbon Dioxide And Global Change

Coalition for Responsible Regulation

Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Council on State Taxation

DCI Group AZ, LLC

Ducks Unlimited

Energy & Environment Legal Institute

Edison Electric Institute

Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity

Free Market Environmental Law Clinic

Frontiers Of Freedom Institute

George C. Marshall Institute

Hill Knowlton Strategies

Hill Knowlton, Inc

Hudson Institute

Hunton & Williams

Independence Institute

Institute For Energy Research

Institute for Liberty

National Association of Manufacturers

National Black Chamber of Commerce

National Conference of State Legislatures

National Mining Association

National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners

National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

NextGen Energy Council

PACE (May refer to Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy)

Science & Public Policy Institute

Sidley Austin LLP

State Policy Network

Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute

Texas Public Policy Foundation

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Western Business Roundtable

Notable individuals named in the initial documents include the following:

Kelly Forbes Mader

Heather A. Wilson

Roy W. Spencer

Willie Soon

Richard Lindzen

May 2, 2016

Kevin Glass, Director of Outreach and Policy at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, wrote an article sympathetic to Duke Energy in Real Clear Markets. [51]

According to Kevin Glass, “shameless green groups are […] running ads in North Carolina vilifying Duke Energy and are ramping up their attacks against the company over coal ash. Their motivation is clear: They want to link Republican Governor Pat McCrory - a former longtime Duke Energy employee - to a contrived 'pollution' scandal.” [51]

Glass says that residents of North Carolina have been “needlessly frightened and misled by both state health officials and by radical environmentalists who will stop at nothing to bring down a trusted, much needed energy producer.” [51]

In 2015, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services issued a do-not-drink order for residents living near coal ash storage ponds managed by Duke Energy. The state had found water wells were contaminated with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium and vanadium, which is known to harm kidneys and affect blood pressure. While “do not drink” notices were released in April, they were later retracted in March, confusing many residents. [52]

Environmental groups said that pointing out how municipal water is also contaminated doesn’t mean the state should withdraw public health protections from citizens using well water. [52]

“While the amounts of hexavalent chromium detected in municipal water supplies in North Carolina are worrisome and show we do need state and federal drinking water standards to catch up to the latest science, some of the levels found in wells near Duke's coal ash sites have been much higher,” said Katie Hicks, Associate Director for Clean Water for North Carolina. [52]

December 13, 2015

Writing as a guest blogger on Watts Up With That, CFACT's executive director Craig Rucker denounced the latest UN climate change agreement: [39]

“This agreement will not meaningfully alter the temperature of the Earth, even under the U.N.’s own computer models.

“The bad news is that it plants the seeds of a new UN climate regime that left unchecked will swell into a bureaucratic behemoth.”

December, 2012 - July 2014

GreenTech Automotive launched a $85 million lawsuit against the Franklin center for Government & Public Integrity after the center's December, 2012 investigative series that attempted to tie the manufacturing company to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.  [21]

GreenTech accused the Franklin Center and Watchdog.org Virginia bureau chief Kenric Ward of defamation and business interference, saying that it had lost $85 million in investment capital due to the articles that the center had published.

GreenTech's suit cites a number of instances of Watchdog.org's reporting as libelous, including describing the company's headquarters as a “broom closet.” Additional examples include: [22]

Quotes from investment advisor Michael Gibson criticizing GTA’s business model “despite the fact Gibson has never seen nor reviewed GTA’s business model”

“Statements from Gibson calling GTA’S EB-5 funding project a ‘fraud’”

“False assertions that EB-5 funding is GTA’s chief source of funding and its long-term plan for continuing capital”;

Allegations that GTA’s plant in Tunica, Miss., is behind schedule in its building and hiring, when both construction and employment goals are on pace to be met;

Statements contending and/or insinuating that federal agencies are investigating or taking “a closer look” at the sources of GTA’s funding.

“There’s no denying that defending the First Amendment rights and responsibilities of our reporters has been costly to us in terms of time, people and money,” Franklin center president Jason Stverak said, “but it’s hard to put a price on defending the Constitution.”

The lawsuit was dismissed on July 24, 2014 by a Mississippi federal court.

February, 2013

The Guardian reported that the Franklin Center was at the forefront of a media campaign against wind and solar power that was largely funded by DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. [23]

The Guardian also comments on the $6.3 million that the two funds gave to the Franklin Center in 2011, saying that this “Signals a shift in priorities for the conservative billionaires who are funding the anti-climate cause towards local and state-level organising.”

2012

The Guardian reports that the Franklin Center, along with its affiliated websites and news groups, was involved in a campaign against wind farms and solar projects in the U.S. along with other organizations that have received funding from the secretive DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. [24]

September 12, 2012

Co-sponsored a “Citizen Watchdog Training” event with Americans For Prosperity featuring right-wing activist James O'Keefe who spoke at the event on how “Together, we can begin the hard, but important job of taking back America.”

The event description hints at government conspiracy: “You've heard the egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse on a daily basis. We can no longer afford to sit by and wait for the government or mainstream media to fully inform the public about what's going on behind closed doors.” [25]

2011

According to records on file at SourceWatch, The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity was a “Vice-Chairman” level sponsor of the 2011 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual conference.  [26], [27]

ALEC maintains ties with some of the largest industry organizations and provides connections to state legislators. The group is primarily responsible for drafting bills and resolutions created by the corporations who finance ALEC.

Notably, one of the Franklin Center's former Directors, Blair Thoreson, was the State Chairman for the North Dakota chapter of ALEC at the time.

February 24, 2011

The Franklin Center commissioned a poll of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal through WisconsinReporter.com, one of the Center's affiliate websites.

The Franklin Center press release said that “ Poll Shows 71% of Wisconsinites Think Walker's Budget Changes are 'Fair'.” [28]

This high percentage created some skepticism about the poll, while the data was cited by major news sources including MSNBC without further investigation.  [28], [9], [29]

December, 2011

Watchdog affiliate New Jersey Watchdog posted an article that pushes for the state to drop a regional emissions reduction program. [30]

Related Organizations

Citizen Watchdog

Sam Adams Alliance (SAA)

American Majority

John Locke Foundation

John W Pope Civitas Institute

Sourcewatch compiled a list of “Statehouse News Bureaus” associated with the Franklin Center. Note that not all of the following news groups are still in operation: [31]

Franklin Center News Bureaus

*(Click image for full size)

Pacific Research Institute, California, calwatchdog.com

Independence Institute, Colorado, coloradonewsagency.com

Hawaii Reporter, Hawaii, hawaiireporter.com

Idaho Freedom Foundation, Idaho, idahoreporter.com

Illinois Statehouse News, Illinois, Illinois.statehousenewsonline.com

Iowa Politics, Iowa, iowapolitics.com

Kansas Reporter, Kansas, kansasreporter.com

Pelican Institute, Louisiana, thepelicanpost.org

Maryland Reporter, Maryland, marylandreporter.com

Michigan Center for Public Policy, Michigan, michigancapitolconfidential.com

Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, Minnesota, mnstatenews.com

Missouri News Horizon, Missouri, minewshorizon.org

Montana Policy Institute, Montana, montana.watchdog.org

Nevada News Bureau, Nevada, nevadanewsbeaureau.com

Rio Grande Foundation, New Mexico, capitolreportnewmexico.com

John Locke Foundation, North Carolina, carolinajournal.com

John William Pope Civitas Institute, North Carolina, nccivitas.org

Plains Daily, North Dakota, plainsdaily.com

Capitol Beat OK, Oklahoma, capitolbeatok.com

Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon, oregoncapitolnews.com

Pennsylvania Independent, Pennsylvania, paindependent.com

South Carolina Policy Council, South Carolina, thenerve.org

Tennessee Report, Tennessee, tnreport.com

Texas Watchdog, Texas, texaswatchdog.org

Virginia Statehouse News, Virginia, virginiastatehousenews.com

Wisconsin Reporter, Wisconsin, wisconsinreporter.com

Cowboy State Free Press, Wyoming, cowboystatefreepress.net

SourceWatch also archived a list of the Franklin Center's previously affiliated “Investigative Reporters” or organizations: [32]

Alabama Policy Institute, Alabama, alabamarighttoknow.org

Alaska Policy Forum, Alaska, alaska.watchdog.org

Goldwater Institute, Arizona, goldwaterinstitute.org

Advance Arkansas Institute, Arkansas, thearkansasproject.com

Pacific Research Institute, California, calwatchdog.com

Independence Institute, Colorado, i2i.org

Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Connecticut, raisinghale.com

James Madison Institute, Florida, jamesmadison.org

Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Georgia, forum.georgiapolicy.org

Hawaii Reporter, Hawaii, hawaiireporter.com

Idaho Freedom Foundation, Idaho, idahoreporter.com

Illinois Policy Institute, Illinois, illinoispolicy.org

Iowa Politics, Iowa, iowapolitics.com

Kansas Watchdog, Kansas, Kansas.watchdog.org

Pelican Institute, Louisiana, thepelicanpost.org

Maine Watchdog, Maine, maine.watchdog.org

Maryland Public Policy Institute, Maryland, mdpolicy.com

Pioneer Institute, Massachusetts, pioneerinstitute.org

Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Michigan, mackinac.org

Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, Minnesota, freedomfoundationofminnesota.com

Missouri Watchdog, Missouri, missouri.watchdog.org

Montana Policy Institute, Montana, montana.watchdog.org

Nebraska Watchdog, Nebraska, nebraska.watchdog.org

Nevada Policy Research Institute, Nevada, npri.org

Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, New Hampshire, newhampshire.watchdog.org

New Jersey Watchdog, New Jersey, newjersey.watchdog.org (*Terminated as of December, 2015) [36]

Rio Grande Foundation, New Mexico, newmexico.watchdog.org

John Locke Foundation, North Carolina, carolinajournal.com

Plains Daily, North Dakota, plainsdaily.com

Ohio Watchdog, Ohio, ohio.watchdog.org

Oklahoma Watchdog, Oklahoma, oklahoma.watchdog.org

Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon, oregoncapitolnews.com

Pennsylvania Independent, Pennsylvania, paindependent.com

South Carolina Policy Council, South Carolina, thenerve.org

Tennessee Center for Policy Research, Tennessee, tennessee.watchdog.org

Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas, texasbudgersource.com

Texas Watchdog, Texas, texaswatchdog.org

Sutherland Institute, Utah, sutherlandinstitute.org

Old Dominion Watchdog, Virginia, olddominionwatchdog.org

Freedom Foundation, Washington, myfreedomfoundation.com

Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia, West Virginia, westvirginia.watchdog.org

MacIver Institute, Wisconsin, maciverinstitute.com

Wisconsin Reporter, Wisconsin, wisconsinreporter.org

Wyoming Liberty Group, Wyoming, wyomingreporter.org

Resources

“About,” Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hM9ej87Q

“About,” Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Archived June 25, 2011. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmogBlog.

Elizabeth Hillgrove. “Become a Citizen Watchdog,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, March 1, 2012. Archived October 27, 2015. Archive.fo URL: https://archive.fo/tZ8ZJ

“'Watchdog' website puts a new spin on politics,” Portland Press Herald, October 2, 2010. Archived October 27, 215. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6cbQUvekt

Allison Kilkenny. “The Koch Spider Web,” truth-out.org, August 4, 2011. Archived October 27, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6cbQc4pG8

“A Closer Look at Non-Profit News Sites,” Journalism.org. Accessed October, 2015.

“Jason Stverak, President,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccjcSYup

“Franklin Center Names Erik Telford President,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccjuEMin

“The Conservative Group Behind The Poll Of Walker’s Budget Plan,” TPM, February 24, 2011 Archived October 27, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6cbQjbzXN

“About,” Sam Adams Alliance. Archived February 16, 2012.

Gene Gibbons. “Statehouse Beat Woes Portend Bad News for Good Government,” Nieman Reports, December 15, 2010. Archived October 29, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceHl5VCp

Dustin Hurst. “As reds and blues unite behind Keystone, greens prepare for battle,” Watchdog.org, January 31, 2013. Archived October 27, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6cbRBYuK3

Rob Nikolewski. ”What I saw at the climate conference; and leading scientist says some colleagues 'endorse Al Gore even though they know what he’s saying is exaggerated and misleading'.” New MexicoWatchDog.org, November 15, 2011. Archived October 27, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6cbTBcLp5

“Media campaign against windfarms funded by anonymous conservatives,” The Guardian, February 15, 2013. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccis65XR

“Donors use charity to push free-market policies in states,” The Center for Public Integrity, February 14, 2013.

“Exposed: The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement,” Mother Jones, February 5, 2013. Archived October 28, 2015.

Sara Jerving. “Franklin Center: Right-Wing Funds State News Source,” PR Watch, October 27, 2011. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccwZH3eP

“Board of Directors,” Franklin center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccxjGaA5

“Staff,” Franklin center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccxjGaA5

“Staff,” Franklin center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived February 21, 2012.

(Press Release). “Judge Throws Out $85 Million Lawsuit Against Franklin Center,” Franklin center for Government & Public Integrity, July 25, 2014. Archived October 29, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceK5icis

Jim Geraghty. “GreenTech vs. Watchdog.org,” National Review, April 17, 2013. Archived October 29, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceJuTuQe

Suzanne Goldenberg. “Media campaign against windfarms funded by anonymous conservatives,” The Guardian, February 15, 2013. Archived October 29, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceIvO8nB

“Media campaign against windfarms funded by anonymous conservatives,” The Guardian, February 15, 2013. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccyKZxLe

“Citizen Journalist Training With James O'Keefe,” Meetup.com. September 22, 2012. Archived October 28, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ccydcFTo

“Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity,” SourceWatch. Archived October 28, 2015.

American Legislative Exchange Council, 2011 Conference Sponsors, conference brochure on file with CMD, August 11, 2011.

“Poll Shows 71% of Wisconsinites Think Walker’s Budget Changes are 'Fair',” Franklin center for Government & Public Integrity, February 21, 2011. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceC65iCv

YouTube. MSNBC Pushes Right-Wing Wisconsin Poll. YouTube. Accessed February 16, 2013.

Mark Lagerkvist. ”IT’S CURTAINS FOR RGGI AS NJ’S CAP-AND-TRADE OPERA ENDS,” New Jersey Watchdog, December 9, 2011. Archived October 29, 2015. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceCFVE2H

“Statehouse News Bureaus,” SourceWatch, accessed October 29, 2015.

“Investigative Journalists” (JPG image) Sourcewatch. Accessed October 29, 2015.

“Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity,” Conservative Transparency. Accessed May 19, 2017. Data on file at DeSmog.

Jeff Nesbit. “Inside the right-wing lie factory: Secrets of a Koch-funded propaganda machine more insidious than Fox News,” Salon, April 30, 2016. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMCbJCEy

“Jason Stverak,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMEfRrhR

Alyana Alfaro. “Lack of Funding Cited for NJ Watchdog Termination,” PolitickerNJ, December 7, 2015. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMFE0o0r

“Board of Directors,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMITWsDW

“Board of Directors,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived May 30, 2012. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmogBlog.

“Staff,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMJ5ubq0

“Advisory Committee,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived May 30, 2012. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmogblog.

John Seiler. “Fact-checking Tom Steyer on climate change,” CalWatchdog.com, August 23, 2014. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMM4icKY

Michael Fox. “The Corruption of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: A National Peril,” Hawaii Reporter, June 22, 2011. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMMO9pyv

Brian T. Schwartz. “Fossil fuel use protects us from climate-related risks,” the Boulder Daily Camera, December 15, 2012. Republished by The Independence Institute, December 21, 2012. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMNK83EE

“EPA is determined to prove Obama right and make energy prices 'skyrocket',” Nevada Policy Research Institute, December 9, 2015. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL:  http://www.webcitation.org/6hMNfkYXT

Roy Cordato. “Front-Page Advocacy on Climate Talks,” Carolina Journal, December 10, 2015. Archived May 8, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hMOo5c2H

“How to get in touch with Franklin Center,” Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Archived May 29, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6hrI80fDW

Nick Surgey. “Peabody Coal Bankruptcy Reveals Climate Denial Network Funding,” PRWatch, June 13, 2016. Archived June 20, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6iPmXjc4W

“In re: Peabody Energy Corporation, et al. Debtors,” United States Bankruptcy Court Eastern District of Missouri Eastern Division,  Case 16-42529, May 27, 2016. Retrieved from DocumentCloud.

Farron Cousins. “Court Documents Show Coal Giant Peabody Energy Funded Dozens Of Climate Denial Groups,” DeSmogBlog, June 13, 2016.

Suzanne Goldenberg and Helena Bengtsson. “Biggest US coal company funded dozens of groups questioning climate change,” The Guardian, June 13, 2016. Archived June 20, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6iPnEUG1o

Kevin Glass. “Junk Corporate Activism Victimizes North Carolinians,” Real Clear Markets, May 2, 2016. Archived June 25, 2016. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6iWFQdIkj

“Confusion and Fear in North Carolina As State Ends Drinking Water Safety Warning,” DeSmog, March 16, 2016.

Jim Lakely. “#WebOfDenial Push by Senate Dems Exposes Their Hatred of Free Speech,” Somewhat Reasonable (Heartland Institute Blog), July 12, 2016. Archived July 14, 2016.

Brendan Demelle. “Senators Launch Resolution, Speech Blitz Calling Out #WebOfDenial Blocking Climate Action,” DeSmog, July 11, 2016.

Coalition Letter to Senate Web of Denial Resolution (PDF). Retrieved from the Heartland Institute. Archived .pdf on file at DeSMogBlog.

Cindy Baxter. “Front Groups Attacking #WebofDenial Senate Action Took Over $92M in Dark, Dirty Money,” Desmog, July 14, 2016. Originally posted at Climate Investigations Center.

“About Us,” Watchdog. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/75rkh6ULf

Other Resources

“Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity,” Wikipedia.

“Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity,” SourceWatch.

“Donors use charity to push free-market policies in states,” The center for Public Integrity, February 14, 2013. WebCite URL: http://www.webcitation.org/6ceJCM8wU

File attachments:

File Franklin Center Funding 2019.xlsx

TAGS: denierorgsFranklin Centre for Government and Public Integritykochorg

franklinctr819

==

nb color below

819 bak

Sam adams ppl jumped here? now doomed b/c of John Doe?

jumped shark from recruiting "investigative reporters to attacking them?

fake news

see state level news bureau

==

https://www.journalism.org/2014/07/10/who-covers-the-statehouse/

...

Nonprofits

Like for-profit digital news organizations, nonprofit outlets have mushroomed since the recession pummeled the legacy news industry. Last year, Pew Research identified 172 nonprofit news outlets across the country. Our new study found that 23 of the nonprofits that were not also ideological   cover state government.

The nonprofits have a relatively small number of reporters in capitols, just 43 full time and 92 in total—6% of all statehouse reporters.  In addition, five reporters cover the statehouse during legislative sessions and 26 do so part time. Fifteen of the nonprofit reporters are college students, and three fall into the “other” category.

The Texas Observer has been covering the statehouse in Austin for 60 years, but that is an outlier in terms of age. Sixteen of the nonprofits that report on statehouses were founded in the past six years. In addition to the Texas Observer, only one—the Center for Investigative Reporting, which dates back to 1977—existed before 2000. St. Louis Public Radio, an affiliate of National Public Radio, also has existed for some time, but it merged with the newer, digital-only St. Louis Beacon in December 2013 to create a new entity.

