Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Sharply Criticizes Heritage Foundation

Here is more from The Hill:

The conservative Heritage Foundation pushed back on Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Saturday after he sharply criticized the organization during a segment on tech policy.

Carlson blasted the foundation and other groups during his show Friday night, arguing that Beltway conservative organizations have "colluded with big tech to shield left-wing monopolies from any oversight."

In specifically going after Heritage, where Carlson used to work, the host asserted, "As an organization, Heritage no longer represents the interests of conservatives, at least on the question of tech."

In response to Carlson, Heritage issued a statement saying that the Fox News host "made several false, outrageous, and unfounded accusations" against the think tank.

Here is the Washington Examiner's reporting on the incident.  Newsweek says that the rebuke of Heritage drew more than three million viewers.

Wikipedia notes that Carlson began his journalism career as a fact-checker for Policy Review, a national conservative journal then published by the Heritage Foundation and eventually acquired by the Hoover Institution.  Its final issue date was in 2013.

Update: Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James received criticism from Carlson in early June 2020, saying that she wrote a "long screed denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation" in her response to George Floyd's death.

Heritage Foundation's VP of Communications, Rob Bluey, defended her, and noted that Carlson took $25,000 from Heritage two years ago and praised the think tank.  [This is likely referring to the Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship that he won from Heritage in 2018.]

BBC Updates Editorial Guidelines to Improve Scrutiny of Think Tanks

Here is more from DeSmog UK:

The BBC has altered its editorial guidelines after persistent calls for the organisation to improve transparency around the commentators to which it gives a platform.

The broadcaster has now added “think tanks” to a list of groups that it says presenters and producers should “not automatically assume … are unbiased”.  “Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context,” the guidelines say.

The change could have significant ramifications for representatives of anti-regulation, pro-Brexit think tanks and campaign groups based in and around offices at 55 Tufton Street, including the UK's principal climate science denial campaign group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on which DeSmog has extensively reported.

This follows pressure from journalists including the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr. She has long fought for the funding and ideology of groups including Vote Leave, Leave.EU, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Taxpayers’ Alliance, and other Tufton Street groups to be made clear when they appear on the BBC’s programmes.

BBC's guidelines concerning impartiality, including those related to think tanks, can be found here.

WPost on Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal

The Washington Post has a new story on the Daily Signal, a news website founded in 2014 and published by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.  Here is more:

Last summer, shortly after the first Republican presidential debate, the editors of the Daily Signal made a decision. Although its digital-only staff of 25 reporters and editors works less than two miles from the White House, they wouldn’t write about the presidential campaign — not at all.

An odd call, perhaps, but then again, the Daily Signal is not your run-of-the-mill news operation.

First off, it is funded by, and housed within, the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank whose president is former Republican senator (and tea party leader) Jim DeMint.

[Editor in Chief Robert] Bluey’s office boasts a large soft-focus poster of Ronald Reagan, and the newsroom lacks the clutter and clatter — and fast-food wrappers — of most places where journalists toil. Clean, quiet and well-appointed, it feels more like a law office or, well, a foundation — except for an impressive new video studio due to debut this summer.

Is it indeed a news operation, or a way for Heritage to do strategic communication in a new and effective way? The editorial insiders insist that it is very much the former.

Former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson is a regular contributor. And when Facebook executives met with conservative news organizations to soothe fears about charges of anti-conservative bias, Bluey was among them. A few weeks later, Bluey was first to report a story about Facebook’s plans for anti-bias training.

So far, though, the two-year-old site has no credentials to cover Congress, which are granted by the Standing Committee of Correspondents. Bluey thinks the prerequisites for getting them may be pretty challenging for the Signal, at least right now. What’s required includes diverse funding sources and no affiliation with (or location within) an advocacy organization.

The article goes on to note that the Signal is trying to diversify its funding by asking readers to subscribe, noting that with an annual budget of $1.3 million, the site gets about 2 million unique visitors a month.

The Editor in Chief, Robert Bluey, noted that sometimes people at the Heritage Foundation, including President Jim DeMint, offer ideas for Daily Signal.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post on the Daily Signal.

List of Top Think Tanks Based on Media Citations

In 2013, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) released its annual list of top think tank based on citations of those think tanks in the media.  Think Tank Watch has mentioned the list before, but we have not dedicated an individual post to it, so here are the results:

1. Brookings: 2,632
2. Heritage Foundation: 1,548
3. American Enterprise Institute (AEI): 1,196
4. Kaiser Family Foundation: 994
5. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
6. Cato Institute: 773
7. Center for American Progress (CAP): 756
8. Urban Institute: 688
9. Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS): 613
10. RAND Corporation: 537

The think tank survey was conducted by sociologist Michael Dolny, who has been doing the think tank survey for FAIR since 1996.

A nice copy of the chart (as pictured above) can be found here.