MEDIA TRANSPARENCY

Newsletter

Sign-up for our newsletter

Register

Only registered visitors are allowed to email content or post comments

Support Media Transparency

Your help is essential to this website

SEARCHING

About the Data

Find out where the grant data comes from, and what years and philanthropies are included.

How to Search

Information, tips and tricks for making your search more successful

Search

Grants – search grants based on their stated purpose
Recipients – search all grants to a particular recipient
Funders – search for organizations or individuals that are funding grants
People – search for people who benefit from grant funds
Website – search the website for specific text
Advanced search – specifiy multiple criteria
All-in-one search – search the website and the database at the same time for specific text

Mobile version

Using MT on a Palm, BlackBerry, or Windows CE device? Try our pda version of this website.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH | pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Neoconning the Media

A Very Short History of Neoconservatism

Within the past month or so the political/cultural group known as the Neoconservatives (Neocons) have lost two of their central magazines. But don't shed any tears for the Neocons - they've got plenty of perches for their pontificating

Read the full report >

Deathbed Dollars

While Terri Schiavo was still alive, her parents agreed to sell their donor list to a right wing direct mail outfit, and radical right wing Christian groups were raising bundles off the case

During the weeks preceding Terri Schiavo's death, a number of radical right wing Christian fundamentalist groups stepped up to take full advantage of what the Traditional Values Coalition's (TVC) Rev. Lou Sheldon characterized as a "blessing...to the conservative Christian movement in America." Established organizations like the TVC, relative newcomers like RightMarch.com, and newly formed coalitions, like Voice for Terri, had their Web sites sizzling with news of the case and extensive fundraising appeals.

Read the full report >

Secret and Ties

GOP Leaders' Pledge Loyalty to the Religious Right's Agenda at Secret Meetings with the Family Research Council and the Council for National Policy

In the mid-1990s, during a speech to the Montana Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, then the national Christian Coalition's executive director and more recently a top advisor to President Bush, advised the group to heed the words of the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu. "The first strategy and in many ways the most important strategy for evangelicals is secrecy," Reed suggested. "Sun Tzu says that's what you have to do to be effective at war and that's essentially what we're involved in, we're involved in a war. It's not a war fought with bullets, it's a war fought with ballots."

Read the full report >

Faith The Nation

The Bush Administration awarded $2 billion in grants to religious organizations in 2004. Is Team Bush setting up a National Endowment for Religion?

On March 1, President George W. Bush told the more than 250 religious Faith the Nationleaders attending the White House Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Leadership Conference at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, that he was committed to his faith-based initiative "despite congressional apathy and criticism from some that he hasn't done enough to push the agenda," the Scripps Howard News Service reported.

Read the full report >

Team Schiavo's Deep Pockets

A host of right wing organizations, many of which are affiliated with the Philanthropy Roundtable -- a consortium of right wing foundations and philanthropists -- have been copiously funding the Terri Schiavo case

If you don't follow the ins and outs of the philanthropy scene you likely have never heard of the Philanthropy Roundtable. Jon Eisenberg, a lawyer working on the Terri Schiavo case wasn't familiar with the organization either until a few months after he filed an amicus curiae brief in the Florida Supreme Court on behalf of 55 bioethicists and a disability rights organization opposing Gov. Jeb Bush's action in trying "to overturn a court order to remove Terri's feeding tube."

Eisenberg, who appeared at a Florida State University public debate with lawyers for Gov. Bush and the Schiavo family two months after filing the suit, was curious as to whether Pat Anderson, "one of multiple attorneys who have represented" Terri's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, and Wesley Smith and Rita Marker, "two activists whose specialty is opposing surrogate removal of life-support from comatose and persistent vegetative state patients," were doing this work on a "pro bono" basis as he was.

Read the full report >

Tim Goeglein: Selling Brand Bush to the Christian Right

Young and relatively unknown, Tim Goeglein is parlaying his street cred with Christian conservatives into support for a vast array of Bush's policies

One week after the terrorist attacks in the US in 2001 Tim Goeglein appeared on the radio program of Jay Sekulow, the legal beagle who runs the conservative American Center for Law & Justice. Goeglein was there to reassure Sekulow's listeners that President Bush was on job and prepared for the task at hand: He's "doing beautifully, he is uplifted, he's determined, he's resolute," Goeglein told Sekulow's listeners. He also pointed out that the president "knows his own mind, he's comfortable in is own person, he's very convicted...We've heard a lot of good and evil, a lot of talk about justice and righteousness. This is an outgrowth of his faith. This is the genuine article. This is George W. Bush, and he takes his role as Commander in Chief as seriously as any man ever has."

