Foundations fund L.A. Times’ education reporting. A conflict?
The Los Angeles Times announced what seemed like good news for its readers in August: a new reporting initiative that would expand the paper’s coverage of local education.
“Our goal is to provide an ongoing, wide-ranging report card on K-12 education in Los Angeles, California and the nation,” wrote then-Publisher Austin Beutner. He noted that the project, called “Education Matters,” would be funded by a series of charitable organizations.
Except the newspaper left out a key detail: Some of the foundations funding “Education Matters” are among the most prominent advocates of public-education reform in Los Angeles. One of them is the principal backer of a proposal to convert nearly half of Los Angeles’s public schools into charter schools.
In other words, the Times’ new education-reporting project is being funded by some of the very organizations the new education-reporting project is likely to be covering.
The Times has said the foundations will provide $800,000, enough to cover the salaries of two education journalists for at least two years.
The Times has said the foundations’ money will provide $800,000, enough to cover the salaries of two education journalists for at least two years. (Richard Vogel/AP)Nevertheless, the initiative has raised suspicions, most notably among teachers’ union representatives and others who oppose the reformers’ agenda. Can a news organization, they ask, take money from vested interests and cover the issues fairly?
“It’s dead wrong,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, the city’s largest teachers’ union. The Times’ readers, he added, “are harmed when they don’t know what they can trust in the biggest paper in Los Angeles.”
Three of the Times’ benefactors — the K&F Baxter Family Foundation, theWasserman Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation — have been major supporters of charter and school-privatization efforts that are strongly opposed by teachers’ unions.
More specifically, the Broad Foundation developed the Los Angeles charter proposal, which would cost $490 million to create 260 new charter schools enrolling at least 130,000 students in the sprawling district (charters are publicly funded but independently operated schools that are usually nonunion and exempt from work rules that govern traditional public schools).
The Broad Foundation’s chairman, billionaire businessman and philanthropist Eli Broad, has repeatedly expressed his interest in buying the Times. The newspaper’s owner, Tribune Publishing, has rejected his offers, reportedly including one this month.
Major news organizations have long tended to fund their own news-gathering activities, on the principle that taking money from another group could compromise their independence, or prompt readers or viewers to question their reporting.
But the practice isn’t unknown; NPR, a nonprofit organization, takes “grants” Foundations fund L.A. Times’ education reporting. A conflict? - The Washington Post: