Campbell Brown was a CNN anchor. Then she became the new face of the Education Disruption movement after the disappearance of Michelle Rhee. Brown advocated for charters and vouchers and she opposed teachers’ unions and teacher tenure. She claimed in various articles in the New York City press that the schools were overrun by teachers who were sexual predators, protected by the union. She created a news site called “The 74” to express her views; it was funded by the usual cast of billionaires (Walton, Bloomberg, Gates, Broad, etc.). She is anti-public school, anti-union, anti-tenure and pro-privatization. When Betsy DeVos was chosen as Secretary of Education, Campbell Brown acknowledged that she was a personal friend and that Betsy funded “The 74,” while Brown served on the board of Betsy’s pro-voucher American Federation for Children.
Those with a longish memory might recall that Brown started the “Partnership for Educational Justice” to file court cases in several states in an effort to destroy teacher tenure–a copycat of the Vergara lawsuit in California, which was eventually tossed out by the state’s highest court. Thus far, all of the PEJ lawsuits have also been thrown out by state judges who said that teacher tenure was unrelated to test scores. (There are probably more tenured teachers in affluent districts than in low-performing, high-poverty districts.)
Then Campbell Brown was chosen by Mark Zuckerberg to be in charge of media relations for Facebook.
Popular Information revealed the multiple roles that Campbell Brown is now playing.
The 74 = has heaped scorn on Elizabeth Warren since she released her K-12 plan, which proposes an end to federal support for new charter schools.
The 74 has (not surprisingly) lavished praise on Betsy DeVos.
Now Brown is in charge of deciding what news gets featured on Facebook.
While Brown served as editor-in-chief of The 74, the site featured at least 11 pieces from Eric Owens, an editor at The Daily Caller. Owens “has a long history of penning racially insensitive, sexist, and transphobic attacks on students and teachers.”
Owens, for example, wrote in The Daily Caller that white privilege is a “radical and bizarre political theory that white people enjoy a bunch of wonderful privileges while everyone else suffers under the yoke of invisible oppression.” In another Daily Caller column, Owens called college students “delicate, immature wusses who become traumatized, get the vapors and seek professional counseling any time they face adversity.”
Owens is also obsessed with female teachers who sexually assault male students, repeatedly writing exploitative stories about the incidents.
After Brown joined Facebook, The Daily Caller was named an official Facebook fact-checking partner, despite The Daily Caller’s history of inaccurate reporting.
Brown thinks Breitbart is a “quality” news source
Brown’s role with The 74 raises further questions about the ideological underpinnings of Facebook’s nascent news tab, which has not been rolled out to all users. Brown’s team elected to include Breitbart — an unreliable and noxious right-wing site that was literally caught laundering white nationalist talking points — among the 200 “quality” sources included in the launch.
Of course, Mark Zuckerberg hates Elizabeth Warren too, because she has talked about breaking up the big tech monopolies, such as Facebook, and taxing the personal wealth of billionaires.
You have just given multiple reasons for me never ever to go to Facebook, not for anything.
I was briefly on FB, then canceled my two accounts. They still appear even though I killed them but I never open FB. Ever.
Because The 74 is anti-labor union and anti-public school. Overwhelmingly.
Read it and decide for yourself. If this is an “unbiased” outlet for education “news” then I’m an iguana.
Every success story is a charter school and every failure story is a public school- that’s when they even mention public schools at all. Most of the time it’s all promotion of charters. The many, many articles promoting Rocketship and Summit are advertising. There’s no other word for what they’re doing. They are selling those charter chains.
I don’t mind that they have a viewpoint and a pro-privatization, anti-labor agenda. Obviously they believe that ideological approach is better. I mind that they insist they don’t.
https://www.the74million.org/
Here’s their totally unbiased and objective “union reporter”:
“ANTONUCCI, MIKE
OWNER, EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Mike is the director of the Education Intelligence Agency and has covered the education beat since 1993. Education Week called him “the nation’s leading observer — and critic — of the two national teachers’ unions and their affiliates.” Mike’s writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New York Daily News, Education Next, and many other periodicals, and his work has been favorably cited in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Post, and a host of other prominent daily newspapers. He has performed hundreds of radio interviews and appeared on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor.”
The self-described “leading critic” of teachers unions provides all the teachers union coverage at The 74. Unsurprisingly, it is 100% negative.
Why not just say they have a political agenda? They do. There wasn’t going to be positive or neutral coverage of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. That was never going to happen, anymore than it would happen on Fox news.
It just seems incredibly naive to accept Facebook’s assertion that their “news” service won’t have an agenda. We have lots of experience with Facebook now in the US. Has any of it been good?
These are people who rewrote the “origin” story of their company although the original (and accurate) story was widely known for a decade. They just erased the actual history and inserted a completely new one. They did this at a congressional hearing.
Quelle surpris!
&–about FB (hey, it should be named Aboutface Book)–I never, ever would have even considered using it after watching The Social Network, depicting MZ as the
dishonest, moneygrubbing individual he is.
How could anyone trust someone like that?! Never have, never will, never use.
Had to laugh, thinking of what SDP could do with this ala Green Eggs & Ham as applied to how Campbell’s “74” doesn’t like Warren.
If not SDP, Bob Shephard (sp.-?)–?
Campbell’s husband, Dan Senor, should disagree with those in her orbit about violation of church and state if, as he claims, he’s read what the founding fathers wrote. But then, it appears that Dan’s made peace with a lot of inconsistencies that would make other people uncomfortable,
He may be channeling Rick Berman’s anti-unionism or, maybe he’s opportunistic like Trump’s Steven Miller.
Sourcewatch has an entry for Senor that lists him as a Fox contributor. He’s also been described as affiliated with Vets for Freedom (labeled a Republican front group).
Reportedly, Senor was to be an AIPAC headliner along with Ralph Reed of the evangelical Faith and Freedom Coalition at a fundraiser. One media site reported that the controversial speakers led to a decision by the Jewish Hospital not to host the event.
Years later, in 2016, Rex Reed was at an AIPAC event in Washington attended by 18,000 people who gathered to hear from Republican presidential candidates. Reed concluded, “….important to the crowd were the millions of evangelical voters…”
The political alliance of influential religious leaders, tech business moguls and billionaires like the Waltons and Adelson is dangerous for the “economic and political freedom” that Senor purports to believe in. Senor’s think tank states its goal as “robust support for America’s democratic allies and opposition to rogue regimes”. What makes Senor think the U.S. isn’t a Bill Gates, Zuck et al oligarchy with a Trumpian rogue governing?
Senor’s mother escaped the Holocaust.
These are dangerous times with Republican ties to white nationalists.
Senor’s wife Campbell, like Ivanka, converted to Judaism. The school privatization agenda with which she is associated has been targeted by both the ACLU and SPLC.
Data breach at Pearson:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/11/14/1899339/-Data-Breech-At-Pearson-Mis-Education?_=2019-11-14T04:59:38.320-08:00