For Nonprofit Newsrooms, Ethical Funding Is Essential

As advertising revenue for small news organizations dries up, donor money from foundations is playing a bigger role. This relationship presents some new ethical questions for journalists: Who should newsrooms accept money from? On what terms? And how should they disclose that relationship to the public? In considering these questions, we were reminded of an incident that happened at PBS in 2013, when the broadcaster announced “Pension Peril,” a two-year series on a crisis in public employee retirement benefits. The series ran during PBS NewsHour Weekend and was spearheaded by its flagship New York station, WNET.

However, PBS failed to disclose that the series was funded with a 3.5-million-dollar grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, founded by John Arnold, a billionaire hedge-funder with a history of involvement in pension policy reform. Journalist David Sirota, who worked at PandoDaily at the time, condemned PBS for soliciting funds from the foundation. “Monied interests are increasingly permitted to launder their ideological and self-serving messages through the seeming objectivity of public television,” he wrote.