Just as Breitbart.com uses the non-profit Government Accountability Institute to provide right-wing content, so does the Daily Caller use their foundation, according to a story in the Washington Post.
The story says the Daily Caller and Tucker Carlson owe their success at least in part to a tax-exempt structure that enables them to make more money and pay fewer taxes.
Most of the roughly 50 journalists who produce content for the Daily Caller actually work for the Daily Caller News Foundation, a tax-exempt organization with 501(c)(3) status that is ostensibly separate from DailyCaller.com. The two entities share the same floor of the same Washington office, however, and virtually everything produced by the foundation — which accepted $3 million in donations in 2015, according to an IRS filing — appears on the for-profit website, which sells advertising on the articles.
In practice, the foundation functions less like journalistic nonprofits such as ProPublica or FactCheck.org, which do not have for-profit affiliates, and more like an in-house wire service for DailyCaller.com — a wire service that doesn't pay taxes on the millions of dollars that fund its work.
The Post spoke to tax specialists who said the arrangement "appears to violate the spirit" of a federal law governing nonprofits. Groups registered as 501(c)(3) nonprofits “must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests,” according to the IRS.
The specialists said it was unlikely they would be investigated in the current political climate.
