Los Angeles blogger Karen Wolfe started the inquiry about the ethics of the Los Angeles Times accepting a subsidy from billionaire Eli Broad for its education coverage even as he is one of the major figures covered. She posted a statement by distinguished journalist Paul Sussman, who literally wrote the book on ethics in journalism; Sussman said the Times has “a massive conflict of interest” by accepting money from a person it covers on the issue he is engaged in.
Blogger Alexander Russo, who is funded by the AFT and Education Post (which is funded by Broad, among others) contends that the issue is more complex than it seems. He draws attention to many other major media that are subsidized by the wealthy.
Yes, others do it too. Last year, investigative reporter David Sirota caused PBS to return a multimillion dollar grant from the John Arnold Foundation. The program was going to reveal the”pension crisis,” a subject that Arnold feels strongly about. PBS was embarrassed by the appearance of a conflict of interest.
The he larger problem behinds these skirmishes is whether we have a free press, one that will dare to expose the misdeeds of the mighty. This will be hard to do if they are subsidized by the mighty.
Blogger Anthony Cody assesses the matter and, as usual, brings clarity to it.
“I want to add one additional point, which I made at some length in this earlier post. It is not “neutral” or “objective” to expand coverage of “innovation” in education. It is not “neutral” or “objective” to have sections of a publication focused on “what is working” in education. The Gates Foundation has made clear that they are very interested in promoting the idea that technology is of tremendous educational value. Stories that trumpet success in this arena are not neutral. They advance the agenda of those selling technological solutions to human problems in education. The act of “focusing on success” sidelines serious criticism of this approach. Journalism that focuses primarily on success misses one of the crucial roles that true journalists must play.
“Solutions to this may be, as Russo suggests, “unlikely or unworkable.” Undoing the corporate influence on the newsrooms of America is not going to be easy. But acknowledging we have a serious problem would be a valuable first step. An important second step would be to recognize independent bloggers as a critical part of the field of education journalism.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not helped with EdWeek setting up a media division that will feed news to PBS. The colonization of the press is really dangeous, even if not entirely new.
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What Anthony Cody points out is part of a larger pattern, discussed in the report
Gated Development
The pattern is clear: support and employ (often purely) technological business oriented “solutions” to problems (which often just happen to be very profitable for big corporations like Microsoft) while simultaneously buying the silence of any organizations which might be critical.
From the report:
“Gated Development demonstrates that the trend to
involve business in addressing poverty and inequality
is central to the priorities and funding of the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. We argue that this is
far from a neutral charitable strategy but instead
an ideological commitment to promote neoliberal
economic policies and corporate globalisation.
Big business is directly benefitting, in particular in
the fields of agriculture and health, as a result of the
foundation’s activities, despite evidence to show
that business solutions are not the most effective.”
“For the foundation in particular, there is an overt
focus on technological solutions to poverty. While
technology should have a role in addressing
poverty and inequality, long term solutions require
social and economic justice. This cannot be given
by donors in the form of a climate resilient crop or
cheaper smartphone, but must be about systemic
social, economic and political change – issues not
represented in the foundation’s funding priorities.”
“Perhaps what is most striking about the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation is that despite its
aggressive corporate strategy and extraordinary
influence across governments, academics
and the media, there is an absence of critical
voices. Global Justice Now is concerned that the
foundation’s influence is so pervasive that many
actors in international development, which would
otherwise critique the policy and practice of the
foundation, are unable to speak out independently
as a result of its funding and patronage.”
//end quotes
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Why am I not surprised that so-called reform shill Russo is funded by the AFT and my union dues?
This is precisely why a (yet unknown) subset of AFT members who are not inherently anti-union will cease paying dues when/if Friedrichs goes against the unions.
Though starving the union of funds for its failures and gross mis-leadership is ultimately self-defeating, it’s understandable why people would be so inclined, when the union both takes money from and gives money to our enemies.
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Mainscream journalistic ethics have gone the way of big business ethics.
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I thought it was against writing protocol to start and end a sentence with oxymorons. Didn’t you check your Strunk & White??
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“The British government, as you may naturally suppose, have it much at heart to reconcile their nation to the loss of America. This is essential to the repose, perhaps even to the safety of the king and his ministers. The most effectual engines for this purpose are the public papers. You know well that that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the minister. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. When forced to acknolege our independance they were forced to redouble their efforts to keep the nation quiet. Instead of a few of the papers formerly engaged, they now engaged every one. No paper therefore comes out without a dose of paragraphs against America. These are calculated for a secondary purpose also, that of preventing the emigrations of their people to America. They dwell very much on American bankruptcies.”
