ThinkProgress Was Always Doomed
By ALEX PAREENE
September 11, 2019
The site ThinkProgress, long a stalwart among left-leaning news organizations, was shuttered last week by its owner, the Center for American Progress (CAP)The site’s closure, however, was brief. Days later, CAP announced that ThinkProgress would continue publishing material by its in-house think tank staff at a new version of the site—becoming, in essence, an institutional blog. It was quickly pointed out to CAP’s top brass that this amounted to firing the entire unionized staff and running the site with scabs, and so the plan was canceled.
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These events were consistent with CAP’s funding model. For the most part, our donor class is simply indifferent to journalism... (This indifference is distinct from the impulse that leads men like Jeff Bezos to buy a newspaper, or Pierre Omidyar to start a media company: There’s a bit more glory in being the owner, and not a mere institutional supporter.) And big political donors interested in a “media play” simply want vulgar propaganda
ThinkProgress was not shuttered because it loses money. It certainly did lose money—political journalism is not exactly a cash cow!—but it was not a business of any kind: It was an arm of an extremely well-funded nonprofit think tank...
It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the independent media arm of the Center for American Progress was deemed inessential around the same time... that the head of the Democratic National Committee went to the mat to prevent presidential candidates from participating in a climate debate,
And this is why the dream of a left-leaning media ecosystem as heavily subsidized as the American right’s propaganda machine will never come to fruition...
This is why Erick Erickson—...left the site he founded because he belatedly noticed its owners were scamming its readers (only to see them fire all its remaining Trump critics)..
The ThinkProgress experiment failed. “Liberal” institutions dependent on corporate money, political donors, and mainstream foundation support will only ever sponsor useful journalism by accident. Alas, none of us get to be Benny Johnsons of the left, eternally buoyed in an endless sea of money from rich suckers.
Alex Pareene is a staff writer at The New Republic.
@pareene
CAP'S first president and CEO was John Podesta, who has served as White House Chief of Staff to U.S. President Bill Clinton, and remained chairman of the Center's board until he joined the Obama White House staff in December 2013.
