Michael Barker, 10 March 2008

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

Embedded Boardroom

Having introduced the key people who are managing the day to day affairs of Pro Publica, this section will now turn to examine the four members of their board of directors to see if this might suggest any further clues as to the values that Pro Publica cherishes and upholds. These directors are Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alberto Ibargüen, James A. Leach, and Rebecca Rimel. In the same manner as before, rather than just uncritically listing their biographical details, the ensuing biographical sketches will critically examine each director’s links to various democracy manipulating organizations.

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and until recently he served as a trustee of the controversial democracy manipulator, the neoconservative Freedom House. Like many of the other Pro Publica people, Professor Gates, was involved with the International Freedom Center, in his case as a scholar/advisor.  Although he has published other books, it is noteworthy that in 1999 along with K. Anthony Appiah, he was the co-editor of the “encyclopedia Encarta Africana published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999).” This is clearly an important undertaking, and so it is worrying that his co-editor, K. Anthony Appiah, maintains good democracy manipulating credentials as he was the winner of the 2007 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, was a scholar/advisor for the International Freedom Center, and was a former director of the Sabre Foundation (in 2005, at least, he also served on their advisory committee). The latter group, the Sabre Foundation, was founded in 1969, and their website notes that it “works to build free institutions and to examine the ideals that sustain them.” According to their 2005 annual report, in the 2004/05 financial year the six major funders of the Sabre Foundation’s work were the US Agency for International Development, the United States Department of State, the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sport, the Ghana Book Trust, the MacArthur Foundation, and The Atlantic Philanthropies (NACESTI, Vietnam). The latter two funders are of course also funders of Pro Publica. Other interesting funders of the Foundations activities include the Hunt Alternatives Fund, the American Foreign Policy Council, and the Orwellian US Institute of Peace. The latter group is the sister organization to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), so it is fitting that the Sabre Foundation’s 1994 annual report should note that in that year they received support from the NED, the US Information Agency, and the Eurasia Foundation.[1] Perhaps not coincidentally, the Sabre Foundation’s president, Kenneth G. Bartels, is also a trustee of World Learning for International Development (see earlier). Two of the Sabre Foundation’s directors also have strong ‘democratic’ ties, these are Bruce Rabb, and Leonard J. Baldyga, who was the former Director of the Office of European Affairs at the US Information Agency, and is presently a director of Partners for Democratic Change.

Returning to Professor Gates’ own affiliations, he is also a director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, so it is now worth briefly introducing the ‘democratic’ orientation of this group. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909 and is oldest and largest civil rights organisation in the United States. A key part of the NAACP’s litigation work is undertaken by their related NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which was formed in 1940 under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall to provide legal assistance to poor African Americans. During the civil rights movement the Ford Foundation became an important funder of the NAACP’s work, and by the late 1960s, Stephen Wasby (1993) noted, the “NAACP’s litigation activities could hardly have continued without the Ford Foundation’s $4.35 million grant to the Special Contribution Fund in the decade starting in 1967, much of which, including grants for northern school litigation, went to the NAACP’s Legal Department” (p.93). So given the strong connections between the Ford Foundation and the NAACP it is fitting that Thurgood Marshall’s son, Thurgood Marshall, Jr., should have been recently appointed as a trustee of the Ford Foundation: furthermore, it is ironic given the high incarceration rate of African-Americas in the US’s colossal prison system that Thurgood Marshall Jr. should also be a director of the largest prison corporation in the US, the Corrections Corporation of America.

In addition to Professor Gates, three other particularly interesting (current) NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund directors are Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr. (who is a former Rockefeller Foundation trustee), Karen Hastie Williams (who is a director of the Fannie Mae Foundation, and is former member of the Trilateral Commission), and Andrew Jackson Young, Jr. (who a former civil rights leader, is a former trustee of Freedom House, and owns a public relations firm, GoodWorks International, which represents clients like Wal-Mart). Noteworthy emeritus directors of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund include Adrian W. DeWind (who is a vice-chairman of Human Rights Watch), Marian Wright Edelman (who is a director of both the Women’s Learning Partnership, and the Robin Hood Foundation), and Michael I. Sovern (who is a director of The Atlantic Philanthropies, and is the director of Comcast Corporation – the largest cable company in the United States). NAACP-corporate overlaps should hardly be surprising because as Joan Roelofs (2006) observes:

“The NAACP has always had strong connections with major corporations. The civil rights movement of the 1960s prompted new close links between activist organizations and business. The Urban Coalition was formed, and thereafter, corporate philanthropy became more focused on defusing systemic threats. Its goal was to challenge segregation and discrimination while discouraging the more radical suggestions of that era’s activists…Today, Lockheed, GE [General Electric], and Boeing are important funders of the NAACP.”

