Treglia Story Makes FNC (which then pulls punches); NYU Asked about Brennan Center's $$$
Since Ryan Sager broke the news of Sean Treglia's candid comments about Pew's role in forming what John Fund has since dubbed an "Astroturf" campaign in favor of campaign finance "reform," no network news program has, to my knowledge, covered the story.
Yesterday evening, however, Fox News broke that silence with this report by William La Jeunesse. The video is available on their site, and if you haven't watched it, you'll want to so that you can see how the story's being played on TV. It's primarily a recitation of Sager's columns, and I found it a straightforward and useful story, as it will carry word of the actions of Pew and its sister foundations to a wide audience.
But there is a discrepancy in the FNC video and the transcript of their own story. The Fox transcript faithfully records the final two sentences spoken by La Jeunesse, but omits one key word that he spoke on the air: dirty.
The video shows that the final sentence should read:
Also, in the video, we're shown a brief shot of the headquarters of National Public Radio. I watched the show last night, and after the piece ended, host Brit Hume said, in effect, that NPR was shown by mistake, that it had nothing to do with the story, and that Fox regrets the error.
But the editors included the NPR clip for a reason: As Ryan Sager reported on March 16, there is a direct connection to this story and NPR.
NPR claims that there has never been any contact between the funders and the reporters. NPR also claims that some of the $1.2 million went to non-campaign-finance-related coverage. But at least $860,000 can be tied directly to coverage of money in politics.
It would appear that someone at Fox, both on air and in the transcription of the story, decided to tone things down a bit.
I would disagree, also, with Mr. La Jeunesse's characterization of Treglia's comments as "inadvertent." No one speaks that candidly about his former employer, and for two hours, inadvertently. No, Treglia was blowing the whistle on his old friends, and he knew it.
Also today, the Washington Square News (the area of Manhattan in which NYU is located) runs a column by Jonathan Cipriani titled "Speech, Lies and Videotape." Cipriani does a favor with this column, which will be read by residents of the area (the Village), many of whom could use a dose of political reality, as well as some in the NYU community.
He's interested in the latter angle because NYU Law School's Brennan Center received $1.6 million from Pew:
I also asked Benz about a 2001 fund-raising dinner, described on the center's website, at which Sen. John McCain was honored for "his heroic efforts to promote and pass federal campaign finance reform." [emphasis added] Benz said the dinner is held annually and is a large source of the center's "unrestricted" funding, though she did not know exactly how much had been raised at this specific event.
Go to the home page of the Brennan Center for Justice, and you'll find the usual array of liberal causes that they support. Click on "Campaign Finance Reform," and you'll find this:
The Brennan Center's Campaign Finance Project strives to strike the right balance between the need for candidates and political organization to raise sufficient funds to communicate effectively with voters and other interests, such as ensuring that elected officials are not unduly influenced by donors, and that our elections embody the fundamental principle of political equality that underlies the Constitution.
The Brennan Center was part of the legal team defending the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 at both the District Court and Supreme Court levels. We are currently helping to defend a similar law in Colorado.
We also provide legal guidance and support to state and local campaign finance reformers through publication of Writing Reform (a state-by-state guide to campaign finance law and precedent), direct counseling, legislative drafting, and testimony in support of reform proposals.
Follow either link in that text, and you'll get a better idea of the Center's (and Pew's) strategies that Sager and others have written about. They fund studies purporting to show the horror of money in politics (except their money, which is of course clean and only given for the best of intentions), as well as publications on how to expand federal restrictions on political speech to your home state.
The soft underbelly of the reform movement is now visible for all to see, if only everyone read blogs or watched the Fox News Channel. This is an issue that we must continue to research, as it represents the most significant threat to our First Amendment rights in memory. I'll be posting more on this soon.
Update: The Brennan Center links to this page (pdf) of "National Organizations Offering Resources for Campaign Finance Reformers." The list is 12 pages long and includes such organizations as PIRG, the American University School of Communication, Brookings, the Campaign Legal Center (run by McCain former staffer Trevor Potter), the Center for Public Integrity, the Environmental Working Group (part of the Tides network), and many more. Again, we see that the many "watchdog" groups that are regularly trotted out by the MSM to comment on "issues of concern."
| Mar. 31, 2005 | 9:47 AM