The 32 highly paid reporters seem to investigate only things liberals don't like. The newsroom claims to work only "in the public interest" and to focus exclusively on stories with "moral force."
Don't bother asking "which public" or "whose morals." You're in a left-wing alternate universe 23 floors up in a New York City office building -- the headquarters of ProPublica Inc.
That's the muckraking brainchild of Herb and Marion Sandler, billionaire former mortgage bankers whose Golden West Financial Corp. allegedly targeted subprime borrowers with "pick-a-pay" mortgages that left negative-amortization dupes owing more after each payment.
These toxic assets were largely blamed for the collapse of Wachovia, which had the misfortune of buying Golden West in 2006 -- just before the subprime mortgage meltdown -- and was forced into a takeover by Wells Fargo two years later amid federal investigations of fraud.
The Sandlers came away from the Wachovia debacle without accusations of wrongdoing and with about $2.4 billion, of which $1.3 billion went into their family foundation, which in turn has pledged $10 million a year to fund ProPublica.
George Soros gave $250,000 in 2010, and his Open Society Institute's former vice president, Gara Lamarche, joined the board of directors, replacing Pew Charitable Trusts President Rebecca Rimel.
The Sandlers are relentlessly partisan, giving millions to the Democratic Party and its allies: $2.5 million to the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, $8.5 million to Citizens for a Strong Senate, and $2 million to the Center for American Progress, liberal think-tank of John Podesta, who led President-elect Barack Obama's transition team in 2008.
These wealthy Democratic partisans pay Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, over half a million dollars to run ProPublica. Steiger maintains he is independent and nonpartisan.
He told "PBS NewsHour" that he accepted the job only after he asked Herb Sandler, "Suppose we did an expose of some of the left-leaning organizations that you have supported?"
When Sandler said, "No problem," Steiger took the money -- and the titles of president and editor in chief as well as a seat on ProPublica's board of directors. But so far Sandler, chairman of the board, had nothing to worry about.
ProPublica's website shows no investigation of MoveOn.org or its Voter Fund or of Podesta's Center for American Progress, or, for that matter, of any other left leaning organization that the Sandlers have supported.
Steiger has said that his history has been doing "down the middle" reporting. One wonders, the middle of what?
ProPublica's investigations include "The Gulf oil spill" (208 stories); "How industry money reaches doctors" (26 stories); "Civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan" (35 stories); "The Wall Street money machine" (28 stories); and "Fracking: Gas drilling's environmental threat" (122 stories).
OK, it's biased. Is it accurate? Dave Kopel, research director at Colorado's Independence Institute, doesn't think so. He checked out ProPublica's assertions about natural gas hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, "suspected of causing hundreds of cases of water contamination."
Colorado and New Mexico officials supposedly "documented more than 1,000 cases where water was contaminated by drilling activities." Kopel called the officials. New Mexico had no fracking cases. Colorado didn't compile fracking numbers.
Kopel concluded that ProPublica cited data about contamination from every drilling-related activity in a story only about fracking.
"ProPublica" is a Latin-sounding coinage intended to mean "for the public," but scholars note that the "a" ending makes it a feminine noun, literally meaning "for the public woman."
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
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