Think tanks all have agendas driven by their backers.

Based on your interest in think tanks, you appear to be a person that likes to dig under the surface for more detailed and comprehensive information, so it seems you should also take it upon yourself to research your sources and do some critical thinking on your own. But if you insist, this is a high-level piece on think tanks as servants of corporate agendas:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-r...

I think the OP made it clear that he accepts think tanks have an agenda, and are politically opinionated and motivated.

The implication of "propoganda" is generally more than that.

Personally, I think "unbiased" and "independant" are silly goals, when it comes to politically contentious issues. In practice it leads to a transparent veneer of impartiality far too often. Who says publications can't be opinionted.

In days past, political parties had publications, pamphlets...

TLDR, I sometimes prefer partial or partisan, especially compared to impartial publications pretending otherwise.

"Propaganda" is a loaded word, as it immediately reminds us of authoritative regimes and totalitarianism, but its definition, according to Merriam-Webster is:

- The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

- Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect.

Is what think-tanks do any different ? Mind, it's different from what normal press/media do, as their goal is usually financial and they just cater to their audience.

Whatever the dictionary definition, we don't use propaganda unless we mean disingenuous means in any context. Propaganda is an accusation.

Who do you trust then? There are no organizations that receive funding from no one are run by no one.

You can't really trust any single source. Get information from all over the place initially and figure out what's closest to the real thing. Eventually you'll find reliable sources. Plus, a reliable source in one area might not be reliable in another.

Not to go tin hat here either, but it seems very weird that just a few hours after this was submitted, it has by far the most upvotes and comments on hacker news, yet is near the bottom of the page. I wonder how much manual influence YC puts over their actual topic rankings.

A high rate of comments can work against a submission as it can trigger the "overheated discussion detector" which is used to work against flame wars. User flags (which suppress ranking even before the [flagged] tag appears) as well as mod weighting can affect ranking.

From the FAQ:

> How are stories ranked?

> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.

> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

being aware of ways to manipulate content is not being tin hat, i would love to be good at that kind of data manipulation, I admire it, sometimes its used for bad but i admire it, its real.

tin hat would be that its being done by some wierd cult of secret members that have a goal of making us unisex slaves to serve the elite few (which no one can agree on anyone in this group, Lady Gaga is apparently one of them, (how are people this dumb and not dead from their stupidity is something my OCD freaks out on)

I wish i saw the data the way that some do, I just make it neat and in order. we gotta stop the retaliation and jealousy of someone getting something we didnt. You will never get that satisfaction. Make life better for you, and just hope they get hit by a car and let it go.

Universities? After all, isn't this what tenure is for? To allow professors to make contributions to the public space without the risk of censure?

In a sense yes, but modern universities are also dependent on contributions from outsiders, so if a professor wants to become "successful" he/she may become bound to the political wishes of their donors. Economics is an area where this is very clear.

Moreover professors have their own agenda. Just looks at the reproducibility problems in many fields. There's very little information out there that doesn't have some kind of hidden bias. At least when you know there is a bias you can systematically take that into account.

while i feel for everyone, I will openly state that you should not trust me. Its not personal, its life. Heres a tip though, I usually trust the news i find excites me the most, the least, then i take the headline and paraphrase that into google and see the sources that are saying similar reports. If I see multiple sites that have a similar bias as the ONLY ones to dominate the first 3 pages of results, especially if they are the same sentence or article, I trust that to be not real until further credible news comes out. I also take anything that the actions of the people have an odd motive. Like Hilary Clinton running a secret child porn ring from the basement of a pizza parlor and a child sex ring, while running for President. (while the onion usually would print that, we have many friends and neighbors that actually would see that story and go "hate the lady, must be true" (I honestly was shocked and saddened by how many bought into that.) None ask "why would she do that?" Evil or Greed or one word, usually moral flaws as motive, are not actual motivators. No one does something just because they love, no they help the poor because they feel for others and knowing that they did just something to help a needy person gives them an endorphine rush and makes them feel good. Others get that from making money and never spending it. I get it from kinky sex with different people, and organizing chaos into structured data for others to pick apart. We may help others in life but nothing is 100% selfless.

