But BINJ’s journalism is not for sale … ever
Over the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism’s decade plus of operation there have been plenty of occasions where marketers and other societal bottom feeders have tried to sucker my colleagues and me into covering something we didn’t want to cover. Or, worse yet, cover a story in such a way that it would amount to outright propaganda if we were to publish it.
Naturally, as experienced reporters, we are not easy marks and have generally avoided such gambits with aplomb.
But there are also people and institutions out there with lots of money that are simply trying to buy off journalists and media influencers of all kinds to parrot whatever disinformation they wish to push on an unsuspecting public. Notably, political operations of one kind or another in an age of often untraceable yet perfectly legal “dark money.”
Stalwarts of the Republican Party are well known for using such tactics. And grassroots Democrats may delude themselves into thinking their party is above them. But last week, Wired magazine broke a big investigative story showing Democratic partisans doing exactly the same thing—specifically, using “Chorus, the nonprofit arm of a liberal influencer marketing platform” to pay Democratic influencers up to $8,000 per month to sing their party’s praises.
Which is bad enough, but the deal got much worse: Program participants are expected to not tell anyone that they are taking the money from Chorus. And the list of those participants reads like a who’s who of prominent liberals on the Internet.
BINJ is generally too small for well-heeled cloak-and-dagger operations to try to buy us off … still, there was a creepy attempt to at least get us to sing a very mainstream Democratic tune indeed right after Pres. Donald Trump came into office. No money was proffered, of course (powerful forces always trying to get small organizations like ours to work for free, as they do). But we let the mysterious emailer in question know right away that we knew what was up—and they disappeared just as fast as they had popped into our inbox.
So just a quick heads-up to any individual or organization who thinks they can buy BINJ off and make us produce propaganda on command: You can’t and we won’t.
We’re independent journalists working in the service of democracy. We are not for sale at any price. And we’d rather have our organization go under for lack of funds than ever violate the public trust.
This editorial was produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
