An often overlooked realm of nonprofit use of technology for advocacy involves access to information, not only with respect to government, but also financial information from corporations and nonprofits themselves. One way such information is used is to demonstrate the influence of special interests on public policy formulation, discourse, and decision-making, under the veneer of nonprofit public interest work and/or grassroots activity. Are there special interests hidden behind the online philanthropic policy watchdogs? The following was originally posted to the NPTalk online forum. An April 16, 2001 NPTalk and a December 13, 2001 Wall Street Journal editorial by Kimberley Strassel point out that there are legitimate questions around what constitute grassroots activity, as more direct big dollar resources find their way into "astroturf"-- grassroots activity generated, organized, and conducted within a fixed time period, around a single issue, by actors or entities who are not themselves grassroots actors, yet shield their involvement and influence in the overall proceedings. While Strassel asserts that the scope of corporate involvement in such activity is expanding, such that it is bankrolling questionable activist activity by grassroots groups, creating the "illusion" of on-the-ground public interest activity and foundation-backed "research," the NPTalk piece points out that "besieged" corporate actors are responsible for bankrolling a number of campaigns designed to confuse, if not undermine, legitimate grassroots activity -- especially in the regulatory arena. Strassel lauds a website called Activist Cash. Launched in mid-December 2001, ActivistCash is powered by a growing database of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents (currently over 100,000 pages) filed by targeted tax-exempt nonprofits (and foundations that support them). It purports to counter, under a banner of right-to-know, a "... web of anti-consumer activism -- promoting false science, scare campaigns, inflated public health causes, and sometimes violent anti-consumer 'actions'" by educating the public and donors around the duplicity of funders, and nonprofits who mislead foundations, into funding "…politicized polemics under the guise of 'research,' or who funnel money to a cadre of activist networks." Approximately 20 groups are currently profiled, featuring commentary on their motivations, financial information, connections to one another, and contradictions in their activities or public statements. In addition to financial records, individual management staff, directors, and trustees are listed such that, when clicked on, their links to other profiled groups are revealed. The ActivistCash.com effort, however, assumes that there is an imbalance in the amount of information available to the public, with nonprofits and their foundation donors responsible for withholding the disproportionate amount of that information. It also assumes the existence of a network of civic-minded foundations, infiltrated by activist plants, that are steering philanthropies further and further away from their missions, and more towards coordinated attacks on a under-resourced corporate/private sector community. Well, guess what? ActivistCash.com doesn't necessarily come clean on its own site about the source of its funding. While it asserts that it receives no foundation funding ("unlike the activists we track", it proudly asserts), it makes passing reference to a sister site called ConsumerFreedom.com. This is the site for the Center for Consumer Freedom, a coalition of 30,000 restaurant and tavern owners (as well as individual alcohol and tobacco interests) engaged in public outreach and education, research, and training activities in opposition to regulations on drinking, health, food safety, tobacco, labor, and environmental issues and the groups that advocate around them. As a counterweight to the ActivistCash, MediaTransparancy.org has provided access to news and commentary around conservative foundations and donors, the groups that benefit from their support, and the issues around which they are most active. Since July 1999, it has attempted to fill the gap between awareness of foundations that support conservative groups and causes, and information on the groups receiving such money, by providing access to information around the people involved in both camps, how the money is spent, and the amount of funds that have been distributed since 1990. Users can track funding sources behind movements around faith-based charities, public school privatization, social security privatization, influence in state and local courts, and even the controversial "Arkansas Project" through which over US$2 million in conservative funding was funneled through two nonprofits established by a conservative magazine to conduct questionable inquiries into former President Clinton's private life and activities in his capacity as Arkansas governor. There are, however, two features that stand out in particular. First is the grants database, which lets users search by funder, recipient, people involved, purpose of the grant, or a combination thereof (including date range of funding). Even more interesting is the "Fundometer." This is an online gauge of how much bias a given web URL has compared to the donor database. In other words, if you enter a website URL, it conducts a search against the database of people, funders, and recipients, and reports back where there is potential overlap by way of text as well as two graphical displays: a traffic light ("red" means high conservative bias, "green" low conservative bias) and a corresponding meter gauge. Click on any of the results that turn up, and you can find out about the entities and funding it has received or given. The site, much like ActivistCash.com, makes a convincing case that a small pool of donor resources supports organizations that are tied to institutions of policy ranging from the academic, legal, think tank, media, and government, such that ideology is effectively formulated, developed, tested, disseminated, marketed, and infused into decision-making while masquerading as legitimate policy deliberation and citizen-based and/or grassroots advocacy. Since both corporations and nonprofits are required to disclose information and financial records around their operations, this raises questions around how much information is available to the public, such that it can determine what interests are actually behind what types of public interest advocacy. One of the compelling elements of both sites is their quest not only to provide public access to financial data, but also reveal the broader philosophical framework through which donors and recipients interact to affect policy. Similar resources can also be found through the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which also reports on the role of conservative donors in shaping public policy (including the use of think tanks), and OpenSecrets.org, which tracks campaign donations by corporate actors. Mediatransperancy.org is actively looking to explore other ways conservative influence is felt, particularly in the court of popular culture and opinion, something also explored by PR Watch and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which track corporate and media influence in shaping public policy. [NOTE: While not exclusively focused on foundation or corporate influence on policy through the media, another organization, Accuracy in Media, does provide occasional investigation, critique, and analysis on these themes, albeit from a conservative perspective.] Also, PR Watch's Impropaganda Review provides a reference explaining the history and techniques behind "front groups" or vehicles through which industry actors (including trade associations) and their public relations resources attempt to influence media and public opinion by planting editorials or news articles which favor a particular position, and/or underwriting research that is passed off as independent or unbiased but that actually reflects the sponsors wishes. The issue is that by failing to reveal who is funding what articulations of opinion and bias in material that is ultimately cited as "proof," such influence is based on "lies of omission" perpetuated as a rationalization, to paraphrase PR Watch's words. In short, it is manufactured news used against legitimate public interest entities to counter (or blunt, if not block) genuine public interest perspectives from gaining visibility in the media and press. Resources Cited 4/16/01 NPTalk 12/13/01 Wall Street Journal editorial Kimberley Strassel Activist Cash ConsumerFreedom.com MediaTransparancy.org National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy OpenSecrets.org PR Watch Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Accuracy in Media PR Watch Impropaganda Review