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SECTORSInternal LinksProfiles:
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CONSERVATIVE PHILANTHROPYMedia & Communications EffortsFrom a report by NCRPThe danger of a narrowed public policy debate is a real one, particularly given the strong marketing orientation of research and advocacy institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Indeed, the institutional grantees of conservative foundations have well understood the importance of marketing in a media age. AEI's former president, William Baroody, for example, demonstrated this understanding during his ten-year tenure when he stated: "I make no bones about marketing... We pay as much attention to the dissemination of the product as we do to the content. We're probably the first major think tank to get into the electronic media. We hire ghost writers for scholars to produce op-ed articles that are sent to the one hundred and one cooperating newspapers - three pieces every two weeks". An article published in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review in the late 1980s made the same point. Entitled "So You Want to Start a Think Tank," it advised: "The easy part is getting your message right. The real test is getting your message out... Everything you do, every day, must involve marketing in as many as six dimensions. Market your policy recommendations, market the principles and values behind them, market the tangible publications and events your organization is producing. Market the think tank concept itself. Then market your specific organizations. And never stop marketing yourself and the other key individuals who personify the organization. " The Heritage Foundation is well-positioned to offer such advice, aggressively having moved to influence public policy debates. Early on, Heritage created a variety of "consumption" formats for its policy products and, as was mentioned, maintains an entire public relations division to cultivate relationships with major media outlets and disseminate its policy ideas through them. Such marketing goes well beyond Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute. Almost all of the major institutional grantees of these 12 conservative foundations have developed sophisticated media and communications efforts. The Hoover Institution maintains an active public affairs office which links it to 900 media centers across the United States and 450 media outlets abroad. The Reason Foundation, a national public policy research organization that also serves as a national clearinghouse on privatization, has developed an aggressive communications strategy, resulting in 359 television and radio appearances and over 1500 print-media citations in national newspapers and magazines in 1995 (see below). The Manhattan Institute has held over 600 forums or briefings for joumalists and policymakers on multiple public policy issues and concerns, from tort reform to federal welfare policy. And the National Center for Policy Analysis reports that "NCPA ideas" have been discussed in 573 nationally syndicated columns and 184 wire stories over the twelve years of its existence. Evidence of the success of these and other conservative grantees at monopolizing political debate in the media is found in a recent report stating that right-wing think tanks receive far greater media attention than their progressive, or even centrist, counterparts. While conservatives have been decrying the media's left-wing bias for over a decade, media references to conservative think tanks in 1995 far outnumbered references to center or left-of-center research institutes. Based on a search of major newspapers and radio and television transcripts, Michael Dolny found that conservative institutions were cited or mentioned almost 8000 times while liberal or progressive think tanks received only 1152 citations.
A box from the Reason Foundation's 1995 Annual Report demonstrates an ability to garner media attentionThe marketing of conservative policy ideas has also been accomplished through a variety of conservative-controlled media outlets and projects (discussed below), newsletters and policy journals, and other simple communications tools. As journalist Lawrence Soley observed in 1990, think tanks have created their own "research" journals to help mask "the academic anemia" of their own researchers. Noting that these "journals bear names that closely resemble those of legitimate joumals," Soley states that they have produced what appears to be impressive credentials for their policy staff. At the time that Soley wrote, AEI's William Schneider, for example, had published 16 articles in the Institute's Public Opinion, but not a single article in Public Opinion Quarterly, a respected journal of social science published since 1937. Yet, Soley states, Schneider became one of the most "sought-after" political pundits, appearing 72 times on network news programs between 1987 and 1989. He also served as a regular political commentator for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" during the same time period. The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy launched a strategic initiative in 1995 to support and extend what it referred to in its annual report as "the conservative revolution of 1994." This initiative consists of a co-publishing venture with William F. Buckley's National Review, entitled National Review West, that goes out to 80,000 political conservatives in the Western states. Then there are the Free Congress Foundation's new National Empowerment television companion communique, NetNewsNow, a broadcast fax letter read by more than 400 radio producers and news editors around the country, and the Heartland Institute's PolicyFax, which makes a variety of easy-to-read policy reports available without charge to any journalist or legislator requesting them. Conservative ideas marketing and political advocacy have also extended impressively to the Internet, with the Heritage Foundation and other major grantees now signing on to the World Wide Web to make their policy ideas, written products and up-coming events even more widely accessible. Most, if not all, of the major grantees appear to maintain Web sites, offering information on their organizations and summaries and/or full texts of policy articles, position papers and reports. It would be a serious mistake to think of these think tanks exclusively as marketing-based policy institutions. However, not only have the grantees sought, largely successfully, to monopolize policy debate in the media, many also have impressive training and mobilizing capacities and a strong convening or coalition-building orientation. These are dimensions of their work that conservative foundations have also supported. Approximately $15 million in grants (1992-1994) was devoted to "networking" activities, defined as support for conferences, meetings, lecture series, speakers bureaus, and leadership training projects. Millions more was invested in a broader effort to create and cultivate grassroots leaders and public intellectuals. All of this, of course, reflects a clear understanding, in the words of Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich, that "ideas have consequences only when they are connected to action." While the conservative foundations directed the bulk of their grant resources to national think tanks and advocacy organizations and academic-sector institutions, they also invested a significant pool of grant money - $41.5 million - in the development and maintenance of media vehicles and projects, nonprofit law firms, state-level policy organizations, and advocacy groups working to shift religious views and philanthropic practices to the right.
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OTHER LINKSSponsoring Conservative Minorities
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