@ Kaosium
Sourcewatch has been around for many decades. They are a part of the Center for Media and Democracy.
About:
As a threat to the right wing disinformation, of course they've been attacked as some liberal disinfo. There's a PAID ad site that pops up on Google when you search for Sourcewatch which claims to have incriminating evidence against Sourcewatch. It's full of all kinds of crap.
Sourcewatch reports funding sources, whose really behind
front groups and
fake news.
If you're a right winger then falsely dismiss away, I don't care. But it you are interested in media literacy, you'll find it's a very useful and reliable website.
I have a better idea, why not evaluate them on the basis of their
actual claim and you might get a better idea of whether its a 'useful or reliable website?' However thinking about it, I wonder if the fault here is more
yours than theirs? For example, here's some information which isn't compatible with NBER being a 'front organization with an agenda:'
Directors by University Appointment
George Akerlof, University of California at Berkeley
Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University
Ray C. Fair, Yale University
Michael J. Brennan, University of California at Los Angeles
Glen G. Cain, University of Wisconsin
Franklin Fisher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Saul H. Hymans, University of Michigan
Marjorie B. McElroy, Duke University
Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University
Andrew Postlewaite, University of Pennsylvania
Uwe E. Reinhardt, Princeton
Nathan Rosenberg, Stanford University
Craig Swan, University of Minnesota
David B. Yoffie, Harvard University
Arnold Zellner, University of Chicago
You've probably heard of some of those places, they're not exactly bastions of right-wing propaganda. Did you take that information into account before you made your dubious accusation? The 'evidence' of the funding Sourcewatch posted was unsourced and uncorroborated and also
not definitive. Merely because a foundation named for James Olin (never heard of the other ones outside Scaife) funded them
doesn't mean that it drives any agenda. For one thing Olin himself is dead, and even if his foundation is still more receptive to conservative causes that
doesn't mean the NBER itself is a conservative 'front group with an agenda', it may very well be that a conservative foundation might very well
want NBER to be a research foundation dedicated to integrity in the field of economics.
As an example, I noted that one of the sources of funding for Sourcewatch is a Rockerfeller foundation (or whatever) grant. Rockerfeller, of course, was about as canny a capitalist as there ever was, some might even say unprincipled and merciless in that regard. However that
doesn't mean that they're a 'right-wing' foundation, as a matter of fact they're actually known as being rather left wing! The scourge of the John Birch society!
That doesn't mean everything or something Sourcewatch is posting is propaganda either though, There's a
better way to evaluate their 'reliability' and that's to
evaluate their claims! You can do that, by looking at the NBER and deciding for yourself whether it's a 'front group' with an 'agenda' and if you had done that you'd find out just how
ludicrous it is to think that all the non-republican and non-rightwing economists and institutions also associated with them would be part of a 'front group' with some right-wing agenda. Another thing would be to decide for yourself that
even if they did whether or not the information contained there is inaccurate. I've posted links from The Nation and recently in the Shambler thread from Marxists.org, that's because I knew that the information contained there (in the later case something from Hume) was accurate and it just so happened to be the first website that popped up when I went looking for that excerpt.
I also once had a subscription to the Nation along with other known left-wing publications. I recall especially enjoying reading Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, Katha Pollit and David Corn, however that doesn't mean I believed everything they said though, I prefer to evaluate sources through other means,
thinking for myself.
Their claim regarding the NBER reflects poorly on
them or perhaps on you for taking those disparate pieces of information they posted and ignoring the rest and then making the absurd accusation that you did. One can establish that for oneself by evaluating their information and not letting websites do their thinking for them.
I'll try to read it later.