Thomas Jefferson
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The first fundamental step in untangling this mess is to take pac money out of politics. Gates and likes have to have one vote like everyone else and be prevented from BUYING “democracy”. The press is just one casualty in many policies effected by the Citizen’s United decision. Public education, home loans, raping of landscape through fracking, local governments looking out for business interests instead of local residents (think water as the latest or bridges in past), pension scandals, banking industry running amok… and on and on. English ivy has been creeping up trees in parks around DC eventually killing these trees … the Nature Conservancy goes out with volunteers and takes clippers and clips the ivy at the base of ivy-strangled trees. Without a parasitic source (once cut at their root), the ivy withers and dies on the trees. Eventually these ivies will fall off and the trees will be restored to health. Our nation needs to take our “clippers”… to divest big business from their tour de force… PAC MONEY TO PAY OFF POLITICIANS TO CONTROL POLICY.
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Higher estate taxes and higher income taxes on the wealthy, along with stricter restrictions on tax deductions for charitable contributions, would be a start to fixing the problem. The election of Bernie would help. The media, driven by ratings and revenue, would at least carry the occasional Presidential address, where Bernie would highlight the main issue to be concerned about- oligarchy has replaced democracy.
The most dangerous American traitors in history, have current competition from education reform oligarchs and their facilitators.
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Here’s a good comment from the Cody article:
———-
Karl Wheatley January 22, 2016 at 11:32 am
Reply
“Should I laugh or cry?
“Russo’s argument seems like a joke, or perhaps what happens when people have been marinating so long in the influence of big money that they don’t know what it would be like to be truly independent.
“Imagine I’m paid to work at a paper whose owner is an aggressively outspoken billionaire who has been sharply critical of public education and the LAUSD in particular, while being such a fierce supporter of charter schools that he’s willing to donate millions to fund them.
“Then imagine if I, working in this situation, come to the conclusion that billionaires are corrupting American education and that democratically-run public education is superior overall to a market-oriented charter approach.
“Assuming I really need this job to pay the bills, and given the shrinking market for newspaper journalists, what are the odds I will voice my real unvarnished opinions about education?
“Zero or close to it, unless I am extremely brave.”
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An indication of how serious the problem is: note the resurrection of the “everybody does it, so how bad could it be?” argument.
Not just deflection, not just avoiding the question, not just silence, not just self-serving words to justify self-aggrandizement [financial and/or emotional]: unethical behavior is part of the cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st century normal.
From the rheephorm POV, it goes without saying. And anyone that raises ethical issues?
Just ask Mr. “Civil Conversation” His Own Bad Self, Peter Cunningham, who prefers monitoring people to engaging in respectful dialogue with them—until they speak up, then they’re just so darn shrill and strident and kooky swarming goodhearted billionaires that they have to be put in their place.
¿? Remember that tv show of yesteryear, GET SMART? The “Cone of Silence”? This is a newer version. With an added twist that involves a giant blender and something called SOYLENT GREEN.
😱
Or so it seems to me at the moment…
😎
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John F Kennedy called his speech “The President and the Press” on April 27, 1961. Nowadays, some people call it “The Speech That Killed Him.” Here it is for your reading pleasure:
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/American-Newspaper-Publishers-Association_19610427.aspx
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An excellent read is “Ethics in Speech Communication” by Thomas Nilsen
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Forgive me, I did no get pat the words “Others do it too.”
This, by the way, is a very important CLUE to the HYPOCRISY that permits UNETHICAL behavior to flourish.
“EVERYONE IS DOING IT,” is so… so HUMAN!
People reason that if others do it to, it must be OK!
This, my friends and colleagues, is THE NORM that runs through our culture — like a SWORD, but which is ‘de rigeur’ in the bureauracies that are EDUCATIONAL systems… schools!
When there is NOT A SHRED OF ACCOUNTABILITY — when too many people do the WRONG thing — then, like day follows night, — some mongrel will go too far.
I am reminded of the men at LIBOR (the English Standards & Poors.) who were entrusted to rate the financial instruments: “Everybody was doing the same thing,” I actually heard one of them say — as if it were a REASON!
Everyone in the oil and coal industry is polluting our air and water. Ubiquitous. look at the gas leak in California, or the tragedy that is destroying the ecosystem where the BP oil leak polluted the gulf. Everyone was sloppy in reporting the poor maintenance on the leak preventers.
So, it was only A MATTER OF TIME, before some sociopath would PUSH THE LIMIT, and allow poisoned water to replace a city’s supply!
People ‘get it’ (that everyone is doing it , too)
It is common behavior in our culture, for example, to ignore COLLATERAL* damage in order to get the job done. I am reminded of what drones do.
We are at the point in the 21st century, where people think that ‘a tough guy,’ is normal and good, and a quality for our President. The anti-hero- – who has internal ‘rules’ for doing things– appeared in fiction in the seventies, and in the movies with” Rambo. THIS, is is what rea, tough guys do in order to reach their goal.
