This may be the most important article you read this week or month or year.
Crack investigative journalist David Sirota, who blew open the story of the financing of the PBS series on pensions, now demonstrates the five rules of what he calls “native advertising.”
In this case, the same John Arnold Foundation that underwrote the PBS series with $3.5 million, underwrote a report by the Brookings Institution on the need to rein in pensions of public sector workers.
Sirota demonstrates that this is far from accurate, that there are other views, but that Brookings did not present a balanced account. It added to the echo chamber of those who want to cut pensions but ignore huge tax cuts for corporations.
Most telling is the David vs. Goliath claim, where the rich corporate sector presents itself as the little guy against the powerful unions.
He writes:
“Rule 4: Portray the native advertiser as an underdog and its work as heroic, all while ignoring facts to portray the native advertiser’s opponents as an evil Goliath
“The best native advertising flips the script. It casts the monied native advertiser as the earnest underdog David and the native advertiser’s disadvantaged opponent as the big bad Goliath. The Arnold-funded Brookings paper does exactly this.
“For instance, the paper asserts that “public employee unions are one of the most—if not the most—powerful political actors in state politics.” Readers are expected to believe that this makes unions the omnipotent villain that needs to be thwarted by poor powerless corporations, even though that’s the opposite of what the data show.
“According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, unions have spent a combined $1.7 billion on state politics since 2000. That’s a lot – but it is dwarfed by the $8.1 billion spent on state politics by the business sector in that same period. Those numbers are hardly surprising or secret – they track the same rough ratio that exists at the federal level.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sirota is exactly right. You’ll notice that media parroting the Overclass line invariably refer to politicians who want to cut Social Security and Medicare as “courageous,” while people who’ve worked all their lives to qualify for them are “greedy geezers.”
In education, it’s the same: parents and teachers are “special interests,” while Bill Gates, who has almost single-handedly purchased education policy to serve his private interests and ideology, is a “philanthropist.”
As Orwell wrote, “He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future.” Those who control the language, control the debate; thus our need to take back the language from the so-called reformers and edu-privateers: no more VAM (students are not products), no more “business model of education,” no more parents and students as “customers,” no more school districts as (investment) portfolios…
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And for God’s sake no more teachers as “human capital”.
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Indeed: time to banish the money changers from the Temple of Learning.
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They also inaccurately refer to Social Security and Medicare as ‘entitlements,” to make it sound like seniors are undeserving leeches like those in need of welfare and food stamps, when workers made cash contributions to those programs throughout their careers through payroll tax deductions.
Don’t these people even honor their parents?
Thank goodness for David Sirota.
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PBS has been primarily funded by large corporate concerns and think tanks for years now. I believe government funding is less than 15 percent now, another fifty percent is viewer donations.
Exiled magazine blew the cover of Mad Money, a PBS financial show, whose sole funder was a mortgage bank.
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I’d like to know why Maryland county school systems are literally telling teachers who to vote for for governor.
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