Eric Lipton, Nicholas Confessore and Brooke Williams, Think Tank Scholar or Corporate Consultant? It Depends on the Day. The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, 8 August 2016. “Acting as independent arbiters to shape government policy, many [think tank] researchers also have corporate roles that are sometimes undisclosed.”
January 14, 2016
How to Cover the One Percent
Michael Massing, How to Cover the One Percent. The New York Review of Books, 14 January 2016. “As the concentration of wealth in America has grown, so has the scale of philanthropy. Today, that activity is one of the principal ways in which the superrich not only “give back” but also exert influence, yet it has not received the attention it deserves. As I have previously tried to show, digital technology offers journalists new ways to cover the world of money and power in America,1 and that’s especially true when it comes to philanthropy.” This is the second of two articles. The first is Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent, published in The New York Review of Books on 17 December 2015.
September 6, 2014
Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks
Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams and Nicholas Confessore, Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks. The New York Times, 6 September 2014. “More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
The money is increasingly transforming the once-staid think-tank world into a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington. And it has set off troubling questions about intellectual freedom: Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.” Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.