The next Pro Publica board member, Alberto Ibargüen, is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of El Nuevo Herald, and has been the president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation since 2005. Ironically, Ibargüen’s Pro Publica biography openly highlights his democracy manipulating connections – in much the same way as the NED publicizes most of its own work online – and one can only assume that the people running Pro Publica thought that no one would bother to investigate the backgrounds of the savory sounding groups that Ibargüen is linked to. Thus according to Ibargüen’s biograpy he is “chairman of the board of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., a museum dedicated to free speech and free press”, but of course the biography fails to mention that the Newseum is a project of The Freedom Forum. His biography goes on to point out that he has also served on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and that he has “work[ed] to protect journalists in Latin America as part of the Inter American Press Association”, and is the “board chair of PBS” (Public Broadcasting System) a television network whose pro-corporate bias is regularly challenged by the progressive media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Finally, Ibargüen’s biography mentions that he is a director of the elite planning group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a “member of the board of PepsiCo” – a corporation whose chair and CEO, Indra K. Nooyi, is a director of the International Rescue Committee, and a trustee of the Asia Society. Similarly, PepsiCo’s vice president for international public affairs, Nestor T. Carbonell, is a director of the NED-funded Center for a Free Cuba, and serves on the board of overseerers of the International Rescue Committee. Last but not least, although not mentioned on the Pro Publica website, Ibargüen is also a member of the important ‘democracy promoting’ organization the Inter-American Dialogue.

The third member of Pro Publica’s board of directors is James A. Leach, who has been the Director of the Institute of Politics of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University since late 2007. Prior to this Leach had been based at Princeton University, while before this he had served 15 terms in Congress as a Republican representative. As Pro Publica has nothing to hide his biography openly states that (like Ibargüen) Leach is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations: furthermore, it adds that he “serves on the board of… three non-profit organizations – the Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”. Here it is interesting to note that his links to two of these liberal groups brings him into contact with Morton Abramowitz – a key democracy manipulator who is a director of the NED. Abramowitz is currently a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and in 1997 he retired from his position as the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (For further details of his extremely ‘democratic’ background, click here.) Likewise, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, who is a Century Foundation trustee, is currently the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (an appointment she assumed in 1997 when Abramowitz departed). Mathews is also linked to other key democracy manipulators as she is a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, is a member of the advisory board of Transparency International, and serves on the American Ditchley Foundation’s advisory council. Finally, although Leach’s Pro Publica biography is fairly lengthy – 458 words to be exact – it fails to mention his most significant media-related connection, as since 1999 he has been a member of the board of directorsInternews.

Rebecca Rimel is the final member of Pro Publica’s board, and since 1994 she has been the president and CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts – an ostensibly progressive “independent nonprofit” foundation that “is driven by the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems”. Yet despite the fact that the Pew Trusts are often the target of conservative attacks (because of their liberal funding strategies), their elitist orientation becomes more apparent when it is known that they provide financial support to Freedom House (a group which also receives aid from the NED). This helps explain why CounterPunch, a brilliant US-based website jammed full of cutting edge investigative journalism, has published a number of articles over the years that critique the Pew Trusts’ cooption of environmental groups, see articles by Felice Pace (2004), Michael Donnelly (2004), and Bernardo Issel (1999).[2] In fact, given that Pro Publica is giving their investigative stories away to the mainstream media they could save themselves a lot of money and time by simply acting as a middle man between alternative media sources like CounterPunch and the mainstream media. Although that said, it is unlikely that the ideological content of CounterPunch’s work will be compatible with the neoliberal ideologies dominating the corporate media that Pro Publica is serving.

