Foundations and Journalism: an Awkward Fit

By RICK EDMONDS

Three years ago, I began a research project on the relationship between foundations and the news media, thinking, on some level, that the two would be a natural match. Foundations have money to mount influential programs; many news organizations need money to do serious, ambitious projects. And for foundations, airtime or coverage in news columns can be like striking gold in reaching opinion makers and prompting action.

But I’ve concluded that foundation support of journalism — especially if it means grant makers playing a role in creating and shaping news content — is just plain dicey. Collaborations allow foundations to share decisions, at least indirectly, about what to cover and how to cover it. Readers and viewers rightly expect editors to do that on their own.

It is possible, of course, for grant makers to support journalistic endeavors without expecting anything in return. But foundation support often carries with it an implied association with an agenda that the foundation, or its benefactor, pursues in separate undertakings.

Even when the result of a foundation’s support is a good piece of journalism, confidence in the report could be undermined if the sponsor’s biases become known. More often they are simply undisclosed — what some would call a textbook hidden agenda. Giving money for a news project without strings doesn’t settle the question, either — even the appearance of bias matters. It matters not only to sticklers like me who think the press ought to be doing everything to protect its autonomy and independence, but it also matters to grant makers, who should be trying to get their messages out in as credible and convincing a fashion as possible.

A good example of a questionable foundation-media alliance is the Florence and John Schumann Foundation and its ties to two news-industry stalwarts: the Columbia Journalism Review, a trade publication for the journalism industry, and Bill Moyers, a well-known television journalist.

In the late 1990’s, the masthead of the Columbia Journalism Review listed among its donors the Schumann Foundation, without specifying the amount given or offering further information. A look at the foundation’s giving record shows it to be a prolific supporter of liberal publications and documentaries with a special focus on overhauling the campaign-finance system. But the typical Review reader has no way of knowing that the magazine took a life-sustaining $2-million over three years, starting in 1996, from a foundation with a pronounced slant on politics and money, a topic that the journalism magazine necessarily must regularly cover.

At the time of the big grant, Joan Konner, then the magazine’s publisher and dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, sat on the Schumann Foundation board. The magazine ran at least half a dozen articles on campaign finance from 1996 through 1999. Several were by authors supported by separate Schumann grants. Another article recommended two Schumann-supported research centers as reporting resources. (In fairness to the magazine, one article, in 1997, suggested that the campaign-finance topic was being beaten to death.)

In 1999, The Washington Post and other newspapers reported that Mr. Moyers was serving as president of the Schumann Foundation, drawing a six-figure salary. Mr. Moyers was concurrently producing Public Broadcasting Service documentaries on the campaign system, thus double-dipping in election-reform advocacy. Also, the documentaries, without disclosure, made heavy use of Schumann grantees as sources. And Mr. Moyers’s son, John, served as executive director of the foundation at the time. (He has since moved on to the related www.tompaine.com, a public-policy Web site.) Bill Moyers acknowledged all this but said he didn’t see a problem with it. The Schumann-Moyers connection didn’t rate a mention in the Review.

Ms. Konner said the Schumann grant had no restrictions and no influence on the magazine’s coverage, and she describes the magazine’s campaign-finance articles as “an overlapping interest” with those of Schumann, “not the result of pressure” from the foundation.

As the Schumann example shows, a back story typically exists on how the content has found its way into a publication or broadcast. But even when a foundation favors full disclosure of its influence on the shaping of a news report, that information cannot be captured in a credit line, or even in a fuller mention of the grant maker’s involvement in the piece. So even in the best circumstances, disclosure goes only part of the way to signaling what the intent of a donor or a grant maker may be.

Investigative reporter Rick Tulsky had a version of that experience several years ago when he was recruited from The Philadelphia Inquirer for what sounded like a dream job directing the Center for Investigative Reporting, in San Francisco.

