Over the last 10 years or so, it has become increasingly evident that the world’s internationalist think tanks, both neo-liberal and neo-conservative, are no longer content with writing policy papers about—and providing in-depth policy advice to politicians regarding—the subterranean undercurrents of foreign affairs.
Nor is it enough that legacy media reporters and editors show great favoritism to these think tanks and closely collaborate with them instead of staying neutral and reporting on their machinations.
And while major think tanks such as Chatham House in the UK and the Council on Foreign ,Relations in the U.S. have long been a springboard for their lettered personnel to step into key government posts in departments of State, Defense and so on, a new dimension for these largely tax-exempt institutions has emerged: Forming their own media outlets.
Early Ramblings
Back in 2018, then-Chatham House Director Dr. Robin Niblett wrote an 11,000-word tome entitled “Rediscovering a Sense of Purpose: The Challenge for Western Think Tanks” in Vol. 94, Issue 6 of Chatham House’s journal, International Affairs. In it, he asked: “To devise a common work [program], do think-tanks from across the world also need to possess a common sense of purpose? ... After something like a hundred years of think-tank experience, the answer is yes.”
Our Internet-connected society, whatever its shortcomings, has enabled the citizenry to become more informed than ever before. The more well-read among them are generally skeptical of, or indifferent toward, elite opinion. Recognizing this trend, Niblett wrote:
Policy audiences appear less interested in the outputs of think tanks if they believe that these have no public resonance beyond the expert circles in which they were developed.
In an especially important statement, he added:
Think tanks have to apply a growing proportion of their resources to trying to mobilize popular engagement with their ideas. One approach has been to raise their public profile by commenting more on current policy developments, rather than analyzing their underlying drivers. The danger is that this blurs the line between think tanks and the media.
The Blurring Line
Phi Delta Kappan, or simply Kappan, a professional magazine in print since 1915, features articles connecting educational research, practice and policy. Going back as far as 2015, Kappan posted the online article, “When Think Tanks Bypass Media Outlets & Do Their Own ‘Journalism.’”
The article noted:
In case you hadn’t noticed, more and more think tanks are behaving in journalism-like ways: hiring journalists to write pleasant, engaging pieces as well as blogging and tweeting directly to policymakers and the public.
The Kappan article also referred the website Think Tank Watch and its then-recent blog post Think Tanks Doing Journalism. Regarding this trend, the blog post (which cited The Economist) stated: “Many Washington think tanks have been hiring well-known journalists in recent years in an effort to beef up their efforts to get good writers, network with media-types, and better disseminate information and policy proposals to a wider audience.“
A September 2014 article in The Economist, “Think-tanks and journalism: Making the headlines,” pointed out that think tanks were not limiting themselves to op-ed opinion pieces in the press, policy papers and conferences anymore. And that was 10 years ago. The Economist article was revealingly entitled “Making the headlines: The divide between having ideas and reporting on them is dissolving.”
It begins:
Ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability—[these three] qualities of a successful journalist, according to Nicholas Tomalin, one of the breed—are not traditionally valued in think-tanks, the semi-academic institutions that come up with ideas for politicians.
Their policy papers are meant to be dry; their wonks more like politicised civil servants than hacks. But increasingly think-tanks are doing journalism—not just blogging and tweeting but foreign reporting, too. Desk-bound journalists, meanwhile, are embracing data and spreadsheets.
Kappan also noted that think tanks such as the education-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the foreign-policy oriented Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Brookings Institution, and the economics-technology oriented New America think tank (chaired by frequent Bilderberg Meetings attendee Anne-Marie Slaughter) all started down a similar “newsy” path several years ago.
“Of course, some news outlets are blurring the line the other way, becoming more wonkish and policy-oriented and less, well, newsy,” Kappan observed at the time, indicating there’s a two-way street between these institutes and media.
The ‘Foreign Policy’ Example
To get an idea of what happens when you take typical “think tank” thinking and “bake it into the bread” of a journalistic enterprise, look no further than Foreign Policy “world news” magazine—whose co-founder, way back in 1970, was heavyweight geo-political strategist and longtime Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, a former World Economic Forum attendee.
Foreign Policy itself notes on its website:
The purpose and mission was to question commonplace views and groupthink and to give a voice to alternative views about American foreign policy. Huntington hoped it would be serious but not scholarly, lively but not glib.
Thus, while FP, as it’s known for short, fancied itself as the producer of a different breed of internationalist journalism, it never wandered too far away from the globalist groupthink that is the hallmark of the world’s most prominent think tanks. So, unsurprisingly, we learn that an existing think tank steeped in traditional internationalist ideology, the Carnegie Endowment, once owned FP and molded it into the spiffy publication of the present day.
