Oh for the good ol’ days when only the politicians could be bought.
Today, influence in public policy is much more insidious, as two recent incidents reveal.
One involves National Public Radio (NPR) and its acceptance of a $100,000 grant from the Ploughshares Fund for its news reporting on the Iran nuclear agreement. The second is the National Football League (NFL) and its attempt to strong-arm the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to which it had donated $30 million, into keeping a brain research project away from an expert it believed to be biased.
The NPR grant, as the fund’s 2015 annual report puts it, supported “national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security.”
Despite a statement by the federally supported network’s ombudsman that its coverage wasn’t skewed, the ombudsman nevertheless said the usually left-leaning network should avoid such grants in the future.