4. Issues and Bias

4.4 Expertise ("Think-Tanks")

One of the ways in which media bias may manifest itself is when stories are built around "expert opinion" but with the accuracy of the content tarnished by either over-reliance on one side of the story (resulting in the exclusion of important information) or on "experts" who have a history of peddling fake or misleading claims. The media's over-reliance on Conservative think-tanks or "experts", and under-reliance on Progressive think-tanks or "experts" is one way in which media bias through the peddling of conservative deceptions or fictions in news content, plays out. What's worse, the ideology, affiliations or funders of think tanks and "experts" are often not reported.

Before we review the actual data on think-tank citations by the media, it is important to understand the significance of this metric, as is illustrated in (Chris Bowers' extract below from) Brock. The creation of a vast right-wing network (especially of "think-tanks") using funds from ultra-conservative multi-millionaires to peddle (usually fraudulent or misleading) right-wing talking points in the form of "expert opinion" or "research" was another part of the long-time Republican game plan to takeover the media (bold text is my emphasis):

Three months before the publication of Efron's The News Twisters, in a memorandum dated August 31, 1971, and printed in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's periodical Washington Report, [Lewis F.] Powell, a well-respected former president of the American Bar Association and a conservative Democrat, argued that the American system of free enterprise was attack by the four institutions that shaped American public opinion: the academy, the media, the political establishment and the courts....

Powell then laid out the strategy that the Right would follow in the coming decades, whereby conservative business interests would create and underwrite a "movement" to front its agenda in the media. Under Powell's plan, heavily subsidized "scholars, writers and thinkers" speaking "for the movement" would press for "balance" and "equal time" to penetrate the media, thereby shaping news coverage, reframing issues, influencing the views of political elites, and changing mass public opinion. These would be the manufactured "intellectuals" referenced by Efron, marketed in the media to "expand the spectrum." They would be housed in new "national organizations" in an effort "undertaken long term" with "generous financial support." (p. 39-40)

...

Published in 1978, [William E.] Simon's A Time for Truth pealed the same alarm bell as had Lewis Powell. "The target of the `consumer movement is business, the target of the `environmentalists' is business, and the target of the `minorities' at least where employment is concerned, is business," Simon wrote. Business, he argued, was losing politically because it had not intellectual firepower so savvy media spokespeople, the same problem that handicapped Goldwater in 1964. Simon frankly suggested conservatives go out and buy the public debate in a bid to make their ideology look respectable and appealing. So, pace Simon, the coal industry would begin funding research to undermine support for environmental regulation, and the financial services industry would pay for a pseudoscholarly campaign to destroy public confidence in the Social Security system.

The ideology of Barry Goldwater and Phyllis Schafly and William Buckley would no be dry cleaned for mass media consumption, and along with it came a neolexicon--a language invented by conservative practitioners trained in the use of manipulative, often Orwellian, rhetoric. Agenda items like gutting, rolling back the civil rights movement, and slashing taxes would be smoothed out with deceptive Madison Avenue--type branding slogans of the kind used to sell commercial products: "privatization," "the new federalism," the "flat tax," and so on. Americans would be told that poverty is a "behavioral" condition, that any advance gained by a member of a minority group amounted to "reverse discrimination," and that providing government subsidies for private and parochial schools while draining resources from public education was to be though of as "school choice."

Just as objective journalism was an obstacle for the Right, so was objective scholarship. Simon laid out a "blue-print for a counter-intelligentsia"--hired guns who could legitimize and popularize right-wing opinion through the media and do battle in the media on behalf of conservative business interests, the wealthy, and the cultural Right with spokespeople for the consumer, environmental, civil rights and feminist movements. Under Simon's plan, academic studies that were damaging to right-wing ideological goals and to the imperatives of business were to be countered at every turn by scholarship for sale. Simon advocated "nothing less than a massive an unprecedented mobilization of moral, intellectual and financial resources" with funds rushing by multimillions" from corporate-backed foundations to a network of pro-business scholars, writers, pundits, and publicists, as well as to conservative book projects, publications, and policy research. (p. 41-42)

...

Though most of Lewis Powell's 1971 memorandum to American business leaders concerned the building of a conservative counter-establishment, Powell also proposed a second track through which "the movement" would directly harass the media into conforming to its ideology. The subsidized right-wing ideas and spokespeople could not compete in the media marketplace without a subsidized campaign to make it happen.

