Transparency Group Lacks Transparency: Another Puppet Show
Submitted by gregflynn on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 9:29am
There’s a new puppet show in town, but you wouldn’t know it from their website. Capitol Monitor claims to “shed daylight into the darkest corners of our "citizen" government”:
We'll provide a behind-the-scenes look at how public policy happens in North Carolina, summarizing the roles of the various players, including grant-making foundations, advocacy organizations, public leaders, and other individuals, in influencing policy-making.
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It's all about transparency.
The problem is there is no transparency about the website and its owners. The only clues are the copyright notice at the bottom referencing "The Capitol Monitor, Inc." and the domain name registration. From the NC Secretary of State filing for "Capitol Monitor, Inc." the initial board of directors is listed as Perri Morgan, Bob Luddy, Kent Misegades and, Becki Gray:
Perri Morgan is the listed registrant for the domain name capitol-monitor.org. Perri Morgan is the executive director and registered agent for NC 100, Inc. NC 100 was founded in 2005 with Art Pope, Ron Joyce and Tom Blair listed as the initial board of directors.
To promote and represent the common interests of businesses that maintain their principal commercial operations in North Carolina through public advocacy and education and through support of public policies and legislation that benefit such North Carolina-based businesses.
On the NC 100 website Kent Misegades is listed Vice-Chairman and Bob Luddy is listed as a founder. Luddy and Pope are both members of the board of directors John Locke Foundation largely funded by the Pope Foundation. Misegades is also chairman of the board of trustees of a private school in Apex, NC, founded by Luddy an advocate for public school vouchers for private schools. Becki Gray is a lobbyist and outreach director for the John Locke Foundation. The address listed for her in the corporate filings is that of the John Locke Foundation.
The website features a glowing review of the John William Pope Foundation in "Non-profit Profiles" . The only other "Non-profit Profiles" on the site is of the Z Smith Reynolds Foundation. It is decidedly less charitable with cynical and coded references to illegal immigrants, Muslims and politically biased characterizations of policy issues. Last week the two reviews were featured side-by-side but by this morning they were separated with the Pope Foundation given greater prominence.
Ironically and hypocritically Gray wrote an op-ed published in the Charlotte Observer March 27th calling for greater transparency regarding expenditures
so reporters and citizens can assess their value and look for patterns, such as personal relationships and political giving.
Too bad Capitol Monitor, Inc can't provide the same degree of transparency about its own operation.
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This calls for a new, updated version of the Puppetshow Map!
I'm sure I'm missing miles of invisible strings, but you get the picture.
Pope's riffing off the Heartland example
An entity named the "Heartland Institute" (based in the Midwest) publishes "reports" and publications attacking environmental regulation, climate change science, public involvement in health care financing, etc. It sends a lot of unsolicited emails and print materials to local elected officials. It's a political dogma machine pretending to be an objective research and education outfit. In other words, it's a national-level analogue of the Lockies' network.
A few years ago, Heartland was fairly out-front about its major corporate sponsors. Then it started catching a lot of flak about its combination of major tobacco-industry funding and its attacks on tobacco regulations. So it stopped reporting its corporate financial sponsors on its website.
Right-wing transparency in action.
Dan Besse
Dan Besse
In reply to Dan Besse
Dan, you seem rather confused on the funding of the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute does not receive funding from the tobacco industry and receives less than 5% of its budget from corporations. For more information on the Heartland Institute check out the truth squad page, linked under Press Room.
Nice try.
Heartland Institute is part of a network of ExxonMobil faux think-tanks whose main goal is thwarting any effort that might cut into the billions that big oil pulls in every year:
I got your Truth Squad right here.
Tobacco Ties
Perhaps you might be interested in the Heartland Institute's Tobacco Ties
Sure hope you got screenshots
Their site is down. Must be scramblin' to make it, ummm, transparent?
Puppetshow
I can't identify the folks in the lower middle. The image seems to be cut kind of close at the bottom of those pictures, so I'm not sure whether the names are there and I just can't see 'em or perhaps the names are missing? Who are they?
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
-Edmund Burke
Their names aren't there
I ran out of room and patience . . . they just keep multiplying like flies. You can find them all in the JLF Locker Room, but you'll have to hold your nose if you visit.
Hate to do that, but
ok, I'll visit the danged locker room. I don't like providing them hits.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
-Edmund Burke
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
-Edmund Burke
They're back up
with no changes that I can see. Just a faceless, invisible cabal of political operatives trying to drive a business agenda. Transparency indeed.
J
PS Plus they have a tip jar! Hilarious! I guess Pope will soon be demanding that they start staging bake sales.
no surprise here
all four of them are kneejerk Republican voters
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http://twitter.com/Jerimee
Is there no underlying plan?
There seems to be agreement here that they are building a polemical echo chamber of some sort, apparently because there are too few "natural" North Carolina conservative voices to meet the Popeist needs.
Grand design aside, who is writing the new site's original material, if any?
For example, with all due respect to everyone involved, the Z. Smith Reynolds profile seems to me to have been freely adapted from print sources.
If there is original material in that, er, "profile," someone here please crack my knuckles with the nearest ruler and enlighten me on that nature of that original material.
Aggregation
There is no authorship declared. All of the various articles posted mirror NC Republican talking points. It is an aggregation of Democrat bashing. The site is bogus in terms of transparency.
Bogus in terms of everything
n/t
JLF
I took a closer look at the articles on the Capitol Monitor site. It is mostly rewritten John Locke Foundation/Carolina Journal material with most of the external links to Carolina Journal including a very recent Hood editorial.
Maybe it's more transparent than I thought. And that's not a good thing.
So it's a species of splog. Well, if splogging themselves
is the strategy, we're likely to see more of this.
Of course creating splogs, or variations on that strategy, is an inexpensive way to push their message on a larger audience of unsuspecting readers. Write once, publish many. Cheap.
Another, more commonplace goal of subsidiary splogs is to drive up the search engine rankings of a target blog.
The subsidiary blogs point "back to" the blog one is trying to promote, using traditional HTML links.
Those links are usually seen as valid by technorati, for example, and so drive up the technorati rankings for the target blog.
Thus driving more traffic to the target.
I'll try to help keep an eye out for that sort of link fraud.