Now, decades later, it seems so normal… that everyone is doing his own thing! It IS it is an American right to march to an internal drummer, like the guys in Oregon believe.
Utter chaos, ensues, as it did when everyone who was running a school system in the eighties discovered that it was open season on tenured teachers..
Indeed, administrations were ALL doing it to tenured teachers, in the 80s & 90s, bu BECAUSE most teachers BARELY KNEW what was afoot in the school DOWN THE ROAD –, let alone across thousands of miles– TEACHERS WERE THE LAST TO KNOW that WAR HAD BEEN DECLARED ON Public Education, and the first assault was on the tenured expert,the professional in practice… the real teachers who would say, “ARE YOU KIDDING… that is not a curriculum or a standards, and you want me to stop what I have been doing.
Lorna Stremcha does a wonderful job of explaining this in the preface of her incredible book “Bravery, Bullies & Blowhards,” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/background-information-bravery-bullies-blowhards-lorna-stremcha
She describes how TOP-Down management took over what had always been the PRACTICE OF THE PROFESSIONAL , in Montana schools.
She did not know what was happening as the EIC directed the war across the states. https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
BUT, WE KNOW IT NOW… so what do we do NEXT…becasue complaining is not working!
Hey, there are 15,880 districts, and teachers caught in THAT transformational era in our public schools, were ALL experiencing the same thing! Top-dogs were mandating anti-learning policies, and when things went south, THEY BLAMED the teacher-practitioner VAM came LATER, when we tenured teachers were BUT A MEMORY
LET ME TAKE YOU ONE MORE STEP — and show you WHAT THE COMMON BEHAVIOR for DEALING WITH TEACHERS became, as the profession of teaching was IN THE PROCESS OF BEING utterly destroyed as everyone in charge was doing it… as I discovered in NYC. None of us knew that THIS was a hidden, but common process–the the WAY IT was being DONE, in schools ACROSS THE NATION!
Others were DOING IT!
THIS was the new culture of REFORM… doing it to teachers.
Good-bye tenured, experienced teachers…hello Core Curricula, and TFA..
Now hold on to your hats>>> Lorna , for example, was SET-UP, by the principal*, to be sexually assaulted by a stranger, in her classroom. This low excuse for a human being, had experienced NO deterrent for the harassment he brought into Lorna’s classroom, and saw the utter lawlessness among OTHER administrations existence, so, he took it to a new low.
* and she had to go to court to prove what he did… because NOTHING HAPPENED TO HIM! No accountability, like the banisters, means anything goes! http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2013/05/one-womans-legal-fight-against-workplace-bullying/
http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2013/10/lorna-stremcha-and-her-rubber-room.html
Gosh… read her book…http://www.amazon.com/Bravery-Bullies-Blowhards-Lessons-Classroom/dp/0991309936/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dptop_dn1Avb040EW4Q_tt
Lorna testified before Congress, and with her state senator brought a workplace bullying law into Montana. That was her path to recovery from the trauma & shock of what this principal thought was acceptable,– because , hey, everyone was getting rid of tenure by ignoring the civil rights of teachers. He just toolkit a step farther.
Administrators trampled on their civil rights of the teachers with impunity and got away with it.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Protecting our civil rights, is WHY we create LAWS that do not depend on subjective rationales like: “Hey, gimme a break, I am not alone –> they are doing it too, and getting away with it.”
Our laws prevents chaos, and ensures that the anarchy does not destroy good societies, or corrupt institutions.
The law MUST BE RETURNED to the classroom first, so that teachers have the floor under their feet when parents or administration undermine their voices and their professional practice. EVERYONE cannot do it any longer— NOT TO TEACHERS.
VAM is a charade, built on that first hidden assault that was so common, that it took our over a hundred thousand teachers, and is still in progress in LA,
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/lausd-and-utla-collude-to-end-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-teachers-part-2.html
We need to band together, like they are in NY right now, to end workplace bullying that is endemic in public schools.
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Join-UFT-Solidarity-in-Alb-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Bullying_Learning_Petition_Politicians-160120-489.html#comment579953
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I agree with Cody that it is not neutral or objective to expand coverage of innovation in education. What if conservation or restoration is more urgently needed than innovation? Won’t get covered by the “innovation” team. Covering “innovation” could easily become a euphemism for celebrating the injection of expensive gadgetry into education. Or celebrating the replacing of human teachers by robots. If we allow “innovation” to mean “good”, it’s hard to escape the implication that “conservation” and anything old is “bad”. I want Gates to fund coverage of preservation in education!
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Anthony Cody is so right to call attention to the “not neutral” aspects of current journalism.
Russo seems to be making a joke when he concedes that maybe the Los Angeles Times could sign some sort of ethics statement–if one exists. Maybe he needs to reread Paul Sussman’s comment. Sheesh.
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