For instance, when Herbert and Marion Sandler set up Pro Publica in 2007, the papers that covered the event—the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Post—made only passing reference to the couple’s political activism, noting that the Sandlers were major donors to the Democratic Party.

In my Slate column, published the day of the Pro Publica announcement, I gave a more detailed account of their political generosity. In addition to donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic Party campaigns, they’d given the MoveOn.org Voter Fund $2.5 million in 2004 and dropped another $8.5 million on the 527 group Citizens for a Strong Senate in the 2004 cycle. CSS was formed by “a group of strategists with close ties to former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards,” as the washingtonpost.com’s Chris Cillizza reported. In 2005, Herbert Sandler gave $1 million to the California stem cell initiative. They’ve also been benefactors of the progressive Center for American Progress as well as other left-liberal groups.

Ordinarily, reporters love to probe the intersection of money, politics, influence, and journalism—Rupert Murdoch’s political shenanigans are routinely examined inside the context of his news outlets’ coverage. All I’m saying is that the Sandlers, John Thornton, Warren Hellman, Pierre Omidyar, Randy Ching, and the other moneybags endowing nonprofit news deserve the same scrutiny we give for-profit news entrepreneurs. Is that too much to ask? Or is nonprofit journalism such a delicate flower that we should never question the motives of its founders?

Jack sees his column as contrarian not to non-profit news organizations but to a utopian view of non-profit news organizations that he thinks some people (maybe a lot of people…) have. Thus, “If you think that money flows to non-profits with no strings attached, you’re an inhabitant of fantasyland.”

Unfortunately, he doesn’t attempt to say who does hold such an unsophisticated and unrealistic view, which is typical of the degraded state of debunking discourse today.

Meanwhile, his interlocutors at Nieman Lab read his column as fellow realists who are friendly to non-profit news organizations but never considered for a moment the idea of “no strings attached.” They don’t need to be disabused of a fantasy they haven’t had, so what they find in his column is a series of arguments “against” non-profits. Thus, “Jack Shafer wrote a scathing critique of the nonprofit-as-impact driver not long ago.”

Whereas in Jack’s mind that critique was directed not toward non-profit news organzations–which he says he supports– but toward the dreamy inhabitants of fantasyland, who seem to believe that non-profits are a “pure” public service because they don’t have a commercial imperative. About this view he is indeed scathing.

But again, since he doesn’t delimit who holds this view, or quote anyone in support of it, or provide any evidence at all that it has enough traction to be worth debunking in Slate, his column when read feels like an attack on the non-profit way, even though he put into it a number of qualifiers to make clear that this is not at all what he meant.

Thus, “Nothing I’ve written should be taken to disparage the good work produced by Mother Jones, National Public Radio, Harper’s, etc..” and “Every community should be fortunate enough to have a nonprofit like the New Haven Independent walking the beat for it.”

If I am right than the culprit here is the lame practice of writing against a view you have no intention of surfacing and documenting in the piece itself, instead gesturing toward it without actually affixing it to real people. This happens in Jack’s column in the following sentence, “But before we get out the party hats and noise-makers to celebrate the rise of nonprofit journalism, here’s the bad news….”

He’s not against non-profit journalism; he’s against the people with the party hats and noise makers. I think he should quit using this device because it generates a lot of misunderstanding and suggests Shaferian realism is rarer than it is. I doubt he will take my advice… but one can always hope.

Cheers.

That said, thanks to Laura for calling attention to this great work by ProPublica and the extraordinarily transparent guide they presented for other journalists. That wasn’t scathing, by the way.

I’m not sure either is better or worse than the other inherently. It comes down to the integrity of the individual journalists.

–Jack

Here’s my gentle-as-bunny-fur conclusion:

Nothing I’ve written should be taken to disparage the good work produced by Mother Jones, National Public Radio, Harper’s, the Christian Science Monitor, or the Center for Investigative Reporting, to pick several nonprofits with good reputations. Hell, long ago I worked for a nonprofit magazine that did good work (Inquiry). Nor should anything I’ve said be automatically taken as a slam against the new nonprofits. But the rise of nonprofit journalism comes at a price. Be prepared to pay it.