Read the full report >

James Kennedy's Christian Crusade

TV Evangelist's ministerial and media empire claim US a 'Christian nation', don't believe in the separation of church and state, and aims to extend political reach

Although not nearly as well-known or flamboyant as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Focus on the Family's Dr. James Dobson, or Pat Robertson, Dr. D. James Kennedy, who was recently inducted into the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB - website) Hall of Fame, has created a media and ministerial empire that is packing a powerful political punch.

Read the full report >

Richard Viguerie's Army Attacks Social Security

USA Next, an organization founded by Viguerie as the United Seniors Association in 1991, backs Bush in battle to privatize Social Security

n their new book, America's Right Turn: How The Conservatives Used New And Alternative Media To Take Power, Richard Viguerie -- the right wing king of direct mail -- and co-author David Franke, describe how the printing press played a pivotal role in the battle between Lutherans and Catholics in the 16th century

Read the full report >

Bush, God, and the Media

How the president has used religion to control American politics

American presidents beginning with George Washington have included religious language in their public addresses. Claims of the United States as a divinely chosen nation and requests for God to bless U.S. decisions and actions have been commonplace. Scholars have labeled such discourse "civil religion," in which political leaders emphasize religious symbols and transcendent principles to engender a sense of unity and shared national identity. George W. Bush is doing something altogether different.

Read the full report >

Wead in the Rose Garden

Doug Wead, former advisor to George H.W. Bush and counselor to Dubya, has a history of self-promotion and crass opportunism. The release of the Bush Tapes is only the latest example

Most of Doug Wead's political career has been spent out of the public eye. Except for a failed run for an Arizona congressional seat in the early nineties, he'sWead in the Rose Garden generally worked behind the scenes, first serving President George H.W. Bush and later, advising George W. He's generally avoided the headlines in the mainstream press. Last month, however, Wead came charging into the hot glare of the media spotlight. When you scratch beneath Doug Wead's surface you find an Assemblies of God minister who divorced his wife, a man involved with pyramid schemes, televangelizing faith healers and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

Read the full report >

God, Government and Gingrich

Newt Gingrich is on the Comeback Trail

Newt Gingrich, who is firmly embedded on the New York Times bestseller list with his new book Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract With America, is both selling books and seeing if people will buy a future for him in electoral politics. Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and the leader of the 1994 Republican Revolution, was the architect (along with PR man Frank Luntz) of the "Contract With America" -- a document often referred to as the "Contract On America," with its series of slash and burn proposals. Will the American people buy his latest Contract and will it lead to the launch of a full-blown political comeback?

Read the full report >

Air Jesus

With The Evangelical Air Force

As Christian broadcasting's leading lights gathered at the National Religious Broadcasters' convention in Anaheim, California, only power-mongering and profiteering could keep their contradictions from bubbling to the surface

"How many of you out there think ministering the Word is unpopular?" the Rev. James McDonald asked a rapt crowd of hundreds at the opening ceremony of the National Religious Broadcasters' (NRB - website) convention. A beefy, bald-headed evangelist with a folksy style and an uncanny resemblance to Jesse Ventura, McDonald spent his 30 minute sermon harping on a theme that would dominate the convention: Christian persecution.

Read the full report >

Cash & Carry

Bush, Blacks and the Faith-Based Initiative

By using faith-based money to court African American churches, is Team Bush laying the groundwork for a political realignment?

Read the full report >

Mangled History

Kate Coleman and Encounter Books' not so secret take down of Judi Bari, Earth First!, and the 'dead-enders' of the environmental movement

Kate Coleman expects her book on Judi Bari and Earth First! to be taken seriously. After all, she has a grand story to tell about some of the leading figures in Northern California's environmental wars that have pitted hard-scrabble, politically savvy and under-funded environmental activists against the Goliath's of the timber industry. But too many things in the book go wrong: she plays way too fast and loose with the facts -- and is accused of hundreds of errors, distortions and misstatement; her tone is mean-spirited and derogatory, showing little empathy or respect for the real life characters in her story; and, the book appears to be more about advancing the publisher's anti-environmental agenda than about the life of Judi Bari and the activities of Earth First!

