I responded to Saltsman, saying this was “political manipulation under the guise of scholarship.” He wrote back to allege bias: “It’s economic consensus that runs counter to your point of view.”
Then I printed the entire exchange with the headline “Flack Attack: The reason we won’t print this letter.” By saying that I’m not printing a letter that I am obviously printing, I thought I’d found a way out of a journalistic rock-and-a-hard-place.
I’m lucky. My readers expect (and often appreciate) this kind of thing. “Your exchange was, sadly, a rare example of a critical thinking approach to the ‘research’ the Employment Policies Institute consistently—and pervasively—offers up to the public,” wrote Jen Kern of the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit organization that defends the labor rights of minimum-wage earners.
But most editors don’t have that privilege. More often, they are victims of flacks “working the refs.” The Saltsmans of the world need merely allege bias. That, combined with the limitations of time and knowledge, often results in exactly what they want.
For us truth-tellers, that’s exactly what we don’t want.
Thank you for an insightful article!
Letters to the editor are a big moneymaker for Rick Berman and his PR firm. Berman's staff send out hundreds of these op-ed pieces and letters under the name of their various front groups and faux nonprofits. Berman and Company Inc then "bills" the nonprofits (such as EPI and the Center for Consumer Freedom), siphoning nonprofit "donations" into Berman's corporate and private bank accounts, where those corporate funds quietly disappear.
According to the past four years of tax years for Berman's nonprofits, they've published (and billed) more than 1,000 of these industry propaganda pieces masquerading as opinion.
It's not only a perversion of our media outlets, it's a shameful abuse of the nonprofit tax code that should be investigated and prosecuted.
#1 Posted by John Doppler Schiff, CJR on Fri 23 Dec 2011 at 03:54 PM