Old joke: Guy tells his friend, “Guess what? My new
girlfriend is a virgin.” The friend says, “How do you know she’s a
virgin?” Guy says, “She told me.” The friend replies, “How do you know
she’s not lying?” First guy says, “Virgins never lie.”
That circular reasoning, UCLA poli-sci professor Tim Groseclose
points out in his book, “Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the
American Mind,” is the kind of thing you hear from otherwise
intelligent, even scientific-minded liberals when it comes to the kinds
of stories that turn up in popular media outlets such as CBS, CNN or The
New York Times.
Groseclose measured the extent to which these
outlets mentioned liberal vs. conservative think tanks in their coverage
and found a pronounced bias toward the left. A colleague of
Groseclose’s to whom he mentioned this said, essentially, “So what?
Those liberal think tanks are more reputable than the conservative
ones.” And how did he know this? Because, er, they were the ones that
were so often quoted on CBS, CNN or in The New York Times.
Andrew Gavin Marshall - Tax-free foundations as a vehicle for transforming vast fortunes into political and social control
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crux of Groseclose’s book, which came out in paperback earlier this
year, is seconded by this summer’s “The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing
Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future”
by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin.
Horowitz and Laksin explore
the world of foundation money, where it came from, where it goes and
what it does. Philanthropic organizations such as the Ford Foundation,
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and their equivalents
with names like Heinz, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Mellon tend to support
left-wing causes.
The financial assets of the 115 major tax-exempt
foundations of the left, says Laskin, added up to $104.56 billion — more
than 10 times the size of the war chest held by their ideological
opposite numbers on the right.
We owe to Hillary Clinton the
deathless term “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a sobriquet she used to
ridicule reports that her husband might have had an inappropriate
relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Norman Dodd- Congressional Investigator on Foundations and their Agenda
The evidence is ample, though,
that when it comes to weaving an intricate web of money and influence,
the left is far more successful than the right.
Measuring the
nation’s most influential news sources, for instance, Groseclose agrees
that the Drudge Report and Fox News’s “Special Report” are far to the
right of the rest — but in absolute terms, they are near the middle of
the road (along with “Good Morning America” and “The NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer”). The Wall Street Journal, CBS Evening News, Washington Post and
New York and L.A. Times are all at least as far left as Connecticut’s
fairly liberal Joe Lieberman.
Groseclose is careful to point out
that, in his analysis, the mainstream media do not make up facts. They
don’t report lies. The bias is in the kinds of stories they do and don’t
do, the kinds of experts they quote, how much prominence they are given
and how they’re identified.
In an illustrative Los Angeles Times
report on the size of the black student body at UCLA (after California
outlawed consideration of race in state-college admissions), the
reporter quoted five liberal supporters of affirmative action (none of
whom was identified with an ideological label) and one opponent (who was
stamped, correctly, as “conservative”). The conservative was given two
paragraphs to make his case. His views were accurately summarized. But
the liberals were awarded 17 paragraphs.
Newspapers don’t
typically ask journalists what party they belong to. They don’t have to.
Journalism is a field that attracts liberals.
So does
philanthropy. In “New Leviathan,” Horowitz and Laksin discover that
foundations don’t necessarily seek out liberal officers. They look for
“nonideological” experts and experienced professionals in the field —
but most of these turn out to have an affinity for giving money to
left-wing or even far-left groups.
Take the Daniels Fund, for
instance. It was set up by conservative Republican Bill Daniels, who
made a fortune in cable television. He didn’t leave any instructions for
how its operations were to be conducted. Its first president, Phil
Hogue, went to existing foundations for advice. Foundations like the
MacArthurs’, which has repeatedly showered largesse on socialist and
even Marxist groups such as Global Exchange, which promoted the
anti-World Trade Organization riots in Seattle and is headed by a
pro-Castro communist.
Says a conservative observer quoted in “New
Leviathan,” “I knew we had lost Daniels when I met a former Rockefeller
program office at a reception who had just been hired at Daniels. Who
can quarrel with foundation expertise acquired at one of the nation’s
best? And I’m sure all the while Hogue thought he was just doing the
most professional job he could in carrying out Daniels’ will.”
And these groups often see themselves as a private army of regulators working shoulder-to-shoulder with government ones.
Andrew Gavin Marshall-Tax free foundations - vehicles for transforming fortunes into political and social control part 1
Andrew Gavin Marshall-Tax free foundations - vehicles for transforming fortunes into political and social control part2
Staff
lawyers for the environmental group the Natural Resources Defense
Council, says Laksin, describe their job as, “We’re the shadow EPA; we
make the EPA do its job.”
Bizarre as it is to contemplate the
fortunes of supercharged capitalists like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford
being used to fight capitalism, isn’t pointing this out merely
conservative whining? Surely everyone is entitled to spend their money
promoting whatever message they please.
Correct, says Laksin. But
these foundations’ tax-exempt status depends on their being nonpartisan.
He mentions that the head of Pew Trusts, Rebeca Rimmel, recently
complained that the book falsely portrays Pew as a partisan group.
“That’s demonstrably false,” Laksin says. “Pew Trusts spends millions
funding radical environmental groups like Earth Justice and anarchist
Ruckus Society. If that’s non-partisan, then the term has no meaning.
Foundations should be upfront about their political agendas.” And lose
their tax-exempt status.
It was free-market apostle Adam Smith
who said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy
against the public.”
Wary of business today, regulators observe
it closely. But the blob of regulation, with its ability to draw on the
public purse, the private foundations and its close relationship with
like-minded media, grows by the day.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com
