First of all, people make the mistake of calling NPR, a vicious left-wing radio, and that's simply not the case. There are left wing programs on the radio (which probably should be cut) but they're also extremely informative shows such as the Diane Reams show, which I found to be the most informative debate I heard in the ENTIRE pollitcal season.
They had a debate on the stem cell research argued by conservative with (get this!) a medical background who actually made me contemplate my position on this research. No Jerry Falwells, or Hannity's, or Hardball/Crossfire's etc throwing slander back and fourth, but real honest to god debate.
And they host a half-an-hour of BBC world. Again, British news is way better than CNN or fox.

For the record, and despite Instapundit's weird interpretation, there was no distancing going on. Rather, we questioned whether what Sean Treglia said last year accurately portrayed Pew's activities (it certainly didn't with us). We disclosed Pew's support of our work -- and provide examples.

You can read what I wrote here and decide for yourself:

http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=673&sid=200

By the way, I'm not sure where you get the "key" Pew grantee stuff (our grants from Pew are in the six figure range, hardly a drop in the bucket for them) -- do you feel it's fine for you to just make stuff up?

Well, if you insist that the Center for Public Integrity is not a "key" recipient, then fine.

But here's Ryan Sager:

All of the major reform groups -- Common Cause, the Alliance for Better Campaigns, the Campaign Finance Institute, the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Responsive Politics, Democracy 21 and the William J. Brennan Jr. Center for Justice -- are funded by the same eight liberal foundations, and have received millions upon millions of dollars each.

I think that's important enough to be labeled "key" -- especially in the context of McCain-Feingold.

But if you insist, I can always use another word.

The real outrage, as I see it, is that Pew would be funding the biggest attack on the First Amendment that I have seen in my lifetime. The original family members would have been horrified. I'm sorry your organization was a part of it -- and I hope not a "key" one (although I'm still not convinced.)

#1. The study you're quoting from is the shoddy work of PoliticalMoneyLine, although sometimes I can't quite tell where they stop and Ryan Sager begins, since he seems to be doing their research for them. You can read my comments on his blog to see what I think of both (not much -- and I faxed Sager documentation proving how inaccurate the PML study was).

#2. The Center for Public Integrity has never advocated any campaign finance reform, ever. EVER. Rather, we've tracked political influence in Washington, D.C., in State Capitols, and around the world. To cite one example, we were the folks who broke the story that the Clintons were renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign contributors. We also were the folks who published on our site the secret text of draft legislation that would have vastly expanded government's powers under the PATRIOT Act. But hey -- that kind of reporting is an assault on your first amendment rights, right? I mean, at heart we're just a bunch of jack-booted thugs who would like nothing better than to tape your mouth shut so you have to listen to us reading Hegel in German for hours at a time to raise your revolutionary consciousness.

#3. The work that we do (and that of some though not all of the other groups you're citing) is not especially different from what PoliticalMoneyLine does; the primary difference is that we make all of our information available for free on our Web site, while PoliticalMoneyLine charges for theirs. Do you think they might have a vested interest in trashing the Center and the other non-profits that do this kind of work? Huh? Do you? Take your time, I know it's a difficult concept to grasp...

#4. I'm sorry you're not convinced about "key." Take a look at Pew's annual report, or its Web site. It does all kinds of things. It spends far more on projects looking at the Internet, public education, the environment and other areas than it does funding us or campaign finance, for that matter.

#5. Note that I have some serious doubts about whether what Treglia said he did is what he actually did. My impression is that plenty of grantees of Pew that studied campaign finance disclosed that Pew funded them (actually, it's more of a hearty thank you than a disclosure), but I can only speak for what our group did -- we thanked Pew up front, and I think Pew (and Treglia) would have been a little perturbed if we hadn't. That's some stealth campaign, isn't it? The evil Center for Public Integrity masking Pew's involvement by thanking them at well attended press conferences, on our Internet site, or in the acknowledgments of commercially published books. How diabolically clever of us! Next thing you know, we'll be hiding our funders by inviting hostile pseudo-journalists like Ryan Sager into the office to examine the non-public portions of our 990s in an effort at full disclosure! (Cue Snidely Whiplash music...)

