At 4:45 on the final day of the Democratic National Convention, Kevin Palmer stands in the lobby of the Charlotte Convention Center, holding a whiteboard reading, “Tell me about the 1%.” Palmer, a recent Harvard graduate, is a reporter for the Franklin Center, a nonprofit, conservative-leaning online media organization that publishes news and commentary on state and national politics. The whiteboard is an innovative attempt to attract interviewees. Everyone wants my picture,” Palmer says. “It’s campy, but it works.”
Palmer and his colleagues have been in Charlotte all week, filing five to eight dispatches a day: a long, reported piece about what, exactly, political conventions are good for; an article by Dustin Hurst about the trash cans in the DNC convention hall; a story about how non-swing states are not drawing much national attention during this election season. It’s typical convention coverage—with a distinctly conservative twist.
The Franklin Center is perhaps the most ambitious conservative news organization you’ve never heard of. Founded in 2009 by Jason Stverak, a former Republican campaign operative, and initially funded by over $2 million in seed money from the conservative Sam Adams Alliance, the Franklin Center funds small online news operations in 18 states. (CJR’s Guide to Online News Startups has profiled several Franklin Center sites.) Eschewing the usual online mix of punditry and aggregation, the sites produce an impressive amount of investigative state and local political reporting, often focusing on government waste and public employee unions, both of which the Franklin Center dislikes. According to its own website, the Franklin Center “already provides 10 percent of all daily reporting from state capitals nationwide.”
When it first began, the Franklin Center served as sort of a news incubator, giving money and training to independent news organizations across the country, many staffed by veteran reporters with longstanding ties to the states they were covering. (The sites varied in quality.) Now—according to the Franklin Center’s vice president of journalism, Steven Greenhut—the Center is consolidating those independent sites into one main site, Watchdog.org, that contains all of the Center’s statehouse reporting. The Center also runs a citizen journalism platform called Watchdog Wire, and publishes some content on its own site, FranklinCenterHQ.org.
The sites report from an obviously conservative standpoint, about which the editors do not apologize. (Though the Franklin Center’s website claims that its sites are nonpartisan, this seems only nominally true.) “We try to set the agenda. That’s what a good newspaper does and what a good website does,” said the Center’s Greenhut, a former O.C. Register columnist, during a panel discussion in Tampa the week of the Republican National Convention. “We have a point of view. Big deal.”
Some say the Franklin Center sites have more than just a point of view. In a July piece titled “How A Right-Wing Group Is Infiltrating State News Coverage,” Media Matters’ Joe Strupp suggests that the sites are thinly disguised lobbying organizations that conceal their activism by calling it journalism. Noting that the Franklin Center does not disclose its funders, and interviewing several other journalists who “speak warily of the group’s ideological bent,” Strupp describes an intricate web of symbiotic relationships between the Franklin Center sites and various conservative advocacy organizations, and raises serious questions about the sites’ impartiality.
Indeed, Palmer’s editors sent him up to the convention center lobby in Charlotte for a specific purpose: to goad inarticulate Democrats into appearing illogical on camera. When people stop, he asks them a series of questions—whether the 1 percent can relate to working people; whether Mitt Romney can relate to working people; whether John Kerry and other wealthy Democrats can relate to working people—designed to elicit responses indicating that it’s alright for Democrats to be rich. “You’re a Mitt Romney supporter, aren’t you?” one woman asks after the interview concludes. A sheepish Palmer admits it. “How did I come across as a Romney supporter there?” he asks after she leaves. It isn’t very hard to tell.
Isn't ideological agenda revealed in the way stories are written? I would think it's up to the reader to deconstruct that in any story — including this one!
I think announcing one's agenda up front is superfluous, because it's revealed in the text. I read economics blogs, for example, by progressives, and others by libertarians. The bias is rarely explicitly stated, but over time it becomes clear.
You seem to be proceeding from the assumption that readers expect neutrality in reporting unless explicitly told otherwise. I'm not sure that's the case.
#1 Posted by eatbees, CJR on Fri 14 Sep 2012 at 12:48 AM
The Columbia Journalism Review is likewise an advocacy organization. CJR advocates through story selection, slant and hints in the masthead that contain the name of a particular political party at the expense of an honest representation of constitutional structure (How about "Strong press; Strong Democratic Republic?" or "Strong Narrative Spinners, Strong Fascist State?").
Media insiders know when and where CJR has failed to report stories that would reflect poorly on old-school, left-leaning dailies. It doesn't take an insider to recognize CJR's recent celebration of a far-left paper in Oklahoma - in which CJR matter-of-factly labeled as conservative the towns liberal alt-weekly "This Modern Word" venue -- as a strong pull toward veiled bias. Perhaps CJR is a bit concerned about an upstart network whose sponsors would rather reveal their bias than their identity.
#2 Posted by feralKat, CJR on Sat 15 Sep 2012 at 01:12 PM
Come on, Justin, you seem to have bent over backward so far to give them the benefit of the doubt that your piece goes far too easy on what any fair-minded observer can see is simply right-wing agitprop. This is not a news organization by any possible stretch of the imagination, but simply political propaganda by other means. Give them credit for their audacity.
#3 Posted by John Ettorre, CJR on Fri 21 Sep 2012 at 10:37 PM