New York Times - Left Wing Funder?

Here is an interesting piece of information on the New York Times Foundation. Do note all of the leftist organizations they fund. Is the NY Times in a conflict of interest? - Sailor

NEW YORK TIMES FOUNDATION


Source
229 West 43rd StreetNew York, NY10036
Phone :212-556-1091Email :N/AURL :http://www.nytco.com/company/foundation/

Funder Profile: -->
Tax-exempt entity closely linked to The New York Times Company
98 percent of its ideological grant dollars have gone to leftwing organizations
Left groups getting its grants have also tended to get abundant favorable coverage in The New York Times
Provides matching gifts for Times Company employee donations, but only to “eligible” groups that tend mostly to be liberal and Politically Correct
Has taken part in fundraisers for the radical group People for the American Way
Even its “help the neediest” dispersal of donations to help victims of 9-11 channeled $700,000 to left activist lawyer groups.
Assets $2,601,808 (2003)
Grants Awarded: $6,169,980 (2003)


The New York Times Company Foundation is a tax-exempt entity closely linked to The New York Times Company, a major source of its funds.

This foundation reflects the political and cultural values of the Sulzberger family that, through its near-monopoly control of voting stock, effectively controls the company and its holdings such as the Boston Globe and The New York Times. It also directs the philanthropies of The Boston Globe Foundation.

The Chairman of The New York Times Company Foundation is former company chairman and former Times publisher Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger, father of the current company chairman and Times publisher Arthur O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr. One member of its board is Judith P. Sulzberger, who inspired her brother’s nickname “Punch,” echoing the medieval European “Punch & Judy” puppet shows.

The foundation conducts “week-long immersion courses on important news subjects for journalists from around the country.” These courses, called New York Times Institutes, provide an opportunity to recruit and influence reporters and critics, thereby extending the reach of the Times and the ideas and agenda it promotes.

Since 2004, the foundation provides theatre grants, in conjunction with the Alliance for Resident Theatres, A.R.T./New York. Such grants, in theory, have the potential to influence what productions are done, and by whom.

The foundation provides matching gifts of $1.50 for each dollar contributed by New York Times Company employees and retirees to “eligible” organizations. To be eligible, an organization must be either tax-exempt or governmental, and it must be involved in journalism, education, culture or environmentalism. This matching gift program thus has the effect of encouraging employee donations to such mostly-liberal organizations, and of discouraging requests to gift-match any donation that might not be Politically Correct.

Organizations chosen by Times Company employees that therefore received matching gifts from the Times Company Foundation have included the left environmental Sierra Club, the radical environmental group Greenpeace and WBAI, the New York City radio station owned and run by Pacifica Radio.

The list of organizations chosen by New York Times Company Foundation officials to receive over the years grants of thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars reads like a roll call of the American left. A few of the best-known of its many largesse recipients are:

American Friends Service Committee
Aspen Institute
Brookings Institution
Children’s Defense Fund
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
Enterprise Foundation
Environmental Action Coalition
Environmental Advocates
Environmental Defense Fund
Environmental Law Institute
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund (NAACP-LDEF)
National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund (NOW-LDEF)
National Public Radio (NPR)
National Security ArchiveNational Urban League
Natural Resources Defense Council
Nature Conservancy
Planned Parenthood and its connected Alan Guttmacher Institute
Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund
Rainforest Alliance
Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund
Urban Coalition
Urban Institute
Wilderness Society
World Resources Institute
World Wildlife Fund

One analysis found that 98 percent of grant dollars given by the New York Times Company Foundation (to organizations with an ideological bent) went to groups that lean left.

Only two percent of Times Company Foundation grant dollars, this study found, went to groups that might be called conservative – the Media Institute, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the libertarian Manhattan Institute.

A study by the Media Research Center found that the New York Times Company Foundation and similar tax-exempt foundations associated with the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times evinced a disturbing pattern of promotion by the papers themselves. Leftwing groups given grants by one newspaper’s foundation tended also to get unusually heavy and favorable coverage in the news and opinion pages of that newspaper.

The Environmental Defense Fund, for example, received tens of thousands of dollars from the New York Times Company Foundation, and during the same period this radical environmental group got nearly twice as many mentions in the New York Times as in the Los Angeles Times and almost three times as many as in the Washington Post. This pattern suggests that in these media giants the left hand knows what the farther-left hand is doing – and that newspaper and foundation work in concert to advance certain left organizations.

Like its outnumbered conservative counterparts, much of what the New York Times Company Foundation does is philanthropic. It has a college scholarship program. It provides funds for Manhattan public elementary school P.S. 111, named for former Times owner and publisher Adolph S. Ochs.

The Times Company Foundation also administers the “Neediest Fund” of the Times’ “Help the Neediest” fundraising campaigns. Following the Islamist terrorist attacks of 9-11 that destroyed Manhattan’s World Trade Center towers and killed almost 3,000 people, a special appeal for this fund raised more than $52 million in donations, almost all of which was dispersed to noble organizations to help people hit by the horror.

The Times Company Foundation, according to its own 9-11 “Neediest” list, dispersed a total of $700,000 to such traditionally leftwing legal activist groups as the Legal Aid Society, Legal Services for New York City, Pro Bono Net, and Urban Justice Center that spend most of their time harassing landlords, businesses, property owners and government welfare agencies.

The Times Company Foundation helps the left in other ways. It does not, for example, list the radical left group People for the American Way among its grant recipients. But for years, reported Byron York in National Review, the Times Company Foundation purchased entire tables at PFAW’s annual fundraising banquets in New York City at a cost of $5,000 plus per table. These PFAW banquets have lionized leftwing icons like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and filmmaker Michael Moore.