Saturday, December 14, 2013
Corporate sponsorship is the rule in the think tank and policy writing world
The Center for American Progress is downplaying the
importance of corporate donors, particularly regarding its papers on
healthcare, even there is concern about the role of subsidy of think tanks on
both the left and particularly the right, according to a New York Times article
Saturday on p. A13 in the New York Times, link here.
Journalists are supposed to be objective, and
syndicated columnists have some leeway on the right or left, according to the
newspapers that run their op-eds. But
most think-tanks and lobbying support research companies have to depend on
biases sources for funding.
When I worked for Lewin ICF in 1989, most of the
reports were sponsored by lobbying groups and trade associations. At the time, we worked on a shoestring (it’s
different now), but I got the idea that one could produce a lot of important
output with few resources.
Typically, all of this means that if you are paid
opinion consultant (even for a libertarian place like Cato), you really can’t
just express your own personal views.
The very most prominent journalists do get to inject their own moral
tone into the coverage of issues (Anderson Cooper likes to do this, having
scolded a couple guests on not having “moral compass” before). It does seem to me that the work from Pew seems very objective.
I don’t advocate that writers follow the path that I
did, putting out reams of material that can’t pay for itself. But I do have an unusual, or “a different
life” to report, one with particular paradoxes and ironies that span decades
and that map to important policy issues.
It’s hard to see, for example, how corporate
sponsorship of research could bear on an issue like “don’t ask, don’t tell”, an
issue that spoke to the capability (and permission from society) to participate
in some shared risk-taking and possible sacrifice to protect others, and
particularly future generations. The same might go for the marriage issue.
In the speech areas, though, it’s clear that there
are different corporate stakes, even within the technology world, when it comes
to issues like piracy, downstream liability, and tort reform (encompassing
abuses by trolls).
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