The Pew Foundation’s Non-Neutrality

Capitol Confidential ^ | 1/27/2011 | Scott Walter

[MichCapCon]

Remember when Pew and some of its friends got caught with their hands in the cookie jar a few years ago on the issue of campaign finance reform? Now “net neutrality,” another dubious “reform,” is in the news, and once again Pew is under fire.

In the earlier controversy, Sean Treglia, a former Pew staffer, explained to some journalists in 2004 at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism how Pew and 7 other left-of-center foundations created a snowball of research, “grassroots” groups, and more, all in order to fool Congress and the courts into imagining that Americans believed they had too much freedom in political campaigns and a government crack-down was needed.

Appropriately for today’s net neutrality chapter of this old, old story, Treglia sneered at bloggers as he tried to cover his posterior: They are “not news journalists. To the contrary, they are nothing more than partisans engaged in an effort to discredit the campaign-finance movement.”