Investigating Power
However, after an investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy, it’s been discovered that a huge ethics concern may exist in the way The Daily Caller is structured.
The mission of the Daily Caller News Foundation, according to IRS filings, is “to train up-and-coming reporters and editors, to carry out investigative reporting, and to perform deep policy reporting with a purpose of consumer awareness and education.”
To evaluate the fulfillment of those goals, the Center for Media and Democracy, which first alerted The Fix to the Daily Caller’s business construct, analyzed the foundation’s output for two separate weeks, one in January and one in March. The watchdog found that only 39 percent of the articles represented original reporting; the rest hardly qualified as “investigative reporting” or “deep policy reporting.”
Now it has come to light that Carlson is more than just a terrible TV host. The Center for Media and Democracy conducted an exhaustive investigation into the stewardship of his website, The Daily Caller (TDC). Carlson launched the site six years ago and it quickly became a staple of wingnut propaganda. The Washington Post published CMD’s findings with this summary of the scam:
You already know that Tucker Carlson is a garbage human and DailyCaller.com is a pile of garbage pixels that will burn your retinas. But today we found out that The Daily Caller is actually a giant tax scam pretending to be a rightwing bullshit factory. Thanks, Center for Media and Democracy! Let’s Scamsplore!!!!
Since its founding in the early 1940s, the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has been a mainstay in funding and building conservative institutions, and supporting right-wing projects. A new report by The Center for Media and Democracy’s “Exposed” project, dives into a new “national effort funded by the … foundation to assess and expand right-wing ‘infrastructure’ [in order] to influence policies and politicians in statehouses nationwide.”
Wisconsin, in particular, has been a beachhead of rightwing state takeovers. The Koch brothers and other right-wing interests contributed handsomely to Gov. Scott Walker’s 2010 election campaign—an attempt to turn the traditionally progressive state into a laboratory for free market policies. Following suit, the language around Article V in Wisconsin suggests the state will use the convention to propose “amendments relating to a balanced budget.”
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“I really see it as a return to the Confederacy,” Arn Pearson, of Wisconsin’s Center for Media and Democracy, has said. “They want the ability for states to override Supreme Court rulings and any federal law they don’t like.”
But even if an expert’s credentials seem to check out, they might still be bogus. “There’s a lot of false credentialing going on, especially at PR firms masquerading as think tanks that aren’t subject to peer review,” says Lisa Graves, executive director for the Center of Media and Democracy. Take, for example, the employees of the Center for Immigration Studies: you’d expect them to be immigration policy experts, right? Trouble is, CIS is actually a xenophobic hate group, founded by a longtime nativist. And these days, you don’t even have to be part of an organization to build an expert-sounding resume: many online journals will publish your research, valid or not, as long as you pay them first.
Lisa Graves: The Dark Money Diviner
“I don’t know what Donald Trump thinks, aside from what he tweets, but I think he is deeply deceitful and deceptive. Throughout the campaign, he talked about draining the swamp, and instead, he’s stocking the swamp and locating it in the Rose Garden, just outside the White House,” says Lisa Graves. And she would know. Graves is the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group with a nose for sniffing out corporate bad guys, enlisting whistleblowers, and shedding light on secretive, misleading campaign contributions, known as “dark money.” She’s the country’s foremost expert on big-money political shenanigans, with decades of experience in government.
At the center of such efforts is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (the Bradley Foundation), which has led a national effort to de-fund and destroy labor unions, according to the Madison, Wis., Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a nonprofit advocacy group that uncovered key documents.
To shed light on these appointees’ backgrounds, The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy have requested the Office of Government Ethics Form 278, the standard financial disclosure document, for hundreds of Trump officials. We have now received over 150 of them and compiled them in a public Google Documents table, and will be adding more as they arrive.