Read the full report >

Faith and Fabrications

In the process of institutionalizing its faith-based initiative the Bush administration has handed over $1 billion to religious organizations and more is coming to a state near you

In the coming year, while secular organizations providing much-needed social services to the poor will likely need the Jaws of Life to pry money from the Bush Administration, faith-based organizations will be taking in money hand over fist. In 2003 alone, the administration handed out $1.17 billion in grants to religious organizations, and if the president has his way, individual states will soon be handing over hundreds of millions of dollars to faith-based organizations.

Read the full report >

Arthur Finkelstein is Hunting Hillary Clinton

Long-time Republican consultant/spin doctor intends to lead the campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton and de-rail her presidential aspirations

"Stop Her Now," is the name of the new Web site soon to be launched by Arthur Finkelstein, the chief political guru of New York Governor George Pataki, and one of the country's most successful yet least known political consultants/spin doctors. The "Her" at StopHerNow.com is New York Senator Hillary Clinton. According to the New York Post, Finkelstein, the longtime master of the political attack ad, hopes the site will raise as much as $10 million dollars from Hillary-haters across the nation and provide a gathering point for conservative activists working to defeat Hillary Clinton in next year's Senatorial election. Hillary's defeat would likely de-rail any presidential aspirations she might have.

Read the full report >

The Capital Research Center at 20

Defunding progressive organizations and scrutinizing the funders that sustain them drives DC-based institute

In April, Foundation Watch, one of the flagship publications of the Capital Research Center managed to stir up a minor election-year controversy by raising questions about the philanthropy of Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Democratic Party presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. In a report entitled "The Heinz Foundations and the Kerry campaign – One Has Money, the Other Needs Money", Ron Arnold – one of the godfathers of America's "Wise Use Movement" – examined the relationship between the "foundation's charitable gifts to environmental groups and environmentalist supporters of the Senator's presidential campaign." Arnold raised a red flag over the possible influence environmental organizations might exert should the Senator win the presidency.

Read the full report >

The kids are all Right

Collegiate Network turns 25

Twenty-five years ago, Tod Lindberg and John Podhoretz, two conservative freshmen at the University of Chicago, founded Counterpoint, a publication they hoped would counter the liberal bias of the campus' student newspaper. Finding it difficult to financially sustain their publication, Lindberg and Podhoretz applied for a grant from the Institute for Educational Affairs, an organization that provided funds for conservative intellectual projects. After receiving the money, the two grateful students thanked the group for "ensur[ing] the financial survival of Counterpoint, for which we and, we daresay, the University of Chicago itself are most grateful."

Read the full report >

David Horowitz's Campus Jihads

At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, "WANTED" posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves appeared on campus a few weeks back; a student who took Associate professor David Gibbs' "What is Politics?" class at the University of Arizona claimed Gibbs "is an anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking America sucks;" a political-science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver says she has been the target of death threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate over the academic bill of rights; a University of Georgia professor is being investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It's the Horowistas, a small but hearty band of followers of right wing provocateur, David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom.

Read the full report >

Church & Scaife

Secular Conservative Philanthropies waging unethical campaign to take over United Methodist Church

The United Methodist and other mainline Protestant churches are the targets of a continuing, orchestrated attack by determined right-wing ideologues who use CIA-style propaganda methods to sow dissention and distrust, all in pursuit of a radical political agenda.

The leader of this attack is an organization called the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a pseudo-religious think-tank that carries out the goals of its secular funders that are opposed to the churches' historic social witness.

Read the full report >

pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

SEARCH RESEARCH

MT WRITERS

Andrew J. Weaver
Andrew J. Weaver &
Nicole Seibert
Andrew J. Weaver, et. al.
Bill Berkowitz
Bryan G. Pfeifer
Dave Johnson
David Domke
David Neiwert
David Rubenstein
Dennis Redovich
Eric Alterman
Jerry Landay
Mark & Louise Zwick
Max Blumenthal
Michael Winship
Phil Wilayto
Rob Levine