Gee.... at least you didn't accuse me of being on the Republican payroll!

(BTW, I'm still waiting for the long promised check from Karl Rove. So I better watch my step or this blog will end up being called "Classical Astroturf" by the Astroturf police.)

Anyway, for what it's worth, I don't think my assertions are all that out of line.

Rich Lowry has described the Center for Public Integrity as "a high-profile Washington-based organization behind campaign-finance reform."

If that's too right wing a source (I think Lowry may be to the right of Ryan Sager -- if such a thing is possible!), CNN has called Center for Public Integrity's president Charles Lewis a "leading campaign-finance crusader."

I'm sure you can attack Lowry and CNN just as you have attacked Mr. Sager. But is it necessary to impugn the motives of people who say what the president of your own organization admits? I've read interviews with him, and he clearly champions campaign finance reform -- and he makes it clear that the noxious McCain-Feingold law is only a first step.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2004/03/03_401.html

http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/2004/04/MJ100_200.html

http://www.liberaloasis.com/lewis.htm

Frankly, I don’t blame you for changing the subject to the Patriot Act.

And while I'm amused by the jack-booted thugs reference, don't you think you're putting a few words in my mouth there? I mean, it's not as if the Center for Public Integrity is pushing to get rid of the Second Amendment....

Perhaps I should be grateful that you didn't accuse me of anti-Semitism. Such was the fate of GOA's Larry Pratt, and I think Dave Kopel's remarks on the subject are worth repeating:

Larry Pratt and his group Gun Owners of America have written literally hundreds of thousands of words on public policy, all of them available to anyone. The people at the misnamed Center for Public Integrity have not cited a single sentence written by Larry or GOA that has any hint of racism or anti-Semitism.

Nor does this "Integrity" group point out that GOA has consistently emphasized the lethal dangers that gun prohibition poses to African-Americans, Jews and other minorities who, when disarmed, are at the mercy of the majority. Whether you agree with this argument or not, it is certainly not an argument likely to be offered by a bigot.

Hope it's not a pattern.

Given that we've been around for 15 years, and that we've done hundreds of reports ranging from 750,000 word behemoths to 500 word quick hits, it's not surprising you could find a few you don't like, just like your opposite numbers on the left didn't care for our exposure of Ron Brown's selling tickets on trade missions, or Tony Coelho's ethical problems (which forced Coelho, Gore's top campaign manager, to resign), or that Democratic 527s were out-fund-raising Republican leaning 527s by a wide margin.

I didn't know Rich Lowry had such a high opinion of us that he thinks we drive the campaign finance reform debate (a mistaken assumption). It may shock you, but I like Lowry's writing, I find he always has something interesting to say, and his book on the Clinton years was well worth reading. And for the record, Byron York, National Review's investigative reporter, has used our stuff from time to time in his stories, and I think he's regarded us as a non-partisan source of information. He may not like everything we do, but few people do -- as Chuck Lewis once said, we're the skunk at that Washington garden party.

I don't know why, after I sarcastically described we Center folk as jack-booted thugs, you'd assume I was going to describe you as an anti-Semite -- I must be missing something. But really, if we were some diabolical anti-Republican group as you suggest we are, wouldn't we'd be trying to prop Pat Buchanan up as much as we could? Don't you think we'd be much better off in 1996 concocting a story that, say, Elizabeth Dole hung out with white supremacist groups? Don't you think that would have done much more to damage the GOP?

Or do you think Pat's views (which are often anti-Israel -- whether or not they're anti-Semitic I leave it to you to decide) are the mainstream of the GOP? We don't really care about such things. We learned about Pratt when we did a project investigating the backgrounds of the top advisors to each of the major primary candidates' campaigns. In the course of that project, we learned that Pratt was giving speeches to some pretty unsavory groups and we reported it. I've yet to read anyone -- including Dave Kopel -- deny that Pratt attended that meeting, and I don't think any of the facts of our report have ever been disputed. We never called Pratt a racist or an anti-Semite; we just noted the company he kept. If reporting something truthfully is a smear, well, we plead guilty as charged.