[tex trib pix]

The Texas Observer has three full-time, year-round statehouse reporters and three students. VTDigger.com also has three full-time statehouse reporters—representing nearly one-quarter of all full-time reporters in Vermont’s capitol. Four other nonprofits have two full-time statehouse reporters.Most nonprofits employ few reporters, but some have bigger staffs. The Texas Tribune has the largest statehouse bureau of any news organization in the country, with 15 full-time, year-round reporters and 10 students. The Connecticut Mirror is next with four full-time reporters.

Ideological Organizations

Among the nontraditional statehouse outlets are those that have a stated ideological point of view. Most of them define themselves as conservative or as in favor of a “free market,” a basic tenet of economic conservatism. Only one outlet, NC Policy Watch, calls itself progressive.

The ideological outlets assign 53 reporters to the statehouse. Those outlets assign 17 reporters to state government full time, just 2% of all full-time reporters.[but this does not mean they only get 2% of eyeballs?]They dispatch 15 reporters to the statehouse only during legislative sessions and 19 are part time. In addition, they have two student reporters. Most of these publications are digital only and many also are nonprofits. But because they describe themselves in ideological terms, we created a category to distinguish them.

About half of the ideological sites (14 out of 33) are owned by the Franklin Center for Government &  Public Integrity, a nonprofit that was founded in 2009  “to address the falloff in statehouse reporting as well as the steep decline in investigative reporting in the country,” said spokesman Michael Moroney. The center, based just outside Washington, D.C., in Alexandria, Va., supports a free market, he said.

In a 2011 study of news nonprofits, Pew Research found that the Franklin Center’s Watchdog.org sites were about four times as likely to present stories with a conservative theme than with a liberal one, though about half (49%) of their stories either had no ideological theme or had a combination of them. Its president, Jason Stverak, is a former executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party.

The Franklin Center places reporters in state capitols full time when legislatures are in session and assigns them to work on investigative projects the rest of the year, Moroney said. He said there is one reporter in each of 14 state capitols and two in Nebraska and Virginia. In addition to posting the stories on Franklin Center websites, the organization syndicates them. That is a nod to the enduring dominance of more established news outlets, particularly newspapers.[but not unalloyed good news?!]

“We know that the best way to get those stories out there is through the legacy media,” Moroney said.

Representatives of some of the conservative outlets say they are acting as an antidote to what they see as liberal bias in the mainstream media.

“Our feeling was in Tallahassee and many other statehouses, there really wasn’t anybody who was looking at the other side of the story,” said Nancy Smith, executive editor of Sunshine State News, which she described as “right of center.” “They look at a more liberal side of the news—almost everybody up there does.”

Sunshine State News was founded in 2010 with investments by “three people who want to see the other side of the news covered,” Smith added. The organization does not divulge their identities, she said. Smith, like a number of other journalists at outlets with known ideologies, hails from the legacy media. She was an editor at The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News for 28 years and is former president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors.

NC Policy Watch identifies itself on its website as a “progressive, nonprofit and non-partisan public policy organization and news outlet.” It is an independent project of the NC Justice Center, a nonprofit anti-poverty organization.

The fact that ideological organizations have begun to put reporters in statehouses has not gone unnoticed by legacy journalists.

“Some of the vacuum has been filled by advocacy groups,” said Rob Christensen, longtime statehouse reporter for the News & Observer in North Carolina. “Of course, they all have axes to grind, but they do provide information.”

Government Insider Outlets

A total of 73 reporters cover state government for specialty publications aimed at government insiders, and 49 of them are full time—accounting for 7% of the total full-time statehouse reporting corps. Five reporters cover the statehouse only during legislative sessions, and 15 do so part time. Two of the journalists are students and two are in the category of “other.”

These outlets often charge hefty subscription fees, placing the content outside the reach of a general audience. They target lawmakers, lobbyists, activists and even journalists who are willing to pay for highly specialized information about the inner workings of government. Indeed, some of these outlets are owned by lobbyists or interest groups.

Prices for these outlets vary widely. The Alaska Budget Report charges $2,397 a year, the Austin Monitor $1,099 a year and the Tennessee Journal, $247 a year, to name a few. Conversely, StatehouseReport.com/ CharlestonCurrents.com is free.

Most of these organizations track legislative bills and cover many of the small-bore daily developments of government—such as the incremental progression of a bill or a committee hearing—that general-interest outlets tend to ignore.

The Florida Current, which says on its website that it “is written for stakeholders in Florida’s legislative process,” is one of the rare insider outlets that does not charge a fee to readers. It is owned by Lobby Tools, an online subscription service that provides legislative research and analysis, bill tracking and customized daily reports. The Current’s managing editor and three reporters formerly worked at legacy outlets, according to the organizations’ website.

The rise of niche outlets that have stepped in to cover statehouses as the legacy press corps shrunk follows a pattern found in coverage of the U.S. federal government. In an earlier report on the composition of the Washington press corps, Pew Research identified a dramatic rise in specialty publications at the same time that mainstream media coverage of Washington was declining.

==

Newly revealed documents from the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation show that the foundation gave significant grants to a diverse array of media institutions, including media sites that pursued a highly partisan agenda.

The Bradley Foundation provided crucial funding to “Wisconsin Watchdog” as the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a right-wing media organization focused on building news bureaus in state capitals across the nation, slowly sank.

MYSTERY FUNDER

The Franklin Center was founded in 2009 with help from the Sam Adams Alliance, a now-defunct new media group founded in 2006 by Wisconsinite Eric O’Keefe. O’Keefe had long-standing ties to billionaire dark money activist David Koch and late Terry Kohler, a secret donor to O’Keefe’s various dark money groups. Franklin center staff were hired from both the Sam Adams Alliance and the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity group.

Franklin Center flourished with a huge influx of funds from Donors Trust and Donors Capital, the preferred funding vehicles of the Koch Network of donors that masks the true identity of givers. The Franklin Center reported annual revenue between $7 and $12 million between 2011 and 2015.

In 2011, CMD reported that the Franklin Center claimed to have 43 state news websites with reporters in 40 state capitols. Some outlets, like Wisconsin Watchdog, had received official reporting credentials. In some states, the reporters and news sites were attached to State Policy Network “think tanks,” important institutions in the “infrastructure” Bradley was building nationwide.

Newly obtained documents from the Bradley Foundation show that in recent years the Franklin Center has foundered. The number of state offices dwindled to five in 2016 and employees fled the sinking ship when a single, mystery funder withdrew support.

It is a “text book case of imprudent funding,” wrote Bradley staff. “Unable to resist the offer of $10M annually from one source, the organization grew beyond its capacity to manage itself, and became too dependent on one funder, making it able to shrug off criticism from elsewhere (including Bradley). Last year, when that funder shifted priorities and the fecklessness of the administration became evident, the organization began to collapse” (Grant Proposal Record, August 16, 2016). The Bradley documents do not say who the mystery funder was, but they do indicate that the group was also funded by the right-wing Searle Foundation with smaller “matching grants” of $35,000.

The decline of the Franklin Center is a blow to efforts by right-wing funders to develop state capitol media sites to compliment right-wing news sites covering politics in Washington, D.C., such as Breitbart News.

A RELIABLE PARTISAN ATTACK DOG

One of last remaining Franklin state news was Wisconsin Watchdog, a site that Bradley deemed “so effective, and such a valuable partner in the state’s conservative infrastructure, staff believes it is worthwhile to support the local office…” Between 2010 and 2015, Bradley gave $545,500 to the Franklin Center to support this “valuable partner” as Governor Scott Walker launched an extreme right-wing agenda (Grant Proposal Record, August 16, 2016). (An additional $250,000 went through the Franklin Center to fund a fellowship at the National Review.)

At the time, the Bradley Foundation was run by Michael Grebe, the former general counsel to the Republican National Committee and the chair of Scott Walker’s campaign for governor 2010, 2012, and 2014 and for president in 2015.

Wisconsin Watchdog’s “editor,” “bureau chief,” and reporter was Matt Kittle. Under Kittle, Watchdog was a reliable attack dog of Democratic candidates and campaigns and a reliable booster of right-wing policies and politicians. When Bradley staff were unsure if Franklin CEO Nicolle Niely was “up to the job,” they still funded Wisconsin Watchdog because it was “so effective and such a valuable partner in the state’s conservative infrastructure.”

According to the Watchdog website, Kittle wrote over 385 articles on Wisconsin’s “John Doe” investigation into coordination between dark money groups like Eric O’Keefe’s Wisconsin Club for Growth and the Walker campaign during 2011-2012 Wisconsin recall races. Kittle portrayed a investigation, launched by a bipartisan group of district attorney’s and run by a Republican Special Prosecutor, as an untethered partisan witch hunt.

That spin pleased Bradley.

“Wisconsin Watchdog became the state’s leading reporter of the John Doe investigation, bringing to light a story of political persecution that is still ongoing,” say the Bradley documents. Bradley especially appreciated the fact that Watchdog had “close ties” to “insiders in the Doe” (Grant Proposal Record, November 10, 2015, August 19, 2014).

But for all the ink spilled by Kittle on the John Doe, those “close ties” were rarely discussed. Kittle neglected to discuss:

that a key source of information on the John Doe, Wisconsin Club for Growth’s Eric O’Keefe, was a founder and early funder of the Franklin Center

that Watchdog’s “Director of Special Operations,” John Connors, was helping Wisconsin Club for Growth funnel money to sham organizations like Citizens for a Strong America and United Sportsmen, the very subject of the John Doe

By financially supporting Wisconsin Watchdog, Scott Walker’s campaign chairman effectively secured a one-sided, 24-7 propaganda arm for the Walker campaign and the dark money groups under investigation. This agitprop was so successful, Kittle’s articles were cited as fact by the right-wing majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court when they shut down the investigation in July of 2015 after failing to develop any fact record in the case.

This the type of “communications” infrastructure Bradley is interested in exporting to other states as CMD detailed in its report “Weaponized Philanthropy” on the Bradley Foundation’s infrastructure investments.

Although Wisconsin Watchdog reporter James Wigderson tweeted on April 14, 2017 that “The Franklin Center is shutting down,” it appears that Franklin fans are keeping it on life support. In a press release on April 17, Franklin announced that Chris Krug, former editor and manager of the Illinois News Network will be the new President. The Illinois News Network is a project of the Bradley-funded Illinois Policy Institute, a State Policy Network “think tank.”

Matt Kittle has landed at the Bradley-funded MacIver Institute, another State Policy Network “think tank” and he is already hard at work writing more articles about the John Doe.

In Bradley world, titles might be interchangeable, but the hard work of spinning disinformation on behalf of Republican politicians and policies must go on.

Click here for our full series on the Bradley Files.

==

==

Apr 30, 2016 05:00 AM PST

Inside the right-wing lie factory: Secrets of a Koch-funded propaganda machine more insidious than Fox News

As daily papers cut back on local news and politics, the Koch brothers are rushing into the void with slanted news

Topics: Books, Koch Brothers, Media Criticism, Rush Limbaugh, Innovation News, Business News, News, Politics News

Excerpted from "Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP"

Medora is a small, seasonal tourist town in the Badlands of western North Dakota, about 25 miles from the Montana border. It has a population of less than one hundred. It went for John McCain for president by a three-to-one margin in 2008. A handful of small stores are in the center of the town—some gift shops, a bookstore, an ice cream shop, two restaurants, a museum, and a hotel that’s full during tourist season.

Around the corner from downtown is the Rushmore Mountain Taffy and Gift Shop (not to be confused with the Rushmore Mountain Taffy Shop at the base of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota). You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but the Medora taffy shop was the first legal home of a media organization that now provides a significant amount of political news coverage in 39 state capitals through 55 interconnected news sites, according to a local reporter who was curious about the entity and asked around.

At the start of 2008, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity had a budget of zero dollars. Its legal home was the taffy shop in Medora. By 2009 the Franklin Center’s budget had jumped to $2.4 million, according to IRS tax records. That’s a spectacular leap for a nonprofit, especially in Medora.

It was almost as if someone wished to utilize the charter concept of the Franklin Center—developing individual but interlinked news centers across the United States that would all promote the same messages—for other purposes and therefore infused it with a mountain of funding and network support. Intriguingly, this was a year before the Tea Party movement seemingly sprang from nowhere and spread like a prairie fire to the thirty-nine state capitals where the Franklin Center now operates its news sites.

The Franklin Center has a second address—a post office box in Bismarck, North Dakota, where mail is forwarded east to Old Town Alexandria, near Washington, DC. North Dakota law requires that nonprofits have a “physical address,” not just a forwarding address or a post office box. So, for years, the Franklin Center’s registered agent was at the taffy shop, while the mail was forwarded from the UPS store in Bismarck.

The Franklin Center’s president is Jason Stverak. He used to be the executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party. He also ran Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign efforts in the state. But just prior to starting the Franklin Center, he was the regional field director for the Sam Adams Alliance, where, according to his Franklin Center bio, he “worked with state groups and associations committed to promoting the free-market policies” that are now embedded in every political story that the network’s reporters write about in state capitals across the country.

“An expert in non-profit journalism, Jason works to promote social welfare and civil betterment by leading initiatives that advance investigative journalism,” his Franklin Center bio reads. “His support of non-profit journalism has played a vital role in exposing corruption in our elected officials and encouraging transparency in government.”

The Franklin Center grew from nothing in 2007–08 to the largest network of local political reporting in the country almost overnight. Its 55 news sites generally cover political events or issues from an antitax, antiregulation, or antispending frame. While each of the sites has its own team of local reporters, they generally tend to share common themes across the entire network of coverage, recent studies have shown. Government is either working badly and needs to be exposed; or local initiatives are spending far too much money; or politicians are unjustly pushing for excise taxes on oil or gas or cigarettes; or the local governments are burying citizens in regulations and bureaucracy.

The Franklin Center describes most of its reporters in the state capitals as “watchdogs,” constantly looking for excise taxes that need to be rolled back or government initiatives and regulations that need to be curtailed. The organization was built to “address falling standards in the media as well as a steep falloff in reporting on state government,” its mission statement says. It “provides professional training; research, editorial, multimedia and technical support; and assistance with marketing and promoting the work of a nationwide network of non-profit reporters.” It supplements that watchdog reporting in state capitals with its “newly launched Citizen Watchdog program that trains ordinary citizens to report from local communities.”

In many of the state capitals across the United States, especially in the less populated red states, the Franklin Center news sites are a significant source of local and statewide political news. “Specializing in state and local government, [the] Franklin Center has focused its efforts on reaching maximum penetration within small and mid-sized media markets—on driving a conversation about transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility at the grassroots level and putting a human face on public policy,” it says. “We specialize in reaching a layman’s audience through local media, coordinating our nationwide network to ensure that we are hitting this audience in every state.

“[The] Franklin Center was founded in 2009 to help fill the void created as the nation’s newspapers cut back on their statehouse news coverage and investigative reporting in the wake of falling circulation and revenues. Our goal is to provide fresh, original, hard-hitting news content that is published on our own Web sites and in traditional media sources.”

While each of the local sites and reporters cover their own beats and stories, they all share a common goal and platform. “All publications have a mission and a voice. We are unabashed in ours: to spotlight waste, fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars by state and local governments. We always ask these questions when reporting on events: What does this mean for taxpayers? Will it advance or restrict individual freedom? We look at the bigger picture, provide analysis that’s often missing from modern news stories, and do more than provide ‘he-said, she-said’ reports from the state Capitol. Our journalists look for the back story and offer much-needed perspective on the day’s news.”

That context—multiple news outlets with the same underlying themes— is what makes the Franklin Center unique. State legislators have come to accept a certain style of coverage from its local news sites, which have names such as KansasReporter.com, PlainsDaily.com, or CapitolBeatOK.com, and they are rarely disappointed. The state legislators and local readers also aren’t generally aware that a national center is directing traffic.

Beyond its news sites and paid reporters, the Franklin Center also trains an army of citizen journalists who will blog and comment on taxes and government in state capitals. “We’re leaders in the new wave of non-profit journalism. We have reporters, news sites, investigative journalists and affiliates across the country—and we’re growing. In addition to our nationwide team of professional journalists, we are expanding our reach into citizen journalism,” it says. “We provide training to these citizen watchdogs so that they can better employ journalistic standards as they keep their local governments accountable through their blogs and Web sites. While distinct from our journalism efforts, this new wave of information activism will help fulfill Franklin’s vision of creating a more vibrant democratic society based on accountability and open government.”

Like the Sam Adams Alliance training sessions that were conducted under the umbrella of Americans for Prosperity in the year or so prior to the Chicago Tea Party event, most of the Franklin Center’s training sessions for citizen journalists are likewise conducted in partnership with Americans for Prosperity.

A training session in Omaha, Nebraska, in the fall of 2013 is a good example of this partnership. The session was free, sponsored by the Nebraska AFP chapter. The Franklin Center ran it for two nights (and included conservative activist James O’Keefe, who filmed ACORN events under cover, creating a firestorm of controversy).

“Nebraska and our nation are in a fiscal crisis,” the AFP’s Facebook event page said, describing the training session. “You’ve heard the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse on a daily basis. We can no longer afford to sit by and wait for the government or mainstream media to fully inform the public about what’s going on behind closed doors. The time has come to stand up and take action. Together, we can begin the hard, but important job of taking back America.”

In an era where old media is being replaced rapidly by digital media and citizen journalism, nonprofit media organizations are paying close attention to the ways in which philanthropy is intersecting with journalism. They are amazed at the rapid growth of the Franklin Center because it has been extraordinarily successful at a time when local investigative journalism efforts—even those supported by philanthropy—have struggled to take hold. Even the largest news organizations in the world are struggling to survive.

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The New York Times has gone through several rounds of buyouts and forced layoffs in the last three years, for instance. Every major newspaper in the country is struggling with the transformation to the digital age of media. An American Journalism Review in 2009 found that the number of reporters covering state capitals had fallen 30 percent since 2003.

Yet the Franklin Center flourishes. Why? Because it has deep financial pockets and no worries about its funding. National Journal reported that the Sam Adams Alliance provided the seed money to launch the Franklin Center in the months prior to the Chicago Tea Party event, taking the funding from zero to $2.4 million in 2009, then to $3.7 million the following year.

Besides operating a group of paid national reporters who focus on state capitals as well as a group of citizen journalists blogging in these state capitals, the Franklin Center also supplies grants to each of the fifty-five sites in the thirty-nine state capitals.

Its success—basically, the reason that it has no need to fight for its survival when every other local digital journalism effort does—is almost certainly due to its connection to the Koch donor network. Like other related groups with operations in the DC area, the Franklin Center benefits greatly from the Koch donor network’s Freedom Partners.

The Franklin Center’s director of donor development, Matt Hauck, worked for the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Its senior vice president in charge of strategic initiatives, Erik Telford, worked for the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity before joining the Franklin Center. The founding board member who set it up was Rudie Martinson, who helped run Americans for Prosperity in North Dakota. Martinson is still on the Franklin Center’s board. One of the founders of the Franklin Center, John Tsarpalas, is a past president of the Sam Adams Alliance and director of the Illinois Republican Party.

The Franklin Center operation works quickly and efficiently. Here’s a good example, from a report by the Center for Media and Democracy. In 2012, the Idaho legislature took up a bill that was designed to keep minors from going to commercial tanning salons. It was uncontroversial—other states have instituted similar restrictions for minors due to concerns about the dangers of skin cancer—until the Idaho Reporter (one of the Franklin Center’s news sites) took up the issue in force. It posted six stories on the tanning-bed bill between February 16 and March 22 of that year, claiming that passing such a bill represents a “huge overreach by the state . . . an infringement upon a family’s right to make these kinds of choices.” A state Senate committee then voted the bill down.