Well i heard that parental thing can make you do things like that, but again its a bio feedback of purpose. Ted bundy got it from killing, he didnt do it to be EVIL. read something other than a 2000 year old book of prophecy. or at least stop making everyone else jump in line to fulfil it. If its a prophecy it will happen regardless of your actions. if you could stop it, not a prophecy.

A man has a think tank...

Only trust your fists.

In age of technology, even your fists may spy on you :)

Why do you need a think tank to think for you? Have you not read about the importance of distraction-free, analog, time with yourself and others?

Trust shouldn't enter into the equation, bro. That's fallacious.

'development' is code for domination by a miniscule portion of the global population who use that monopoly of state and economic power to extricate the maximum of value with the least cost (de facto parasitism) while also using that monopoly to guide behavior so as to maintain said relation.

"Why do you need a doctor to think for you?

[...]

Trust shouldn't enter into the equation, bro."

Sometimes other people know more about something than I can afford to figure out by myself, and listening to what they have to say can be useful.

Cato was specifically founded to advance libertarian views. They say so explicitly. They tolerate some open debate and have some intellectual honesty about it, but don't expect them to continue to fund or advance projects counter to libertarian concepts.

Brookings are pretty dang centrist, and I think there was actually a formal study on this point.

Anyhow, the point I'm making is that think tanks vary in how overtly political they are, but some like Cato and Heritage are very ideologically driven, and others like Brookings more reflect the selection bias of the status quo.

It comes down to where their money comes from. Think tanks are funded by people who are looking to manufacture intellectual backing for their political agenda. Given recent developments, I can see a positive aspect to this, because at least it implicitly supports the assumption that research and intellectual arguments matter in politics. However, it shows that you can't conclude anything from the existence of a well-researched and well-argued intellectual support for a position. The think tank system guarantees that anybody with sufficient resources can buy well-researched and well-argued intellectual support.

Which is important. I know I've had a few epiphanies in my time where I realized, "Wait, this thing I thought was stupid, there are some really smart people who are into it... they've invested a lot of effort and research and have some coherent arguments to support it... I should really take another look." It's a meaningful signal in some contexts. In some contexts it even creates a presumption in my mind that I am probably wrong in not recognizing any value in something. In politics, though, it doesn't mean anything, because that kind of intellectual engagement is manufactured through the think tank system as a matter of course.

I have not observed many people who have the ability (or willingness) to honestly engage in that sort of introspection. Very seldom do I hear, "You make a good point..." It is even rarer that I hear, "I was wrong..."

> "Wait, this thing I thought was stupid, there are some really smart people who are into it... they've invested a lot of effort and research and have some coherent arguments to support it... I should really take another look."

That's what causes hype around technology. Even if people don't 'get it' they think well everyone else is doing it there has to be something to it.

The book Dark Money by Jane Mayer tells much of the backstory of how many of these think tanks got started. Most of them were funded by rich folks, mostly far right or libertarian (e.g. Kochs brothers), for one reason: to make the rich folks' far right, libertarian views seem moderate and mainstream. The idea was to sponsor a think tank that looked moderate and unbiased, but then to fill it up handpicked people who were basically paid to try to "prove" that the Koch brothers ideas are good. Of course both sides do this now, but the libertarian and far right folks have done it the best.

Left and right are flavors of authoritarianism. Far right and libertarian are not synonymous.

You have no idea what you're talking about, nor do the people that responded to you it seems. Authoritarianism is completely orthogonal to the "left-right" axis of political philosophy.

There is a libertarian left (anarchism) and libertarian right (Ayn Rand style American libertarianism), as well as authoritarian left (marxist-leninist style socialism) and authoritarian right (fascism).

politicalcompass.org

> You have no idea what you're talking about

Please don't post like this, no matter how wrong someone else is. It poisons the commons and breaks the site rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am just a random know-nothing Internet guy. Leonard E. Read, who started the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), has better credentials.

