Center for American Progress starts ideologically driven news organization

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A common criticism of anyone taking a conservative political position is that they should stop getting all their information from Fox News. Criticism like that works both ways, however, especially now that the Center for American Progress Action Fund, according to Politico, is “ramping up an in-house full-fledged, ideologically driven news organization aimed in part at tripping up Republican candidates on the ground in the early presidential contests.” In the coming weeks the ThinkProgress blog will be relaunched as this news organization.

Some key points:

  • There are ambitious goals: “The newsroom side is absolutely competing with all the leading news organizations,” said Faiz Shakir, the editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress. “We’re not out there to peddle research — we’re out there to make news.
  • Disclosure requirements are good for my political enemies, but not for me: “ThinkProgress may quack like a duck, but it’s hardly just another media organization. For one thing, like the conservative groups that have drawn Democratic criticism, its parent 501(c)4 nonprofit doesn’t disclose its donors, which Palmieri justified on the grounds that, unlike those groups, they don’t produce political advertising.”
  • CAP Action fund is, of course, an arm of the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely associated with President Barack Obama’s administration and George Soros, who advocates many liberal and left-wing political causes: “Further, CAP Action Fund openly runs political advocacy campaigns, and plays a central role in the Democratic Party’s infrastructure, and the new reporting staff down the hall isn’t exactly walled off from that message machine.”
  • Oh, it’s a moral thing: “Rejecting a question from POLITICO about why CAP declined to reveal its donors while calling out the Kochs for not disclosing their donations, he [blogger Lee Fang, a vocal critic of Charles and David Koch] said ‘It’s fundamentally different when you have wealthy individuals that want to donate to a worthy cause, and the Koch brothers and some of their cohorts that are funding groups that are essentially just advancing their self interests and their lobbying interests.’” Fang and the others at Center for American Progress and its allied organizations are evidently not able to understand that the economic freedom that Charles and David Koch advocate is not necessarily in their own interests, if all they wanted to do is become richer. As Charles Koch recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Too many businesses have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations or tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market.”

It’s the big-government, freedom-killing policies that Center for American Progress supports that are not moral. As seen in the video presented Monday by Walter E. Williams, most government programs exist to take property from one American and give it to another to whom it does not belong, thereby making us all poorer in the process. After these government programs become ensconced, we end up with a country that is not able to care for itself and make arrangements for even the most important things such as retirement and health care, as George Resiman explained.

Center for American Progress news team takes aim at GOP

By Ben Smith & Kenneth P. Vogel

The liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund is ramping up an in-house full-fledged, ideologically driven news organization aimed in part at tripping up Republican candidates on the ground in the early presidential contests.

The group, executives told POLITICO, now has 30 writers and researchers at ThinkProgress, its blog, which is being redesigned and relaunched in the coming weeks. The editorial staff, similar in size or larger than that of many political websites, marks the latest phase in the deliberate, decade-long construction of a liberal infrastructure for reporting, research, and hammering home a message that the right is scrambling to match.

“We see ourselves as a content provider,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the president of The Center for American Progress Action Fund, the group’s advocacy arm. “There actually is an echo chamber now.”

Continue reading at Politico

Comments

4 responses to “Center for American Progress starts ideologically driven news organization”

  1. Josh

    The criticism against Fox isn’t that it’s espousing a conservative point of view; it’s that it resorts to fabrication and outright lies under the guise of being fair and balanced. If the “liberal agenda” were so horrific and so utterly detrimental to stability of our nation, then Fox wouldn’t have to resort to perpetuating falsehoods now would they?

  2. Wow

    Finally, some sense. Thanks, Josh. To echo his point, it’s *not* because they’re conservative that the “Left” and moderates bash Fox. It’s because Fox News blatantly exaggerates, distorts, skews and insinuates an agenda into its “news” presentation.

  3. Anonymous Mike

    Boy it’s nice that ABC, CBS, and NBC NEVER, EVER, NEVER exaggerate, distort, or skew any news items…..

    Mike??
    Wichita KS

  4. Wow

    Mike–

    I never said those other networks didn’t do that. I just said Fox did it *blatantly*, and I should have also added “incessantly”.

    And even though I disagree wholeheartedly as to the level of “liberalism” injected into those networks’ programming** (**Unlike Fox’s 24-hour, over-the-top, raging-neoconservative circus, from “Fox and Friends” to the painfully unfunny “Redeye.” Every show pushes the same agenda. Basically the message on truly every program is Look Out! There are dark, powerful forces always around, out to destroy good old America and Jesus and desperately trying to promote Islam and socialism. Why? We’ll never know…), let’s pretend I did agree with you. Does that make it OK for Fox to do something bad and unethical, too?

    Just when exactly did it become OK for a NEWS station to be slanted, either to the left OR right? I feel the same about MSNBC. It adds nothing to the debate, it just fuels the looneys on both sides who will agree with their respective leaders no matter what. Most importantly, it’s not representing the truth, but rather a truth through the lens of the right or left. If one is intellectually honest, they would realize this is morally unacceptable.

    Just sayin’.

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