Former Reuters chief White House correspondent Gene Gibbons conducted a review of statehouse coverage by traditional media outlets shortly after the spontaneous combustion of the Tea Party movement in 2009— and ran smack into the Franklin Center network. He was surprised at what he found, he wrote in his study for the NiemanReports publication of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in 2010.

“For the most part, the people in charge of these would-be watchdog operations are political hacks out to subvert journalism in their quest to grab and keep power using whatever means they have to do so,” Gibbons wrote. “At the forefront of an effort to blur the distinction between statehouse reporting and political advocacy is the Franklin Center.” He added that such efforts were “political propaganda dressed up as journalism.”

Gibbons interviewed Jason Stverak in the spring of 2010 for the Nieman Foundation report. Stverak told him that the Franklin Center journalists were held to the same journalism ethics as those from traditional newspapers. They should be judged “based upon the content that they produce,” Stverak said.

But when Gibbons looked into how the Franklin Center went about its business, he indeed found “political propaganda dressed up as journalism.” Four months after he interviewed Stverak, Gibbons wrote, “The Franklin Center co-sponsored and played an active role in a two-day conference organized by Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The Right Online Agenda conference included such breakout sessions as ‘Intro to Online Activism’ and ‘Killing the Death Tax’ and featured speakers such as conservative U.S. Representative Michele Bachman of Minnesota and Tea Party activist Sharron Angle, a Republican who was then running against Harry Reid in the election for U.S. Senate in Nevada. No Democratic legislators were included in the program. The finale of the Las Vegas conference was a ‘November is Coming Rally.’ ”

But Gibbons also said that this was likely the future of some form of journalism and cited conservative columnist K. Daniel Glover in a subsequent report in June of 2010 on the trends for the Kennedy School of Government’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

“Once conservatives realize they can conduct great investigations that expose the flaws of intrusive government and the special interests that corrupt it, you will see more of them embracing that kind of journalism,” Glover told him. “Mainstream publications like the [Washington] Examiner and organizations like the Franklin Center . . . which helps support and fund budding watchdogs, are showing them the way.”

The Franklin Center sites also clearly drive follow-on news coverage, often uncritically. Its Wisconsin Reporter, for instance, once sponsored a poll that found more than 70 percent of people in the state supported an effort by Governor Scott Walker to cut the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public sector workers—a fight that angered the unions of teachers and other public sector workers. National news organizations, including MSNBC, picked up the coverage and reported on the poll.

In his study, Gibbons found a highly leveraged network of sites: “The State Policy Network–Sam Adams Alliance–Franklin Center troika is at least loosely associated with more than a dozen other conservative groups funding news sites in various states.”

By 2011, according to CMD and others, the Franklin Center had more than tripled in size from its 2009 start. Donors Trust, a 501(c)(3) charity whose Web site says they encourage giving to “fund organizations that undergird America’s founding principles,” alone provided $6.3 million to the Franklin Center in 2011, according to those reports. Mother Jones called Donors Trust “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement” in a 2013 article. The Franklin Center was the second-largest recipient of Donors Trust funding in 2011. A central contributor to Donors Trust is the Knowledge and Progress Fund founded and run by Charles Koch.

ESCALATOR:

Today, Franklin Center reports make the national news circuit through the Fox News Channel, the Washington Examiner, and The Daily Caller and hit the front page of the Drudge Report consistently. For instance, at the end of October 2014—just a few days before the midterm elections, its Wisconsin Reporter story about Governor Scott Walker’s opponent in his reelection fight (Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke) was highlighted by Rush Limbaugh.

“Now this story hit,” Limbaugh said on his popular, syndicated radio program. “It’s a story about Mary Burke, the Democrat candidate there, and how she was fired from the family business for incompetence. Whatever the family business is, she was fired from it. She’s seeking the governorship in Wisconsin, and the point is, if her own family had to discharge her from the family business because of how much she gunked it up, then what business does she have being elected governor?”

Needless to say, Burke contested the news story. But the damage was done, with little time to deal with it publicly before the election.

One thing is also obvious from this episode. What began as a novel concept—shaping media coverage from a libertarian perspective by becoming the media and presenting only one side of an issue—in the years and months prior to the spontaneous rise of the Tea Party in Chicago in 2009 may now, according to Gibbons and others studying the intersection of philanthropy and journalism, become the norm for the way in which news is conveyed in American democracy.

Excerpted from “Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP” by Jeff Nesbit. Published by St. Martin’s Books. Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Nesbit. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

JEFF NESBIT was the director of public affairs for two federal science agencies. He was once profiled in The Wall Street as one of the seven people who ended the Tobacco Wars. Nesbit was a journalist, communications director for Vice President Quayle, and manager of a strategic-communications business for nearly fifteen years. Now the executive director of Climate Nexus, he writes a weekly science blog for U.S. News & World Report. He lives in New York

==

...onor-advised funds offer private foundations created by wealthy individuals several tax advantages and a degree of anonymity, but there are also advantages for recipients.

The Franklin Center, for example, maintains a tax-exemption as a “publicly supported” entity.

If the organization were perennially accepting 95 percent of its funding from a handful of wealthy donors “it would not count as public support” and could jeopardize its tax status, Owens said.

Though its donors remain anonymous, the Franklin Center touts “transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility as its watchwords.”

Franklin has numerous ties to the Koch-connected Americans for Prosperity like board member Rudie Martinson, a former assistant state director for AFP’s North Dakota’s chapter, and Franklin’s vice president of strategic initiatives, Erik Telford, who was director of membership and online strategy at AFP for four years.

One of Franklin’s state-based blogs, New Jersey Watchdog, also received $50,000 from AFP in 2011, according to IRS records.

In 2011 alone, Donors Trust helped the Franklin Center expand by funding state-based reporting projects in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.

Recurring themes on the Franklin Center blogs include “union bosses,” “Marxian” senators and the perils of renewable energy.

Franklin has noted that its journalists’ work had landed on major networks from Fox to MSNBC. The details of several stories offered by the Franklin-funded outlets have been called into question, however.

One report from a New Mexico affiliate housed at a free-market think tank also funded by Donors Trust garnered national attention when it reported that millions of dollars in federal stimulus money had been allocated to non-existent congressional districts.

The government database on stimulus spending had indeed listed non-existent districts as receiving funds, but the Associated Press reported that the problem was due to data errors and that “’phantom congressional districts’ are being used as a phantom issue to suggest that stimulus money has been misspent.”

When asked to comment on the criticism, Franklin Center spokesman Moroney said: “Franklin Center adheres to the highest degree of journalistic integrity and we stand by our Watchdog.org reporting 100 percent. In this case, the Associated Press had it wrong.”[no]

==

6/15 guardian

...To trace how the money was spent, the Guardian obtained annual tax filings made to the US Internal Revenue Service by the Donor’s Trust and Donor’s Capital Fund and cross-checked grantees with organisations associated with the climate change counter-movement.

In 2011, 42% of funding, or $35.7m, went to groups promoting climate denial and opposed to environmental regulations, according to the tax filings.

In the last presidential elections in 2012, when Obama fended off a challenge from Mitt Romney, that figure jumped to 51% of the funds directed through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – a total of just over $49m.

...?

2013, the last year for which tax records are available, 46% of anonymous funding to conservative groups through the two Donors channels, or just over $41 million was spent that way.

Robert Brulle, a professor at Drexel University who first exposed the conservative network of think tanks and activist groups of the climate change counter-movement, said those funds helped hone opposition to regulations.

“It is a well-oiled, complicated, cultural and political machine of the right wing of the conservative movement,” he said.

In 2013, the two organisations took in just over $152m, distributing $90m to a constellation of groups. However, the ultimate sources of those funds were untraceable, an important consideration for companies or individuals wanting to avoid bad publicity for rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change.

“All these corporations that were getting bad press realised they can still fund conservative thinktanks,” Dunlap said. “Exxon or BP can still fund one of these things while doing all these great things on climate change to reduce emissions etc.”

Whitney Ball, the chief executive of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, said the funds were set up to “promote liberty and help like-minded donors preserve their charitable intent”. She said that grants were made at the request of account holders, not the Donors Trust or Donors Capital Fund. “Our role is to ensure that recommended grants are to IRS-approved public charities, and we require that the charities do not rely on significant amounts of revenue from government sources,” she said.

Almost all of the thinktanks and activist groups on the Donors rolls work on a broad range of topics – and in most cases there was no way of tracking what portion of funding went to climate change related work.

But all of the groups have a record of rejecting climate science and fighting environmental regulations.

“You don’t have to be an outright science denier to try to prevent action on climate change,” Brulle said.

“You’ve got gradation – it’s not real; it’s real but we are not sure how much humans are contributing to it; I am not a scientist. There are all sorts of strategies.”

Funds sent through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund were allocated to 92 organisations that deny climate change or oppose environmental regulations – but only 24 organisations got donations of $1m or more over the past three years.

By far, the biggest overall beneficiary was the Franklin Centre for Government and Public Integrity, which received $22m over the three years. According to its website, the centre “trains and supports journalists working to detect and expose corruption and incompetence in government at the state and local levels”. It runs a network of online conservative websites in state capitals which are generally hostile to clean energy and pro-coal.

In 2011, the anonymous funding through Donors Trust amounted to 95% of Franklin’s budget, according to an investigation by the Centre for Public integrity.

Erik Telford, the president, denied that there was a conflict between the Franklin Centre’s watchdog mission, and its failure to disclose the ultimate source of its funds.

“As is the case with almost any news outlet in America, we have an editorial perspective, with a mission to expose government misdeeds, advance liberty, and look out for the taxpayers’ interest,” he said. “We welcome the support of citizens who believe in our mission, and afford them the right to privacy as established in the supreme court’s 1958 NAACP v Alabama decision.”

==

srcwtch stub:

Jason Sverak is the president of The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a national 501(c)(3) journalism organization based in Bismarck, North Dakota.[1] The center funds reporters in more than 40 states.[2] Despite their non-partisan description, many of these websites have received criticism for their conservative bias.[3][4]

Stverak is the former Regional Field Director for the Sam Adams Alliance, served as North Dakota Executive Director for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.[5]

The Franklin Center was launched by the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance (SAM),[6] a 501(c)(3) devoted to pushing free-market ideals. SAM gets funding from the State Policy Network,[7] which is partially funded by The Claude R. Lambe Foundation.[8] Charles Koch, one of the billionaire brothers who co-own Koch Industries, sits on the board of this foundation.[9] SAM also receives funding from the Rodney Fund. The Franklin Center also receives funding from the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[10] a conservative grant-making organization.[11]

1 Sourcewatch resources

2 External resources

3 Contact

3.1 References

Sourcewatch resources

Charles Koch

Sam Adams Alliance

Rodney Fund

State Policy Network

Koch

David H. Koch

Koch Family Foundations

External resources

Franklin Center "For The Media"

Media Matters "Conservative Transparency"

Contact

Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity

DC Office 127 S. Peyton Street, Suite 200

Alexandria, VA, 22314

Office Phone: 571-384-2090

North Dakota Office

547 S. 7th St. #176

Bismarck, ND 58504

Office Phone: 701-214-5612

Email: info@FranklinCenterHQ.org

For media inquiries please contact Meghan Tisinger at Meghan.Tisinger@FranklinCenterHQ.org

References

Jump up? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. About. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Think tank Journalism: The Future of Investigative Journalism. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Portland Press Herald. 'Watchdog' website puts a new spin on politics'. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Truthout. The Koch Spider Web. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Staff. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Sam Adams Alliance. Sam Adams Alliance Media Kit. Organizational PDF. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Media Matters Action Network. Sam Adams Alliance. Conservative Transparency. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Media Matters Action Network. State Policy Network. Conservative Transparency. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Media Matters Action Network. Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation. Conservative Transparency. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Franklin Center boss wants apology from Democratic staffer. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

==

donors trust: #1

6/15 uk guardian (beware malish ware)

The secretive funders behind America’s conservative movement directed around $125m (£82m) over three years to groups spreading disinformation about climate science and committed to wrecking Barack Obama’s climate change plan, according to an analysis of tax records.

The amount is close to half of the anonymous funding disbursed to rightwing groups, underlining the importance of the climate issue to US conservatives

The anonymous cash flow came from two secretive organisations – the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – that have been called the “Dark Money ATM” of the conservative movement.

The funds, which when channelled through the two organisations cannot be traced to individual donors, helped build a network of thinktanks and activist groups. These worked to defeat climate bills in Congress and are mobilising against Environmental Protection Agency rules to reduce carbon pollution from power plants which are due to be finalised this summer. In many cases, the anonymous cash makes up the vast majority of funding received by beneficiaries – more than comes openly from the fossil fuel industry.

“The conservative thinktanks are really the spearhead of the conservative assault on climate change,” said Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who studies environmental politics. “They write books, put out briefings and open editorials, bring in contrarian scientists ... They are an immense megaphone that amplifies very, very minority voices.”

Organisations funded through the secretive donors operations are also working to roll back measures promoting wind and solar power and block planning for future sea-level rise in state capitals.

To trace how the money was spent, the Guardian obtained annual tax filings made to the US Internal Revenue Service by the Donor’s Trust and Donor’s Capital Fund and cross-checked grantees with organisations associated with the climate change counter-movement.

In 2011, 42% of funding, or $35.7m, went to groups promoting climate denial and opposed to environmental regulations, according to the tax filings.

In the last presidential elections in 2012, when Obama fended off a challenge from Mitt Romney, that figure jumped to 51% of the funds directed through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – a total of just over $49m.

...?

2013, the last year for which tax records are available, 46% of anonymous funding to conservative groups through the two Donors channels, or just over $41 million was spent that way.

Robert Brulle, a professor at Drexel University who first exposed the conservative network of think tanks and activist groups of the climate change counter-movement, said those funds helped hone opposition to regulations.

“It is a well-oiled, complicated, cultural and political machine of the right wing of the conservative movement,” he said.

In 2013, the two organisations took in just over $152m, distributing $90m to a constellation of groups. However, the ultimate sources of those funds were untraceable, an important consideration for companies or individuals wanting to avoid bad publicity for rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change.

“All these corporations that were getting bad press realised they can still fund conservative thinktanks,” Dunlap said. “Exxon or BP can still fund one of these things while doing all these great things on climate change to reduce emissions etc.”

Whitney Ball, the chief executive of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, said the funds were set up to “promote liberty and help like-minded donors preserve their charitable intent”. She said that grants were made at the request of account holders, not the Donors Trust or Donors Capital Fund. “Our role is to ensure that recommended grants are to IRS-approved public charities, and we require that the charities do not rely on significant amounts of revenue from government sources,” she said.

Almost all of the thinktanks and activist groups on the Donors rolls work on a broad range of topics – and in most cases there was no way of tracking what portion of funding went to climate change related work.

But all of the groups have a record of rejecting climate science and fighting environmental regulations.

“You don’t have to be an outright science denier to try to prevent action on climate change,” Brulle said.

“You’ve got gradation – it’s not real; it’s real but we are not sure how much humans are contributing to it; I am not a scientist. There are all sorts of strategies.”

Funds sent through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund were allocated to 92 organisations that deny climate change or oppose environmental regulations – but only 24 organisations got donations of $1m or more over the past three years.

By far, the biggest overall beneficiary was the Franklin Centre for Government and Public Integrity, which received $22m over the three years. According to its website, the centre “trains and supports journalists working to detect and expose corruption and incompetence in government at the state and local levels”. It runs a network of online conservative websites in state capitals which are generally hostile to clean energy and pro-coal.

In 2011, the anonymous funding through Donors Trust amounted to 95% of Franklin’s budget, according to an investigation by the Centre for Public integrity.

Erik Telford, the president, denied that there was a conflict between the Franklin Centre’s watchdog mission, and its failure to disclose the ultimate source of its funds.

“As is the case with almost any news outlet in America, we have an editorial perspective, with a mission to expose government misdeeds, advance liberty, and look out for the taxpayers’ interest,” he said. “We welcome the support of citizens who believe in our mission, and afford them the right to privacy as established in the supreme court’s 1958 NAACP v Alabama decision.”

The Federalist Society, a networking group for conservative lawyers and justices which calls on states to reject the EPA authority to regulate carbon pollution, received $8.7m over the past three years.

pix: A member of the Boilermakers local 154 Pittsburgh holds a sign at a rally to support American energy and jobs in the coal and related industries at Highmark Stadium in downtown Pittsburgh, Wednesday, July 30, 2014. The rally is being held the day before the Environmental Protection Agency conducts public hearings on its new emissions regulations for existing coal fired power plants. Facebook Twitter Pinterest]

Another top recipient, the State Policy Network, a network of ultra-conservative thinktanks, received a total of $8.2m over the last three years.

Thinktanks allied with the State Policy Network have worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business lobby, which has sought legislation to penalise homeowners who install solar panels.

The Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank whose climate expert opposes cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, took in $7.9m over three years. The Heartland Institute, which sent a delegation to Rome in April to try to upstage meetings between the Pope and the United Nations chief Ban Ki Moon on climate change, received $3.8m.

Another big beneficiary of the anonymous funds, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received $4.3m over three years, claims on its website that climate change is its biggest programme.

“CEI questions global warming alarmism,” the website reads. Last year, CEI sued the White House over a video linking the chill Arctic blasts of the polar vortex to climate change. The CEI has also tried – unsuccessfully – to sue climate scientists.

The thinktank would not respond to requests for comment.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, whose communications director is Marc Morano, took $3.7m from donors in 2012 – its most ever. A year later, however, the organisation received $325,000.

==

fang machine 2013

ch 5 states

big loss 2008 fed so shift to state level; already had fair no. of gov and legis, plus bunch of rw fronts built over decades; ~ BO, and his win fuelled 197; no new ideas, but footsoldiers for rw agenda; would localize msg ~ eg ACA

muscle to go on offense: immigration AZ, unions 198

SPN 1992 (BC) planned by defunct Madison group: Th Roe (heritage) So Caro Policy Cncl eg vouchers, ~ grn regs; go between local conserv eg Family Policy Cncl // Dobson evangelicals and nat'l rw ctrs 199/

mid 90's 37 spn, // Heritage Mandate (plan plus staffers) so new gov or legislature (often part time latter) had ready made plan and ppl 200 really gop but kinda look nonpart; have boilerplate to ward off pseudo/stinktank charge: IRS bless, we don't take bribes, advance "civil society" 201 so ironically confirms rubberstamp

DCI entwines

SPN funded Pelican, ~ dem 4k$ conf of mayors and inaug, but silent on jindal 45K$ tax for helo campaign trips 202; Laffer, Vitter, james o'keefe

now 58 tanks, every state: CA official pac res, but affiliate Claremont, horowitz, indep inst oakland, Reason, prometheus 203

SPN media savvy, so connect to local media, (90's colo independent inst had cable news show, and VT ethan a inst had regular npr op ed) has radio shows (web? sirius?), bogs, podcast 205.

now oppos res masked as jrnl: Jason Stverak, pres frkln ctr, ex N Dak gop honcho), stealth camp for SAM (erick O'k w/ h rich $) 206

Bill McMorris invest jrnl at fkl ctr, Robt Novak fellowship from Phillips 2 L to pay him 206

spn put up 75K for alaska reporter gig; Wayne Hoffman ID challenged to find bias 207

Illinois Statehouse News denied creds b/c wd not disclose $, couple others states deny also;

scam phantom district on stimulus zip code error; but drudge, politico then ABC 208 (then weeks on Fox)

rep Mary fallin denounced; // fnk ctr w/ McCain and Coburn did report, but either not stim, or mischaracterized eg WNBA facility was tribal community ctr w/ no for-profit anything 208.

b/c real reporters laid off, easy to grab for cred; eg Mackinac created mich Transparency Center [fe] then hired local nbc kathy hoekstra eg on film tax credit for m moore 209; OC reg --? pac res CalWatchDog; pres soc prof jrnl --> tenn ctr pol res [gore hit?]; assoc of am phys and surgeons ~ ACA but not shown nuts: BO covert hypnosis to get ppl to rally, medicare ~ const; cited alex jones VBO cia spy 209

local news desperate: in WI 18 pprs syndicates the franklin front 210

FC pledge to build out; partner w/ Nat Rev on battlegnd elections (in 2014?); expand training.

