Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

The relationship between reporters and think tanks used to be, well, pretty simple. You called up defense expert X for a quote on, say, cost overruns on a stealth fighter jet, and if you were lucky, you’d get something lively. . . . Now . . . [p]rint is dying, newsrooms are shrinking and the media industry is generally in the toilet. Think tanks are starting to become full-time patrons of the news business, and they are bankrolling book projects, blogs and even war reporting. . . . [W]hat does this mean for journalism? When think tanks are often a revolving door for government service, what happens when reporters . . . become office-mates of past or future political appointees? How do you keep national security reporting from becoming an echo chamber of the Beltway policy elite? It’s hard enough giving objective analysis of some policy maven’s ideas, after you two have shared a few cocktails together. Now imagine how much tougher that becomes, when the policy maven is in the next cubicle over.

Ironically, less than six months later, Hodge’s Danger Room colleague Noah Shachtman (now executive editor at the Daily Beast) announced that he was taking a position at the Brookings Institution, while maintaining his editorial presence at Wired. The venerable Brookings does have a good reputation for scholarly independence—even as it is watered down, under pressure as it is to put out constant product, like practically all think tanks these days. And to Shachtman’s credit, he did acknowledge Hodge’s earlier criticism of this very career move. But in trying to allay fears that he might lose objectivity, Shachtman doesn’t quite succeed. “My Brookings bosses have assured me I’m allowed to tool on whoever I’d like at the Institution. They just want me to give that person the heads-up. Seems like a reasonable request.” This raises the possibility that the target of the story, who could be, to use Hodge’s formulation, “in the next cubicle,” might be in a better position to spike the story. Shachtman also strenuously tried to make it clear that funders are well-removed from Brookings’s research, stating in a blog post that “[a]ll a donor can do is give to the Institution’s general fund” rather than a specific project or person. But now, in a corrected version, that line is struck through (but still readable). 67

Clearly, the boundaries between journalism and PR have been so breached that the public’s ability to know whom to trust has been seriously compromised.

THE WILD WEST DIGITAL TERRAIN

Think tanks aren’t just hiring journalists. In the new digital terrain, some think tanks are beginning to look very much like news outlets themselves, attempting to adapt in an era where the limited attention span reigns supreme. This rearrangement is one of the countless variations of new forms of journalism and never-before-seen business models emerging from the ashes of the old media. Previously unknown players have leapt to the fore. While many experts praise the spirit of innovation and passion of many new media pioneers, the landscape is truly a Wild West in terms of transparency and accountability. Experts also warn that the creation of new “accountability journalism,” the old investigative reporting in new format, at least for now, comes nowhere near to making up for the destruction of the old.

A former commissioner of the U.S. communications regulatory body, the Federal Communications Commission, was the sole dissenter on the 2011 merger of NBC Universal and Comcast (Comcast was the biggest video and residential Internet services provider in the United States at the time). 68Described as “Mr. Public Citizen” by the Seattle Times , former FCC commissioner Michael Copps spoke late in 2012 with Bill Moyers of PBS: 69

The Internet has the potential for a new town square of democracy, paved with broadband bricks. But it’s very, very far from being the reality. . . . The traditional media is a shell of its former self . . . really as hollowed out as [a] Midwestern steel mill, a rust belt steel mill. . . . [T]he new media—there’s wonderful entrepreneurship and experimentation taking place in the new media, but there’s no business plan to support expensive investigative journalism. . . . You just wonder how many stories are going untold, how many of the powerful are being held completely unaccountable for what they did.

Activist/author Astra Taylor calls this new state of journalism “churnalism.” In an interview, she described the term as “the intense pressure to produce and post and to be up-to-the-minute and how that ultimately becomes essential to financial survival for new media outlets.” 70

Philanthro-Journalism

This is not to say that some people aren’t trying to revive investigative reporting in the form of the new accountability journalism. Consider “philanthro-journalism.” It certainly sounds noble. Wealthy citizens and foundations, galvanized by the decline of the old media and investigative journalism, are stepping up to help fill the void. Many first-rate reporters are joining its ranks—and this book draws on sources such as ProPublica.

Glenn Greenwald, for instance, who helped break the Edward Snowden bombshell, has joined the ranks of philanthro-journalists. In 2014, Greenwald, along with other investigative journalists/activists, started an online outlet for “fearless, adversarial” journalism supported by a billionaire, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. 71

Greenwald is just the most recent and perhaps best known to make this move. By some estimates, more than a quarter billion dollars has flowed into this area over the past decade. 72But “nonprofit” or “philanthropy” does not necessarily mean no “strings or baggage,” as the American Journalism Review has outlined. 73

Simplifying the issue a bit, one can think of it this way: In the old commercial-journalism model, an outlet is struggling to attract a vast readership or viewership to maintain subscription fees and high ad rates. But in nonprofit journalism, an outlet might be free to pursue accountability projects regardless of raw popularity because the readers, in effect, are not paying the bill.

But who is paying the bill, if not readers and advertisers?

In the case of ProPublica, probably the best known of the new nonprofit journalism outlets, the primary early benefactor was one liberal-minded couple: Herb and the late Marion Sandler, California banking billionaires. ProPublica, founded in 2008, has put out a slew of in-depth investigations spanning topics like “dark money” in campaign finance, fracking, the use of drones, and prosecutorial overreach. It was the first digital news outlet to win a Pulitzer Prize. But when the Sandlers themselves came under the investigative lens as the mortgage business exploded, they fought both 60 Minutes and the New York Times strenuously. It appears that the Sandlers indeed were unfairly represented in many respects 74; and yet what if they, or other patrons of philanthro-journalism, had deserved intense scrutiny? Would these nonprofit outlets vigorously report on the people underwriting their work?

A Slate writer was quick to raise doubts. Writing in 2009, he noted that “The nonprofit news business . . . is spreading like a midsummer algae bloom. . . . No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions.” 75

How does this nonprofit journalism of handouts differ from the commercial media—say, Rupert Murdoch and his vast news empire—we might ask? Nonprofit journalism appears more “neutral.” Yet, as we saw in earlier chapters, influence and funding are often obscured. Given the proliferation of nonprofits that range from pharmaceutical companies dressed up as patient-led advocacy organizations to energy companies parading as grassroots organizations, they can be much less transparent.