“Left” and “right” are each descriptive of authoritarian positions. Liberty has no horizontal relationship to authoritarianism. Libertarianism’s relationship to authoritarianism is vertical; it is up from the muck of men enslaving man. But, let’s begin at the beginning …

Source: “Neither Left Nor Right,” https://fee.org/articles/neither-left-nor-right/

The kind of libertarianism the FEE think tank advocates for is what I would call right-libertarianism. And it's kind of an oxymoron because there is still a need for authority. How do you assert anyone's claim to private property without a centralised authority? The original libertarianism, which is a strain of socialist political philosophy, calls for decentralised authority and therefore also the end of the private ownership of property.

Of course, this FEE think tank, along with all the other "Libertarian" think tanks, are funded by the likes of the Koch brothers in an effort to legitimise the deregulation of their industries. There is no requirement for it to make any logical sense, just to appear as if it does so that legislation can have some semblance of an intellectual backing.

Please apply the principle of charity[0], friend.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

And this itself is a piece of propaganda spread by libertarian think tanks.

Left and right are degrees of authoritarianism, e.g. libertarian is far right, and nazism and communism are far left. Nazism and communism would be flavors of authoritarianism.

The comment you replied to wasn't great, but you took what was worst about it and dialed it up to 11.

I agree. Soros and the Koch bros are two sides of the same coin. They both advocate pro-globalization policies, Soros the social aspects, and Koch the economic aspects. It's clear that globalism has massively benefitted the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the lower and middle class, and one way they justify the madness is by funding these propaganda organizations.

What bugs me is how often reports from "Think Tanks" and NGOs are uncritically reported as news by the media without disclosing their donors.

Nancy Pelosi is a mainstream center-left Democrat who just happens to be a woman (!) from San Francisco (!) in a position of power, which gets some people in a tizzy. Most of the outrage about whatever it is she’s saying or doing this week is manufactured by a propaganda machine.

The Koch Brothers, by contrast, have a self-serving radical fringe ideology and no public accountability whatsoever, but because they are billionaires who have organized with other billionaires, can spend huge amounts of money in a subversive campaign to make their fringe ideas seem respectable.

Have you ever heard Limbaugh’s show? My grandfather once was a reasonable, competent, practical mainstream Republican (worked in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations), but 20 years of listening to Limbaugh and later Fox News turned him into a ranting conspiracy theorist.

>I see it repeated a lot that think tanks are really propaganda engines with an intellectual veneer, but can you back that up with specific examples?

You mean other than the article we are replying to? :)

All joking aside, I'm sure all think tanks aren't shilling with every article, but follow the money. They are typically founded by, actively solicit and are paid for by corporate donations and corporations don't typically give money for nothing.

Cato is a libertarian think tank. They have a specific libertarian slant. The print more articles that libertarians would like and print fewer articles that libertarians don't, specifically Koch flavored libertarian-ism. I mean that's the way it just is. I mean I favor social libertarian-ism, but for someone to be an objective reader, they need to know that Cato was formed to serve libertarian interests.

Remember the Koch's 2012 takeover:

The Koch brothers have long supported Cato, which they helped found in Washington in 1977. Recently, however, they have come to consider their creation politically unreliable. In a meeting with Robert Levy, chairman of Cato’s board of directors, they expressed their intention to remake the institute into a party organ that would aid their effort to unseat President Obama. To do so, however, they need control of the board. They intend to get it by suing the widow of William Niskanen, a recently deceased board member, for control of Niskanen’s shares.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/why-wou...

Pointing to Ezra Klein to explain what is happening on the right is the opposite of "slant-free".

He's not "pointing to Ezra Klein to explain"; he's citing reporting. If some part of it is false, correct it.

In the age of the internet, shooting the messenger is not an effective way to suppress the message.

Most of the time it is. Look at how they character assassinated Snowden. They said his girlfriend was a stripper, he was a Russian spy, etc.

