A Challenge for Campbell Brown’s The 74: Publicize Your Detailed History
In June 2015, former CNN anchor and anti-union, corporate reform pusher Campbell Brown officially launched The Seventy Four, which she describes as follows:
I am excited to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working on for some time now. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal today, The Seventy Four, a non-profit, non-partisan news site about education, is now a reality.There are 74 million children under the age of 18 in the United States. And the unfortunate reality is that for many of these children, the public education system is broken.Our mission at The Seventy Four is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children the education they deserve.Visit our website at the74million.org.
When Michigan billionaire and democracy wrecker Betsy DeVos was nominated as US secretary of education, Brown was all in, as one might expect: DeVos is among the funders of Brown’s Seventy Four.
Brown wants the public to believe that her Seventy Four is an unbiased news source. On November 30, 2016, Politico reported that Brown decided to limit her role in covering DeVos on the Seventy Four because they “are friends”:
CAMPBELL BROWN STEPS BACK FROM COVERAGE: Campbell Brown, editor-in-chief of The 74, is “recusing herself” from her website’s news coverage of Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary. That’s according to a note from Romy Drucker, CEO of The 74, which will post online today. The note comes after reporters and activists in the last week have raised questions about Brown’s ties to DeVos and the ethics of covering her in The 74, which Brown maintains is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news site. Critics have labeled the site as advocacy journalism.— “We’ve received some inquiries about The 74’s relationship with Betsy DeVos,” Drucker’s note says. “In particular, her family foundation’s philanthropic donations to the site, our disclosures of any possible conflict of interest, and our standing policy on editorial independence. While we typically allow our article disclosures to stand by themselves, the current situation is unexpected and unprecedented — and deserves further transparency and explanation.”— Brown and DeVos are friends, and Brown sits on the board of DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, the American Federation for Children. (DeVos resigned as chair last week after accepting Trump’s Cabinet offer.) In 2014, the Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation helped launch The 74 with a two-year grant — the amount of which wasn’t disclosed to Morning Education.A Challenge for Campbell Brown’s The 74: Publicize Your Detailed History | deutsch29:
Campbell Brown’s The 74: Detailed History