Business, Powell advised, should underwrite "monitoring of the media--particularly the broadcast networks--to enforce its demand for "equal time" for right-wingers. "The movement" would play a coordinated double game, seeking to co-opt the media, while at the same time scorching it as biased against conservatism and conservatives. The latter tactic would enforce the former. "The staffs of [media] experts," Powell wrote, should commence a "constant examination of the texts of adequate samples" of TV programs, newspapers, magazines and books; such systematic scrutiny and criticism of the media would provide "incentives" to "induce" the media to put the heavily subsidizing pro-business commentators in print and on the air. (p. 74)

Bowers has more extracts, including one of countless examples showing how the wide Right-wing network (which goes beyond "think-tanks" and is something Brock calls the Republican Noise Machine - and I call the Republican Misinformation Machine or RMM) works. As Matt Bai mentioned in this New York Times Magazine article (bold text is my emphasis):

What [Rob] Stein showed him when they met was a PowerPoint presentation that laid out step by step, in a series of diagrams a ninth-grader could understand, how conservatives, over a period of 30 years, had managed to build a ''message machine'' that today spends more than $300 million annually to promote its agenda.

Rappaport was blown away by the half-hour-long presentation. ''Man,'' he said, ''that's all it took to buy the country?''

Just looking at the Top 20 Conservative "think-tanks" alone, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) found the following (bold text is my emphasis):

This 1999 report picks up the threads of that analysis to provide an expanded and more detailed analysis of 20 leading conservative think tanks.

Summary of Findings

The top 20 conservative think tanks studied in this report are:

• American Enterprise Institute

• American Legislative Exchange Council

• Atlas Economic Research Foundation

• Cato Institute

• Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Citizens for a Sound Economy

• Competitive Enterprise Institute

• Empower America

• Employment Policy Foundation

• Ethics and Public Policy Center

• Family Research Council

• Free Congress Research and Education Foundation

• Heritage Foundation

• Hoover Institution

• Hudson Institute

• Manhattan Institute

• National Center for Policy Analysis

• National Center for Public Policy Research

• Progress and Freedom Foundation

• Reason Foundation

...

2. Partial data from 1997 indicates that spending by center-right and far-right think tanks continues to grow rapidly, suggesting that the 1990s has been a period of continued institution-building by political conservatives. Overall spending by these institutions between 1990 and 2000 is likely to top $1 billion.
...
5. Conservative policy organizations continue to promote a highly ideological world view, working on multiple policy fronts to privatize the public sphere and elevate the market as the prime mechanism for social arbitration and resource allocation. These policy groups have pushed aggressively to privatize Social Security and Medicare, loosen laws governing workplace safety and the rights of workers to organize, roll back environmental and consumer safety regulations, cripple the ability of nonprofit organizations to engage in public policy debate and advocacy, privatize systems of public education, and pare back the scope, size and cost of government in numerous other areas. They also saw their long-standing crusade to end the federal welfare entitlement come to fruition in 1996.
...
8. There is no mainstream left-of-center parallel to the critical mass of conservative policy institutions currently operating in the United States today. Conservative policy institutions tend to be multi-issue organizations with multi-million dollar budgets, powerful corporate boards, and significant media access. They work along dual tracks, promoting a broad public philosophy while tying specific policy initiatives to it. They also tend to pursue bold structural reforms with the potential to change both the substance of police and the rules of the political game for decades to come.

With that backdrop, it is now instructive to review how often right-leaning, centrist and left-leaning "think-tanks" are cited by the major U.S. media outlets. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has been conducting an annual study of this (since 1995) using Nexis transcripts and I've compiled their year-by-year data into a chart (below) that makes it clear what has been going on. Let me add, that, think-tank citations alone are an insufficient condition to prove that the news reporting is skewed - because we don't know what the content is that is cited and whether the news coverage overall is accurate (see this post by Brian Montopoli at CJR Daily for some additional perspective on citations). However, Right-leaning think-tanks have a long history of providing misleading or false information certainly much more so than centrist or left-leaning ones. Just a handful of examples:

• Open Source Software: Tim Lambert covers conservative think-tank deceptions and lack of disclosure of industry funding on the topic of Open Source Software, here.

• Global Warming: Mother Jones covers industry-funded think-tanks playing the role of liars or deceivers (see here for why) on the topic of global warming, here (and see this chart/list). 

• Taxes, Budgets and Social Security: The center for Budget and Policy Priorities has been chronicling the deceptions, lies and misleading statements from the Heritage Foundation (the Right's "premier think-tank") on topics relating to the economy, here. Elaborate fake or misleading propaganda on social security by several leading conservative "think-tanks" is covered here as well.

• Other: SourceWatch has a number of links where you can start exploring the vast web of deceit and disinformation from right-wing "think-tanks".

