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.