“In 2000,” FP’s website also explains, “under the ownership of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, FP transitioned from a slim, quarterly journal to the glossy magazine it is today—while retaining its independent viewpoint and commitment to rigorous exploration of the world’s biggest issues,” although such claims of “independence” are certainly not absolute and ring rather hollow when one reads FP and most often finds it hard to distinguish between its stances and those of the CFR’s “Foreign Affairs” journal or the Chatham House publication referenced early in this article.
FP recalls that, under Carnegie’s wing, its “global audience rapidly grew” and “international editions were launched in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.”
Yet, lo and behold, come September 2008, FP was purchased by none other than the Washington Post Company (parent company of the Washington Post newspaper), which FP called “one of the world’s most respected media organizations.”
But as this UK Column reporter often heard when covering Congress in Washington for several years, the Post was wryly referred to in hushed tones as that “banker’s paper”—cloaked as a denizen of “democracy.” Some have speculated that it’s a “CIA rag.”
For the record, the Post was founded by Federal Reserve Board member (and first president of the World Bank Group) Eugene Meyer, whose daughter, Katherine Meyer Graham, married newspaperman Phillip Graham and became “Kate”the fearless Post publisher, commandeering it thru the heady days of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and other scandals and intrigues.
FP grew to become the FP Group—an expansion of Foreign Policy magazine to include ForeignPolicy.com and FP Events. The Post leadership saw in FP an opportunity to build on past successes and use new media to serve decision-makers in business, finance and government in ways that would further establish FP as the leader in its field. In 2013, FP became part of Graham Holdings Company, formerly the Washington Post Company.
Nowadays, FP’s journalistic adventures, rooted deeply in “think tankish” ideology, are concentrated in a core FP project called “Democracy Lab,” wherein nation states are, in effect, put in separate test tubes and monitored under a metaphorical microscope to see whether they’re:
- “Autocratic,” or “illiberal,” which is a mortal sin from a globalist vantage point;
- “In transition,” meaning you’re on your way to becoming an “approved” nation state eligible to wear the banner of“democracy.”; or
- A genuine democracy, as defined by the world’s elite custodians, including those in think tanks where journalism and traditional think-tank operations are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from one another.
As FP explains it:
A partnership between Foreign Policy magazine and the Legatum Institute, Democracy Lab is a unique journalistic effort to cover the political and economic challenges facing countries that are striving to make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. It’s a story that can only be told through a genuinely global prism, incorporating voices from many nations. At the heart of this effort stands our Transitions blog, a collective report from countries all along the spectrum of change, with regular contributions from reporters around the world.
Foreign Policy Lab features profiles of “political and economic decision-makers in transitional societies, reform case studies, and expert interviews,” FP also says. “While many of our contributors undoubtedly favor Democracy to despotism, Democracy Lab has no particular political agenda. Our reporting comes from a range of countries, opinions and disciplines.”
Such modesty. The problem lies in the definition of “democracy” and of “despotism.”
From the Internationalist-world governance perspective for which FP and the other “independent” institutions mentioned in this article are faithful partisans and dare not wander very far outside that globalist box, a “democracy”would be, for example, the United Kingdom.
But as UK Column has steadily documented, the UK’s “democratic” civil government, like many throughout Europe, is oftentimes outright hostile to free speech and, as a matter of policy, will monitor, suspend, cancel and otherwise put the kibosh on any social media user or citizen journalist who, believing that they live in a democracy, chooses to exercise their democratic right to free speech before it’s dissolved forever.
Accordingly, a “despot” could very well be a real despot (perhaps North Korea’s rather creepy leader) or it could be, say, Hungary’s leader Victor Orban who has bucked the globalist system and the alleged “democratic values” that the system’s managers preach nonstop.
So, if you’re a leader who stands up for nationhood, if you choose not to overturn your social order with abortion-on-demand, if you oppose “hate crimes” laws that punish traditional values and protect radical minorities such as the LGBTQ+ movement and others, or if you want to create economic self-sufficiency, then you’re an “illiberal despotic strongman” worthy of being denounced and possibly overthrown by those neighboring “democracies” who proclaim that a “democratic right to choose” this or that policy is a great thing—as long as you choose their globalist option.
Full Circle
Perhaps the most official example of think tanks and journalism fusing—with think tanks transforming into news organizations more than the other way around—is Blue Marble, a journalistic outfit created just one year ago by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA).
