Review: SourceWatch

The Center for Media and Democracy is a pretty small organization, with just a $1M budget, stretched across many different projects. Yet they draw a lot of attention from right-wing sources (example: Fox stories, Breitbart stories), often centered around a grant from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations (which give support to many progressive organizations while being at the heart of every “globalist new world order” conspiracy theory).

Why is CMD so heavily targeted? I can only conclude that it’s because they attack disinformation where it hurts the most: at the source. It documents the connections of right-wing spinmeisters like Steven Milloy, who are paid to attack environmental science or other findings and activism that could affect a company’s bottom line, as well as the activities of ALEC, a right-wing group that drafts (usually reactionary) legislation for Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Long before most people had heard of Wikipedia, CMD set up an instance of MediaWiki to document funding connections, revolving doors, and influence networks, calling the result SourceWatch. You need to send an email to become an editor – I’m unclear as to whether they do any kind of additional vetting. It’s a typically chaotic wiki where it’s not always clear why something is categorized in a certain way. The abundance of branded micro-projects like “ALEC Exposed”, “Koch Exposed”, “FrackSwarm”, “CoalSwarm”, “NFIB Exposed”, Fix the Debt", and occasional links to other micro-sites can be confusing, as well.

But there’s a lot of high quality information, much of it footnoted. If you ever see an expert talking head spout off something suspiciously corporation-friendly, chances are SourceWatch will tell you a lot about the think tank they’re part of, the corporations that are funding it, and the causes they’ve previously supported. And if the journalist who gave that person a platform doesn’t mention those pertinent facts, you can point that out – and ask journalists for more disclosure and careful selection of exports.

So, as with any wiki, read it critically, and expect to get lost a little bit – but SourceWatch is unique, and if you ever want to track information provenance, it’s a useful resource to know about.