LA Times Tries to Unmask Dark Money Donors
Earlier this week, Matea Gold and Joseph Tanfani of the Los Angeles Times teamed up for a sharp article about the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR), an opaque nonprofit institution that helped steer about $55 million in conservative cash to other opaque institutions during the 2010 election cycle. It’s recommended reading for anyone following the money-in-politics story.
The news up high in the article is that, while the center’s donors are not disclosed, the group has ties to the billionaire Koch brothers, who are among the country’s biggest donors to conservative causes. The circumstantial evidence marshaled by the LAT is juxtaposed against a series of no-comments, did-not-responds, and comical professions of ignorance as Gold and Tanfani try to pin down the source of the center’s funding. (One of the latter: a Phoenix doctor who once sat on the center’s board—and who headed an advocacy organization that got almost all its funding from the center—“said he couldn’t remember who asked him to join.”)
But the story’s greatest value—and the most useful takeaway for journalists—may be its look not at where the center’s dark money comes from, but where it goes. The article helpfully explains that the center acted as a sort of clearinghouse for right-wing money. As a tax law professor consulted by the LAT put it: “Rather than have to make the decision yourself, you would entrust them to spread it around.”