Flack Journalist’s Defense Confirms Flackhood

In May, 2000, I received an anonymous email objecting to my summary of a New York Times article about a public policy research institute called The Independent Institute. The Times report had made the Independent Institute’s very name a dark joke, revealing that its aggressive campaign in support of Microsoft during the government’s antitrust action against it had been secretly funded by one Microsoft Corporation.

My new correspondent directed my attention to an article supporting the Institute that appeared in Reason Magazine, a publication of The Reason Foundation, another research institute . The Reason Foundation describes itself as “a national research and educational organization that explores and promotes the twin values of rationality and freedom as the basic underpinnings of a good society.”

The main thrust of the article, by Senior Editor Jacob Sullum, is to protest “The Think Tank As Flack,” a Washington Monthly article by David Callahan. Callahan’s piece notes that the Institute/Microsoft affair described in the Times report is but one example among many of supposedly unbiased public policy reasearch institutes being used by private interests to promote their political agendas.

“I take this charge a bit personally,” says Sullum in his article, “since I work for one of the think tanks mentioned in the article.”

Sullum -- whose online bio notes that he has spoken at policy conferences, won journalism awards, and written for National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others -- then proceeds to demonstrate his determination to distort and deceive in order to promote his causes. It is instructive to scrutinize his technique.

The Times article, published on September 18, 1999, had stated:

On June 2, the day the [Microsoft] antitrust trial resumed for its final month of testimony [...], the institute ran full-page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post signed by 240 academics who were said to support the view that antitrust prosecution was harmful to consumers -- a key argument Microsoft was making in court. Complemented by a heavily promoted news conference in Washington, the effort received enough attention that David Boies, the government’s lead lawyer in the antitrust suit, referred to it in court on June 3.

[...]

[Institute Founder and President David Theroux] has long acknowledged that Microsoft is a dues-paying member of his institute, a point that is usually made in news articles about the institute. But he has insisted all along that Microsoft is "just one of 2,000 members" and as such pays a membership fee of roughly $10,000 a year -- an inconsequential part of the organization’s overall budget that gives the company no special standing. [...]

He has also maintained that Microsoft had nothing to do with the newspaper advertisements. The ads, he said in the interview, "were paid for out of our general funds."

His letter to economists soliciting participation made no mention of Microsoft.

But, in fact, among the institute’s internal documents is a bill Theroux sent to John Kelly, a policy counsel for Microsoft, for the full costs of the ads, plus his travel expenses from San Francisco to Washington for the news conference, totaling $153,868.67. Included was a $5,966 bill for airline tickets for himself and a colleague. [...]

Asked Friday evening about that bill, Theroux acknowledged that Microsoft had paid for the ads [....]

The accounting sheets show that Microsoft contributed significantly more than $10,000 last year -- $203,217, in all, the most from any outside individual or organization [....]

Sullum’s article appears to contradict the Times story by summarizing the central point as follows:

Three and a half months after the ads appeared, The New York Times ran a front-page article noting that the Independent Institute had used money from Microsoft, one of its donors, to pay for them. [...] The Independent Institute had long acknowledged donations from Microsoft, which it says amount to about 8 percent of its budget.

What this conveys is more than obvious: that the Institute had “long acknowledged” the Microsoft donations revealed by the Times report. This would overturn the central allegation of the Times story.

But Sullum’s sly wording is in fact technically consistent with the Times report. The above passage actually presents nothing more than two completely innocuous assertions:

1. The Institute “had long acknowledged donations from Microsoft.” This is true, since the Institute had indeed long acknowledged the annual $10,000 membership fees paid by Microsoft. Note that Sullum is careful not to say the Institute had long acknowledged the donations from Microsoft. (That would be wrong, because the donations would refer to the donations that were the point of the Times article.)

2. The Institute “says” (present tense) that the donations amount to 8 percent of its budget. This may well be true too, since this statement by the Institute is made after the Times article made Microsoft’s contributions public knowledge. The point of the Times article, of course, was that this was a secret before the article appeared. It is evidently no longer a secret after it is published in the Times.

Quoting the passage above from Sullum’s article, I queried him by email: “What is the basis for your statement?”

Sullum might have divined that what was being questioned was the basis for his apparent contradiction of the Times allegation. But he responded as if the question had been: “What is the basis for your statement about what the Institute says now?” The answer to this is effortless: The basis is that that’s what the Institute now says. That is essentially his response (emailed May 15, 2000):

My basis for reporting that the Independent Institute said Microsoft’s donations amounted to about 8 percent of its budget was that the Independent Institute said Microsoft’s donations amount to about 8 percent of its budget.

Sullum then goes on to quote a passage from the Institute’s published response to the story.

I replied that the Institute’s response is implausible (for reasons given in my commentary). Referring to the Institute’s claim that it had acknowledged the extent of Microsoft’s donations since before the appearance of the Times article, I added: “you cannot swallow whole anything an accused person says in self-defense. At the very least, indicate they are your sole source.”

Sullum insisted he had done so, emphasizing that he had indicated that the 8% figure came from the Institute.

One can hardly doubt that Sullum is well aware of what he is communicating. The only conclusion one can draw is that this journalist, rather than disseminating news and information, is intent on deviously advancing falsehoods in order to promote unethical people and institutions.