70's lobbyists from 100 co/trade gps State Gov Affairs Cncl, funded Cncl state gov, pro biz but not radical enough, so ALEC, fdr Weyrich, differs from spn in that it actually writes legis; 2k members; corps pay up to 50K/yr; into 1/k/yr, 20% pass 212

~ min wage, net neutral; big funder of climate/~ grn pwr; PIC: Laurie Shanblum CCA, mtg w/ Russell Pearce AZ state sen, wrote SB 1070 (show yr papers; but you can tell by shoes 214; AZ has 3 CCA jails, want to grow more;

Pershing Sq cp investor;  Gov Jan Brewer hired CCA top lobbyist and camp chr; dep COS; 2/3 1070 co-spon either alec member or at conf where written; 30 got $ during debate; Mgt & Training Corp; clone 1070 tried in penn, ok, tenn, colo, fla; TP boost.

gop wants rx care across state lines, so biz can flee to least consumer protection (//credit card [utah?] 216

ban lawsuit of hmo

10 states w/ gop gain 2010, voter restrictions 217

2010 gerrymander (had org/strategy custom made?]

rove and gillespie polled, found ppl receptive to overpaid teachers arg "new fed bureaucratic elite" 219  SPN/SAM posted public worker salaries (foia bomb where not easy to get); helped kasich gut collective barg; // Koch fight Back WI, walker 40K koch $, tim phillips stumped; spn/mciver bogus studies support gt unions, NYT oped; claimed tcher got 2z avg pvt wage or 100K actually 50 222

3 ez fix for budget, but walker cut taxes; public empl had already offered concessions, so goal was to kill union 223; mciver had war room ~ union; partnered w. Franklin news bur; hired local reporter and gop staffer; made VNR; Drew Ryun opps res bloggers: said bbq union in ret for votes; local da said bogus 224.

2012 looked like big demo win, but gerrymander so only 10 of 23 seats needed to have any power 226; conv wisdom is that gop $ wasted, but actually prevented dem sweep 227; big GOTV TP ginned eg by AFP (telemkt mogl lend infra?); right after election, went after Kay hagen for 2014 by oil co;

2012 record corp profits; ceo 3500x avg worker; avg family lost 40% wealth in Gt Rec; foreclosures, domestic viol etc ripples

occupy ridiculed in press and smashed by cops and surveill state; 230 endit

Free-market think tanks across country start up news operations, hide funding sources

April 14, 2010 7:58 a.m. - Updated: 8:18 p.m.

A growing number of conservative groups are bankrolling startup news organizations around the country, aggressively covering government and politics at a time when newspapers are cutting back their statehouse bureaus, the Associated Press reports; we’ve seen our own example here in Boise, where the Idaho Freedom Foundation launched “Idahoreporter.com.” “If you have a laptop, a wireless card and a flip cam, you’re as powerful as The New York Times,” Jason Stverak, a former North Dakota Republican Party director who runs the year-old Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity in Bismarck, told the AP. Stverak said the movement has caught on because people are skeptical of the mainstream media. “You can draw a parallel between the explosion in the tea party and the rapid increase in the amount of new news organizations,” he said.

The new organizations have been denied Statehouse press credentials in numerous states because of their ties to advocacy groups. Many of the groups, including the Idaho one, refuse to say where they’re getting the money to finance the operations. Phill Brooks, director of the University of Missouri’s State Government Reporting Program, said such reluctance is a “red flag.” A similar startup news service in his state, Missouri News Horizon, refused recently to say who was paying the bills. “I can’t recall in 40 years that there’s been an organization that has come here and asked for recognition as a news organization that hid its financial background,” he said. Click below to read the full story from AP reporter John Miller.

News sites funded by think tanks take root

By JOHN MILLER, Associated Press Writer

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A growing number of conservative groups are bankrolling startup news organizations around the country, aggressively covering government and politics at a time when newspapers are cutting back their statehouse bureaus.

The phenomenon troubles some longtime journalists and media watchdogs, who worry about political biases and hidden agendas.

The news outlets have sprouted in larger numbers in recent months to fill a void created by the downsizing of traditional statehouse coverage and to win over readers, including those from the tea party movement who don’t trust the local paper or the TV news.

“Our state Capitol used to be bustling with the media,” said Matthew Brouillette, president of the Harrisburg, Pa.-based Commonwealth Foundation, whose news outlet, the Pennsylvania Independent, went live in January. “Now, you can swing a dead cat and not hit anybody in the state Capitol newsroom.”

The news outlets usually receive their money from right-leaning, free-market organizations. Idahoreporter.com, for example, is funded by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a think tank that has barraged local governments with public records requests since last year in an effort to expose waste.

Similar news operations are now in place in Washington state, Michigan, South Carolina, Montana, Wyoming, Florida, West Virginia, Arizona, Missouri, Maryland, Nebraska, Illinois, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio and elsewhere.

The outlets publish almost exclusively on the Internet and usually look like traditional news sites. For example, the front page of Idahoreporter.com recently featured stories about proposed tax increases, higher park fees, a labor report, and the funding of a college scholarship program. The lead stories all had accompanying graphics and photos; some stories have video.

Journalism watchdogs say they have not noticed any obvious slant in the coverage. But some of these news organizations have been barred from capitol press corps because of rules that forbid lobbyists from membership.

And there are fears that these organizations are trying to advance a certain agenda by the stories they decide to cover — even if the articles themselves are unbiased.

“They are still very new. But in any content, there are a couple of different kinds of bias to look for: the angles taken by a reporter, the tone of writing. But there is also a bias that can exist in terms of choices of stories to cover,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Wayne Hoffman, executive director of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, challenges people to find bias in the stories and stresses that he doesn’t dictate what his staff should cover. But he does emphasize that the stories should be presented from the viewpoint of taxpayers.

“I want them to ask the question ‘Who is going to be impacted when government creates a new program?’ It still needs to be funded. When there is a new regulation, who will it impact and how? We ask them to close that loop, to present all the details, not just the ones politicians want you to know about,” Hoffman said.

The trend comes at a time when technological advances and the growth of citizen journalism have blurred the lines between traditional and nontraditional reporting and created all sorts of new ways to cover the news.

“If you have a laptop, a wireless card and a flip cam, you’re as powerful as The New York Times,” said Jason Stverak, a former North Dakota Republican Party director who runs the year-old Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity in Bismarck and advises news outlets like those in Harrisburg and Boise.

Stverak also said the movement has caught on because people are skeptical of the mainstream media. “You can draw a parallel between the explosion in the tea party and the rapid increase in the amount of new news organizations,” he said.

It does not appear that left-leaning organizations are funding their own news outlets to the same degree.

Hoffman said Idahoreporter.com has been a success on many levels. A few of the site’s stories were mentioned in mainstream media or referred to in newspaper blogs. He also said it became a place statehouse reporters and lawmakers turned to for developments. Page views have increased fivefold since the launch in January to about 1,000 per day.

Ethical questions persist, however.

Hoffman recently stood at a lectern at the Idaho Capitol and demanded that state lawmakers require greater transparency for education spending. A reporter from Idahoreporter.com took notes on his laptop for a story about the event.

To deal with the potential conflict of interest, Idahoreporter.com stories that quote Hoffman end with a disclaimer about his relationship to the news service.

Some of the jobs pay better than newspaper reporting gigs. The Alaska Policy Forum recently put up a help-wanted Internet ad offering to pay an investigative reporter up to $75,000 to cover government in Juneau.

Organizations that issue press credentials for statehouse reporters in such places as Ohio, Illinois and Idaho have denied membership to some of the new outlets, citing their links to advocacy groups. That means Idaho Freedom Foundation’s reporters were excluded from the capitol press room.

“The vote of the membership was unanimous,” said Betsy Russell, president of the Idaho Capitol Correspondents Association and a reporter with the Spokesman-Review newspaper. “They simply didn’t meet the bylaws.”

Critics have also raised concerns about the identities of the news organizations’ financial backers. Stverak will not say where he is getting the money to pay his 12-person staff. Neither will Hoffman or Brouillette.

Phill Brooks, director of the University of Missouri’s State Government Reporting Program, said such reluctance is a “red flag.” A similar startup news service in his state, Missouri News Horizon, refused recently to say who was paying the bills.

“I can’t recall in 40 years that there’s been an organization that has come here and asked for recognition as a news organization that hid its financial background,” he said.

Hoffman said his donors expect privacy when they pitch in to cover his $78,000 annual salary, paychecks for his journalists, or his foundation’s work to organize a tea party rally and to bring libertarian-leaning Texas Rep. Ron Paul to Boise.

“Supporters to organizations such as mine have been harassed, they have been criticized, they’ve been vilified,” he said. “We choose not to subject our donors to that, unless they choose to be subjected to that.”

AP writers Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, Matt Joyce in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Todd Dvorak in Boise contributed to this story.

Capitol News Bureau Launched in Virginia

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Virginia now has a fresh set of eyes and ears covering Virginia state government with the launch of the Virginia Statehouse News Bureau (VSN). VSN is a group of seasoned and talented journalists covering issues of importance to Virginians. VSN is a product of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a national nonprofit journalism organization.

“The emergence of the Virginia Statehouse News Bureau is a direct response to the recent cutbacks by cash-strapped news organizations and the gaping hole in capitol news coverage,” said Franklin Center President Jason Stverak. “With the decreasing media presence at state capitols fewer media watchdogs are working to keep our elected officials and bureaucrats accountable. The journalists at VSN are experienced and dedicated and will fill the void in Virginia capitol news coverage.”

The VSN staff includes managing editor Scott Reeder and Virginia Statehouse news bureau chief Seth McLaughlin. Old Dominion Watchdog reporter Paige Winfield Cunningham and reporter Elizabeth Hillgrove will also be contributing to the website. Reeder has been a newspaper reporter and editor for 22 years. He covered the Illinois Legislature for a chain of newspapers for 10 of those years and captured more than 20 national journalism awards. McLaughlin’s work has appeared in Politico, The Washington Diplomat and World Politics Review. Prior to joining Virginia Statehouse News, he worked as a freelancer in Washington, D.C., covering national and international politics. Before that, he worked for nearly three years as Virginia bureau chief for The Washington Times and as a reporter at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island.

VSN operates under a “steal our stuff” model. Meaning that their mission to supply robust, far reaching coverage of state house and government news, and they encourage broadcasters, media organizations & citizen journalists to utilize their content.  VSN will share its reports in audio, video and text formats through the internet, new media and traditional mediums such as newspapers and radio. To view Virginia Statehouse News content visit virginiastatehousenews.com.

Virginia Statehouse News Bureau is an initiative of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Founded in January of 2009, The Franklin Center is a nonpartisan organization that believes that new technology can advance the cause of transparency in government. The Franklin Center aims to educate, to advise and to train individuals and organizations from all backgrounds to become thorough, unbiased and responsible reporters well versed in new media techniques and journalistic integrity. For more information on the Franklin Center please visit www.FranklinCenterHQ.org.

For more information, please visit FranklinCenterHQ.org

• See more at: http://franklincenterhq.org/tag/rhode-island/#sthash.ZD4vrN2g.dpuf

==

fake news state level spn

http://www.prwatch.org/files/spn_national_report_final.pdf

==

Center for Media and Democracy / By Brendan Fischer [1]

Right-Wing Front Group Poses as Journalists to Attack Investigation Into Political Money Laundering

December 19, 2013  |

The Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity (through its Wisconsin Reporter and Watchdog.org [2] websites) has aggressively attacked the government’s "John Doe" probe into possible campaign finance violations during Wisconsin's 2011 and 2012 recall elections. Its media outlets have also published new information about the apparent targets of the investigation, but they have omitted an important detail: Franklin Center has close ties to individuals and groups that may be caught up in the John Doe probe.

The only name associated with the investigation led by the Milwaukee County's District Attorney's office, Eric O'Keefe, helped launch the Franklin Center's operations in 2009, and his Sam Adams Alliance group provided the majority [3] of its startup budget. O'Keefe has spoken publicly [4] about being subpoenaed in his capacity as director of Wisconsin Club for Growth. Franklin Center's Director of Special Projects [5] John Connors, and the Executive Assistant to the President [5] Claire Milbrandt, also have close ties to a group reportedly involved in the probe. Its former Director of Operations and General Counsel, James Skyles, worked with another group active in the Wisconsin recalls.

Franklin Center's Wisconsin Reporter has written 16 stories so far that are highly critical of the anti-corruption probe and prosecutors (calling its series "Wisconsin's Secret War" [6]), but these latest revelations raise questions about whether the outfit has a conflict of interest in its coverage.

"It does sound like a conflict-of-interest situation that minimally ought to be disclosed, whenever stories are written," said Robert Drechsel, Director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communications. "Particularly if the reporting in question is being done by an entity that holds itself out as nonpartisan and as doing the same kind of journalistic work being done by any traditional journalism institution."

Franklin Center Attacks John Doe, Citing Unnamed Sources

After Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Bice first reported on [7] the new "John Doe" investigation -- a secret inquiry unique to Wisconsin that is "just like a grand jury except no jury [8]," led by special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, a former federal counterterrorism prosecutor with Republican credentials [9] -- interest was high, but thanks to the John Doe's strict secrecy rules, details were hard to come by.

The Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter quickly filled the void.

Wisconsin Reporter launched its "Wisconsin's Secret War" series in October, citing unnamed sources to reveal [10] that Wisconsin Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, and Republican Governors Association had received subpoenas [11], and describing details about "after-hours visits to homes and offices" and prosecutors' "demands for phone, email and other records." Thanks to those unnamed sources, Wisconsin Reporter had a new platform, and used it to recast the John Doe investigation as "an abuse of prosecutorial powers" with "the apparent goal of bringing down Gov. Scott Walker." The Walker campaign and 28 other groups also reportedly received subpoenas.

"This is a taxpayer-funded, opposition-research campaign," an anonymous source told the Wisconsin Reporter.

Wisconsin Club for Growth soon became the most prominent name associated with the John Doe after its director, Eric O'Keefe, told the Wall Street Journaleditorial board [4] that he had been subpoenaed, with the investigation allegedly looking into what the Wall Street Journal called "illegal campaign coordination" between campaigns and independent groups. The group is also led by RJ Johnson, a top Walker advisor.

CMD uncovered [12] how in 2011, O'Keefe's Wisconsin Club for Growth took in $12 million [13], some of it from dark money conduits like the Koch-connected Center to Protect Patient Rights [14] (CPPR) and the Wellspring Committee [15], and in turn shuffled millions [12] to other organizations that spent money on ads during Wisconsin's Supreme Court race and recall elections. (CPPR, which is connected to the billionaire Koch brothers, was recently fined $1 million [16] by California's elections board for its role in what the Washington Post called "a series of money swaps and transfers through a network of politically active nonprofit groups [16]" to avoid donor disclosure. California prosecutors called it "campaign money laundering").

All of the groups involved in Wisconsin Club for Growth's monetary transfers are "dark money [17]" groups, a phrase which refers to election spending by nonprofits that exploit loopholes in campaign finance disclosure laws, and keep their donors secret by running "issue ads" designed to influence elections.

Franklin Center's John Connors Directly Connected to Dark Money Web

A central character in the Wisconsin Club for Growth dark money web is John Connors, the Franklin Center's "Director of Special Projects," who has close ties to many of the groups receiving funding from O'Keefe's Wisconsin Club for Growth. Some of those groups have reportedly been subpoenaed.

In the wake of the Center for Media and Democracy's reporting [12] on money changing hands between O'Keefe's Wisconsin Club for Growth and groups tied to Connors, Franklin Center's Wisconsin Reporter [18] quickly went on the offensive in a series [19] of articles [20], making up its own definition of "dark money" [21] for an unfounded attack on CMD's credibility, and falsely claiming that CMD's reporting constituted the launch of a "national campaign" to "unseat the governor."

None of the articles note Connors' ties to the Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter, even when attacking [19] CMD's stories that address him by name.

Here are some examples of those ties:

Connors is president of Citizens for a Strong America, whose entire $4.62 million budget [22] in 2011 came from Wisconsin Club for Growth [22], and which spent $836,000 [23] on ads (some of which included misleading [24] claims) in support of Justice David Prosser during his 2011 Supreme Court race, and additional undisclosed amounts [25] on Senate recall races that year. The Treasurer of Citizens for a Strong America is Valerie Johnson, wife of R.J. Johnson, who is a top advisor to both Wisconsin Club for Growth and Governor Walker.

90 percent [12] of the grants received by [26] Wisconsin Family Action in 2011 came from Connors' Citizens for a Strong America [22], which was entirely funded by Wisconsin Club for Growth. Wisconsin Family Action spent an estimated $850,000 [27] on the Senate recall campaigns in 2011. Connors acted as a consultant [28] to Wisconsin Family Action during the election year and helped plan a scheme that resulted in a different John Doe investigation [29] into possible election bribery, which resulted in no charges. The Wall Street Journal [4] reports that Wisconsin Family Action has received a subpoena in the latest John Doe probe.

Connors registered [30] the web domain for United Sportsmen of Wisconsin, a group that worked with [31] Wisconsin Family Action and Americans for Prosperity on an operation during the 2011 recall races in which absentee ballot applications were sent with the incorrect date for elections. Connors' Citizens for a Strong America transferred $236,000 [22] to United Sportsmen in 2011. The United Sportsmen group was embroiled in scandal [32] earlier this year after outgoing Assembly Majority leader Scott Suder cut a $500,000 [31] taxpayer-funded "sweetheart deal" for the group, which Governor Walker rescinded [33] after public outcry.

A review of Franklin Center's tax filings shows that it has paid $235,157 to Connors' Milwaukee-based consulting firm, J Connors & Co, over the past two years ($114,930 in 2012[34] and $119,227 in 2011 [35]). A close Connors associate, Claire Milbrant, who has worked at J Connors & Co since its founding in 2009, was also hired by the Franklin Center last month as its Executive Assistant to the President.

In addition to being the Franklin Center's "Director of Special Projects" -- part of its "leadership team," according to the organization's website [5] – Connors registered [36] Wisconsin Reporter's "Watchdog.org [2]" web domain.

Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter has attacked CMD's reporting [19] about Connors' groups but has failed to mention that one of its directors is directly tied to those organizations.

CMD's calls to John Connors for comment have not been returned.

Club for Growth's Eric O'Keefe Helped Launch and Fund Franklin Center

Mike McCabe, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, cautioned that the public still doesn't actually know what the John Doe investigation is about: we only know what Franklin Center has reported, and what Eric O'Keefe, the Wisconsin Club for Growth chair, told the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

"Its no accident that he went to Murdoch's newspaper, and no accident that it ran as an editorial [in the Wall Street Journal] rather than a news story," said McCabe, whose nonpartisan, nonprofit group tracks election spending in Wisconsin.

On Wisconsin Club for Growth's last published IRS Form 990, O'Keefe was listed as one of just three board members who spend hundreds of hours a year leading and guiding that group, whose budget increased twelve-fold in 2011 while Scott Walker was facing a potential recall election and also grew in the 2012 election year.