The Future of Investigative Journalism of the little known but very significant democracy manipulating group,

As this article has demonstrated, there are more than a few reasons why people who value investigative journalism should be worried by the launch of Pro Publica. Indeed, rather than strengthening and improving the diversity of investigative journalism in the mainstream media, Pro Publica may even facilitate (albeit unintentionally) its demise. Moreover, the free stories provided by Pro Publica will no doubt bolster the bottom line of their corporate media recipients (who also happen to serve as Pro Publica’s advisors),[3] who may even use this service as an excuse to cut the little resources they had previously set aside for investigative reports.

To be precise about the matter: in spite of their rhetoric Pro Publica are not in the business of improving investigative journalism, but instead they are in the business of promoting a variety of ‘investigative’ journalism that bolsters the status quo. As Noam Chomsky notes, “the media serve the interests of state and corporate power” and “fram[e] their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly”. In this regard, investigative journalism serves a vital role, as if investigative journalism is undertaken in the ‘correct’ (limited) way, it can help sustain the illusion that the media crusades against the powerful in the interests of the public. The power of this illusion is apparent when influential liberal reporters reminisce about the good old days, and the infamous Watergate case. On this point, in 1996, Andrew Marr – who at the time was the Independent’s “much-vaunted Columnist of the Year and Chief Political Correspondent (soon to become Editor)” – undertook a rare televised interview with Noam Chomsky (watch it online here, Part 1 & 2). David Edwards narrates a specifically revealing part of the interview, during which Marr used Watergate as the:

“…classic example of how the free press can humble the powers that be. After all, Marr said, ‘This brought down a president.’ Chomsky, however, argues that Watergate is a perfect example of just how servile the press is to power. Watergate is, he has said elsewhere, ‘small potatoes’ compared to what the state secret police - the FBI - had long been doing to socialist, black and women's movements under the COINTELPRO programme. ‘Sorry, you'll have to explain that,’ Marr chipped in. ‘Exactly!’ Chomsky replied. He had to explain the meaning of COINTELPRO, whereas Marr knew all about Watergate.” (see transcript of interview)

Of course many vital investigative reports are covered in the mainstream media, but the world might look like a very different place (democratic for instance) if mainstream investigative reporters worked in the service of the public not elites. Robert Jensen concludes his critique of Pro Publica by asking: 

 “[W]hat if the group investigated the commodification of everything in a capitalist system and the fundamental illegitimacy of corporate structures? What if instead of pointing at ‘flaws in our system of criminal justice to practices that undermine fair elections,’ Pro Publica journalists covered how the law legitimizes the everyday crimes of the powerful and how money-dominated pseudo-elections eliminate meaningful democracy?”

Thankfully one solution to the problems identified in this article can be resolved immediately. If you want to support investigative journalism that strengthens democracy then simply click on one of the following links and give your money to progressive alternative media instead of corporate media, for example, the Centre for Research on Globalization, CounterPunch, Medialens, Monthly Review, Spinwatch, Znet, or a local outlet of your choice. If you can’t afford to do this, yet still give money to the corporate media, then now might be the time to make a choice as to which of the types of media strengthens democracy and which undermines it. Or alternatively you might simply write an email to Pro Publica and tell them how you feel, or better still direct them to a story that the corporate media has failed to cover: in fact, I know that they would be happy to receive such ideas as they have a dedicated email address to be used for this purpose This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (For some illustrative ideas of stories they might ‘forget’ to cover, see Project Censored Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008.)

Michael Barker Notes 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

[2] For further critiques of the Pew Charitable Trusts, see Brian Tokar (1997), Norman Solomon (2003), Dru Oja Jay (2007), and David F. Noble (2007). I have also authored an article that will published in the next few months that examines the cooption of the environmental movement by liberal foundations in the late 1960s, see Michael J. Barker, “The Liberal Foundations of Environmentalism: Revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford Connection,” Capitalism Nature Socialism.

[3] Members of Pro Publica’s twelve person strong advisory board includes representatives from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Seattle Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Denver Post, Fortune magazine, and the publisher Simon & Schuster. Three specifically interesting individuals serving on this advisory board are L. Gordon Crovitz (who is a senior vice president of Dow Jones & Co., and a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal), David Gergen (who is a member of the elite planning group, the Trilateral Commission, and is the chair of the national selection committee for the Ford Foundation’s program on Innovations in American

Government), and Cynthia A. Tucker (who is the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations).