Who’s manufacturing your news?

After weeks of battling media misinformation about the Affordable Care Act, I was hungry to write about something different this week. And thankfully, a different item popped up as my deadline loomed.

Two headlines screamed out to me on Thursday morning: “DOUBLE WOW!! www.StinkTanks.org PERFECTLY Exposes Koch Cabal $$ used in each US state” and “Corporate America’s New Scam: Industry P.R. Firm poses as Think Tank!” In other words, corporate interests use think tanks to lobby our representatives, and said think tanks make stuff up.

The first article, a Daily Kos post by War on Error, highlighted the latest project by the Center for Media and Democracy to uncover corporate manipulation of our government via media and think tanks. This new web site, stinktanks.org, allows citizens to track the influence of the State Policy Network, a Koch Brothers organization, currently targeting statehouses to advance corporate interests.

As War on Error writes, “While SPN members call themselves ‘think tanks,’ they rarely act as such. SPN groups often engage in extensive lobbying activities, even though nonprofits are limited in the amount of lobbying activity they may participate in by the IRS. SPN ‘think tanks’ release ‘research’ and policy reports, and there are numerous instances of SPN think tanks being accused of skewing facts and using faulty research to reach their policy goals. Many SPN think tanks also collaborate with the right-wing Franklin Center to launch agenda-driven ‘news’ outlets, hawking right-wing talking points from behind a mask of journalism.”

The second article outlined events surrounding the release of a study finding that low wages paid to fast food restaurant workers cost American taxpayers $7 billion in social supports annually. The study authors argued that raising these workers’ wages would unburden taxpayers of subsidizing super-sized corporate restaurant profits.

Shortly thereafter, media began reporting conflicting research results from an entity called the Employment Policies Institute. As article author Lisa Graves noted, “In fact, the Employment Policies Institute operates from the same office suite as Berman and Co., a public relations firm owned by Richard Berman. This is not an opinion; it’s a fact anyone can verify by viewing EPI and Berman and Co.’s websites. In such a depressed media environment — where there are four public relations flacks for every reporter, compared to a 1-to-1 ratio in the 1960s – it is not surprising that a P.R. company could successfully rebrand itself as a think tank and capitalize on an acronym held by an actual think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, with 20 staff and 36 respected research associates.”

This is why I always ask who is paying for your news. Who owns your favorite cable or network TV or radio station? Who owns your daily newspaper and magazines? Who owns and operates the web sites you visit? Are they for profit? Are they funded by advertising or donations?

And if owners and key decision makers are not transparent about these things, instead operating in secret, they are probably trying to manipulate you to act for their benefit, not yours.

Which, darn it all, gets me back to Obamacare. Are we going to accept the sketchy reports from media and politicians rooting for its failure, or are we going to fight for the help we need?