Unable to deny Koch brothers/ALEC connections, Mackinac Center turns to laughable plagiarism charges
You can always tell with the powerful corporatist groups around the country are feeling nervous about the light that’s being shone on them: they fire up the well-known conservative echo chamber to create a story out something that is basically a non-story. The most recent and, I must say, comical, example of this is an attempt by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy to discredit an entire 17-page report about their connections to corporate funding, the Koch brothers, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) because an initial version of the report lacked citations to four sentences from a piece by Andrew Kroll of Mother Jones. Progress Michigan quickly corrected their error but the right-wing blogosphere wants you to ignore the substance of the well-researched report anyway. (I first wrote about this report and another national report by Progress Now and the Center for Media and Democracy HERE.)
Mackinac Center works regularly with a variety of online “news” sites like The Daily Caller. For example, when they were trying to exploit Michigan Teacher of the Year Gary Abud, Jr. as a pawn to promote a teacher pay bill he doesn’t support, it was The Daily Caller they ran to to push the story out to the conservative blogosphere.
Although it was corrected with the correction noted on the front page of the report, the initial report lacked proper citation to Kroll’s original work. That was enough, apparently,