Are liberals biased by their dependency on grants from left-wing foundations and government contracts? Are conservative and libertarian writers bought off by big corporations?
Doug Bandow’s Mistake
Who is paying the pundits is in the news because Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist and briber, is spilling his guts to the feds about all the politicians he bought and sold over the years. Abramoff revealed that he had paid Doug Bandow, who until a few weeks ago was a Cato Institute senior fellow and syndicated columnist, to write columns on topics of interest to his clients.
(Full disclosure: Bandow and I have met a number of times over the years and occasionally traded emails, but that is about the extent of our relationship. I think he’s a great thinker and writer.)
Bandow’s mistake was not that he accepted payment from Abramoff for writing articles. There is no ban on writers taking money from willing clients, nor should there be. Senior fellows and professional writers are usually independent contractors with multiple clients, getting by (or living large) by ghostwriting speeches, opinion editorials, and books for famous but inarticulate people.
Nor did Bandow compromise his principles by writing things he didn’t believe. According to Bandow, Abramoff’s money affected the topics he addressed but not his long-standing free-market views on those topics. Bandow is a libertarian, and none of his columns ever called for subsidies, tax hikes, or bigger government programs.
So what was Bandow’s mistake? He submitted those bought articles to Copley News Service as installments of his syndicated column, still identifying himself only as a Cato senior fellow. He failed to disclose the payments to his readers, Copley News Service, or the Cato Institute.
When news of the payments appeared in the press, Copley News promptly fired Bandow and Cato asked for his resignation.
Pundit Payola
It was soon revealed that other policy wonks also had accepted pay on the side from corporations or trade associations. Some newspapers announced policies to never publish the work of pundits they felt violated an ethical rule.
The media were quick to connect the dots to an earlier mini-scandal involving payments by the U.S. Department of Education to conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, to defend the No Child Left Behind program, and by the Health and Human Services Department to conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher, to help promote the Bush administration’s marriage initiative. In both cases the columnists failed to publicly acknowledge the payments.
Michael Kinsley, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, dubbed the practice “pundit payola” and wrote, “How embarrassing: opinions for sale, like cheeseburgers. Can I supersize that tax break I’m advocating for you, sir? You can buy a pundit for even less than it costs to buy a politician.”
Ouch.
Sorting It All Out
To my knowledge, no op-ed or policy study ever represented as coming from a Heartland senior fellow, managing editor, or other staff member was written by someone paid on the side by an interested party. But this is only the tip of the ethical issues iceberg raised by this controversy.
Each month, Heartland produces five publications containing around 90 articles, written by perhaps 30 different authors. Do any of them have undisclosed conflicts of interest? Possibly. Sometimes we publish articles written by people who work for companies with an immediate stake in the topic being discussed. In such cases we disclose their affiliation and let the reader decide.
Some of our senior fellows are highly paid professional speakers who travel the country addressing business and civic groups and collecting hefty honoraria. Does this disqualify them from writing for us on any of the subjects of interest to those “clients”? Must we list all of their clients in a disclaimer following their names at the end of opinion-editorials or letters to the editor?
Some of our senior fellows and managing editors used to work for corporations or trade associations. Is there a statute of limitations that tells us how long it takes for the corrupting influence of such income to disappear? I haven’t seen one.
If a senior fellow is paid to be a consultant for a company or trade association, must that be revealed when he speaks or writes on issues that aren’t of interest to that company or trade association? Who decides what issues are and aren’t “of interest” to the client? What if the client is paying for private advice and research that opposes the company’s public statements?
This gets complicated!
Working with Donors
In my 22 years with The Heartland Institute I have worked with many experts on the staffs of corporations, foundations, think tanks, and universities. Experts working for corporations easily match the mental acuity of their non-corporate counterparts and are invariably better informed about the details of current public policy.
But what about the appearance of working closely with corporations, which after all have no interest in advancing the public good or finding the truth, but only in maximizing profits by shaping public policies to benefit themselves and handicap their rivals?
Better, I think, to ask why nobody worries about the appearance of working closely with eccentric individuals, the staffs of their foundations, or government-funded academics and “public interest” advocacy groups. I have found individual donors and foundation staff to be more apt to try to dictate the outcome of research than are corporate government affairs directors.
For these reasons, Heartland has adopted guidelines for all donors seeking to influence our research program. For example, donors can suggest topics for us to address, but they must be of general public interest and have real public policy implications. They can earmark gifts for specific publications, but when finished the publications must be made available broadly to all policymakers and the general public. A donor or his representative may choose to participate in our peer review process, but he or she cannot suppress unexpected results or have his or her opinions weighed more heavily than those of other experts.
A Double Standard
When experts are quoted in the establishment press, the potential conflicts of interest of conservatives, libertarians, and people in corporate America are often spelled out, while liberals get a free ride. The most vivid examples of this double standard occur in the debate over tobacco, where reporters unfailingly report The Heartland Institute receives funding from tobacco companies but never mention who funds the American Lung Association or other anti-smoking groups.
Are newspaper writers biased because their publications are funded by corporate advertising? Almost certainly, since every publisher knows the best way to attract advertising is to write favorable stories about companies or institutions with advertising budgets. Yet we don’t see disclaimers appear under the names of reporters at the end of each article they write.
So too are the reporters and news readers at National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service biased because they rely on funding from liberal foundations and government grants. NPR and PBS respond directly to requests for programs and specials crafted by foundations and political appointees.
There is little satisfaction in pointing out the potential conflicts of interest of spokespersons on the other side when one’s real interest and goal is to have an informed and healthy debate about public policies. Unfortunately, the selective use of disclosure of potential conflicts of interest is a standard method of media bias and increasingly seems to be the only argument left in the toolbox of liberals, so we have to confront it as best we can.
Conclusion
No one should be surprised that money buys influence in the think tank world, just as it does in the worlds of media, government, and practically everywhere else. Appropriate disclosure and proper guidelines, however, can ensure such influence benefits rather than detracts from an informed dialogue about public policies.
