Foundations and Blogs

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

To the Editor:

If Sean Treglia wishes to question my integrity as a journalist (“Philanthropy and Blogs Can Be a Dangerous Mix,” Letters, May 26), he should have the confidence in his charges to level them at me by name. He would also do well to avoid making things up.

Mr. Treglia, a former program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts, gives an account of a telephone conversation we had prior to my publishing a story in the New York Post about the funding behind the campaign finance-reform movement. The story centered around a speech Mr. Treglia gave at a journalism conference (of which I obtained a video), back in March of 2004. In it, Mr. Treglia discussed Pew’s role in funding a plethora of supposedly independent policy groups to, in his words, “create an impression that a mass movement was afoot” calling for the campaign-finance reforms that would eventually come to make up the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.

In the course of his account, Mr. Treglia grossly misremembers (or worse) a number of key facts and fabricates an incriminating-sounding quote from me out of whole cloth.

First off, Mr. Treglia claims that I did not watch the full video upon which my column was based — in other words, that I only watched a few clips. Nonsense. I watched the full video before seeking Mr. Treglia’s comment and never said anything to him that could have been construed otherwise.

Second, Mr. Treglia claims that I never looked at the “Web sites, materials, reports, statements, etc.” of the groups that received grants from Pew, where Pew’s name was “displayed prominently.”

How Mr. Treglia presumes to know what I did or did not look at prior to writing my story, I do not know. But I was thoroughly aware that Pew’s name appeared in these places, and my Post story never made any claim to the contrary.

Third, the made-up quote. Mr. Treglia claims that I declined to fact-check my story, telling him, “I don’t have time for all that, I’m going with my story.” I simply said no such thing.

It should also be noted that Mr. Treglia can’t claim that one single fact in my piece is untrue. He says that Pew “did not attempt to hide its involvement in campaign finance.”

But if that’s true, why did he tell the crowd, speaking about Pew’s funding, that “if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it’d be worthless. It’d be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain. So, in order, in essence, to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway, I felt it was best that Pew stay in the background.”

Sounds like hiding to me. Or does Mr. Treglia have a more innocent-sounding word for it?

Ryan Sager
Editorial Board
The New York Post
New York