O'Keefe ties to the Franklin Center run deep. He was the CEO and chairman of the Sam Adams Alliance, which in 2009 launched and funded the Franklin Center. According to an O'Keefe bio from last year: [37] "Under his leadership, the Sam Adams Alliance (SAM) has established some of the most active and respected organizations in the freedom movement, including American Majority and the Franklin Center." Whether he continues to fund or direct funds to Franklin Center is unknown.

O'Keefe's Sam Adams Alliance, whose president was the former executive director of the Illinois State Republican party, acted as [38] the Franklin Center's "sponsoring organization" until the group obtained its 501(c)(3) status, according to its communications director [38]. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [3], much of the $2.9 million Franklin Center raised in its first year came from the Sam Adams Alliance. (The other group that O'Keefe boasts of creating in his bio, American Majority, was established to recruit and train Tea Party political candidates, and held a rally [39] in support of Governor Walker during the height of the 2011 protests featuring Andrew Breitbart and others.)

Franklin's President, Jason Stverak, previously worked as Regional Field Director for O'Keefe's Sam Adams Alliance, after leading the South Dakota Republican Party for six years. Their allies speak of O'Keefe and Stverak in the same breath. For example, in the acknowledgement section [40] of James O'Keefe's book, the undercover videographer whose heavily-edited videos helped bring down ACORN (and who is not related to Eric O'Keefe) thanks "Eric O'Keefe and Jason Stverak for their role in the citizen journalism movement."

In only one [41] of the sixteen articles Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter has written on the John Doe have they touched on O'Keefe's ties to Franklin Center.

"The public has to be very wary of taking for granted what is being reported by the Wall Street Journal and Wisconsin Reporter," McCabe said. "O'Keefe and others have decided that is who they want reporting on John Doe, they've decided what to leak, and how they want it framed, and what they want the public to believe what the investigation is about," he said, while prosecutors and judges are gagged by the John Doe's secrecy order.

Ties to the "Coalition for American Values"

Franklin Center also has connections to another mysterious organization active during the Wisconsin recalls called "Coalition for American Values." That group dropped $400,080[27] on a flood of ads in the final weeks before Governor Walker's recall election, and attracted significant attention by making a unique appeal: instead of promoting Walker or attacking his opponent, the ads attacked the premise of the recall itself. The ads depicted individuals who claimed they would vote for Walker not necessarily because they support his policies, but because they opposed the use of recall under these circumstances.

These ads, coupled with similar messaging from Governor Walker, proved effective. Exit polls on June 5, 2012 showed that sixty percent of voters thought recalls were only appropriate for cases of official misconduct -- a complete reversal from polls conducted in November 2011, just as the recall was launched.

The address Coalition for American Values lists on its filings with Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board [42], and on its associated PAC's filings with the Federal Election Commission [43], is 119 S Emerson St #231 in Mt. Prospect, Illinois. This is also the address given for Coalition for American Values' lawyer, James Skyles, who was General Counsel and the Director of Operations for the Franklin Center [44] until March 2011.

The "treasurer" listed on Coalition for American Values' FEC filings and the contact on its filings with Wisconsin's election board is Brent Downs. In 2008, when Connors chaired the Marquette College Republicans, Downs was his treasurer [45]. Both were both students at Marquette University at the same time, and Downs, like Connors, also chaired the Students for Prosperity [46] chapter of David Koch's Americans for Prosperity at Marquette University.

In its FEC filings, the Coalition for American Values reports [43] tens of thousands [47] of dollars [48] of payments [49] to [50] Connors' Campaign Now! consulting and direct mail firm (which he has run out of the same office as J Connors & Co, along with Claire Milbrant).

The Coalition for American Values explicitly called for the reelection of Governor Walker, so the group reported its spending, but it did not report the true origin of its funds. Wisconsin law requires that nonprofits or corporations disclose the source of all contributions "made for" the purpose of funding their ads -- but Coalition for American Values sidestepped those rules by claiming that the $400,080 was not specifically provided to the group for the ads, despite there being few other reasons that a donor would have given the group hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Franklin Center Takes Bull by Horns

The Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter has led the charge against the John Doe investigation, the prosecutors involved, and even reporters covering the topic.

Professor Theodore L. Glasser [51], a Professor of Communications at Stanford University, told CMD that at a minimum, a news outfit should disclose their connections to the subjects they are reporting on. "For the reader, without that transparency, it is hard to make a judgment about the independence of that reporting," he said.

"Not to say that the conflict [of interest] would go away with transparency, but it would at least allow readers to judge for themselves."

See more stories tagged with:

Wisconsin recall elections [52],

wisconsin dark money groups [53],

wisconsin john doe investigation [54],

franklin center [55],

Center for Media and Democracy [56]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/right-wing-front-group-poses-journalists-stop-campaign-finance-investigation

==

Koch-Funded spn Franklin Center "Watchdogs" Infiltrate State Capitols

by Rebekah Wilce — August 14, 2013 - 7:53am

Topics: Right Wing, Media

Projects: Defend the Press

As newsrooms across the country have cut staff reporters -- due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration -- the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity has rushed to fill the gap, as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has documented. The Franklin Center has 40 state news websites, with reporters in 34 states so far. Its reporters have received state house press credentials and its stories appear as news in mainstream print newspapers in each state without alerting readers to the heavy right-wing bias of the Franklin-related publications.

Franklin Center Quadruples in Size, Adjusts Strategy

Franklin Growth 2009-2011

(Source: Franklin Center IRS Forms 990)

The Franklin Center does not disclose its funders. But based on a review of the annual IRS filings of foundations that fund groups like Franklin, as of 2011 (the most recent available financial data), 95 percentof the group's funding comes fromDonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. These two related entities are "donor-advised funds" that were spun off by the Philanthropy Roundtable and cloak the identity of donors to right-wing causes across the country. Mother Jones has called the combined Donors funds "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement." The Franklin Center received the Donors funds' second-largest donation in 2011. Among the most prominent funders of Donors is the Knowledge and Progress Fund, a Charles Koch-run organization, which contributed nearly $8 million from 2005 to 2011. The Franklin Center has also received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Searle Freedom Trust. As CMD has previously reported, the Franklin Center received a startup grant from the Tea Party Sam Adams Alliance, run by Eric O'Keefe, who also helped launch American Majority and sits on the board of Club for Growth Wisconsin.

From its founding in early 2009 to the end of 2011, the Franklin Center's revenues have grown almost fourfold, from $1.7 million in 2009 to $6.6 million in 2011. In an unexpected twist, however, the number of statehouses in which it placed reporters declined slightly from 41 in 2010 to 34 in 2013. Franklin Center Executive Director Jason Stverak did not respond to CMD's requests for comment on this trend.

Franklin Center Reporters in Statehouses, 2009-2013

(Source: Franklin Center documents)

According to Trent Seibert, former editor and founder of Franklin affiliate Texas Watchdog, the Franklin Center "announced last year they would not be supporting independent journalism operations in 2013." This means they are no longer funding organizations such as Seibert's, which was founded in 2008 before the Franklin Center itself, and over which editorial control was exercised by Seibert himself rather than the Franklin Center. Without that funding, both Texas Watchdog and the Nevada News Bureau have folded.

But there are now 20 "Watchdog Bureaus" operated directly by Franklin -- including one writer in Texas to replace Seibert's crew -- and 20 "Watchdog Partners," according to a May 2013 Franklin Center document obtained by CMD. "Watchdog Bureaus" operate as a direct part of Franklin, with reporters and bureau chiefs listed as staff of the center. They are located in Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin. That includes the big five swing states of the 2012 election: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Colorado (which was the tipping point state). And it includes two of the more important secondary swing states: Pennsylvania and Iowa. North Carolina, another swing state, is covered by a "Watchdog Partner."

Franklin Funds Right-Wing Think Tanks and Other Groups

As the Franklin Center's revenues have increased, flush with cash from the secret billionaires at DonorsTrust, it has spread the wealth more lavishly to other ideological groups. In 2009, when its revenues were $2.4 million, it spent less than $96,000 -- or four percent -- on grants to the Lucy Burns Institute (whose ties to this network CMD has documented), the Small Business Hawaii Foundation (an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN)), and the online state news website Maryland Reporter.

In 2011, with revenues of $6.6 million, the Franklin Center spent more than $1.1 million -- or almost 17 percent -- on grants, ranging from $994,000 to Cause of Action and Freedom Through Justice Foundation (Cause of Action's former name) to $7,500 to Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity (an SPN member think tank).

Cause of Action: "The Most Active Nonprofit You've Never Heard of"

Cause of Action is a non-profit organization primarily focused on legal work and claiming to use "public advocacy and legal reform tools to ensure greater transparency in government, protect taxpayer interests and promote economic freedom." Its executive director, Dan Epstein, worked for controversial Republican Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) in the investigation of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as Counsel for Oversight and Investigations at the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for the U.S. House of Representatives.

In its early days, one of Cause of Action's first targets was ACORN. Since then, it has been called "the most active nonprofit you've never heard of."

Cause of Action has gone to bat for socially liberal as well as conservative causes. It has represented a lesbian couple in California who wanted to start a family by using a donor they knew; and represented Oregon Windfarms in a lawsuit concerning a Chinese-owned company's attempts to set up a wind farm in Oregon, which was blocked by President Obama. It has also been a main supporter of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company's lawsuit against the federal government, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, for refusing to renew the company's lease of the public lands on which it operates. The organization's position is that these are all instances of unconstitutional government overreach.

But whatever the organization's positions, the Franklin Center claimed on its 2011 form 990 that it gave Cause of Action nearly a million dollars "for journalism." Cause of Action did not respond to CMD's requests for a description of its reporting or journalistic work. It operates what it calls a blog; and it issues Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, resulting in targeted complaints. In June 2013, it changed its mission statement on its website to add that it "uses investigative, legal and communications tools to educate the public on how government transparency and accountability protects economic opportunity for American taxpayers."

Funding State Policy Network Think Tanks and Others to "Dig up Dirt on the Left"

As CMD has reported, the State Policy Network is a web of advocacy and news spinning operations in each of the states. It is a prominent ally of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded by the Koch brothers and DonorsTrust, among others. Like ALEC, SPN and its affiliates seek to change state laws, but report little or no lobbying, as CMD has documented in its reporters' guide to the Goldwater Institute.

The relationship between SPN affiliates and ALEC is strong and is funded by some of the same donors. That means that some corporate interests like the Kochs get, in effect, multiple votes to change the law on ALEC task forces, where corporate lobbyists and special interest groups like SPN operations vote as equals with elected officials behind closed doors. (The Franklin Center has also funded ALEC, as CMD has reported.)

SPN's legislative agenda Is frequently buttressed by its forays as "press" and the echoes of its allies in the growing right-wing state "press" corps at the Franklin Center and in groups like MediaTrackers. That is another news-like non-profit launched in 2011 in Wisconsin and other states, sponsored by the tea party group American Majority, to "dig up dirt on the left" rather than purportedly be "on the receiving end of damaging stories developed by liberal groups such as Media Matters and the Center for American Progress."

Franklin has funded SPN member think tanks -- including the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, and Louisiana's Pelican Institute -- and SPN associate members -- including the Small Business Hawaii Foundation. It has also funded American Majority, again "to support journalism." For more, see recipients of Franklin Center funding at CMD's SourceWatch.org.

Concerns Raised about Franklin's Brand of Free "News"

Dave Zweifel of the Capital Times and the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council said this about Franklin in 2011: "This outfit masks itself as an investigative journalism service that provides free content to newspapers, many of which are cash-strapped these days, and eager for such a product. ... You have to give these guys credit for capturing the moment when the press is particularly vulnerable."

Laura McGann, assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, wrote in 2010, "As often as not, their reporting is thin and missing important context, which occasionally leads to gross distortions," pointing to several instances where the Watchdog websites wrote stories that turned out to be misleading or untrue. "This sort of misleading reporting crops up on Watchdog sites often enough to suggest that, rather than isolated instances of sloppiness, it is part of a broad editorial strategy."

The Franklin Center continues to grow and shift, as the stories it funds are picked up by more cash-strapped state and local newspapers. In the meantime, its funding of advocacy groups -- like Cause of Action and ALEC allies in the State Policy Network -- indicate that its goals extend further than creating right-wing news. Is funding these groups another part of Franklin's "editorial strategy," or does it reveal the part its funders wish it to play in molding pro-corporate policy state by state?

The progressive advocacy organization Keystone Progress recently published a report on the Pennsylvania Franklin Center affilate, Pennsylvania Independent -- "Driving the News: How Right-Wing Funders Are Manufacturing News and Influencing Public Policy in Pennsylvania" -- available here.

==

lee fang right leans in the nation mag

INFLUENCING THE NEWS MEDIA

In recent months, The New York Times and other news organizations have reported that Charles and David Koch are taking an interest in possibly buying the Tribune Media Company, which owns several major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and Hartford Courant.

The billionaires’ interest in journalism began in 2009 with the creation of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. In 2011, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, 95 percent of the center’s income came fromDonors Trust, bankrolled first and foremost by the Koch-funded foundations ($3.3 million since 2008, according to IRS records). The Franklin Center has created a project called Watchdog.org, which bills itself as “a collection of independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity.” They are based in the same office in Alexandria, Va. With 40 bureaus or “partner” organizations in 40 states, Franklin Center and Watchdog.org told CJR that they “conform to the Society of Professional Journalists standards, follow AP style and are not partisan or political.” Others, including CJR, disagree, noting that they “occasionally blur reporting and opinion and go beyond the facts of [their] findings.”

http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the_koch_club/story/Koch_millions_spread_influence_through_nonprofits/

crypto/zombied/punked?

SPN's Legislative Agenda Is Frequently Buttressed by Its Forays as "Press" and the Echoes of Its Allies in the Growing Right-Wing State "Press" Corps. As CMD was one of the first to document, SPN groups like the Goldwater Institute are hiring people to act as reporters, and the legislative agenda of SPN is increasingly echoed by the growing right-wing infrastructure of groups that pose as press. Some even get their stories or "reports" picked up as news and delivered to state newspapers as a "wire" service like the Associated Press, as with the Franklin Center's Watchdog.org groups and the Ryun brothers-allied "American Majority" and "Media Trackers" operations.

lost bit: The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity is a national 501(c)(3) journalism organization based in Bismarck, North Dakota.[1] According to the organization's website, the group's mission involves "networking and training independent investigative reporters, as well as journalists from state based news organizations, public-policy institutions & watchdog groups."[2] The center funds state reporters in more than 40 states.[3] Despite their non-partisan description, many of these websites have received criticism for their conservative bias.[4][5]

==

...

Americans for Prosperity, known largely for its affiliation with the billionaire Koch brothers and for organizing Tea Party rallies, is part of this state-focused spending spree. The group has opened new local chapters or more than tripled the funding for existing chapters in key states. This increased spending has helped Americans for Prosperity recruit conservative activists and deploy them during contentious policy debates. Audit reports collected by the New York State Attorney General’s office show that Americans for Prosperity went from spending about $4.9 million on state chapter activities in 2009 to $10.6 million in 2011, the last available disclosure. Those figures do not necessarily account for the television, radio and Internet advertising purchased by the group when lobbying on state policy issues (which has reportedly reached over $4 million in places like Wisconsin), or the ubiquitous bus tours it has sponsored around the country.

A key area of growth among state-level conservative think tanks involves efforts to develop nonprofit media. Founded in 2009, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity has partnered with SPN and Americans for Prosperity to hire and train conservative reporters in nearly every state capital. In fact, many Americans for Prosperity officials now lead the center.

As Joe Strupp of Media Matters has reported, the Franklin Center’s stated mission is to take advantage of cutbacks at local papers: “Cash-strapped and under-staffed, local and regional newspapers often can’t provide the real information that voters need to make good decisions.” Strupp, who interviewed several local editors who reluctantly run the center’s syndicated content, noted that some stories covered by the group—including one claiming that a union traded free barbecue for votes in Wisconsin—turned out to be false.

The head of the Franklin Center, a former executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party, boasted that by 2011, the group had hired more than 100 journalists in forty-four states—virtually all of them placed at SPN-affiliated think tanks. In Tennessee, it hired an award-winning journalist, Clint Brewer, for over a year, while in Hawaii and other states, its affiliates ran multiple stories questioning Obama’s birth certificate.

Consultants associated with State Policy Network have also set up supposedly nonpartisan “government transparency” websites. These sites, which neglect the topic of highly paid government contractors while at times exaggerating the pay of public sector employees like teachers—have recently cropped up in almost every state. In Ohio, the Buckeye Institute, an SPN-affiliated think tank, provided the underlying data for a database on public employee pay, which came under criticism after the Associated Press reported that it was “riddled with errors and omissions.”...

==

SW

SPN's Legislative Agenda Is Frequently Buttressed by Its Forays as "Press" and the Echoes of Its Allies in the Growing Right-Wing State "Press" Corps. As CMD was one of the first to document, SPN groups like the Goldwater Institute are hiring people to act as reporters, and the legislative agenda of SPN is increasingly echoed by the growing right-wing infrastructure of groups that pose as press. Some even get their stories or "reports" picked up as news and delivered to state newspapers as a "wire" service like the Associated Press, as with the Franklin Center's Watchdog.org groups and the Ryun brothers-allied "American Majority" and "Media Trackers" operations.

Staff Ties to Conservative & GOP Organizations

The center was launched by the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance (SAM),[6] a 501(c)(3) devoted to pushing free-market ideals. The Franklin Center also receives funding from the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[7] a conservative grant-making organization.[8]

The Franklin Center’s president, Jason Stverak, is the former Regional Field Director for SAM, served as North Dakota Executive Director for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.[9] The Franklin Center’s president, Jason Stverak, is the former Regional Field Director for SAM, served as North Dakota Executive Director for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.[10]

The Center's Director of Donor Relations Matt Hauck is a former Associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. [11]

The Center's Chief of Staff Gwen Beattie is the former Director of Development and Operations at America's Future Foundation, an organization committed to "identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders."[12]

The Center's 2009 IRS 990 form lists Rudie Martinson as director and secretary, who formerly worked as the assistant state director for North Dakota's chapter of Koch's Americans for Prosperity.[13]

Accusations of Inaccuracy & 'Manufactured News'

In August 2010, the West Virginia Watchdog blog quoted an unnamed source claiming that Democratic Governor Joe Manchin's office had been subpoenaed as part of a federal grand jury investigation. The story said that the subpoenas asked for contracts and records for businesses that have done work at the governor’s mansion. "The target may be Manchin himself, according to a source who asked to remain anonymous," the original story said. The governor’s office responded saying that “Neither subpoena was directed to Governor Manchin or the Governor’s Office.... No individual in the Governor’s Office was served with a subpoena…. The State has not been informed that Governor Manchin or any other state employee is under investigation.” The West Virginia Watchdog updated its site with these statements then reported that their "source was ultimately wrong about the purpose of the subpoenas."[14]

In February, the Wisconsin Reporter sponsored a questionable poll asserting that 71% of Wisconsin residents thought the state's Governor Scott Walker's budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was "fair." Several local and national news outlets cited the poll without investigation, including MSNBC. The result seemed completely out of whack with other polling leading some to question the source. The same month, We Ask America, largely owned by the Illinois Manufacturing Association, a leading business organization in the region, polled 2,400 Wisconsin residents and found that 52 percent opposed Walker's bill. The Franklin Center's poll was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research. [15]

In 2009, The New Mexico Watchdog reported that based on data from Recovery.gov millions of dollars were spent in non-existent congressional districts in the state. The story picked up steam among reporters, even turned into a Colbert Report segment called "Know your Made-up District." The Franklin Center released a national report that said $6.4 billion in stimulus money had been spent in hundreds of “phantom” congressional districts. There was truth to the New Mexico Watchdog report, but it turned out, as reported by the Associated Press, that the culprit was an error-ridden government database. The funds were actually distributed to the right recipients but errors such as zip codes entered incorrectly accounted for the "phantom districts" rather than, as the report suggested, had been unaccounted for or misused.

