The Boston Globe-Barr Foundation Marriage and the Rise of Philanthro-Interest Group Journalism

The announcement last week of the $600,000 grant from the Barr Foundation to the Boston Globe was presented as a public spirited philanthropy offering the Globe the means to research our education system’s failures and report back on how to fix them.  It is not. It is the dawn of philanthro-interest group journalism.

That’s a mouthful so let me explain. Journalism is easy – the Globe is the most important media outlet in the state. Philanthropy is something that generates positive responses as leading citizens “give back” to the community. What? You’d rather have them buy another yacht? But philanthropies are increasingly acting like interest groups[1] and that is what Barr is doing. It’s expending money to gain influence for its policy preferences on education.[2]

Get over the idea of Barr as a disinterested philanthropy scrupulously pursuing only the public good. It’s an interest group. How so?

Consider the political operating charities Barr has been supporting in the bitter contest between union and civil rights and community groups versus the wealthy interests who wish to privatize public education. Barr’s Form 990 tax returns show it routinely donates to political non-profits that promote privatization.

• In both 2015 and 2016 Barr gave $200,000 to Stand for Children, a beard for privatization interests. (SFC, then funded by members of Strategic Grant Partners, was behind the 2010 charters ballot measure and the 2012 anti-union ballot proposal, both of which ended in compromise legislation).
• In 2016 Barr gave $125,000 and in 2017 $175,000 to Educators for Excellence “to support the launch of E4E’s Boston chapter.” E4E is a faux teachers operation, a company union alternative to real teachers’ unions.[3]
• Barr has contributed to Massachusetts Parents United, the Walton family front that executes privatization activities for the WalMart heirs.[4]
• Just this year Barr funded the rollout of SchoolFacts Boston, a new operating non-profit headed by former mayoral candidate John Connolly, whose candidacy was backed by $1.3 million in dark dollars from Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts. Connolly recently appeared at a DFER event.

We also can’t ignore the history of the money man behind Barr, Amos Hostetter Jr. (By the way, did Hostetter donate to DFER for the 2013 Boston mayor’s race? We’ll never know. DFER is a dark money front).

• In 2009 Hostetter contributed $32,500 to the Committee for Public Charter Schools, the ballot committee formed by Stand for Children to support a ballot initiative in support of more charter schools.
• In 2016 Hostetter secretly donated over $2 million to Families for Excellent Schools in favor of Question 2 to increase the number of charter schools. Because Hostetter hid his donations behind that dark money front, his largesse was not known until the Office of Campaign and Political Finance ruled that FESA had violated state campaign finance law and ordered it to disclose the true sources of its funding. Hostetter was the fourth largest individual donor to FESA.[5] If not for OCPF, we’d never know.[6]

Now let’s turn to what the partners say will be the focus of the investigation. The Globe “will explore educational programs that succeed and identify those that fail the students and communities they are supposed to serve.” Also,

“Inequality of opportunity is one of the defining issues of our times, and our failure to give all kids the opportunity to get a quality public school education is where it all begins,’’ the Globe’s editor, Brian McGrory, said in a statement. “This team is charged with probing where we’ve gone so wrong and what can be done to help make it right.”

The study should

examine public education in Boston and nearby communities, always with a goal of being as provocative as possible in what might be done to fix core issues of inequality, social mobility, and economic opportunity in the region.

It looks like the Globe and Barr will ignore a significant part of the debate that looks to poverty, under investment in public education, and yes, privatization as imposing great damage on public education (and democracy as well).  I’m not an education scholar so read Diane Ravitch on this stuff. But the focus of the two year program seems to be right where Barr would like it.

I don’t know if this philanthro-interest group journalism model is in place elsewhere but I do know that foundations invest heavily in think tank advocacy “research” that is then disseminated to influence policy toward pro-market solutions. Recently two outstanding political scientists, Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tompkins-Stange published a journal article on the topic, also in Interest Groups & Advocacy.

Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange show that foundations “commission, control, and package information – especially research evidence – and fund advocacy organizations” to drive the political agenda. In a quantitative portion of their study, they found that foundation grantee witnesses at congressional hearings “were significantly more likely to share policy preferences related to teacher evaluation than their non-grantee counterparts. Thus, foundation grantee witnesses differed systematically in their policy preferences compared to non-grantees.”

Why throw money into non-profits which then mount communications campaigns to move the public agenda when you can partner with the area’s dominant news outlet that has vast influence over the public discussion?

The Globe and Barr are clear on this: “The Globe will maintain complete editorial control over story selection, reporting, and editing.” There will be a firewall between Barr and the Globe’s reporting. That’s something we can all support.

Still, we’re all human. We’re subject to the reciprocity principle. When someone (or some foundation) does something nice for us, we feel obligated to return the favor.[7]

And the individuals who will work on this project have to know (because the Globe put it in print) that this new model is important due to the collapse of traditional media revenue streams. Reminding the employees that we may all go under unless we can nurture this relationship could quell even the most rebellious spirit. It’s also a signal to other philanthropic interest groups.

Remember a few weeks ago when I posted UnKoch My Boston Globe because the paper was passing off corporate happy talk sponsored by Koch Industries in its “Bold Types” series? The Globe even had one of its real business reporters produce the Koch advertisements.

In December of 2017, after the disclosure of Hostetter as one of the dark money donors to Families for Excellent Schools, the Globe published a tough Frank Phillips piece called Philanthropist Funded Trip for Oversight Officials tying Hostetter’s $2 million in contributions to a desire to influence the Baker administration to block a hotel development near Hostetter’s waterfront office. Phillips also reported that Barr had funded travel for two state environmental officials to attend a conference in Europe just as Hostetter was seeking the department’s aid in stopping the hotel project. Phillips wrote that “No authorities have suggested Hostetter did anything wrong. But he is a prime example of how the appearance of conflicts of interest can arise for both private citizens and government officials when an individual involved in civic causes and local development is also a big political donor.” You have to wonder how much spirit would be behind doing a similar story today.

The Globe will be printing stories and conducting forums to drive its education agenda. Given the inherent conflicts of the philanthro-interest group journalism model, the paper risks both its credibility and its reputation.

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]

[1] Jeffrey M. Berry and Kristin A. Goss, “Donors for Democracy? Philanthropy and the Challenges Facing America in the Twenty-first Century,” Interest Groups and Advocacy (2018) 7:233-257. This journal edition is edited by Berry and Goss and devoted to scholarship on philanthropies as interest groups.

[2] Spare me the protests that the Globe could never be swayed by such a contribution. It doesn’t have to be, it’s already there. The money is to amplify, not change or create.

[3] E4E is a special project of privatizer Joanna Jacobson, who has poured in at least $5 million dollars through her family’s One8 Foundation and Strategic Grant Partners foundation.

[4] See Barr Foundation Form 990 tax returns, available at Guidestar.org, and maparents.org.

[5] The top three individual donors were all members of the Boston based foundation Strategic Grant Partners: Seth Klarman, $3.3 million; Joshua and Anita Bekenstein, $2.5 million: Jonathon Jacobson, $2.04 million, Hostetter, $2.202 million. The next two top contributors were Jim and Alice Walton, WalMart heirs.

[6] The Form 990s are very extensive and so I acknowledge that the complexity of Barr’s giving can’t be captured in a blog post. It gives to both charter and public schools for example. But in terms of its giving to non-profits that engage in education politics, it supports the privatization agenda.

[7] Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: Harper Business Edition, 2006).