Your first impression might be to say that wasn't effective, but did we ever get any real NSA reform? Nope.

But to your point, the message still got out, but many people allowed themselves to ignore it.

I direct the Open Source Policy Center at the American Enterprise Institute. We contribute to open source economic modeling tools. Check us out. I think we do good work, and I have never felt as if a donor biased our work -- this is probably because I state our values and objectives clearly when we raise money.

It's more about what they don't publish or research than what they do. Very few of those publications have ever published staunchly anti-corporate articles.

It's all good to argue some partisan political stuff, or things around the edges, but god help you if you start publishing anti-corporate articles.

> I subscribe to the Brookings Papers, Cato Journal, Chatham House and Council on Foreign Relations. Yes, the content is political, but discussions of economics and policy are necessarily political in nature.

There is a difference between political subject matter and a clear ideological bias that makes it so if you know the subject and the name of the think tank producing a work, you can predict the general thrust fairly reliably with no other information (or, similarly, where you can identify someone's membership in both a major party and a faction within that party by the think tank’s they are inclined to cite.)

Many major think tanks are ideological in this way.

>Many major think tanks are ideological in this way.

That's not at all the same statement as "think tanks are a euphemism for propaganda machine".

The goalpost has shifted.

> That's not at all the same statement as "think tanks are a euphemism for propaganda machine"

Yes, it's a different (compatible, though, not contradictory) statement, though related.

> That's not at all the same statement as "think tanks are a euphemism for propaganda machine"

You are mistaking a many-soded discussion for a two-sided debate. My having a different position than an earlier participant is not a goalpost shift (them changing the point they are arguing for without acknowledging that it has changed would be.)

Yeah it is; when you are ideological, you put out pieces that subscribe to said ideology and ignore evidence/observations that support other ideologies or contradict your own. This is the same as propaganda which, instead of putting out pieces raised from an objective perspective, you only publish pieces that support a specific ideology.

I don't believe so. Ideological propaganda is still propaganda.

I think you can roughly split this into two questions:

1) Is the organization receiving funding to focus on analyzing a certain area of policy? Here, you can argue that the organization has an agenda that is driven by its backers, but I don't think it's sufficient to call it propaganda, because by that definition, any paid effort to focus on any particular area is propaganda.

2) Is the organization seeking to highlight positive evidence while seeking to squelch negative evidence? That's where it more becomes about propaganda.

Not every think tank is the same. I'm sure some of them are just fronts for various interests, and some are legitimate groups of people interested in an issue.

I agree there probably are some good ones that get funding somehow. But if the general consensus is most/many think tanks are independent organizations that think about stuff and publish articles, like authors or philosophers for the common good, they certainly are not.

Also, I would suspect that the bigger the think tank (read well funded) the better chance of getting their article republished. I mean if I started Clubber's think tank about whatever, I doubt I'd get much traction.

Depends on what Clubber's think tank produced. If you create "reports" (they don't call 'em studies, and for good reason) media outlets can use for story hooks you might get plenty of traction.

Also, you need to call your think tank something meaningless and anodyne like "People United for Truth and Justice". Because who isn't united for truth and justice?

Think tanks were born as ways for monarchs to research and organize legal arguments against Church doctrine. They have since expanded to cover a broad range of subjects, but the central point of a think tank is to get a bunch of smart people together to formalize a particular opinion and support it with arguments/research.

Most often, these are funded by a particular group, for a particular agenda. This is the definition of propaganda.

I don't see how this is incompatible with the parent's remarks.

The disconnect is probably with confusion or distaste over the word 'propaganda'. It has a negative connotation, but 'propaganda' means "non-objective information used primarily to influence an audience or further an agenda", which is what think tanks produce.

I think many think-tanks would take issue with "non-objective". Certainly the think tanks themselves subjectively examine only certain issues, but they would like to believe their examinations are as objective as possible.

The difference being that while I may only ever study the stars and refuse to study plants, my examinations of the stars are still objective, even though the area of my examinations are not comprehensive.

