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About Media Transparency

Media Transparency is the most complete resource for tracking the money behind the conservative movement. Dating to 1985, its searchable database includes 40 conservative funders and 9,000-plus recipients of 50,000 grants totaling $3.5 billion. Media Transparency also publishes 60 to 70 original articles per year, incorporating database research to illuminate the conservative movement's central role in formulating and implementing Bush administration policy.

Among the major issue areas covered by Media Transparency are the movement's efforts to privatize both public education and Social Security, limit union participation, particularly among public workers, reshape legal theory and practice to further favor commercial or corporate interests, institutionalize faith-based policies, discredit climate change research, and promote a neoconservative foreign policy agenda.

Media Transparency was cited in a New York Times Magazine cover story, "Wiring the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy," as a prime source for "The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix," the PowerPoint presentation created by Democracy Alliance co-founder Rob Stein, who calls Media Transparency "an essential element of the emerging progressive media infrastructure." And Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation that it's "the essential tool for researching this [conservative] movement."

A Daily Kos poster noted that "Stein's PowerPoint presentation sounds very consistent with Media Transparency's article on 'The Apparat' regarding how the conservatives got organized and funded." And another wrote that "I'm sure Stein has some value added in his presentation, but the raw data and the backstory is all ... at Media Transparency."

Media Transparency is a widely used resource for popular and scholarly media, including researchers at Media Matters, the Center for American Progress, and the Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch. It has also been cited as a source in more than 30 recently published books, including David Brock's "The Republican Noise Machine," "What Liberal Media?" by Eric Alterman, and Joe Conason's "Big Lies."

Read how Conason at Salon.com and Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books, used Media Transparency's research to reveal that a self-described non-partisan media watchdog had received almost $3 million in conservative funding.

See who else utilizes our research and how, what other readers and media say, more about how we follow the money, and read Media Transparency’s entry in the “Next Left” guide to the progressive infrastructure.