Those commentaries by Chuck sugges only that money has a corrupting influence on politics, and that the recent ballyhooed reforms haven't made things much better. I can't speak for Chuck on this, or the organization, but my own view has always been that just as water rises to its own level, money always will find its way into politics. There is too much at stake for it not to. The best thing you can try to do is to disclose it, to publicize the real abuses, and trust that the American people will do the right thing. I think there's some evidence that this approach works at least some times -- look at Torricelli in New Jersey.

If you're a partisan Republican (full disclosure: I'm not, though I've voted for both Democrats and Republicans for every office from mayor to President), I would be worried about the Jack Abramoff scandals unfolding now; you can see the same sort of corrupting influence of money, the use of public policy for personal gain, exactly the worst sort of corruption that the American people DO seem to get.

Speaking of advocating reforms (and as I said -- we don't), your good buddy Glenn Reynolds once co-authored a book which argued that members of Congress on, say, the banking committee shouldn't accept campaign contributions from banks -- that's a far more specific reform than anything my old boss has argued for. (In fairness, I should point out that Chuck usually points to problems within the system; he's always been focused on exposes; Reynolds -- or his coauthor, hard to tell -- offers the committee example, which was actually someone else's idea, as one common sense reform, but doesn't offer much more than that.) Does this mean that Reynolds (or his co-author) is more of a threat to free speech than Lewis?

Wouldn't common sense also suggest -- if one takes this to its logical conclusion -- that banking interests shouldn't be able to run independent campaigns (issues ads) aimed at defeating or re-electing a member of the banking committee? If I were an incumbent facing a tough competitor, and Credit Card Corp of America ran independent ads that smeared my opponent and gave me a narrow win, don't you think I'd be grateful to them? And let's take the flip side -- I've got a tight race in November, there's a bill credit card companies want that I think is a bad bill, and the credit card lobbyists quietly let me know that if I don't support them, they've got a 527 ready and waiting to run tough ads against me.

Thinking off the top of my head, this is a far more likely scenario in the Senate than in the House.

Again, I'm not advocating anything -- I'm just fooling around with possibilities here -- but why is the common sense proposal potentially any less of a threat to free speech than BCRA was? Because some committees -- say, Finance or Ways and Means or Budget -- affect everyone, no? So under the Reynolds Rule (you can call it the Allison rule if you prefer, unlike my last comment I'm not trying to insult anyone here), you couldn't run an independent campaign against a Dan Rostenkowski because, as chairman of House Ways and Means, every citizen was potentially affected by him.

Even if you don't have the independent expenditure corollary to the Reynolds Rule, let's say that Senator Jones is on Banking -- does that mean his opponent, Smith, can't raise money from banking interests? She might not end up on the Banking Committee, but since she's opposing a member of that committee...

This is why by and large we don't get into the tricky business of advocating any kind of reform whatsoever. We put out scads and scads of information, searchable databases covering everything from lobby disclosure laws in the states to 527 expenditures to media ownership. We also look at federal contracting, at first amendment and press freedom issues around the world, and quite a few other issues.

Look, I don't think anything I write here will convince you that we're not the great Satan, but I will also promise you this -- at some point down the road, there will be a Democratic President or presidential candidate or 527 or what not, and we will break damaging information about an ethical lapse on his/her/their part, and you will quote it and denounce the damn Democrat, and you won't mind at all that it was the Center for Public Integrity that broke the news.

And you know what? It won't bother me in the least.

Great Satan?

Diabolical anti-Republican group?

I simply disagree with McCain-Feingold, and don't like seeing Pew money funding limitations on free speech -- especially when ordinary people don't know about it. Last time I looked, McCain was a Republican. I voted for him in the primary against Bush, too. But I think he's dangerously wrong on campaign finance reform.

I have no problem with providing information to the public, and as you remind, CPI has done some great things. However, disclosure is one thing, but I think prohibitions on money or speech invite worse mischief than the mischief they prevent. There is no way to get the money out of politics, and in my view, complex rules devoted to combating the appearance of impropriety only ensure the survival of the sneakiest. I don't think the Pew family would have liked it.

It may surprise you that I enjoyed reading your blog, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we may be making invalid assumptions about each other. (Jack booted thugs who want to make me listen to Hegel? Really now....)