Even with this new information on the shortfalls of the Recovery.gov site, the Franklin Center failed to set the record straight. In its 2010 Annual report, the center boasted it found that the "stimulus sent funds in the form of grants, loans and government contracts to support more than 200 projects in imaginary ZIP codes covering 38 states." It did not mention the errors in the database, but let the record stand as a story of government waste. [16][17]

Support for the American Legislative Exchange Council

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity was a "Vice-Chairman" level sponsor of 2011 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Annual Conference, which in 2010, equated to $25,000. The Franklin Center was one of about 60 companies and institutions represented in the conference exhibition hall.[18]

Franklin Center in Wisconsin

One of the Franklin Center's sites, the Wisconsin Reporter, was launched in January, and it's articles have been featured in weekly newspapers across the state. In February, the outlet supported a poll that claimed 71% of Wisconsin residents thought Governor Scott Walker's budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was 'fair.'[19] The suspiciously high percentage caused some to question the source of the poll.[20] But a lot of local and national news outlets cited the poll without investigation, including MSNBC.[21] Data from the poll of 500 likely voters was managed by Pulse Opinion Research, owned by Scott Rasmussen, a trustee of Property and Environment Research Center, which has ties to the Koch Brothers and Exxon Mobile. [22] The Rasmussen Poll also released a poll that showed 48% of American voters supported Walker, while just 38% supported the unions,” said Evan McMorris-Santoro writing for TPMuckracking. “That poll was criticized for asking leading questions that seemed to point respondents toward opposing the unions.” [23]

Criticism from Media Watchdog Organizations

The journalistic integrity of these sites has been called into question by media watchdog groups. Laura McGann, assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, wrote that the Franklin Center is backing news organizations who engage in distorted reporting across the country. "As often as not, their reporting is thin and missing important context, which occasionally leads to gross distortions," wrote McGann, who pointed to several instances where the Watchdog websites wrote stories that turned out to be misleading or untrue. [24]

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism on a sliding scale of highly ideological, somewhat ideological and non-ideological, ranked the “Watchdog.org” franchise "highly ideological." [25]

Franklin Center-Funded and Affiliated Sites

Statehouse News Bureaus[26]

Pacific Research Institute, California, calwatchdog.com

Independence Institute, Colarado, comoradonewsagency.com

Hawaii Reporter, Hawaii, hawaiireporter.com

Idaho Freedom Foundation, Idaho, idahoreporter.com

Illinois Statehouse News, Illinois, Illinois.statehousenewsonline.com

Iowa Politics, Iowa, iowapolitics.com

Kansas Reporter, Kansas, kansasreporter.org, [http://kansas.watchdog.org kansas.watchdog.org

Pelican Institute, Louisiana, thepelcanpost.org

Maryland Reporter, Maryland, marylandreporter.com

Michigan Center for Public Policy, Michigan, michigancapitolconfidential.com

Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, Minnesota, mnstatenews.com

Missouri News Horizon, Missouri, minewshorizon.org

Montana Policy Institute, Montana, Montana.watchdog.org

Nevada News Bureau, Nevada, nevadanewsbeaurea.com

Rio Grande Foundation, New Mexico, capitolreportnewmexico.com

John Locke Foundation, North Carolina, carolinajournal.com

John William Pope Civitas Institute, North Carolina, nccivitas.org

Plains Daily, North Dakota, plainsdaily.com

Capitol Beat OK, Oklahoma, capitolbeatok.com

Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon, oregoncapitolnews.com

Pennsylvania Independent, Pennsylvania, paindependent.com

South Carolina Policy Council, South Carolina, thenerve.org

Tennessee Report, Tennessee, tnreport.com

Texas Watchdog, Texas, texaswatchdog.org

Virginia Statehouse News, Virginia, Virginiastatehousenews.com

Wisconsin Reporter, Wisconsin, wisconsinreporter.com

Cowboy State Free Press, Wyoming, cowboystatefreepress.net

Investigative Reporters [27]

Alabama Policy Institute, Alabama, alabamarighttoknow.org

Alaska Policy Forum, Alaska, Alaska.watchdog.org

Advance Arkansas Institute, Arkansas, thearkansasproject.com

Pacific Research Institute, California, calwatchdog.com

Independence Institute, Colorado, i2i.org

Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Connecticut, raisinghale.com

James Madison Institute, Florida, jamesmadison.org

Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Georgia, forum.georgiapolicy.org

Hawaii Reporter, Hawaii, hawaiireporter.com

Idaho Freedom Foundation, Idaho, idahoreporter.com

Illinois Policy Institute, Illinois, illinoispolicy.org

Iowa Politics, Iowa, iowapolitics.com

Kansas Watchdog, Kansas, Kansas.watchdog.org

Pelican Institute, Louisiana, thepelicanpost.org

Maine Watchdog, Maine, maine.watchdog.org

Maryland Public Policy Institute, Maryland, mdpolicy.com

Pioneer Institute, Massachusetts, pioneerinstitute.org

Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Michigan, mackinac.org

Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, Minnesota, freedomfoundationofminnesota.com

Missouri Watchdog, Missouri, Missouri.watchdog.org

Montana Policy Institute, Montana, Montana.watchdog.org

Nebraska Watchdog, Nebraska, Nebraska.watchdog.org

Nevada Policy Research Institute, Nevada, npri.org

Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, New Hampshire, newhampshire.watchdog.org

New Jersey Watchdog, New Jersey, newjersey.watchdog.org

Rio Grande Foundation, New Mexico, newmexico.watchdog.org

John Locke Foundation, North Carolina, carolinajournal.com

Plains Daily, North Dakota, plainsdaily.com

Ohio Watchdog, Ohio, ohio.watchdog.org

Oklahoma Watchdog, Oklahoma, Oklahoma.watchdog.org

Cascade Policy Institute, Orgeon, oregoncapitolnews.com

Pennsylvania Independent, Pennsylvania, paindependent.com

South Carolina Policy Council, South Carolina, thenerve.org

Tennessee Center for Policy Research, Tennessee, Tennessee.watchdog.org

Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas, texasbudgersource.com

Texas Watchdog, Texas, texaswatchdog.org

Sutherland Institute, Utah, sutherlandinstitute.org

Old Dominion Watchdog, Virginia, olddominionwatchdog.org

Freedom Foundation, Washington, myfreedomfoundation.com

Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia, West Virginia, westvirginia.watchdog.org

MacIver Institute, Wisconsin, maciverinstitute.com

Wisconsin Reporter, Wisconsin, wisconsinreporter.org

Wyoming Liberty Group, Wyoming, wyomingreporter.org

Staff

Management team

Jason Stverak (president)

Gwen Beattie (director of development)

Nicole Gentile-Stverak (events planner)

Frank Keegan (National Watchdog Editor)

Scott Reeder (National Statehouse Editor)

Megan Ritter (Development and Office Coordinator)

James Skyles (General Counsel and Director of Operations)

Meghan Tisinger (Director of Communications)

Reporting staff

Kelly Carson (writing coach and content editor)

Mary Massingale (writing coach and content editor)

Elizabeth Hillgrove (staff writer and special projects)

Jonathan Miltimore (national reporter, fiscal issues)

Bill McMorris (staff writer)

Ben Yount (Bureau Chief, Illinois Statehouse News)

Drew Thomason (Reporter, Illinois Statehouse News)

Earl Glynn (contributor, Kansas Watchdog)

Stephan Burklin (editor, Maine Watchdog)

Brian R. Hook (editor, Missouri Watchdog)

Joe Jordan (editor, Nebraska Watchdog)

Andrew Griffin (reporter, Oklahoma Watchdog)

Paige Winfield Cunningham (editor, Old Dominion Watchdog)

Amanda Iacone (Bureau Chief, Virginia Statehouse News)

Stephen Groves (reporter, Virginia Statehouse News)

Kirsten Adshead (investigative reporter and special projects,

Wisconsin Reporter)

Kevin Lee (Statehouse reporter, Wisconsin Reporter)

Sourcewatch resources

Charles Koch

Sam Adams Alliance

Rodney Fund

State Policy Network

Property and Environment Research Center

Koch

David H. Koch

Koch Family Foundations

External resources

Franklin Center "For The Media"

Media Matters "Conservative Transparency"

Contact

Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity

DC Office 127 S. Peyton Street, Suite 200

Alexandria, VA, 22314

Office Phone: 571-384-2090

North Dakota Office

547 S. 7th St. #176

Bismarck, ND 58504

Office Phone: 701-214-5612

Email: info@FranklinCenterHQ.org

For media inquiries please contact Meghan Tisinger at Meghan.Tisinger@FranklinCenterHQ.org

References

? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. About. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Franklin Center For Government & Public Integrity. Mission. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Think tank Journalism: The Future of Investigative Journalism. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Portland Press Herald. 'Watchdog' website puts a new spin on politics'. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? Truthout. The Koch Spider Web. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? Sam Adams Alliance. Sam Adams Alliance Media Kit. Organizational PDF. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Franklin Center boss wants apology from Democratic staffer. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Staff. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Staff. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

?? Matt Hauck LinkedIn [[1]] Accessed 5 October 2011

? Gwen Beattie LinkedIn [[2]] Accessed 5 October 2011

? AFP Announces Free Market Essay Contest [[3]] Accessed 5 October 2011

? West Virginia Watchdog, Gov. Joe Manchin’s Dept. of Administration, Division of Highways Subpoenaed in Federal Probe [4] Accessed October 5, 2011

? Wisconsin Reporter, "Poll Shows 71%..." [5] Accessed October 5 2011

? New Mexico Watchdog, "$6.4 Billion Stimulus Goes to Phantom Districts" [6] Accessed October 5 2011

? Associated Press, "Stimulus accuracy comes under fire" [7]

? [American Legislative Exchange Council, 2011 Conference Sponsors, conference brochure on file with CMD, August 11, 2011]

? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. BREAKING: Poll Shows 71% of Wiscosnites Think Walker's Budget Changes are "Fair" Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? Talking Points Memo. The Conservative Group Behind The Poll of Walker's Budget Plan. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? YouTube. MSNBC Pushes Right-Wing Wisconsin Poll. YouTube. Accessed August 19, 2011.

?? Media Matters Property and Environment Research Center Conservative Transparency, accessed April 14, 2011

? Evan McMorris-Santoro Mysterious Conservative Poll of Walker’s Budget Plan Hits Wisconsin TPM, February 24, 2011

? The Portland Press Herald. 'Watchdog' website puts a new spin on politics'. News website. Accessed October 5 2011.

? The Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism [8]. News website. Accessed October 5 2011.

??? Statehouse News Bureaus, Source Watch, accessed March 23, 2012

? Investigative Journalists, Sourcewatch, accessed March 23, 2012

Categories: Stubs | ALEC Exposed | Water | Energy | Think tanks | Lobbying | Politics (U.S.)

An election took place last fall in Virginia that didn't garner national attention, but it should have - not for the candidates or issues - but for the giant pile of corporate cash manipulating events behind the scenes.

Rick Boucher, a then-28-year incumbent Democratic Congressman from the Ninth District - the longest-serving Congressman in that district since the Civil War - was surprisingly defeated by Republican Morgan Griffith. The upset came as a shock to many, since an early October poll showed Boucher ahead by double digits, including one measure earlier in the month that put him ahead by 10 percentage points.

C'est la vie. Such is political life. The National Republican Congressional Committee spent around $600,000 in ads, and the media framed the defeat as a Blue Dog, Boucher losing due to his support for cap-and-trade policies.

Except, there was more to the story. A Democratic Party official from Virginia, who asked to remain anonymous because he is still serving in an official capacity, says the "Boucher is an enemy of coal" narrative is a lie and that actually far more sinister actions are at play in Virginia.

In fact, Boucher is the type of moderate Democrat that Progressives loathe. He is indeed a great friend of coal and went out of his way to preserve coals jobs in his district. Boucher did vote for cap and trade, but only because he feared the alternative was to leave regulation to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he said would be devastating for companies that rely on coal and their employees. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) actually praised Boucher for his commitment "to protect coal miners and the coal industry."

Griffith nonetheless seized upon the "Boucher is bad for coal" narrative and added it to his existing arsenal, accusing Boucher of being too cozy with President Obama (Boucher voted against both versions of the House health care bill, but refused to repeal the law).

These kinds of campaign smears aren't unusual, save for the fact that the "Boucher Betrayed Coal" ads that played in Virginia and that were so effective they eventually cost Boucher his seat, were paid for by the Americans for Prosperity, a special-interest group founded with the support of David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch of Koch Industries, and the same group that was so instrumental during the now infamous health care town hall debacles.

Boucher survived the Republican Revolution of 1994, but he could not survive propaganda funded by two of the wealthiest men in the world.

That wouldn't be the last time Virginia heard from the Kochs.

In January, a special election was held to fill the vacated seat of now-Congressman Griffith in the House of Delegates. The Republicans ran the former Chair of the Salem Democratic Committee, Greg Habeeb.

The Democratic nominee was Ginger Mumpower of Roanoke. Before the election, Mumpower held a press conference in December in front of a state-owned liquor store to publicize her opposition to Governor McDonnell's ill-fated plan to privatize such stores. The public was against the plan and the opposition was gaining momentum. That same day, Habeeb quickly reversed, leaving him vulnerable to the most-dreaded political accusation: being a "flip-flopper."

The Roanoke Free Press called it a "holiday hallelujah" moment for the Mumpower campaign, and Habeeb's swift reversal seemed like a gift that would help Mumpower secure victory.

Then, my source received a voicemail from Paige Winfield Cunningham, a reporter with virginia.watchdog.org and also a contributor for The Washington Times, as did the Mumpower campaign. Before returning the call, the official briefly viewed the web site and quickly dismissed it as a "right-wing misinformation site." He didn't return Cunningham's phone call.

Later in the week, Cunningham left another message on the official's voicemail, which he also didn't return.

Soon after, the official visited virginia.watchdog.org and saw that Cunningham had run a story in which she stated the country club to which Mumpower used to belong stated that she had not paid her past dues and that her home had been sold in a foreclosure auction. Obviously, the story caused a lot of embarrassment for Mumpower during an already chaotic political season.

Meanwhile, Habeeb raised over $138,000 for his campaign, more than five times what the Mumpowercamp had in their reserves, and he secured the tentative support of the Roanoke Tea Party, though they did express concern that perhaps the anti-choice, anti-gay marriage, pro-gun Habeeb wasn't conservative enough.

Ultimately, he won 64 percent of the vote, defeating Mumford.

The whole experience left my source feeling uneasy. Who had fed the reporter that information and what was the deal with that web site?

As it turns out, the [insert your state here].watchdog.org web sites are a franchise. Tailor the brand with a state, though not all states are represented, and a whole list of anti-union, anti-regulation, right-wing misinformation articles springs up in one's browser.

Plug in "newjersey.watchdog.org" and the web site will regale one with tales of greedy pensioners and the evils of the EPA. Type "washington.watchdog.org," and anti-union propaganda, helpfully tailored for the state of Washington, pop up.

According to the hub web site, watchdog.org is the brainchild of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, a 5o1(c)3 non-profit organization "dedicated to promoting new media journalism."

However, those "journalism" credentials have been called into question by groups like the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which rates watchdog.org as being "highly ideological" and "somewhat transparent." The site has one editor, Steven Allen Adams, a stringer for Reuters and a contributor to a West Virginia entertainment news web site called Kanawha Valley Live that, sadly, closed operations in April.

The Franklin Center has well-established ties to right-wing groups, including the Sam Adams Alliance (SAA), which originally funded the organization. In addition to running partisan web sites, Franklin Center also funds partisan polls.

SAA, a non-profit organization based in Chicago, also has a litany of tries to the Kochs to the extent that the two groups function with a singular purpose. CEO Eric O'Keefe helped create American Majority, a Tea Party-candidate training organization. O'Keefe has attempted to take credit for being the architect of the entire Tea Party movement, and he once worked for Citizens for Congressional Reform, a project of David Koch's Citizens for a Sound Economy.

The group has always been wary of publicly displaying connections to their wealthy donors and even went so far as to scrub an internship recruitment page that originally connected it to Koch Industries:

"Interested parties can apply for a Sam Adams Alliance internship through the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program administered by the Institute for Humane Studies and the State Policy Network."

The internship is still posted. Charles Koch is still funding it. However, the Koch reference is now suspiciously absent from the redesigned SAA web site.

Examined from above, the range of the Koch brother spider web is enormously impressive. Here, we have a gigantic cash machine disseminating funding to a litany of Astroturf groups and nonprofits (doesn't that always sound so innocent?) that then splinter off to fund other nonprofits, which set up openly partisan web sites staffed with an army of hack reporters charged with destroying the credibility of Democratic candidates.

Truly, it's a wonder to behold.

http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=2444:the-koch-spider-web

Franklin Center: Right-Wing Funds State News Source

by Sara Jerving [1] — October 27, 2011 - 8:00am

Topics: Journalism [2]

As newsrooms across the country shave off staff due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity [4], is rushing to fill the gap. The group has 43 state news websites, with writers in over 40 states. Its reporters have been given state house press credentials and its news articles are starting to appear in mainstream print newspapers in each state. Who funds Franklin and what is its agenda?

The Funding Trail Leads to Bradley, Koch, and Other Right-Wing Groups

The websites started sprouting up in 2009. Some of these new sites go by the moniker "Reporter" as with the Franklin Center's Wisconsin Reporter [5] that was launched in January as a website and wire-like service. Others have taken the shared name of "Watchdog.org [6]," or "Statehouse News [7]." The websites all offer their content free to local press -- many of the news bureaus send out their articles to state editors every day. The sites also offer free national stories that media can receive daily by subscribing.

The websites are coordinated and funded by a new non-profit group that calls itself the "Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity." The Franklin Center told the Center for Media and Democracy that it does not disclose its funders, but some of its funding can been uncovered from foundation reports. Franklin acts as a hub that distributes funding that it receives from right-wing institutions such as the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation [8] and the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance [9]. The North Dakota and DC-based center works with [10] reporters embedded in conservative think tanks and others who have their own news bureaus.

According to Media Transparency [11], a media watchdog group that was acquired by Media Matters Action Network in 2008, the Bradley Foundation's clear political agenda and network has allowed it to have extensive influence on public policy. The media group notes that while the Foundation's "targets range from affirmative action to social security, it has seen its greatest successes in the area of welfare 'reform' and attempts to privatize public education through the promotion of school vouchers." The Bradley Foundation gave the Franklin Center $190,500 last year. [12]

The Franklin Center was launched with the help [13] of Sam Adams Alliance, which calls itself "SAM." The CEO of SAM, Eric O'Keefe [14], has been featured at events funded by David Koch [15]'s right-wing group called "Americans for Prosperity [16]" (AFP). As the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch.org has previously noted [17], O'Keefe frequently and positively profiles the Tea Party [18] and attacks health care reform and other progressive ideas. He also helped launch the "American Majority [19]" group which trains conservatives to run for office. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Club for Growth Wisconsin [20], which ran divisive ads in support of Scott Walker's radical overhaul of collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin workers. He previously worked for David Koch's AFP predecessor group named "Citizens for a Sound Economy [21]," among other roles.

