Introduction
May 1, 2006
Dear Progressive Donor,
Welcome to the inaugural edition of -- NEXT LEFT: The Unofficial, Incomplete, and Utterly Biased Guide to the New Progressive Infrastructure -- the first (and likely only) book designed specifically for progressive donors.
I put this book
together because I’ve heard from many of you about
how challenging it
is to know which groups to help -- which ones are doing the best
work, how they’re doing it and who is responsible.
Taking the country back should be hard,
but it doesn’t need to be
complicated -- so I put this book together to make it a little easier.
Because I really believe that if great organi-
zations get the support they need and great donors engage in a way
that is meaningful
and satisfying, then together we can get things back on track. It’s
just a matter of con-
necting the best dots.
So I asked some of the smartest people I know,
from all different parts of politics -- donors, organization heads,
writers and other thought leaders -- for their Top Picks -- for
the one or
two groups they think are doing the best, most interesting work and
why. Al Franken,
Maureen White, Bernard Schwarz and the rest of my amazing contributors
recommended
new groups and old groups with tiny niche missions and ones with
multimillion dollar
national agendas. Then I called these groups and asked them to tell
me a little bit about
themselves, in their own words.
You will find the results in the (unofficial) pages that follow.
I hope it helps!
Erica Payne
Tesseract
MediaTransparency.org
(A project of Cursor, Inc.)
Mediatransparency.org offers “one stop shopping for anyone looking to “uncover the financing of the far right.” "Everything you need to know about how the other side works and networks.” The “411 on the right wing funding” -- this group “has it all.” |
Address:3844 Pleasant Ave. Organization Founding Date: Type of Organization: |
What is your annual operating budget?
$140,000 in 2005; target budget of $330,000
Please briefly describe the mission of your organization:
MediaTransparency.org is dedicated to news, opinion, analysis and investigative data related to links between conservative philanthropies and the organizations and people which they fund, and their influence in the media.
The heart of Media Transparency is its free, searchable database of grants made by major conservative philanthropies since 1985. The database presently contains 50,000 grants totaling more than $3 billion, and is searchable by an array of criteria, including funder, recipient, grant purpose, and date(s). Media Transparency is a widely-cited and much used resource among the world's news media and researchers at educational institutions.
Please describe your organization’s objectives and summarize the principle activities undertaken to meet these objectives:
Given Media Transparency's unique data relating to conservative philanthropy and its influence on our -- and the world's -- societies, our mission is to continue reporting on the grantmaking, structure and influence of conservative philanthropy. This mission includes identifying conservative philanthropies, cataloguing the grants they make, and tracking the proliferation of their activities.
We do this in three ways:
- First, we acquire IRS 990s from the targeted philanthropies and enter the grants they make into our database.
- Secondly, we publish original research that contextualizes and reports on the activities of the philanthropies and their grant recipients.
- Finally, we link to and summarize articles published on the Internet that touch on conservative philanthropy.
What gap in the progressive infrastructure does your organization fill?
Many people and organizations have written over the past decade the role that conservative philanthropy has played in advancing Republican Party control over the three branches of the US government, and over US media in general. Indeed, even the discussion of supporting and creating "progressive infrastructure" stems from reports on the activities of conservative philanthropy, which has taken a "supply side" approach to achieving Republican political control by creating a range of right wing "infrastructure" organizations such as think tanks, legal, media and religious organizations. Creating progressive infrastructure is often viewed, sometimes enviously, through this lens. Logically the first step in countering the right wing's infrastructure is to analyze what the Republicans have done, and track their activities. Media Transparency fills this role like no other organization by focusing solely on the grantmaking, activities, and influence of this conservative movement, and trying to get other media organizations to understand the money behind much of the conservative movement. There is literally no other source for much of the information contained at MediaTransparency.org.
What is the most relevant conservative counterpart to your organization?
There is no perfect analogue to Media Transparency
in the conservative movement.
The closest conservative cousin to Media Transparency would be the
Capital Research Center (www.capitalresearch.org), which SourceWatch
describes as "...a
conservative think tank whose stated mission is to do 'opposition research'
exposing the funding sources behind consumer, health and environmental
groups." Though
CRC has an abbreviated database of grants made by so-called "liberal" funders,
it does not track in a scientific way all of the grants made by a range
of funders over a period of years. Instead, it cherry-picks grants which
suit
its purpose. CRC is much more partisan and less credible than Media Transparency,
even among some conservatives. David Horowitz's Discover the Networks
(www.discoverthenetwork.org) is actually a preposterous (and admitted)
attempt by conservative philanthropy
to create an analogue to Media Transparency. Like CRC, it has no comprehensive
database, and is even more nakedly partisan and political. The David Horowitz Freedom Center, publisher of discoverthenetwork.org, reports on its tax form that it spends an amazing $450,000/year on the site, which is three times the annual combined budgets of Cursor.org and MediaTransparency.org. A third possible
counterpart to Media Transparency is ActivistCash.com (www.activistcash.com),
published by the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF). SourceWatch calls
the CCF "a
front group for the restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industries."