Sure, there are researchers who are making narrow claims, but what think tank isn't making broad claims?

If you're going to make broad claims and claim to be objective, you need a more robust metaphysical approach than the mission statement of these places usually allows... And even then, you'll probably fail. Your tactics leak into your metaphysics and your ideology leaks into your tactics. Broad claims and objectivity just don't mix.

Citation requested.

>I see it repeated a lot that think tanks are really propaganda engines with an intellectual veneer, but can you back that up with specific examples?

You'd figure the fact that the only "thinking" that gets factored into any decision (apart of that of bureaucrats too worried about their election coffers and thus easily paid off - oh, I'm sorry, "donated to") is privately paid is damning enough...

I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. Would you mind elaborating or rephrasing it?

They present the illusion of rigor with the style of presentation and sophistication of their rhetoric.

However what makes censorship so powerful is that you can't see it!

In Class, Fussell cited think-tanks' kind-of-ridiculous adoption of academic titles and trappings ("Fellow" and such) to make themselves seem respectable and trustworthy as evidence of the social and class standing of academics.

They're lobbying organizations with a carefully and consciously applied veneer of learned, academic legitimacy.

It becomes even more powerful when every single mainstream media outlet and every 'think tank' approach the context with the same 'frame.'

Think tanks are organizations funded and founded on a believe, whatever that might be. Their goal is to support the believe with "research." I am one that thinks that it's possible to put just about any believe in positive light. Given this then think tanks are propaganda machines. It comes down to this. If I believe in the think tank's vision then the research papers are research. If I don't then they are research with a spin. Which is the same as propaganda.

Bottom line, think tanks are propaganda machines. It just depends on what your believes are.

Not to distract from the main point, but my experience has been NYT and WST lean towards the left than the right, although WST is more conversative on the financial side which is obvious.

I recently wrote a little Python script to scrape the url from top submissions to Reddit's /r/The_Donald vs. /r/EnoughTrumpSpam to get an idea of the most conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning news outlets (e.g. more specifically which news sites conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning redditors use to support their respective narratives). Here are the results:

https://i.redd.it/45ezt3j9hziy.png

Edit: Oh and I almost forgot (and to bring this full circle) a Googler saw my post about this and made an interactive version:

https://medium.com/@hoffa/reddit-favorite-sources-the-most-l...

Edit: and to really bring this full circle, this Googler made an interactive version about HN:

https://medium.com/@hoffa/hacker-news-on-bigquery-now-with-d...

What if one side is more reality based than the other? Which certainly has to be the case, both sides would not have exactly equal representation of reality based facts.

So your graph is not very helpful unless you want to pretend the Washington Post and New York times are just leftist versions of Breitbart.

Honestly do not see the point or value in what you have done.

I wanted to see "which news sites conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning redditors use to support their respective narratives". I think my graph helped me find out. Nowhere did I mention anything about truthfulness.

Well here's an interesting observation: the "right" subreddit cites some sources that the "left" subreddit cites, but not vice versa. For example, NYT and Politico appear near the tail of the "right" sub's sources and near the head of the "left" sub's sources, but none of the "right" sub's sources appear anywhere in the "left" sub's sources.

So, assuming that NYT and Politico are left-leaning, it would appear that the "right" sub links to its opponents' views, while the "left" sub does not.

The implications of this are left to the reader.

The conservative subreddit links to archive.us (notice it is 2nd on the list) instead of the NYT, WaPo, etc. because they do not want those news orgs to capitalize from traffic it would be sending there; instead they send their massive conservative user base to archive. (i suppose this behavior might be another interesting observation?)

This is not just because of traffic, but to get the original story. There have been plenty of times where the story was changed and edited after the initial post.

Also, I think the majority of journalism harbors a liberal bias. So any basic analysis of aggregate news links would likely lean liberal.