Within two years, Mr. Tulsky left the position on less-than-cordial terms, after learning a lesson from the center’s alliances with grant makers. Though stories that the center produced — most typically in the form of television documentaries, many of them for the Public Broadcasting Service’s investigative Frontline series — were fine on their own terms, and several won prestigious prizes, he said, each had a foundation or corporate sponsor. And virtually every underwriter, if you looked just a little, had an ax to grind.

A whistle-blowing television documentary on mining pollution, for instance, was financed by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, which says it focuses its giving on protecting the environment and on building a “sustainable” world. But Mr. Tulsky says that retaining journalistic independence while taking money from such an obviously ideologically driven source as the Jones Foundation “gave me the willies.” The mining exposé was a legitimate story, he says. But because W. Alton Jones provided both a trail map of what to look at and money to do the story, Mr. Tulsky says he felt like a paid hand of the foundation, producing fodder for Jones’s environmental agenda.

Not surprisingly, many foundation executives are not such purists as Mr. Tulsky about financial backing of media projects.

Hodding Carter III, chief executive officer of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and a former newspaper and public-broadcasting journalist, concedes that foundation support of news organizations is a “slippery slope” that must be navigated with caution. But he says such arrangements are not wrong in principle in all cases.

“The trouble comes when a news organization starts doing things they would never otherwise do,” he said. “So maybe the test should be, ‘Does it change our shape or mission?’” Even so, Mr. Carter added, “if the foundation wants you to do A, B, and C, and you want to do C, D, E, and F, and they’ll pay for the whole thing, that’s all right — as long as A and B are not incompatible with what you’re doing.”

But Mr. Carter’s conciliatory views are by no means universal. Some of the most pronounced debates over foundation-media alliances have focused on the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $12-million project of the Pew Charitable Trusts now in its ninth year. The center has commissioned dozens of newspaper and television newsrooms to use its seed money to reach out to hometown citizens, identify a civic issue, then write about the results.

Pew had no trouble finding newspaper and television collaborators who were comfortable taking its money, but it also quickly drew a host of critics, including news executives of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Civic journalism is more soft community relations than real news, the critics said, and a few accused Pew of trying to buy its way into participating newsrooms.

Pew has also committed more than $10-million to its Project on Excellence in Journalism and close to $12-million to public-interest polling. And in recent years Pew has sponsored five different research and reporting projects in the million-dollar-and-up range. These are fairly dizzying amounts and raise a suspicion that participating news organizations are being used even as they are being helped.

In the field of health policy, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is every bit a media polymath as Pew, whether influencing the messages on reproductive health on television dramas or giving small grants to cover the special expenses of approximately a dozen health-reporting projects per year for newspapers or television. A few — but only a few — other foundations seem to be following the trail Pew and Kaiser have blazed, perhaps not eager to ruffle the prickly sensibilities of working journalists.

But even if content collaborations are highly problematic (and certainly not all in the media profession would agree with me on that), grant makers can be doing plenty else to help. Possibilities include unrestricted grants to quality operations like National Public Radio; support of world press freedom and professional training for journalists; and forward-looking studies of quality journalism’s big challenges, from profiteering media chains to free content on the Internet.

In foundations and the news media, we’re talking about two important cultures that barely know each other. Mainstream journalism has been blind to the vast nonprofit world and only now is starting to open its eyes. At the same time, many grant makers are just getting familiar with the values that inform good journalism: independence, absence of favoritism, and the aggressive pursuit of truth, no matter the fallout.

It would be great if groups on both sides of the divide talked more with each other — preferably without grant money on the table.

Rick Edmonds spent 25 years in the newspaper and magazine industry as a writer and as an editor, most recently with the St. Petersburg Times, whose nonprofit owner, the Poynter Institute, trains journalists and news-media executives. This article is based on research that Mr. Edmonds conducted for a Poynter Report titled “Behind the Scenes: How Foundations Have Quietly Seized a Role in Journalism, Commissioning Content.” The report is available on the institute’s Web site at http:// www.poynter.org.