O'Keefe's latest enterprise, SAM, gets part of its funding [22] from the State Policy Network [23] (SPN), which is partially funded by The Claude R. Lambe Foundation [24]. Charles Koch, one of the billionaire brothers who co-own Koch Industries [25], and his wife and children, along with long-time Koch employee Richard Fink [26], comprise the board of this foundation. SAM is named after Founding Father Sam Adams, one of the leaders in the Boston Tea Party tax protests.

In its first year, the Franklin Center had a budget of $2.9 million, [27] much of it from O'Keefe's SAM.

"Franklin Center" Staffed by Right-Wing Activists

Many Franklin staffers have ties to conservative activist groups and the GOP. The Franklin Center's president, Jason Stverak [28], is the former Regional Field Director for SAM, and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.

In late July, Erik Telford, the Director of Membership Online Strategy for Koch's AFP, announced that he would take on the position of Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Outreach for the Franklin Center. He had worked at AFP for four and a half years. In his farewell letter [29], he minced no words in explaining the activist role he will play in his new position, "As I move on to a new challenge, I look forward to staying involved with AFP, but now in an even more important capacity: that of a member and grassroots activist."

The Franklin Center's Director of Donor Relations, Matt Hauck [30], is a former Associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation [31]. The center's Chief of Staff, Gwen Beattie [32], is the former Director of Development and Operations at America's Future Foundation [33], an organization committed to "identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders." The Franklin Center's 2009 IRS 990 form lists Rudie Martinson [34] as director and secretary. He formerly worked as the assistant state director for North Dakota's chapter of Koch's Americans for Prosperity. [35]

The Franklin Center was one of the sponsors [36] of the Western Republican presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas this month, along with Americans for Prosperity and other right-wing groups.

Interestingly, unlike traditional journalistic outlets, the screening process for writing for websites like the Wisconsin Reporter asks applicants ideological questions. As the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based school and resource for journalists, has reported, Wisconsin Reporter applicants must answer questions [37] like: "How do free markets help the poor?" and "Do higher taxes lead to balanced budgets?" Such queries likely have optimal answers to a group like the Wisconsin Reporter, just as some of its stories have been criticized for being results-oriented in ways that are consistent with its funders' world view.

The address listed on the Franklin Center's 2011 nonprofit disclosure form [38] is a UPS Store Post Office box, as reported [39] by a North Dakota political blog. The North Dakota phone line on the Franklin Center contact page is re-routed to the DC office.

"The Franklin Center" Supports the American Legislative Exchange Council

At the 2011 American Legislative Exchange Council [40] (ALEC) annual conference in New Orleans, The Franklin Center was listed as a "Vice-Chairman" level sponsor of the ALEC conference. In 2010, this equated to a gift of at least $25,000. It was also one of about 60 companies and institutions represented in the conference exhibition hall. ALEC brings corporations, such as Koch Industries, and state legislators together in task forces to vote on so-called "model legislation" that benefits the corporate bottom line or ALEC's ideological agenda. These bills are then introduced by legislators in state houses across the country, without any mention that corporations previously approved such legislation behind closed doors, as the Center for Media and Democracy has reported [41].

Sloppy Reporting, or Manufacturing News?

In August 2010, the West Virginia Watchdog [42] blog reported that an unnamed source said that the former Democratic Governor Joe Manchin's office had been subpoenaed as part of a federal grand jury investigation. The story said that the subpoenas asked for contracts and records for businesses that have done work at the governor's mansion. "The target may be Manchin himself, according to a source who asked to remain anonymous," the original story said.

The governor's office responded saying that "Neither subpoena was directed to Governor Manchin or the Governor's Office. No individual in the Governor's Office was served with a subpoena. ... The State has not been informed that Governor Manchin or any other state employee is under investigation." The West Virginia Watchdog updated its site with these statements then reported [43] that their "source was ultimately wrong about the purpose of the subpoenas." But the damage had been done. The article was picked up by the Associated Press, Charleston CBS affiliate, Charleston Daily Mail, and other news sites. The story also was reported in outlets like Politico and CNN. The reporter who broke the story is stationed at the Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia. While this group does not disclose its funders, some outlets have alleged [44] it to be linked to the Koch brothers.

The timing was convenient. Manchin had announced in July of that year he would run to fill the unexpired term of U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, who passed away in 2010. Despite the controversy, Manchin did end up taking Byrd's seat.

Center for Media and Democracy??• 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/10/10971/franklin-center-right-wing-funds-state-news-source

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35298/sara-jerving

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/media/journalism

[3] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.prwatch.org%2Fnews%2F2011%2F10%2F10971%2Ffranklin-center-right-wing-funds-state-news-source&linkname=Franklin%20Center%3A%20Right-Wing%20Funds%20State%20News%20Source

[4] http://www.franklincenterhq.org/

[5] http://www.wisconsinreporter.com

[6] http://watchdog.org/

[7] http://www.statehousenews.com/public/default.htm

[8] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lynde_and_Harry_Bradley_Foundation

[9] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sam_Adams_Alliance

[10] http://www.franklincenterhq.org/2723/the-new-watchdogs/

[11] http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=1

[12] http://www.bradleyfdn.org/pdfs/Reports2010/2010AnnualReport.pdf

[13] http://features.journalism.org/non-profit-news/watchdogs/

[14] http://www.eric-okeefe.com/

[15] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Koch

[16] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity

[17] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/03/10375/cmd-special-report-who-are-headliners-koch-funded-afp-conventions

[18] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tea_Party

[19] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Majority

[20] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Club_for_Growth_Wisconsin

[21] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_for_a_Sound_Economy

[22] http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/Sam_Adams_Alliance/funders

[23] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=State_Policy_Network

[24] http://freeridebook.com/transparency/organization/Claude_R_Lambe_Charitable_Foundation

[25] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries

[26] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Fink

[27] http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/noquarter/127152603.html

[28] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jason_Stverak

[29] http://www.americansforprosperity.org/072211-farewell-message-erik-telford-moving-afp

[30] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-hauck/1/545/b11

[31] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Charles_G._Koch_Charitable_Foundation

[32] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gwen-beattie/6/659/608

[33] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America's_Future_Foundation

[34] http://www.linkedin.com/in/rudiemartinson

[35] http://americansforprosperity.org/americans-prosperity-foundation-announces-free-market-essay-contest-north-dakota-high-school-student

[36] http://westernrepublican.com/

[37] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/141113/editor-opportunistic-conservatives-are-behind-wisconsinreporter-com/

[38] http://www.scribd.com/doc/53911562/Franklin2011SOS-Filling

[39] http://www.northdecoder.com/Latest/the-koch-brothers-slow-poisoning-of-america.html

[40] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Legislative_Exchange_Council

[41] http://www.ALECexposed.org

[42] http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/1959/source-federal-probe-subpoenas-manchin/

[43] http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/1969/gov-joe-manchins-dept-of-administration-division-of-highways-subpoenaed-in-federal-probe/

[44] http://sundaygazettemail.com/News/201009260391?page=1

[45] http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=6d195a77b46a877ab2b3a62b1&id=aae9b36e46&e=

[46] http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/group_pushing_the_group_behind_the_conservative_poll_of_walkers_budget_plan_wisconsin_poll_has_gop_ba.php

[47] http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/whatsnews/article_be38b2a2-3c6d-11e0-b34d-001cc4c002e0.html

[48] http://weaskamerica.com/2011/02/18/weirdness-in-wisconsin/

[49] http://newmexico.watchdog.org/1031/federal-stimulus-funds-reportedly-spent-in-nonexistent-zip-codes/

[50] http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/default.aspx

[51] http://watchdog.org/1530/6-4-billion-stimulus-goes-to-phantom-districts/

[52] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705345576/Stimulus-accuracy-comes-under-fire.html

[53] http://www.pressherald.com/news/watchdog-website-puts-a-new-spin-on-politics_2010-10-02.html

[54] http://features.journalism.org/non-profit-news/#undefined

[55] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck

[56] http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102509/Statehouse-Beat-Woes-Portend-Bad-News-for-Good-Government.aspx

[57] http://www.wisconsinreporter.com/wisconsin-democrats-threaten-wisconsin-reporter

[58] http://lacrossetribune.com/news/article_0131ddf0-9ee7-11e0-aa7e-001cc4c002e0.html

[59] http://www.leadertelegram.com/news/daily_updates/article_50201cc9-8d78-55bb-82f4-52aee922caba.html

[60] http://www.wisconsinreporter.com/union-concessions-save-17-teacher-jobs

[61] http://www.stevenspointjournal.com/article/20111012/SPJ0101/110120681/Special-Wisconsin-legislative-session-shows-hints-bipartisanship

[62] http://chippewa.com/news/local/article_8d9189ba-7ea0-11e0-9789-001cc4c002e0.html

[63] http://www.beloitdailynews.com/news/wisconsin/errors-typos-plague-wisconsin-recall-elections/article_341b06dc-bf7c-11e0-a15f-001cc4c002e0.html

[64] http://www.wisfoic.org/

[65] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heritage_Foundation

[66] http://blog.heritage.org/category/scribe/

[67] http://blog.heritage.org/2011/06/20/welcome-to-scribe-think-tank-journalism/

In February, the Franklin Center's Wisconsin Reporter sponsored a questionable poll [45] asserting that 71% of state residents thought Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was "fair." Several local and national news outlets cited the poll without investigation, including MSNBC. The result seemed completely out of whack with other polling leading some to question the source [46]. The same month, We Ask America, largely owned [47] by the Illinois Manufacturing Association, a leading business organization in the region, conducted a similar poll surveying 2,400 Wisconsin residents [48] and found that 52 percent opposed Walker's plan. The Franklin Center's poll was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research.

In 2009, the New Mexico Watchdog [49] reported that based on data from Recovery.gov [50], millions of dollars were spent in non-existent congressional districts in the state. The story picked up steam among reporters, even turned into a Colbert Report segment called "Know your Made-up District." The Franklin Center released a national report [51] that said $6.4 billion in stimulus money had been spent in hundreds of "phantom" congressional districts. There was truth to the New Mexico Watchdog report, but it turned out, as reported [52] by the Associated Press, that the culprit was an error-ridden government database. The funds were actually distributed to the right recipients, but errors, such as zip codes entered incorrectly, accounted for the "phantom districts." The money had not, as the report suggested, been unaccounted for or misused.

Even with this new information on the shortfalls of the Recovery.gov site, the Franklin Center failed to set the record straight. In its 2010 Annual report, the Center boasted it broke the story that federal stimulus money was allocated to 440 non-existing congressional districts. It did not mention the errors in the database, but let the record stand as a story of government waste.

Franklin Center Comes Under Fire From Journalism Watchdogs

The journalistic integrity of these sites has been called into question by media watchdog groups. Laura McGann, assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, wrote in a 2010 [53] piece in the Washington Monthly, that the Franklin Center sites are engaging in distorted reporting across the country.

"As often as not, their reporting is thin and missing important context, which occasionally leads to gross distortions," wrote McGann, who pointed to several instances where the Watchdog websites wrote stories that turned out to be misleading or untrue.

"This sort of misleading reporting crops up on Watchdog sites often enough to suggest that, rather than isolated instances of sloppiness, it is part of a broad editorial strategy," she wrote.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, using a sliding scale of highly ideological, somewhat ideological and non-ideological, ranked the "Watchdog.org" franchise "highly ideological [54]." Not surprisingly, Glenn Beck [55], a controversial conservative FOX talk show host, has touted the Franklin Center's network as a nonpartisan trusted source of news and information.

Writers affiliated with Franklin Center groups are asking for accreditation [56] in various legislatures.

Responding to criticisms from the Neiman Foundation, Jason Stverak said: "Obviously, there is skepticism coming from some in the traditional legacy media. ... We write for the people, and the content that we produce is at such a high-quality level that it is continually being embraced by consumers in each community."

New Breed of Reporting

Graeme Zielinski, Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesperson, accused [57] the Wisconsin Reporter of using off-the-record comments, butchering quotes, and not correcting the record when errors were called to its attention.

Zielinski told the Center for Media and Democracy that he's never worked with a news outlet that operates like the Wisconsin Reporter. He acknowledges that other outlets across the state are biased, but the difference, he said, is that the Wisconsin Reporter's content is ideologically-motivated and passed off in newspapers across the state as "straight-shooting reporting." He calls their methods of journalism "ambush reporting." He said he has received calls late in the evening and early in the morning on weekends from their reporters, given a short deadline to comment on slanted and inflammatory statements.

Yet, this newsource is gaining traction in the state. Wisconsin Reporter's stories have been picked up by a host of local media outlets in the state, such as La Crosse Tribune [58], Eau Claire's Leader Telegram [59], Wausau Daily Herald [60], Steven's Point Journal [61], Chippewa Herald [62], and Beloit Daily News [63].

Dave Zweifel, co-founder and long-serving president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council [64], and editor emeritus of the Madison-based Capital Times, told the Center for Media and Democracy that the Wisconsin Reporter is a new breed of news reporting. "Of course, many news organizations are owned by corporations or supported by politically active donors, but most keep a hands off approach when it comes to covering the news," he said. "This outfit masks itself as an investigative journalism service that provides free content to newspapers, many of which are cash-strapped these days, and eager for such a product. ... You have to give these guys credit for capturing the moment when the press is particularly vulnerable."

This manner of producing and distributing 'news' is such a clever idea that its inspired other right-wing think tanks to devote resource to news production. The Heritage Foundation [65] launched the "Scribe [66]," a blog that features reports complimentary to the Foundation's stance on policy issues. It cites the Franklin Center's [67] successes in expanding think tank journalism as a reason for its launch.

The Franklin Center is a multimillion-dollar organization whose websites and affiliates provide FREE statehouse reporting to local newspapers and other media across the country. Funded by major conservative donors, staffed by veterans of groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, and maintaining a regular presence hosting right-wing events, the organization boasts of its ability to fill the void created by state newsroom layoffs.

The group's editors claim that their "professional journalism" work is walled off from the organization's more nakedly political operations and say that their "pro-taxpayer, pro-liberty, free market perspective" doesn't compromise their accuracy or independence. But many journalism professionals - even newspaper editors who reprint the work of Franklin Center affiliates in their own pages - speak warily of the group's ideological bent.

All but one of the IdahoReporter.com stories quoted Franklin Center parent the Idaho Freedom Foundation and highlighted its opposition to the bill -- which would have barred those under 18 from commercial tanning beds -- a restriction that 38 other states have already instituted because of the dangers of skin cancer and other health concerns.

A March 6 story even based its angle on the Freedom Foundation's opposition to the bill and touted its reasons in the lead paragraph.

"They covered the tanning bill because it is one of those pieces of legislation that impacts the free market," said Wayne Hoffman, three-year executive director of the Idaho Freedom Foundation. "The reporters write stories based on the news of the day of the legislature."

But the website's coverage of the tanning issue clearly figured into the Idaho Freedom Foundation's efforts to stop the measure and protect that industry's business owners, a pattern observers say many of the IdahoReporter.com articles appear to follow.

"I think it's viewed as something other than a regular news organization," said Betsy Russell, president of the Capitol Correspondents Association of Idaho and a statehouse reporter for the Spokesman-Review of neighboring Spokane, Washington."They report on their own organization's activities and they reveal it, they give more play to stuff their organization is pushing."

Such a conflict was enough for the Capitol Correspondents Association to deny membership to IdahoReporter.com on two occasions, in 2010 and 2011, denying them access rights to the legislature enjoyed by legitimate news outlets.

The website did not seek credentials for 2012.

Russell says of IdahoReporter.com: "It was basically a lobbying organization that linked to a news arm. They very plainly don't qualify and are not going to qualify" as a news organization.

IdahoReporter.com is one of 55 news sites covering state government in 39 states that have ties to the Franklin Center, which claims to provide 10 percent of all state government news in the United States. Some of the Franklin Center state news sites are described as "affiliates," which means the Franklin Center provides training and grants, but no oversight. Others are operated and controlled by the non-profit organization.

UPDATE 4/13

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity is a national 501(c)(3) journalism organization based in Bismarck, North Dakota.[1] According to the organization's website, the group's mission involves "networking and training independent investigative reporters, as well as journalists from state based news organizations, public-policy institutions & watchdog groups."[2] The center funds state reporters in more than 40 states.[3] Despite their non-partisan description, many of these websites have received criticism for their conservative bias.[4][5]

Contents

[hide]

1 Staff Ties to Conservative & GOP Organizations

2 Accusations of Inaccuracy & 'Manufactured News'

3 Support for the American Legislative Exchange Council

4 Funding

4.1 Majority of Funding Comes from "the Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement," Donors Trust

5 Franklin Center in Wisconsin

6 Criticism from Media Watchdog Organizations

7 Franklin Center-Funded and Affiliated Sites

7.1 Statehouse "News Bureaus"[29]

7.2 "Investigative Reporters" [30]

8 Personnel

8.1 Board of Directors

8.2 Advisory Board

8.3 Staff

8.3.1 Leadership

8.3.2 Development and Outreach

8.3.3 Special Projects and Marketing

8.3.4 Communications and Citizen Engagement

8.3.5 Operations

8.3.6 Journalism Support

8.4 Former Staff

9 Sourcewatch resources

10 External resources

11 Contact

11.1 References

Staff Ties to Conservative & GOP Organizations

The center was launched by the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance (SAM),[6] a 501(c)(3) devoted to pushing free-market ideals. The Franklin Center also receives funding from the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[7] a conservative grant-making organization.[8]

The Franklin Center’s president, Jason Stverak, is the former Regional Field Director for SAM, served as North Dakota Executive Director for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.[9] The Franklin Center’s president, Jason Stverak, is the former Regional Field Director for SAM, served as North Dakota Executive Director for the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee and former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party.[10]

The Center's Director of Donor Relations Matt Hauck is a former Associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. [11]

The Center's Chief of Staff Gwen Beattie is the former Director of Development and Operations at America's Future Foundation, an organization committed to "identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders."[12]

The Center's 2009 IRS 990 form lists Rudie Martinson as director and secretary, who formerly worked as the assistant state director for North Dakota's chapter of Koch's Americans for Prosperity.[13]

Accusations of Inaccuracy & 'Manufactured News'

In August 2010, the West Virginia Watchdog blog quoted an unnamed source claiming that Democratic Governor Joe Manchin's office had been subpoenaed as part of a federal grand jury investigation. The story said that the subpoenas asked for contracts and records for businesses that have done work at the governor’s mansion. "The target may be Manchin himself, according to a source who asked to remain anonymous," the original story said. The governor’s office responded saying that “Neither subpoena was directed to Governor Manchin or the Governor’s Office.... No individual in the Governor’s Office was served with a subpoena…. The State has not been informed that Governor Manchin or any other state employee is under investigation.” The West Virginia Watchdog updated its site with these statements then reported that their "source was ultimately wrong about the purpose of the subpoenas."[14]

In February, the Wisconsin Reporter sponsored a questionable poll asserting that 71% of Wisconsin residents thought the state's Governor Scott Walker's budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was "fair." Several local and national news outlets cited the poll without investigation, including MSNBC. The result seemed completely out of whack with other polling leading some to question the source. The same month, We Ask America, largely owned by the Illinois Manufacturing Association, a leading business organization in the region, polled 2,400 Wisconsin residents and found that 52 percent opposed Walker's bill. The Franklin Center's poll was conducted by Pulse Opinion Research. [15]

In 2009, The New Mexico Watchdog reported that based on data from Recovery.gov millions of dollars were spent in non-existent congressional districts in the state. The story picked up steam among reporters, even turned into a Colbert Report segment called "Know your Made-up District." The Franklin Center released a national report that said $6.4 billion in stimulus money had been spent in hundreds of “phantom” congressional districts. There was truth to the New Mexico Watchdog report, but it turned out, as reported by the Associated Press, that the culprit was an error-ridden government database. The funds were actually distributed to the right recipients but errors such as zip codes entered incorrectly accounted for the "phantom districts" rather than, as the report suggested, had been unaccounted for or misused.

