Michael Barker, 29 February 2008

A Critical Look at Pro Publica (Part 1 of 3)

“[M]any news organizations have increasingly come to see investigative journalism as a luxury that can be put aside in tough economic times.  Thus, a 2005 survey by Arizona State University of the 100 largest U.S. daily newspapers showed that 37% had no full-time investigative reporters, a majority had two or fewer such reporters, and only 10% had four or more.  Television networks and national magazines have similarly been shedding or shrinking investigative units.” (Pro Publica, 2008)

With a budget of $10 million a year, and stable of some 24 journalists, all dedicated to investigative reporting, the recently launched Pro Publica is one of the largest investigative journalism units of its sort in the United States (if not the world). Billing itself as a “non-partisan and non-ideological” nonprofit organization,[1] the Manhattan-based group plans to make up for the lack of investigative reporting in the mainstream media by supplying free stories to “partner publisher[s]… with an eye to whose publication of a story would give it the most impact”. Pro Publica’s website observes that they aim to: 

“… look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power... But… will also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and on the media when they constitute the strong exploiting or oppressing the weak, or when they are abusing the public trust.”  (my emphasis)

To explain why I think Pro Publica will most likely undermine popular control of democratic processes rather than bolster them, I will first investigate the groups and individuals that were responsible for creating the group. This will involve providing a critical examination of the motives of the liberal foundations and philanthropists that support their work, which is ironic because Pro Publica actually notes that one of the institutions that they aim to critique will be these foundations (perhaps they meant just conservative ones). Once Pro Publica’s supporters have been examined, the article will then turn to investigating the backgrounds of the key people associated with Pro Publica (that is, their officers and directors).

Pro Publica’s editor-in-chief, Paul Steiger, points out that his investigative
group “is the brainchild of San Francisco entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists
Herbert and Marion Sandler”. Their general manager, Richard Tofel, adds that
the Sandlers “asked Paul Steiger who was retiring as the Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, to help them think about how they might best take steps to increase the quantity of quality investigative journalism being produced in the States, and Paul came
up with the plan that now is Pro Publica”. Thus it is clear that Herbert and Marion Sandler working through their Sandler Family Supporting Foundation – to which they recently gave a further $1.3 billion – are major supporters of the group, “ha[ving] made a major, multi-year commitment to fund ProPublica”, but three other liberal foundations also  fund their work, these are The Atlantic Philanthropies, the JEHT Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. So what’s the big deal I hear you ask, four liberal foundations supporting investigative journalism, so what? To deal with this question it is perhaps best to introduce some recent critiques of liberal philanthropy.

Cultural Domination via Liberal Philanthropy

So given their ostensibly commendable mission, alarm bells should start ringing when it is known that well respected radical journalist Robert Jensen recently wrote that Pro Publica “is a great idea trapped by the worst aspects of the best instincts in contemporary corporate commercial journalism”. Furthermore, with regard to the aforementioned statement from Pro Publica, a strong case can already be made that one of the mains functions of the mainstream media is to exploit and oppress the weak, by manufacturing consent for elite interests; so does this mean that their work will predominantly focus on the antidemocratic nature of the corporate media? I hardly think so. No one would question the proposition that more journalism needs to focus on the systematic abuse of power by business and government elites, but what is certainly questionable is whether Pro Publica will serve as the “new model” that will “carry forward some of the great work of journalism in the public interest”, which can provide “an important bulwark of our democracy”. In fact, as I aim to demonstrate in this article, rather than improving journalism in the public interest, the long-term influence of Pro Publica is likely to diminish democracy, not strengthen it.

In her latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, mainstream dissident writer Naomi Klein relates a small part of the history of America’s most influential liberal foundation (the Ford Foundation) observing that during the 1960s the Ford Foundation was the “leading source of funding for the dissemination of the Chicago School ideology throughout Latin America”. Moreover, she adds that Ford-funded institutions played a: 

“…central role in the overthrow of Chile’s democracy, and its former students… appl[ied] their US education in a context of shocking brutality. Making matters more complicated for the foundation, this was the second time in just a few years that its protégés had chosen a violent route to power, the first case being the Berkeley Mafia’s meteoric rise to power in Indonesia after Suharto’s bloody [1965-66] coup.”

Given that the Ford Foundation is currently one of the leading sponsors of progressive groups around the world, especially those based in the United States, it is concerning that there is ample evidence of their having worked hand-in-hand with the US government and the CIA to effectively coopt civil society.[2] Moreover, as Robert Arnove explains:

 “[F]oundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society’s attention. They serve as ‘cooling-out’ agencies, delaying and preventing more radical, structural change. They help maintain an economic and political order, international in scope, which benefits the ruling-class interests of philanthropists and philanthropoids – a system which, as the various chapters document, has worked against the interests of minorities, the working class, and Third World peoples.”

More recently, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s have made a valuable contribution to a the growing number of critiques of liberal foundations in their exceptional book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, while another useful, albeit little mentioned book is Joan Roelofs Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.

Although few would dispute the importance of money to the success of progressive social movements and their associated media outlets, it is interesting to note that very few academics have given this subject serious thought. So while it is widely acknowledged that conservative financiers have succeeded in driving the ideological orientation of mainstream media outlets further rightwards over the past few decades, hardly any attention has been paid to the influence of liberal funders on the evolution of progressive media outlets. This is disturbing to say the least considering the decidedly detrimental and antidemocratic influence that liberal foundations have wrought on society. Two obvious examples of the antidemocratic (and pro-plutocratic) work of liberal foundations would include the key role  they have played in supporting elite planning groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, and the integral aid they provided to American academics to help them devise effective strategies to enable elites to take the risk out of democracy by manufacturing our consent.[3]

Returning to Pro Publica’s major liberal funder, the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, it is interesting to note that in 2005 they announced that they were donating $3 million a year for five years to Human Rights Watch – which happened to be the largest grant that Human Rights Watch had ever received. The significance of this grant only really becomes clear when it is known that Human Rights Watch maintains an extremely high level of elite links to the US government’s primary democracy manipulating organization the notorious National Endowment for Democracy.  Furthermore, the elitist nature of Human Rights Watch has also been exposed by Edward Herman, along with his co-authors David Peterson and George Szamuely, who wrote an article titled Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party – which examined Human Right Watch’s role in supporting the dismantlement of Yugoslavia. In a similar vein, the Sandler Foundation funds the work of the nonprofit Crimes of War Project, a group that is funded and closely linked to the Orwellian named US Institute of Peace; while the Sandlers along with the US Institute of Peace also fund the work of the misnamed Human Rights Center of the University of California. (Incidentally all three of the aforementioned ‘human rights’ groups obtain funding from one Pro Publica’s other key funders, the MacArthur Foundation.)

Consequently it is fitting, given the elitist nature of Herbert and Marion Sandler’s philanthropic efforts, that both Sanders are members of a recently formed group of liberal elites called the Democracy Alliance. Working around leading liberal ‘visionaries’ like George Soros, this Alliance was formed in 2005 in an attempt to emulate the ideological cohesion of the conservative foundations that have successfully forced the neoliberal revolution upon most of the world – an antidemocratic solution to the neoliberal problem if ever there was one. Thus having briefly explored the dubious financiers of Pro Publica’s work, the following sections will examine the ‘democratic’ ties of the group’s leadership. 

To be continued.... Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University, Australia. He can be reached at Michael. J. Barker [at] griffith.edu.au. He is currently coediting a forthcoming book which will be examining the influence of liberal foundations on social change, for further details see here.

Notes