In their own words:
In 2023, Blue Marble was founded by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs —an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization—to transform the way we see our world. At Blue Marble, we’re prioritizing connection over clicks and pursuing stories that go beyond headlines and borders. We’re keeping our eye on the now and the not yet, seeking out what the next generation needs to know to shape a more open and promising world. Like the Apollo 17 crew, we believe that remarkable things happen when the world comes into view [Editor’s note: The name “Blue Marble” refers to NASA’s image of earth in space associated with American astronauts]
Here are some of Blue Marble’s headlines:
- July 18, 2024—Chicago lags behind other global cities for bike-friendliness. Here's how it can improve.
- September 26, 2024—Five features that define Chicago's role in global trade.
- October 17, 2024—As global cities feel the strain of overtourism, what makes Chicago immune?
- September 5, 2024—Chicago businesses embrace British tea traditions
- July 11, 2024—Are economic ties to China a strength or weakness for Illinois?
Many of these and other Blue Marble articles, while they exhibit the global leanings of the CCGA, are quite informative and not all of them cover weighty topics. Overall, they’re well-written and easy to read. A British-style tea in Chicago sounds great. However, beyond matters of content, the context and general thrust of this symbiosis between think tanks and the journalistic enterprise is what matters.
The general public, given the relatively slow evolution from think tanks’ traditional programs to their increasingly“newsy” format, is scarcely aware that much of “the news” is coming less and less from traditional journalists anymore—as typified by the classic iconic reporter hitting the keyboard in a smoky newsroom flanked by loads of coffee, with true grit carrying him or her through to the next big scoop. That is but a memory.
Indeed, there are painfully few remaining merciless columnists like the late great Mike Royko of Chicago Tribune fame; and the no-holds-bar investigations and wry observations of intrepid newsman H.L. Mencken, the early 20th century’s “bad boy from Baltimore.” That kind of highly inquisitive news and biting commentary is nearly forgotten, having become mere news lore.
Instead, we have have well-manicured, rather tame think-tank types tapping the typewriters, so to speak, and forming new news ecosystems while schooling us in “globalism 101” and eroding foundational ideas of nationhood and the basic Christian precepts that have solidly underpinned many countries for centuries.
Furthermore, modern think tanks, whose programs are funded by Big Pharma’s top players, sometimes by NATO, and by leading defense contractors and foundations with names like Clinton and Gates, display an orientation that seems benign but is in fact deceptive and corrosive. Clear conflicts of interest are commonplace. Many are very serious.
What conflicts? Well, ABC News Senior National Correspondent Terry Moran is a longtime Council on Foreign Relations member, and he is just one of countless highly influential journalists—veteran U.S. journalists Diane Sawyer and Dan Rather also come to mind—who populate or used to populate these think tanks as members.
Meanwhile, well-known reporters and commentators moderate think tank programs—witness the Financial Times moderating the CCGA’s annual Pritzker Forum on Global Cities instead of reporting on the CCGA in a detached, impartial manner.
It gets worse: CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan is on the CFR board of directors, as are NBC Universal NewsGroup Chairman Cesar Conde, Washington Post Columnist and CNN Host Fareed Zaharia, and CBS National Security Analyst Frances Townsend, a former federal Department of Homeland Security advisor. Regularly, the CFR’s stable of journalists collaborates with those in power, from CIA chiefs and other “intel” directors, to current and former military brass, high-tech and big pharma officers, top central bankers, other top-drawer financial figures etc.
All of this begs the question: Have we ever had honest-to-goodness journalism, the real thing? Or has it always been a kind of con-job, fueled and projected by corporate power to usher the largely unsuspecting masses in a certain agenda-driven direction, from which there may be no return?
The McCormick Betrayal
Consider, too, that the CCGA has as one of its chief revenue sources the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. The Foundation’s namesake, Robert Rutherford McCormick (1880-1955), served in the military and became a young Chicago Alderman before his reign as the powerful anti-globalist, America-first editor of the Chicago Tribune in its early to mid-20th Century heyday. His Tribune, which was just part of his vast media empire, gave U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and other unconstitutional government schemers a severe case of heartburn with his bold crusades to keep the U.S. out of world wars and other info-battles.
So, for that Foundation to bequeath millions of dollars to the CCGA, with full acceptance by the CCGA, shows the basic betrayal that’s taking place: Ignore what a rare, real newsman like McCormick labored for, and shake down his legacy to pursue policies he’d loathe.
When it comes to the evolving relationship between think tanks and the news business, and what’s really going on, that speaks multiple volumes. We’re left with a “media” beholden to, and doing business with, the very power structure it’s supposed to keep in check. So, our response is crystal clear: Grow UK Column and other like-minded real media with all our might. There’s no time to waste.