Please identify the progressive groups with whom you have most frequently collaborated in the past year?
Media Transparency has worked directly with Dave Johnson of the Commonweal Institute. Mr. Johnson is on the Cursor board of directors, and has written original research for MediaTransparency.org. We also work indirectly with the Center for Media and Democracy and its website SourceWatch. Mr. Levine helped edit a chapter that touched on Media Transparency in Banana Republicans, a recent book by CMD's directors John Stauber and Sheldom Rampton.
In 2005 Mr Levine wrote investigative research on where the right is currently innovating for the recently formed Democracy Alliance (DA). The three areas researched were: attempts to privatize public pension funds or otherwise limit Socially Responsible Investing; Attacks on liberals in the academy; and the politicization of Public Broadcasting. The research was presented to all members of the DA. The goal of the research is to help progressives predict where any new attacks on progressive values are to be waged, and ultimately target progressive organizations the DA could fund to counter such efforts.
Media Transparency research and data is regularly cited at a wide variety of progressive websites and books and school curricula. It is listed in the media accountability sections of numerous media websites and books.
The websites that regularly link to or mention Media Transparency include MediaMatters.org, Dailykos.com, SourceWatch.org, TalkToAction.org, BuzzFlash.com, ThinkProgress.org and CampusProgress.org (both from the Center for American Progress), People for the American Way (pfaw.org), BlackCommentator.com, Antiwar.com (not a progressive site), and others.
Name and short bio of Executive Director/Founder:
Rob Levine, President and founder
Rob Levine, a native of Duluth, Minnesota, graduated with a
BA from the University of Minnesota-Duluth in Journalism
in 1980.
He attended
graduate
school in
Mass Communication and Journalism at the University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis, from
1980-1983. He worked as a staff photographer at the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune from 1983-1987, and has worked as a freelance
photographer and computer
consultant in Minneapolis since that time.
In 1998 Levine, Mike Tronnes, and others founded Cursor, Inc., a Minnesota non-profit corporation dedicated to media education and criticism, and began publishing www.Cursor.org. Later, in 2000, Levine created the website www.MediaTransparency.org, itself an outgrowth of a project begun by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) that analyzed the grant making of a dozen conservative philanthropies.
In 2000 Cursor was granted 501(c)(3), by the IRS.
Levine works in a studio in the warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis, and lives in Minneapolis with his wife.
Please list your board of directors and include a brief description of each:
Rob Levine
Rob is president and co-founder of Cursor, Inc., and editor of
MediaTransparency.org.
Mike Tronnes
Mike is the vice president and co-founder of Cursor, Inc., and
editor of Cursor.org. Before that, he was a publishing consultant,
specializing in advertising sales and marketing for independent
publications, and was
the advertising director at Utne Reader for nine years.
Patrick
O'Leary
Pat is a multimedia producer and media consultant in Minneapolis.
Steve
Paprocki
Steve is an expert in philanthropy and fundraising for non-profits.
Dave
Johnson
Dave Johnson is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and has
written about conservative philanthropy.
Mike Griffin
Mike Griffin is a media studies instructor at Macalester
College St. Paul.
Is there any additional information that you would like the donor community to know about your group?
With movement conservatives now firmly ensconced throughout the government, Media Transparency's research is essential to understanding the role that conservative funders play in shaping public policy. And while the traditional media -- from reporters at major dailies to producers of cable TV and talk radio programs -- is more receptive than ever to this kind of information, it must also be educated on the conservative agenda, and the money and players advancing it.
Accomplishing this requires both increased marketing of Media Transparency to media outlets and individuals that cover public policy issues, as well as working individually with writers, researchers and producers. Additional funding will allow us to hire a full-time editor/writer to further amplify Media Transparency's research, as well as provide a daily critique of the mainstream media's coverage of these issues -- similar to what Media Matters does, but focused on highlighting the omissions and distortions in reporting on the conservative movement.
As an institution, Cursor, Inc. (publisher of MediaTransparency.org) is at somewhat of a crossroads. From our inception in 1997 until 2004 our budget has gone from $0 to $140,000 in 2005. Still, the institution itself is far from being established as an organization that can survive the extra efforts of its two founders. Our current goal is to establish Cursor, Inc. as an organization that will have more of a permanent footing. The key to this transition is a larger and more consistent funding base, which is where most of our efforts are now focused.