There was a time when journalism, academia and leftist mass politics were separate entities. Not too long ago, some university professors could still be found who took a dim view of demagogues, for example, and even the liberal media bestirred itself to report on the philanderings of William Jefferson Clinton. Today, though, the trifold Venn diagram has collapsed: universities, most journalists and the militant left have fused into one.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a given newspaper article, college syllabus or Democrat Party platform are conceptually interchangeable documents. And when people working in one estate change jobs, they are equally fungible. Jay Carney works either as a reporter for Time magazine or as President Barack Obama’s press secretary, and Donna Shalala is either President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services or the president of the University of Miami, but the tasks they perform are all geared toward exactly the same end regardless of where they punch their time card.
We got a glimpse into just how this triple nexus works—and why it has made both professors and newsrooms into parrots of the party line—when it was revealed last week that the Center for Communication and Democracy, right here at the University of Wisconsin, was one of two universities the Federal Communications Commission selected to help decide what information the government should allow us to know. Partly behind this newsroom monitoring project was George Soros, who gave more than $1.6 million to UW over the past decade. The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, the other school selected by the FCC, also received Soros money—$120,000 in direct funding in 2012 alone.
Lewis Friedland, a key investigator in the FCC news-oversight project, is the director of the UW Center for Communication and Democracy, and is also the head of leftist journalism group Madison Commons, funded in part by the J-Lab at American University, a school itself in receipt of more than $2 million from George Soros since 2000. And, according to the UW School of Journalism’s own website, the Friedland-directed Center for Communication and Democracy received $20,000 from USC’s Annenberg to conduct the questionable FCC work.
Friedland is hardly the only individual or department on campus with ties to left-wing journalism and politics, but the fact that he and the UW Center for Communication and Democracy were chosen to spearhead the Pravda-ization of the free press shows just how deeply the confluence among academia, politics and the media goes. If what we are hearing from professors, politicians and media outlets has begun to sound very much the same, we now have some idea as to why.
Much to the chagrin of our would-be leftist hall monitors, history will have to record that it was Republican Ajit Pai, an FCC commissioner, who bravely blew the whistle on this nefarious scheme and helped preserve what freedoms remain to those who want to write the truth, without waiting for the imprimatur of the party. Obama has a drone, his National Security Association has your phone records and emails and his IRS has your bank account information, but the fact that his FCC does not yet have the few remaining independent-minded journalists under workplace surveillance is in direct defiance of the tripartite alliance of the left, its media and its very compliant universities.
Jason Morgan ([email protected]) is a history Ph.D. student.