So, FAIR's data, taken together with the above history of deception and disinformation from right-wing "think-tanks", shows clearly that mainstream media outlets tend to skew Right in their overall coverage.
[NOTE: The data for the chart is taken entirely from FAIR's reports - 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 - with the latest report for any given year chosen as the reference. These links also provide tables listing which think-tanks are ranked Conservative, Centrist or Progressive. Note that the claims made in a separate paper by Groseclose and Milyo, that think-tank citations tend to lean more towards the left or that they reflect "liberal bias", are baseless and I've shown that in Sec. 2.9]

In addition to providing conservative "think-tanks" far more airtime, often times media outlets fail to divulge information on their ideology or (corporate) funders. You can see some of this in the extensive database of resources and articles on the RMM at the progressive Commonweal Institute. For example:

What's in a Label? Right-wing think tanks are often quoted, rarely labeled (Michael Dolny, FAIR, May/Jun 1998):

To see how the top four think tanks were identified, a random 10 percent of their citations were examined. Surprisingly, all four institutions were not identified at all in a majority of their respective citations.

The most mentioned think tank, the Brookings Institution, was given no identification in 78 percent of the 229 citations examined. In another 17percent, it was identified as being located in Washington, D.C. Twice it was referred to as "liberal," twice as "non-partisan" and once as "centrist."

The "liberal" label is inaccurate; Brookings has long had a centrist or center-right orientation. As far back as the mid-1980s, Fortune magazine(7/23/84) was approvingly noting that "Brookings Tilts Right." Current president Michael Armacost was undersecretary of state in the Reagan administration and President Bush's ambassador to Japan. Brookings' two most prominent analysts served in Republican administrations. Their most visible foreign policy expert, Richard Haass, is formerly of George Bush's National Security Council. Domestic political analyst Stephen Hess helped edit the Republican platform in 1976,and served in the U.S. delegation to the U.N. under Gerald Ford.

The Heritage Foundation was not identified in 68 percent of 182 cases; in a further 8 percent, only its location in Washington was noted. Its political orientation was noted 24 percent of the time: Forty of these 44 mentions used the word "conservative," while four used "right-wing" or "on the right." Twice, while labeled as "conservative," the institute's support from right-wing funder Richard Mellon Scaife was mentioned.

Seventy-two percent of the time, the American Enterprise Institute appeared with no qualifying label. In only 14 percent of the 132 stories sampled was it identified as conservative. The Cato Institute was similarly not labeled in 68 percent of the 130 stories sampled. It was identified as "libertarian"13 percent of the time, "conservative" 6 percent of the time, and twice was referred to as both "libertarian" and "conservative." One reference called the institution "free-market oriented."

For comparison purposes, we sampled the labeling of the survey's top progressive think tank, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). As with the top four think tanks, EPI received no label more than half the time (52 percent). However, EPI received an ideological label more often than any of the top four, in29 percent of the 58 cases sampled. Almost half of the ideological labeling was "progressive," "liberal" or "left-leaning," but slightly more than half(9 out of 17) referred to EPI as having ties to or receiving funds from labor unions.

In sharp contrast, none of the top four think tanks were referred to as "corporate-backed" or any similar label. A call to EPI confirmed that they received a quarter of their funding from labor sources; however, Brookings acknowledged that nearly one-third of their funding comes from corporate sources. AEI's webpage discloses that 40 percent of its budget comes from corporate donations.

Rethinking the Think Tanks (Curtis Moore, Sierra Magazine, July/Aug 2002) - bold text is my emphasis:

Turn on National Public Radio most any afternoon, leaf through a newspaper or news magazine, watch a congressional hearing, or surf the Internet, and you will likely encounter the thoughts of Charles and David Koch (pronounced "coke"). The views will seem to be coming from an independent think tank–the Cato Institute or Citizens for a Sound Economy, for example. Yet behind these groups stands the brothers’ vast fortune: Koch Industries is the nation’s second-largest privately owned company and the largest privately owned oil company, with annual revenues of more than $30 billion. Charles cofounded Cato in 1977; in 1986 David helped launch CSE. The brothers are following in dad’s footsteps: Fred Koch was a charter member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society in 1958.

Today, Koch money–and cash infusions from corporate allies such as Exxon, Philip Morris, General Motors, and General Electric–funds industry-friendly messages that fill our airwaves and editorial pages, and influence outcomes in the halls of Congress and courtrooms across the country.
...
Fashioning themselves after the very university research centers they deplore (or old-style "think tanks" that are only a step removed from universities), these groups have neither the neutrality nor the expertise of their academic counterparts. They are simply self-described as "libertarian" or "market liberals," as if this explains why their conclusions differ so sharply from those of academic or government researchers. No mention is made of the corporate money that is lavished on them–or the corporate agenda, which is, at heart, their raison d’être.
...
John Stossel, an ABC correspondent, has become notorious for blurring the line between industry spin and science. On June 29, 2001, in a one-hour special called "Tampering With Nature," Stossel interviewed a scientist identified as "Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia" who not only discounted the dangers of global warming, but said, "Maybe a little warming is better." It is true that Michaels is a professor at the University of Virginia–but he is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and has been on a personal retainer from the Western Fuels Association, a group of coal-owning, coal-burning electricity generators located in the West and upper Midwest.

