By sponsoring a journalism event featuring Tucker Carlson, the philanthropy is mistaking openness for strengthening democracy.
“A well-functioning democracy depends on healthy and trusted public and private institutions; an economy that provides broad-based opportunity and prosperity; tolerance and respect for one another and our differences; and a vibrant civic life.”
Those are the first words from the Knight Foundation on a post published November 9, 2020, introducing a collection of essays on “Democracy and Civic Life: What is the Long Game for Philanthropy?”
In their own introduction to the collection, Knight Foundation President/CEO Alberto Imbarguen and Vice President/Chief Program Officer Sam Gill wrote, “Rebuilding and reforming our democracy will require interventions that respond to both our near-term challenges and the underlying long-term phenomena. We need to get control of Covid-19. We need to provide economic relief to struggling Americans. We need to ensure free and fair elections and get back to a point where the results are regarded as legitimate by the vast majority of Americans. We need immediate action to reverse racial oppression. Addressing these challenges now is necessary.”
They added, “We also believe that philanthropy can help accelerate the reimagining of our democracy. Philanthropy can be a part of the solution, if it is open to continually rethink its own assumptions about how and where to be most effective. Experience tells us that we are not the ideal investors for every solution. We do our best work when we target challenges that exceed our means, and we make change most effectively when we leverage or accelerate trends in society.”
I’m flagging these statements because of Knight’s decision to sponsor an upcoming series of forums on the future of news starting with an event July 7th featuring Tucker Carlson of Fox News. The event is called “Signal and Noise: Polarization & Trust in News,” and it is the first pre-launch event convened by Semafor, a new global news for-profit led by Ben Smith, the former media columnist for The New York Times, and Justin Smith, former CEO of Bloomberg Media. Full disclosure: In my past life running Personal Democracy Forum and Civic Hall and consulting for the Sunlight Foundation, I’ve benefited several times from support from the Knight Foundation. I’ve also known and been friends with Ben ever since the early 2000s, when he was a young political columnist at the New York Observer, and I’ve generally admired his work. But now I think he’s made a huge mistake.
Here is what the Anti-Defamation League said about Carlson back in May, after a white racist who had just massacred ten Black people in Buffalo, after, by his own words, being radicalized online to believe in the “great replacement” theory.
“A key promoter of the extremist Great Replacement theory is Tucker Carlson, who pushes this conspiracy theory through his immensely popular show on Fox. He has also amassed a sizable audience on social media, with 5.2 million followers on Twitter, nearly 5 million on Facebook, and 1.8 million on Instagram. As early as 2021, white supremacists were praising Carlson’s promotion of the Great Replacement theory, the racist, antisemitic and xenophobic conspiracy that posits that white Americans are at risk of being disenfranchised by non-white immigrants, sometimes described euphemistically by Carlson as ‘demographic change’ or ‘replacing the population.’ He has elevated the conspiracy theory that Democrats are plotting to replace ‘legacy American’ voters with immigrants in more than 400 episodes of his show and discussed the falling white birth rate and shifting gender roles, another key component of the conspiracy, in over 200 episodes.”
After a detailed examination of Carlson’s malign influence across the major social media platforms, the ADL called on them to “deplatform” him along with other repeat perpetrators of great replacement theory because of “their significant role mainstreaming ideologies that normalize hate, foment fear and buoy extremists.” This follows on a call that the group made a year earlier, demanding that Fox fire Carlson after he launched an anti-Semitic and racist attack on immigrants. “This is not legitimate political discourse,” the group’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote Fox. “It is dangerous race-baiting, extreme rhetoric…. At ADL, we believe in dialogue and giving people a chance to redeem themselves, but Carlson’s full-on embrace of the white supremacist replacement theory on yesterday’s show and his repeated allusions to racist themes in past segments are a bridge too far.”
But maybe this Semafor/Knight event is going to be one of those rare encounters where the forces of light and reason take on a purveyor of hate and racism. Isn’t that a way to advance a “well-functioning democracy”? Let’s see.
In their Twitter announcement of the upcoming event, Semafor says, “Join us on July 7th for Semafor’s first pre-launch event, featuring some of the biggest names in media.” The event website says, “Semafor’s first pre-launch event will convene both leading actors and commentators in the contemporary battle over the nature of news, and ask whether and how news can operate in a hyper-polarized landscape.”
The problem, obviously, is that Tucker Carlson is not in the news business, but in the misinformation business. He is indeed one of the biggest names in media, but only in the same way that Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi rag Der Sturmer, or Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the propaganda outlet Russia Today, would be considered big names in media too.