> Reddit's /r/The_Donald vs. /r/EnoughTrumpSpam to get an idea of the most conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning news outlets

I mean, I guess if you consider Trump-supporting == "conservative" and Trump-critical == "liberal"

I'm not sure that's really true.

hah that's really cool, can you run it again for August?

In an edit above, I linked to a version fhoffa from Google made using data studio; I think that version might auto update.

What's ”WST“? Did you mean WSJ (Wall Street Journal)?

Sorry, I mixed up right and left. Ah, sometimes I just can't.

Center right? If center left is international socialism or the revival of the Soviet Union, then perhaps you’re correct. Your analysis is would suggest that Obama was center right, which is patently ridiculous.

Compared to Europe Obama is center-right. Sanders is the closest thing we have to what would be considered center-left in Europe.

https://www.quora.com/Are-left-wing-Democrats-of-the-United-...

Universal basic income, free university education and free state-run healthcare are leftist... no Democrat puts those things in their platform so I wouldn't call any democrat leftist.

> Universal basic income, free university education and free state-run healthcare are leftist... no Democrat puts those things in their platform so I wouldn't call any democrat leftist.

That's not a logical conclusion. Even if they did support those things, they wouldn't put them in their platform now because it wouldn't fly now. You're defining "leftist" as "actively supports X, Y, and Z," which is arbitrary. And the part about Europe is a red herring; this isn't Europe.

the WST is a left wing paper lol

Thanks the "lol", sarcasm.

We have the equivalent of "think tanks" with real intellectual rigor, they are called universities. Yes, you can take issue with the way that university research is funded, etc., but tenure makes a difference.

> I see it repeated a lot that think tanks are really propaganda engines with an intellectual veneer, but can you back that up with specific examples?

Let's not lump together all think tanks. Some are more intellectually honest, some are places for partisan intellectuals to work when their party is out of power, some exist to provide intellectual cover to political goals.

I've had the same questions as you. According to an interesting paper I came across[0], there have been three waves of think tanks (and this also is painting them with a very broad brush):: 1) Think tanks like Council on Foreign Relations and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which aimed to promote global engagement by Americans. 2) Brookings and Rand, which grew out of quasi-governmental programs (IIRC). 3) Starting in the 1970s, groups that "focus as much on advocacy as on research, aiming to generate timely advice that can compete in a crowded marketplace of ideas and influence policy decisions." Heritage is the prototype; it was the source of much of Reagan's policy and now of Trump's. Heritage (I really hope I have the right think tank) hired someone to write talking points for cutting the estate tax in the U.S., and that is the origin of the meme "death tax", and the (false) argument that small businesses and farmers suffer widespread harm from it - so effective that I'll bet you've heard those.

In the last few years, I've seen many allegations of leading think tanks selling out their independence, including Brookings, CNAS, CSIS, and others. The leader of one defended the practice saying (IIRC), 'This isn't the Greatest Generation. Nobody will give you money now and say 'do something good with it'. Everyone wants specific results.'

Here is a dump of some more articles. If you really want to know about them, look up U. of Pennsylvania's 'Think Tanks and Civil Society Program'.

-- Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, in NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-r...

-- Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams, Nicholas Confessore NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-power...

-- How Saudi Arabia captured Washington by Max Fisher in Vox: Covers more than Saudi Arabia - http://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11275354/saudi-arabia-gulf-wash...

-- Hacked Emails Show UAE Building Close Relationship With D.C. Think Tanks That Push Its Agenda by Zaid Jilani, Alex Emmons in The Intercept - https://theintercept.com/2017/07/30/uae-yousef-otaiba-cnas-a...

-- Hackers Vow to Release Apparent Trove of U.A.E. Ambassador’s Emails by Kevin Poulsen in The Daily Beast - http://www.thedailybeast.com/hackers-vow-to-release-apparent...

[0] From Contributor to Partner? Norway's role in foreign policy research and implementation in the United States by Tove Bjørgaasat Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre/Norsk Ressurssenter for Fredsbygging (NOREF). Here's an old link: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1284...

Think tank research does not undergo peer review, so there is no accountability