Doubtless at least a few of ABC’s 9 million viewers that evening believed Michaels’s assertion that "maybe a little warming is better"–but would they have believed it had they known that they were hearing the voice of the coal industry, speaking through a scientist on its dole?

Stossel is by no means alone in failing to adequately identify his sources. Michael Dolny, a senior research associate at the Center for Criminal Justice Research at California State University, San Bernardino, has used the LexisNexis database to study article citations in major newspapers as well as transcripts from major radio and television outlets. Dolny found that none of the four most-cited think tanks–the Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Cato Institute–was described as "corporate-backed" or anything similar, even though big-business money supplied a third of their support. The business-backed centers not only outspent their "liberal" counterparts such as the Economic Policy Institute, the Urban Institute, and the Freedom Forum four to one, but were also quoted more often.

Cato and CSE are only 2 of roughly 300 industry-funded groups that are helping businesses and the wealthy convert their vast economic and market power into political might. Their messages are invariably the same: Government regulation–most especially environmental protection–is bad, and any science that justifies it is "junk." Usually these messages are reinforced by money deployed to campaign coffers.
...
Corporate think-tank influence extends even into the branch of government designed to be immune to it: the judiciary. Some of that influence is exerted by intervention in lawsuits to make arguments that favor industry.
...
For example, the same Lambe Foundation that gave to CSEF also donated $150,000 to the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, Montana. FREE conducts seminars for federal judges–including those at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where CSEF’s briefs were filed. FREE is in ideological lockstep with organizations like CSEF: While the foundation works the legal angle, FREE "educates" the judges who will hear the cases. Indeed, the two judges, Douglas Ginsburg and Stephen Williams, who held the Clean Air Act unconstitutional (a ruling that was later overturned by the Supreme Court), based their decision largely on the arguments advanced by CSEF. And both judges had enjoyed the all-expenses-paid FREE seminars. (Ginsburg attended them each year from 1993 to ’98; Williams went in 1993 and 1998.)
...

The Think Tank as Flack (David Callahan, Washington Monthly, Nov 1999):

On September 18, The New York Times ran a breathless front-page account of corporate propaganda. The Microsoft Corporation, we learned, had bankrolled a California think tank---ironically named the Independent Institute---to run full-page newspaper ads supporting Microsoft's claim of innocence in the face of federal antitrust charges. The ads took the form of a letter signed by 240 academic "experts" and purported to be a scholarly, unbiased view of why the government had gone overboard in its case against the company. According to the Times article, Microsoft had not only paid for the ads, but was in fact the single largest donor to the Independent Institute, a conservative organization that has been a leading defender of the company since it first came under fire from federal prosecutors.

This revelation has been an embarrassment both to Microsoft and to the Independent Institute, which claims to adhere to the "highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry." But the Times is another institution that should be embarrassed, trumpeting the story as a shocking exposé. To be sure, the article had timely elements, running on the eve of final arguments in the high profile Microsoft trial. But framed more broadly, the tale of right-wing think tanks propagandizing on behalf of their corporate masters is now many years old. What was truly remarkable about the Times story is that the paper has run so few similar stories and has failed to report on one of the most important ways in which corporate dollars seek to influence public policy.
...
The extent to which conservative think tanks rely on corporate funding support varies widely. The American Enterprise Institute and CEI have two of the highest levels of corporate support, with both getting roughly 40 percent of their 1996 revenues from corporations. CATO also received major corporate support, although it does not release the exact percentage of its revenue that comes from this source. In 1996, more than 100 corporations contributed to CATO, including Bell Atlantic, Exxon, Microsoft, Phillip Morris, Citicorp, Netscape, R.J. Reynolds, and General Motors. Substantial CATO money also comes from private businessmen.
...
Elsewhere, CATO's huge Social Security privatization project has been underwritten by $2 million or more in corporate money, much of it from financial service companies which would directly benefit from privatization. Hedging their bets, these same financial companies have paid for privatization work at nearly a half dozen other conservative think tanks as well. The campaign against the 1997 Kyoto global warming treaty waged by right-wing think tanks has been another area where corporate America has heavily invested in right-wing policy groups that advance its interest. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been a particularly aggressive advocate of the notion that global warming is a "theory not a fact." Since 1991, CEI's budget has grown from less than $1 million to over $4 million.

Perhaps no conservative policy group works more closely with private industry than Citizens for a Sound Economy.
...
And the price tag for this policy work can't be beat. All corporate contributions to conservative think tanks have the advantage of being tax-deductible. While giving money to politicians is a direct non-deductible expense, giving money to AEI or Heritage---nonprofits that must be non-partisan by law---confers the same tax benefits as donations made to the United Way.
...