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ProPublica: The Scandal Journalists Won’t Touch

By encinoman

At a recent CORO seminar, journalist Joe Mathews (author of a definitive Arnold Schwarzenegger political biography)  noted that though he now works for the New America Foundation, he didn’t trust non-profit journalism sponsored by foundations–”They have more of an agenda than advertising supported newspapers ever did.”

I pounced on his point and asked him about one of my pet peeves: ProPublica.  ProPublica is one of those nonprofits.  It funds investigative journalism to the tune of many millions of dollars–but where the money comes from is always worth knowing. Maybe the newspaper ‘ad goons’ the LA Times James Rainey remembers weren’t so bad after all.

ProPublica was founded by Herb and Marion Sandler, a husband and wife team Time Magazine listed in their exclusive round-up, “25 people to Blame for the Financial Crisis” due to their ‘pioneering’ use of option ARM loans at World Savings.  They sold World Savings to Wachovia for $2.3 billion dollars, walked away and watched as Wachovia imploded from the weight of all the bad loans.

Will the journalists of ProPublica rake this very prominient muck?  No, and certainly not when Paul Steiger, ex editor of the Wall Street Journal,  made $570,000 in 2008 at ProPublica.   Worse, with the desperate straits of journalism, other journalists (with the exception of Slate’s Jack Shafer) seem very unwilling to question what they see as a liferaft to the drowning.

I wrote a letter to the editor at the LA Times after this glowing pro ProPublica story and another to Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) which devoted four (four!) articles in a recent issue about the exciting future of non-profit journalism.   Neither was published; perhaps CJR was miffed when I told them to go sell some ads (they had a page and a half paid in the issue I looked at.)  As for the LA Times, they use ProPublica stories, (provided free to participating publishers) so apparently they’ll brook no criticism.

Meanwhile, these high-minded philanthropists follow the lead of the dynamic Ariana Huffington, a pioneer of progressive unpaid journalism.  A non-profit startup will use 120 unpaid Berkeley journalism students as “slave labor” to cover the area.

I could use some (paid) work but I’ve probably blown my chance at a ProPublica job.  So here’s the letter I wrote to the LA Times:

To the Editors:
 
As a long-time journalist struggling with the economy and the ’secular decline’ of print (read ‘paying’) media, I’m glad nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica exist.  However, this “new phenomenon of philanthropically supported newsrooms” bares some uncomfortable similarities to the often self-censoring journalism practiced by what Stephen Engelberg calls “the big corporations.”
 
The “California philanthropists” he works for, Herb and Marion Sandler, were founders of World Savings.  They were named to Time Magazine’s exclusive list, “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” in 2008, due to what Time calls their “misleading” promotion of the option arm loan, which led to the implosion of Wachovia after the Sandlers pocketed $2.3 billion in the sale of their bank.
If ProPublica practices investigative journalism to “hold powerful people accountable”, Engelberg doesn’t have far to look for his next story.
 
Michael Goldstein

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This entry was posted on October 1, 2009 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Journalism, ProPublica. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “ProPublica: The Scandal Journalists Won’t Touch”

  1. Hypocrisy Detector Set to High « Monday Morning Media Quarterback Says:
    October 2, 2009 at 1:31 am | Reply

    [...] Monday Morning Media Quarterback A top independent journalist looks at the good, the bad and the outrageous in the media. « ProPublica: The Scandal Journalists Won’t Touch [...]

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