Well, it’s been a pretty dire week for the news. For those who want to take a brief reprieve from all the overwhelming SCOTUS developments, I wanted to share with you an investigative feature I spent a long time reporting this year, which was just published online and is in the new print issue of Washingtonian magazine.
It’s about New America, a DC-think tank. (If that sounds boring, stay with me.) Some of you may recall that last summer New America found itself embroiled in a national media scandal when The New York Times revealed it had ousted Barry Lynn, a longtime staffer and a well-known critic of Google. New America has a longstanding relationship with Google, and at the time of Lynn’s firing, the tech giant comprised 3.6 percent of the think tank’s total funding.
Leaked emails showed that one year earlier New America’s CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter had stressed that her think tank had been “trying to expand” its relationship with Google further, and that she worried Lynn’s actions could “imperil funding for others.” The New York Times stories and subsequent coverage sparked major debates about the role and influence of corporate funding in research and policymaking.
New America’s leadership, for its part, maintains Barry Lynn’s criticisms of Google had nothing to do with his firing, and that it was his non-collegial behavior that ultimately cost him his job. “We have never had an instance of a funder shaping what we do,” Slaughter told her staff.
My story is an inside-look at how New America responded to this high-profile drama, as well as how it’s grappled with other, more thorny problems that have emerged as the think tank’s grown in size and scale.
A headline like this one is clickbait for me. Great piece. The quotes
amassed by the management consultant are a particularly good get.
Wondering whether Slaughter's emails to Friedman released by WikiLeaks
would have tax consequences for New America. I'm pretty sure it's a
501c3... I assume this was reported on and explained at the time, so if
anyone has a link, pass it on.