On the heels of this Summer’s Old Media attack of News Corp’s donation of $1 million to the GOP, we discover that billionaire Bill Gates of Microsoft fame has given $1.5 million directly to ABC News so that they’ll cover his personal “news” issue: health conditions of the poor.

Gates has been spreading his money around in more traditional media buys over the last year or so, too. He spent $3.5 million to start a TV production company that is working with PBS to report on global health issues and he’s also spent millions buying newspapers to keep them afloat. Additionally Gates has donated money to journalism schools and other media operations.

But this direct donation to ABC News is a different animal than the other media related spending that Gates has done. This is a direct donation of money to ABC News to buy their attention for Bill Gates’s personal interests. ABC is supposed to be a self contained, independent news agency that funds its own reports governed under its own authority. Gates’s donation really brings this status into question.

As to which program is targeted, ABC is using Gates’s money for its upcoming Be The Change: Save a Life series.

Now it would be different if Gates’s TV production company created its programming and then bought time on ABC to air it. There’d certainly be nothing wrong with that. But this is far different and more troubling. This situation is far different thing than, for instance, corporations donating money to programming on PBS because those are independent productions that PBS merely airs. (more…)

Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post.  A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide.  By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.  And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.

It is an abuse of their power, and an abuse of the institutions they represent.  It is appalling and repellent.  Perhaps even against their employers’ rules or the industry’s ethical code. Consider it an ominous warning — this will have a dire impact on our political and economic system in the future, if we remain apathetic in the face of such a rhetorical and intellectual assault.

In fact, both the rhetoric and the intentions demonstrated in Peter Dreier’s email are a classic example of much of what is wrong with today’s educational institutions: hypocrisy, bias, recklessness, and a blatant disregard for differing beliefs and viewpoints.

As Americans, we place an enormous amount of pride in the quality of our nation’s system of higher education.  In our country, colleges and universities have long been the bastions of research, the sources to which we turn for information that is expertly developed; for data that is honestly mined, analyzed, reviewed and responsibly published by noted researchers so that individuals, business people and policy makers can make well-informed decisions.

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