What is it about right wing organizations who complain about so-called "liberal bias," set out to counterbalance said perception of bias with right wing hackery, and then when the money trail leads to a billionaire, they whine?

Steven Greenhut with the inaccurately-named Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity took to the pages of the Huffington Post to whine:

But in mid-February, the game started again. Another left-wing, foundation-funded journalism group, the Center for Public Integrity, released a report about our funding. Media Matters wrote about us yet again, and its headline captured the gist of all these stories: "Franklin Center Top Donor Is Right-Wing's 'Dark Money ATM.'"

We expect these groups to target us. That's their mission. Here's where it gets disturbing. Their circular hype -- I write about you and then you write about me writing about you -- caused enough of a stir to prompt some prominent journalism enterprises to bite at the story. First, the London-based Guardian newspaper published a piece headlined, "Media campaign against wind farms funded by anonymous conservatives."

My editors and I couldn't immediately recall even running any articles about wind farms, let alone leading a campaign against them. But there we were in a major news publication described as the cat's paw for "conservative billionaires who are funding the anti-climate cause."

The author, Suzanne Goldenberg, never contacted us. She regurgitated the CPI "findings." We tried to respond. Nearly two weeks after the story ran, we finally heard back from the Guardian's readers' editor. He wouldn't print a rebuttal, but agreed to include my letter in the comments section and link from the story to the comment. He edited the letter significantly, removing the key fact that Goldenberg never contacted us while she reported the story. His explanation: Our criticism of the reporter was "ad hominem."

These elite journalists can say what they want about us, but any of my reporters who did such shoddy work would now be unemployed.

Huh. Standards at the Franklin Center? I guess Greenhut forgot to fire the person who reported on Kyle Wood's lie about being attacked for supporting a Republican candidate last year. Remember that one?

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