Even with this new information on the shortfalls of the Recovery.gov site, the Franklin Center failed to set the record straight. In its 2010 Annual report, the center boasted it found that the "stimulus sent funds in the form of grants, loans and government contracts to support more than 200 projects in imaginary ZIP codes covering 38 states." It did not mention the errors in the database, but let the record stand as a story of government waste. [16][17]

Support for the American Legislative Exchange Council

The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity was a "Vice-Chairman" level sponsor of 2011 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Annual Conference, which in 2010, equated to $25,000. The Franklin Center was one of about 60 companies and institutions represented in the conference exhibition hall.[18]

About ALEC

ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site.

Funding

Known funders of the Franklin Foundation include:

The Searle Freedom Trust:

2010: $125,000

2011: $87,500

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation:

2010: $190,500

2011: $50,000

Dunns Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking:

2011: $50,000

DonorsTrust:

2011: $6.3 million[19]

Majority of Funding Comes from "the Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement," Donors Trust

Franklin Center Director of Communications Michael Moroney told the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) that the source of the Franklin Center's funding "is 100 percent anonymous." But 95 percent of its 2011 funding came from DonorsTrust, a spin-off of the Philanthropy Roundtable that functions as a large "donor-advised fund," cloaking the identity of donors to right-wing causes across the country (CPI did a review of Franklin's Internal Revenue Service records).[20] Mother Jones called DonorsTrust "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement" in a February 2013 article.[21] Franklin received DonorsTrust's second-largest donation in 2011.[20]

Franklin Center in Wisconsin

One of the Franklin Center's sites, the Wisconsin Reporter, was launched in January, and it's articles have been featured in weekly newspapers across the state. In February, the outlet supported a poll that claimed 71% of Wisconsin residents thought Governor Scott Walker's budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was 'fair.'[22] The suspiciously high percentage caused some to question the source of the poll.[23] But a lot of local and national news outlets cited the poll without investigation, including MSNBC.[24] Data from the poll of 500 likely voters was managed by Pulse Opinion Research, owned by Scott Rasmussen, a trustee of Property and Environment Research Center, which has ties to the Koch Brothers and Exxon Mobile. [25] The Rasmussen Poll also released a poll that “showed 48% of American voters supported Walker, while just 38% supported the unions,” said Evan McMorris-Santoro writing for TPMuckracking. “That poll was criticized for asking leading questions that seemed to point respondents toward opposing the unions.” [26]

Criticism from Media Watchdog Organizations

The journalistic integrity of these sites has been called into question by media watchdog groups. Laura McGann, assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, wrote that the Franklin Center is backing news organizations who engage in distorted reporting across the country. "As often as not, their reporting is thin and missing important context, which occasionally leads to gross distortions," wrote McGann, who pointed to several instances where the Watchdog websites wrote stories that turned out to be misleading or untrue. [27]

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism on a sliding scale of highly ideological, somewhat ideological and non-ideological, ranked the “Watchdog.org” franchise "highly ideological." [28]

Franklin Center-Funded and Affiliated Sites

srchwtch

The Wisconsin Reporter is an online state news website funded by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. The site launched in January 2011 as a division of StateHouseNews.[1] The Franklin Center funds reporters in over 40 states.[2] Despite their non-partisan description, many of the websites funded by the Franklin Center have received criticism for their conservative bias.[3][4]

In August 2011, the Wisconsin Reporter was accused by State Democratic Party Spokesperson Graeme Zielinski of using off-record comments, butchering quotes and not correcting the record when it was called to its attention. The questionable quotation came from Zielinski as a response to Governor Scott Walker’s claim that the state had added more than half of the jobs created in the nation in June 2011. The article had supported this claim, but not the statement from the Democratic spokesperson.[5]

In February 2011, the outlet supported a poll that claimed 71% of Wisconsin residents thought Walker's budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was 'fair.'[6]The suspiciously high percentage caused some to question the source of the poll.[7]

As part of the application process to land a job at the Wisconsin Reporter, applicants must answer questions like: “How do free markets help the poor?” and “do higher taxes lead to balanced budgets?”[8]

Contents  [hide]

1 An ALEC Ally

2 Conflict of Interest in Wisconsin "John Doe" Campaign Finance Investigation

2.1 Silence on Pay-to-Play Allegations Highlights Conflicts of Interest

2.2 The Assault on Clean Election Laws: The Well-Funded Campaign to Legalize Coordination in Wisconsin and Nationwide

3 Ties to the the Coalition for American Values

4 Franklin Center Funding

5 Staff

6 Contact Information

7 References

An ALEC Ally

The Wisconsin Reporter is a vehicle for promoting ideologically-based wire stories about state legislation and politics, and is a division of StateHouse News, a product of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. The Franklin Center is an ALEC member, sponsor, and exhibitor. The Franklin Center’s stated mission is "networking and training independent investigative reporters, as well as journalists from state based news organizations, public-policy institutions & watchdog groups."

The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University wrote in 2010 that “critics have accused the Franklin Center, and its array of state-based websites, of purposefully half-reporting stories for a conservative gain.” Its bureaus, including the Wisconsin Reporter, function as a news wire service, and local newspapers across Wisconsin have reprinted the free Wisconsin Reporter wire news stories with no notice of their ideological slant.

During the Wisconsin protests over Walker’s budget in early 2011, the Wisconsin Reporter sponsored a questionable poll asserting that 71 percent of state residents thought the budget proposal to cut the collective bargaining rights of most of the state's public sector workers was “fair.” The result was a statistical outlier, leading some to question the source. The same month, We Ask America, largely owned by the business organization Illinois Manufacturing Association, conducted a similar poll surveying 2,400 Wisconsin residents and found that 52 percent opposed Walker's plan.

The Franklin Center was a “Vice-Chairman”-level sponsor of ALEC’s 2011 Annual Conference – which in 2010 equated to a $25,000 sponsorship fee – and was one of about 60 entities with booths in ALEC’s conference exhibition hall.

The Franklin Center receives part of its funding from the Bradley Foundation, which also has funded ALEC.[9]

About ALEC

ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site.

Conflict of Interest in Wisconsin "John Doe" Campaign Finance Investigation

In 2013, the Franklin Center's "Wisconsin Reporter" website published over a dozen articles aggressively attacking Wisconsin's "John Doe" probe into possible campaign finance violations during Wisconsin's 2011 and 2012 recall elections, and broke stories about the investigation. The Center for Media and Democracy (publishers of Sourcewatch.org) uncovered in December 2013 that the news outlet may have a conflict of interest, as "Franklin Center has close ties to individuals and groups that may be caught up in the John Doe."

Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter called its series on the John Doe "Wisconsin's Secret War," and cited "unnamed sources to reveal that Wisconsin Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, and Republican Governors Association had received subpoenas, and describing details about "after-hours visits to homes and offices" and prosecutors' "demands for phone, email and other records." [10]

Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter described the John Doe investigation as "an abuse of prosecutorial powers" with "the apparent goal of bringing down Gov. Scott Walker." However, the news outlet had what journalism professors called "a conflict of interest that minimally ought to be disclosed, whenever stories are written."

As CMD reported:

"The only name associated with the investigation, Eric O'Keefe, helped launch the Franklin Center's operations in 2009, and his Sam Adams Alliance group provided the majority of its startup budget; O'Keefe has spoken publicly about being subpoenaed in his capacity as director of Wisconsin Club for Growth. Franklin Center's Director of Special Projects John Connors, and the Executive Assistant to the President Claire Milbrandt, also have close ties to a group reportedly involved in the John Doe probe. Its former Director of Operations and General Counsel, James Skyles, worked with another group active in the Wisconsin recalls."[10]

Silence on Pay-to-Play Allegations Highlights Conflicts of Interest

John Menard, owner of the Menard's chain of hardware stores, gave $1.5 million in previously unknown contributions to Wisconsin Club for Growth during the 2012 Wisconsin recall election, according to reporting by investigative journalist Michael Isikoff published March 23, 2015. Isikoff wrote that the contributions "seem to have paid off for the businessman and his company." Over the following two years, Menard's received $1.8 million in tax credits from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, which Walker chairs, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources "sharply scaled back enforcement actions" under Walker.[11] The story made national headlines, including coverage by The New York Times, MSNBC, and U.S. News & World Report the day following its publication.[12]

Wisconsin Reporter, which had previously defended O'Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth against allegations of improper coordination with Walker and his campaign, made no mention of the pay-to-play allegations in the days following Isikoff's story despite the national news coverage, according to Media Matters. "Their silence on the story highlights the conflicts of interest that surround the outlet's reporting on Walker and the 'John Doe' investigations," Media Matters wrote.[12]

The Assault on Clean Election Laws: The Well-Funded Campaign to Legalize Coordination in Wisconsin and Nationwide

According to the press release relating to a report published by the Center for Media and Democracy in January 2015:[13][14]

A bipartisan effort to enforce Wisconsin's longstanding laws governing coordination between campaigns and independent groups has been mislabeled a "partisan witch hunt" by a well-funded legal and media campaign, with the ultimate goal of undermining what remains of limits on big money in politics, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD):

"Anti-coordination laws have become more vital than ever before in the post-Citizens United world, where 'independent' political organizations are raising and spending unlimited funds for elections but keeping their donors a secret," said Brendan Fischer, CMD General Counsel and the author of the report. "If a candidate can coordinate with these secretly-funded groups and establish shadow campaign committees, then the candidate contribution limits and disclosure requirements are rendered meaningless."

And that, it seems, is precisely the goal:

"Proponents of more secret money in politics aim to use this case nationally to argue against common sense campaign laws designed to prevent corruption, and to intimidate regulators from enforcing the laws that remain on the books," said Lisa Graves, CMD's Executive Director.

How did an investigation led by Republicans and the state's nonpartisan Government Accountability Board get counter-factually recast as a politically-motivated "witch hunt" by Democrats against Republicans?

Key to the spin surrounding the probe has been the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity's "Wisconsin Reporter" website, which has produced more than 160 stories (and counting), but without routinely disclosing that it was launched and funded by Eric O'Keefe, Wisconsin Club for Growth's director and the chief plaintiff in the lawsuits challenging the probe. Nor has Franklin Center disclosed that its Director of Special Projects, John Connors, is also president of Citizens for a Strong America, another group facing criminal liability in the investigation and which is almost entirely funded by the Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG).

The federal judge who issued an extraordinary ruling halting the investigation in May of 2014, Judge Rudolph Randa, cited to Franklin Center/Wisconsin Reporter stories as "evidence" that the investigation was politically motivated. Yet Judge Randa has his own issues: as the Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch was first to report, he has regularly attended all-expenses-paid "judicial junkets" funded by, among others, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation -- financial interests directly tied to the groups under investigation.

The future of the probe now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but some of those justices also face a significant conflict of interest: two of the primary groups potentially facing criminal liability in the probe, WiCFG and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, have been the dominant spenders in Wisconsin Supreme Court elections in recent years. They spent more than $10 million to elect the four justices in the Court's Republican majority, in most cases spending more than the candidates themselves.

In other words, the future of the investigation -- and with it, the future of Wisconsin's clean elections laws -- could be decided by justices who were elected to the bench by precisely the same organizations facing criminal liability.

CMD's report seeks to correct the record, describe how such a warped portrayal came into existence, and warn that if this attack on the enforcement of campaign finance laws is successful, it could have significant consequences for transparency and anti-corruption laws in elections in Wisconsin and around the nation.

Read the report here.

Ties to the the Coalition for American Values

The Coalition for American Values (CAV) is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose only major activities have been spending $400,080 on ads supporting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in the final weeks of the 2012 recall elections. While the CAV did not disclose its funders at the time, tax filings later revealed that almost all of its funding in 2012 came from the Koch-tied Center to Protect Patient Rights, run by Koch operative Sean Noble.[15]

CAV's lawyer, James D. Skyles, was previously General Counsel and Director of Operations at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs Wisconsin Reporter.[16]

The CAV's federal PAC has also paid money to a consulting firm run by John Connors, a leader of operations at the Franklin Center, and president of the group "Citizens for a Strong America," which was also active in the Wisconsin recall elections and kept its donors hidden, while operating out of a UPS drop box.[15] [17]

Additionally, as the Center for Media and Democracy reported,[18] "[t]he 'treasurer' listed on Coalition for American Values' FEC filings and the contact on its filings with Wisconsin's election board is Brent Downs. In 2008, when Connors chaired the Marquette College Republicans, Downs was his treasurer. Both were both students at Marquette University at the same time, and Downs, like Connors, also chaired the Students for Prosperity chapter of David Koch's Americans for Prosperity at Marquette University."

Connors' Citizens for a Strong America was entirely funded by Wisconsin Club for Growth and has been under investigation in the "John Doe" campaign finance investigation. The Franklin Center was founded in part by Koch operative Eric O'Keefe, head of the Wisconsin Club for Growth.

Franklin Center Funding

Donors Trust Money Trail (Source:

Center for Public Integrity)

The Franklin Center was launched by the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance (SAM),[19] a 501(c)(3) devoted to pushing free-market ideals. SAM gets funding from the State Policy Network,[20] which is partially funded by The Claude R. Lambe Foundation.[21] Charles Koch, one of the billionaire brothers who co-own Koch Industries, sits on the board of this foundation.[22] SAM also receives funding from the Rodney Fund. The Franklin Center also receives funding from the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation,[23] a conservative grant-making organization.[24]

Franklin Center Director of Communications Michael Moroney told the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) in 2013 that the source of the Franklin Center's funding "is 100 percent anonymous." But 95 percent of its 2011 funding came fromDonorsTrust, a spin-off of the Philanthropy Roundtable that functions as a large "donor-advised fund," cloaking the identity of donors to right-wing causes across the country (CPI did a review of Franklin's Internal Revenue Service records).[25]Mother Jones called DonorsTrust "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement" in a February 2013 article.[26]Franklin received DonorTrust's second-largest donation in 2011.[25]

One of the major contributors to Donors Trust is the Knowledge and Progress Fund founded and run by Charles Koch. The foundation gave almost $8 million to DonorsTrust (DT) between 2005 and 2011.[27] The fund began its contributions to DT in 2005, with a $390,000 contribution.[28] In both 2007 and 2008, the foundation gave $1.25 million per year to DT[29] and another $2 million in 2010.[30]

Staff

M.D. Kittle, Bureau Chief

Kirsten Adshead, Investigative Reporter

Alissa Smith, Reporter

Contact Information

Wisconsin Reporter

502 E. Main St., LL B

Madison, WI 53703

Phone: (608) 467-4109

Email: info@wisconsinreporter.com

References

Jump up? Wisconsin Reporter. About. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Think tank Journalism: The Future of Investigative Journalism. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Portland Press Herald. 'Watchdog' website puts a new spin on politics'. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Truthout. The Koch Spider Web. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Wisconsin Reporter. Wisconsin Democrats Threaten Wisconsin Reporter. News website. Accessed August 19,2011.

Jump up? The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. BREAKING: Poll Shows 71% of Wiscosnites Think Walker's Budget Changes are "Fair" Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Talking Points Memo. The Conservative Group Behind The Poll of Walker's Budget Plan. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Poytner Institute. Editor: ‘Opportunistic conservatives’ are behind WisconsinReporter.com. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? ALEC Exposed in Wisconsin: The Hijacking of a State, ALEC Exposed, May 2012

? Jump up to:10.0 10.1 Brendan Fischer, Why Are the Franklin Center's "Wisconsin Reporter" and "Watchdog.org" Attacking the John Doe?, PRwatch.org, Dec. 19, 2013.

Jump up? Michael Isikoff, "Secret $1.5 million donation from Wisconsin billionaire uncovered in Scott Walker dark-money probe," Yahoo Politics, March 23, 2015.

? Jump up to:12.0 12.1 Daniel Angster, "The Pay-To-Play Allegation Walker's Watchdog Isn't Defending," Media Matters, March 26, 2015.

Jump up? Brendan Fischer, Center for Media and Democracy, The Assault on Clean Election Laws: The Well-Funded Campaign to Legalize Coordination in Wisconsin and Nationwide, organizational report, January 13, 2015.

Jump up? Center for Media and Democracy, CMD Issues New Report on Latest Assault on Clean Election Laws, organizational press release, January 13, 2015.

? Jump up to:15.0 15.1 Brendan Fischer, "Exclusive: Ads Telling Voters 'Recall Is Not the Wisconsin Way' Funded by Out-of-State Koch Network," Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch.org, January 8, 2014.

Jump up? Andy Kroll, "Could this Pro-Walker Dark-Money Group Torpedo Recall Turnout?," Mother Jones, June 5, 2012.

Jump up? Lisa Graves, "Group Called "Citizens for a Strong America" Operates out of a UPS Mail Drop but Runs Expensive Ads in Supreme Court Race?," Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch, April 2, 2011.

Jump up? Brendan Fischer, Why Are the Franklin Center's "Wisconsin Reporter" and "Watchdog.org" Attacking the John Doe?, PRWatch.org, December 19, 2013.

Jump up? Sam Adams Alliance. Sam Adams Alliance Media Kit. Organizational PDF. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Media Matters Action Network. Sam Adams Alliance. Conservative Transparency. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Media Matters Action Network. State Policy Network. Conservative Transparency. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? Media Matters Action Network. Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation. Conservative Transparency. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Franklin Center boss wants apology from Democratic staffer. News website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

Jump up? The Bradley Foundation. The Bradley Foundation. Organizational website. Accessed August 19, 2011.

? Jump up to:25.0 25.1 Paul Abowd, Center for Public Integrity, Donors use charity to push free-market policies in states, organizational report, February 14, 2013.

Jump up? Andy Kroll, Exposed: The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement, Mother Jones, February 5, 2013.

Jump up? Paul Abowd, "Donors use charity to push free-market policies in states: Nonprofit group lets donors fly 'totally under the radar,'" Center for Public Integrity, February 14, 2013.

Jump up? Knowledge and Progress Fund, 2005 Form 990, organization's annual Internal Revenue Service filing, November 13, 2006.

Jump up? Steve Connor, "Exclusive: Billionaires Secretly Fund Attacks on Climate Science," The Independent, January, 24, 2013.

Jump up? Knowledge and Progress Fund, 2010 Form 990, organization's annual Internal Revenue Service filing, November, 21, 2011.

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Illinois

Illinois quick hits: Raoul joins SNAP benefits lawsuit; disaster declaration denial appealed

20 hrs ago

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Veterans

U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick speaks at a Pittsburgh event in 2025.

Pennsylvania

McCormick talks veterans, shutdown in Pennsylvania

Oct 27, 2025

Pennsylvania

McCormick tours new treatment facility for veterans

Oct 27, 2025

Washington

Day 24 of government shutdown means no paychecks for thousands of Washingtonians

Oct 24, 2025

Pennsylvania

Deluzio brings the fight to Perry's district over veteran jabs

Oct 23, 2025

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Agriculture

Close-up of a black Angus cow near a fence in a pasture.

Illinois

Illinois beef producers say Trump’s Argentina beef plan hurts farmers

3 hrs ago

Illinois

Illinois quick hits: Raoul joins SNAP benefits lawsuit; disaster declaration denial appealed

20 hrs ago

North Carolina

Showpiece attraction wraps with nearly 1M attending

Oct 28, 2025

Illinois

Illinois quick hits: Unemployment estimates little changed; State Fair discounted ticket sales

Oct 28, 2025

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