pew

I’ve been reading some of Ryan Sager‘s reporting on the role of Pew Charitable Trusts in passing campaign-finance reform. It’s a complicated story, but after listening to about 50 minutes of videotape from former Pew staffer Sean Treglia, it seems to me that Sager has the gist of it right: that Pew “astroturfed” grant money to make it seem like the public was demanding campaign-finance reform.

From the transcript:

The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington. The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform …

Having been on the Hill I knew that … if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it’d be worthless. It’d be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain. …

It wasn’t stealth … All you had to do was go to the grantee’s Web site, and look at the funders, and you’d see Pew.

An audience member asks Treglia what would have happened had the press caught on to Pew’s involvement in lobbying for campaign-finance legislation before the passage of [McCain-Feingold]:

We had a scare. As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew’s role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this, that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. But you know what the good news is from my perspective? Journalists didn’t care. They didn’t know what to make of it. They didn’t care. They don’t know about the sector, so no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up.

From a related Sager piece — what was the American Prospect thinking when it didn’t tell readers its special issue on “Checkbook Democracy” was funded by the Carnegie Corporation? Maybe its next issue should be on “Checkbook Journalism.”