Three Questions For You

Question One

So after all my writing yesterday about the Heller decision (I’m supportive), what would you think if it were divulged by someone other than myself that I were getting payments from, say, the National Rifle Association to plug news releases from the Institute for Legislative Action (an NRA subsidiary), and not divulging that organizational or financial link?

Better example; what if, say, the Strib (owned by Avista Capital Partners) ran an uncritical, even fawning, report about the surpassing excellence of Frontier Drilling’s offshore exploration technology – and did it without disclosing that they are owned by the same company?

Woudl you consider that an ethical lapse on the Strib’s part?  Well, duh; pretty shady – right?  Pretty dubious ethics, perhaps?

Well, have no fear; both cases are supremely hypothetical.

Hold that thought as we proceed.

 Question Two

So how about if the Minnesoros “Independent” ran a piece uncritically fawning over a study put out by a political pressure group-cum-economics think tank that is a financial first-cousin of theirs, without disclosing the link?

Well, yeah, of course they did it, publishing a report by the Center for Economic Policy Research (about declining home values and, naturally, the wisdom of an interventionist approach to the housing crisis.

Learned Foot looks at the CEPR’s funders…:

Foundation support in 2008 includes:

The Annie E. Casey Foundation

The Nathan Cummings Foundation

The Ford Foundation

The Meyer Foundation

The Moriah Fund, Inc.

***The Open Society Institute***

The Retirement Research Foundation

The Russell Sage Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Streisand Foundation

Washington Area Women’s Foundation

There’s that “Open Society Institute” again! That name just keeps popping up like a bad Soros huffing Viagras.

And who else does the “Open Society Foundation” support?

MorOn.org – Your one-stop shop for hatchet-jobbery done on behalf of (but not in coordination with – oh no, that’d be wrong) the Democratic Party.

Media Matters – Media watchdog group that specializes in combating “conservative misinformation in the media.” As such on that site, “the media” tends to consist almost entirely of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

The Center for “Independent” Media – Runs several “non-partisan” (battleground) state-based “media outlets” that spew forth all manner of leftist drivel / character assassinations.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: A “non-partisan” ethics watchdog that specializes in suing Republicans, and making endless FOIA requests regarding Republicans.

Approdeh – An outfit that lobbies on behalf of South American terrorist organizations.

And now…

The Center for Economic Policy and Research – Issues bogus reports that can be cited by all of the above as authoritative. Kind of like money laundering.

Or like working for a law firm with one client.  In the “construction” business. 

Question Three

Does the Minnesoros “Independent’s” “code of ethics” actually impel them to behave ethically, or does it merely give them a framework under which to rationalize their unethical behavior?

 

8 thoughts on “Three Questions For You

  1. You know, I like to keep an eye on their Web traffic statistics as an amusing occasional distraction. They get about 2,000 unique visitors a day (7,000+ if Kos deigns to link to them), which is pretty frickin’ anemic for an outlet claiming to be a legitimate “news” organization. What’s more, most of that traffic comes from a bunch of similarly-themed left-leaning sites all twittering about the same basic bullshit. Soooo, you have all this money coming from “donations,” including some coming courtesy of Soros, for a bunch of lame, amateurish sites that get relatively no traffic and act as basically one big circle jerk of leftist talking points.

    Seems like an extraordinary waste of money to me.

  2. Seems like an extraordinary waste of money to me.

    And this is different from a typical liberal project how?

  3. I think the truth is a little less sinister than Mitch believes it is.
    All these Soros/MM outfits are terrible if your actually trying to find a source document. You go to Willis’s site and he makes a comment with a link to ‘Bush’s speech’ that takes you to another MM site that criticizes Bush’s speech with out-of-context quotes, snarks, etc. You find a link in that piece that says ‘New FCC Rules’ and you click on it and find yourself on another Soros site that doesn’t have any source docs for the FCC but does have a feminist critique of Bush’s new FCC rules.
    I think they do it to drive each site’s hit & unique visitor count up. Soros pays people to spread his message, it only makes sense that he’d want a metric to show his people are actually reading what he pays people to write, and if you work for Soros it only makes sense to inflate those numbers as much as possible by doin everything you can to keep those visitors withing the Soros network of blogs & NGO’s.

  4. They get about 2,000 unique visitors a day (7,000+ if Kos deigns to link to them), which is pretty frickin’ anemic…

    Right you are and The Monitor isn’t much better, which begs the question: Why does Mitch spend so much energy and time trying to debunk mediocre websites that nobody reads? I’m thinking the boy prefers easy targets. The day he starts going after Glenn Greenwald, Roy Edroso or Tbogg is the day his readers should start taking him seriously. Which he doesn’t want, natch. I’m as media-savvy a left-leaner gets and I’ve never even bothered to read those sites.

  5. I’m as media-savvy a left-leaner gets and I’ve never even bothered to read those sites.

    Obviously, on both counts, since the Monitor and the site Yoss was referring to are the same site.

    [Rolls eyes]

  6. Why does Mitch spend so much energy and time trying to debunk mediocre websites that nobody reads?

    Not an unfair point.

    I’m a regional blogger. For a variety of reasons – some editorial, some on the logistical side of personal – I’ve staked out my territory locally for now.

    I’m thinking the boy prefers easy targets.

    If you dig brunettes, but get transferred to Sweden, would you suddenly prefer blondes?

    There are no hard targets in the local leftyblogosphere. At best there are competent ones (MNPublius, Chris Dykstra), benign ones, stupid ones, and venal ones.

    And I go after the “Indy” because while they are pretty much a waste of time, they are a waste that is a symptom of something the good guys need to be aware of; the left is trying to buy itself some grass roots. Conservatism has talk radio (a completely organic phenomenon) and blogs (which nobody in the world expected six years ago), which happened without the aid of Madion Avenue, Hollywood or the Beltway. The Dems don’t. They’re trying to throw money at the issue. I’m trying to show the world not only how corrosive that idea is, but what lousy results they’re getting.

    The day he starts going after Glenn Greenwald, Roy Edroso or Tbogg is the day his readers should start taking him seriously. Which he doesn’t want, natch.

    My readers can take me any way they want. I do what I do because I like to do it.

    However, as the rest of my life evens out a bit, I do plan on raising my sights a bit. But that’s a ways off.

  7. My belief is that after the Powerline/LGF induced blogswarm that took down Dan Rather, people on the left (Soros, Hilary!) said to themselves “I want to be able to do that”. So they created a loose affiliation of astro-turfed websites with the intention of using them as a tool to go after targets on the right. We saw a touch of that with Rush’s “fake soldiers” story, and I’m sure we’ll see it repeated numerous times this year.

    So the quality of the lefty websites has no importance, it’s just the quantity. The last time I counted, CIM had at least 40 affiliated blogs run by their fellows, and probably 5 times that more loosely affiliated.

    I’ve pretty much stopped reading MiniMoni except occasionally when Mitch links to something interesting. I was going to file a complaint to the IRS for their political activity (as I did with MinnPost), but I’ve lost interest.

  8. Pingback: Shot in the Dark » Blog Archive » Set ‘em Up, Tear ‘em Down

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