I understand that Carlson has a huge audience, so shunning or marginalizing him personally is not likely to have any effect. As long as Fox profits from the audience he attracts, it will keep him on the air. Sometimes it is necessary and useful to debate demagogues, in order to show why their ideas are wrong or dangerous. But this event is not framed as a debate; the language that Ben Smith and Semafor are using to describe it is in fact quite cagey. “To convene both leading actors and commentators” … and “ask whether and how news can operate” is doesn’t suggest any value system about the purpose of news is at work here beyond “can it operate.” Hyper-polarization is also a very sanitized way of describing what Carlson and others have been doing to public discourse; it’s like inviting Dupont to an event discussing the impact of napalm on Vietnam and asking the company CEO whether the chemical weapons industry can continue to operate in a “hyper-defoliated landscape.”
Likewise this snippet of promotional language from Semafor: “As trust in the news industry sinks to a new low, we’ll ask what comes next, and what we can do to reinvigorate the news industry.” Again, the only active value on display here is generic curiosity about the future. (This happens to be a recurring move for Knight, which has held more events and symposia on the “future of news” than I can count, and is a great way to say, “we’re putting on a show but we’re not really serious about the content.”) This kind of framing dodges the most basic question, which is the purpose of news. Is it to inform accurately or to just make money? Because if the answer to invigorating the news industry as a business is to play even more to people’s rankest prejudices, well, then that’s another reason why we can’t trust capitalism to fix what ails journalism. As a foundation, Knight should be putting its thumb on the opposite side of this scale, as it has for many years with other investments in nonprofit media.
“Our plans are to ask hard questions of powerful people — I don’t think there are a lot of journalists who would refuse to do that interview?” Smith said on Twitter in response to an appeal from Nandini Jammi of CheckMyAds.com, asking why he invited “the biggest white nationalist in America” to appear at Semafor’s first event. Smith added, “I’m sure reasonable people can disagree on this, but I think he’s very powerful because he has a giant audience whom he speaks to directly every night.”
Does this sound like someone seeking to demonstrate why Carlson and his ideas are problematic? No, it sounds like someone who sees the media business as a game of access-playing and audience-building. That’s something that Smith has gotten very good at ever since the days he was a columnist for the New York Observer who attracted a gossipy crowd of commenters on his blog posts and he realized that keeping the comments thread open (something I personally advised him to do) helped him attract a bigger audience. Back then, the theory was that inviting comments didn’t diminish a journalist’s authority but rather allowed readers to share their smarts. Now that noble idea, that “my audience is smarter than me alone” has been degraded down to “he has a giant audience” so I must show him respect.
As a for-profit news enterprise, Semafor is free to do whatever it wants (and now we are all free to think much less of it). But as a public foundation, Knight’s tax-exempt status gives it a higher obligation to act for public benefit. Knight’s own mission harks back to the views of John S. and James L. Knight, newspaper publishers who “believed that a well-informed community could best determine its own true interests and was essential to a well-functioning, representative democracy.” When the Knight brothers sold the Knight Newspapers chain, they created the foundation to promote excellence in journalism, not excrescence in journalism. If such a thing were possible, they’d be turning over in their graves.
Alas, the Knight Foundation has such a big footprint in philanthropy, supporting many genuinely valuable projects and news nonprofits, that you won’t hear much from leaders in that world about this controversy. Since 2011 to present, Knight has made more than one thousand grants totaling more than $330 million to groups working to advance democracy in America, according to the Foundation Center. Those include ProPublica, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Democracy Works, Investigative Reporters and Editors, NPR, Institute for Nonprofit News, Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the Texas Tribune, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the News Literacy Project and the list goes on.
But maybe public outcry will cause the Knight Foundation to change its mind about sponsoring this event. Certainly that is what CheckMyAds is trying to do with its online push on Twitter aimed at @knightfdn and @jimbrady, its vice president for journalism. Molly de Aguiar, a veteran of the news literacy world and now the head of the Independence Public Media Foundation has also spoken out, tweeting, “This is what a lack of principled leadership + imagination looks like.” I’ve written personally to Knight President/CEO Imbarguen, imploring him to back away from this event. Should I hear back, I’ll update this post accordingly.
Micah Sifry is a Medium columnist and the author of several books on tech and politics, including The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) and WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. He also writes a weekly newsletter called The Connector, where he focuses on movements, organizing and democracy. You can also follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.
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