ProPublica protects its liberal donors

Crusading news site hides its backers – and its left-wing agenda, critics say

The donor-funded ProPublica news organization bills itself as an “independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force . . . shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust.”

But conservative activists are calling foul, saying that ProPublica, founded in 2007 by former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger, has a left-wing bias and is funded mainly by progressive fatcat donors, including George Soros — and some who remain anonymous.

ProPublica’s reporters and editors — some of whom are very well-paid, according to tax filings — attack right-leaning figures and organizations, they said, and often hypocritically criticize them for a lack of transparency.

Disclosures

Although ProPublica listed donations of more than $35 million in 2021 in its most recent disclosure to the IRS — which appears to go above and beyond what the IRS requires them to reveal about donors — there is a layer of opacity and fine print that obscures some of their contributions.

In 2020 and 2021, the organization took in a total of $6.3 million from donors it kept anonymous.

And despite repeated questions about the identity of two donors who appear to have made up nearly a quarter of ProPublica’s donations last year, the organization declined to name them to The Post or explain how they donated to the organization.

Some donors opt to donate through Donor Advised Funds, which do not require them to disclose who they are. Other contributors are listed as “anonymous,” using the Manhattan address of ProPublica, federal filings show.

The conservative activists, who did not want to be named, were irked most recently by ProPublica’s bombshell April report detailing what they called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ “beneficial relationship” with Republican megadonor Harlan Crow — which involved Thomas vacationing with Crow on his yacht and his private jet. Thomas never disclosed these gifts.

“I’m sure in their own minds they are righteous warriors for truth and justice,” said one conservative activist of the nonprofit’s reporters.

“But I know bulls--t when I see it. Among other things, they’re running a very aggressive campaign to target conservative justices of the [Supreme] Court,” the activist added.

“They act all righteous and preening faux-objectivity as if they’re moral giants and we’re knuckle-dragging animals. It’s ridiculous.”

Political ‘party’

Since its founding, ProPublica has won six Pulitzer Prizes, including in 2010 for a story published in The New York Times Magazine, and has stirred controversy by publishing billionaires’ leaked tax secrets.

According to their 2022 audited financial statement, more than $9.9 million in funding to ProPublica from two donors made up a quarter of the site’s revenues — but the names of those donors were not disclosed.

Some of the site’s ultra-rich donors attended a fundraiser at a luxe Gramercy Park home in Manhattan on Monday night thrown by multimillionaire financier Mark Colodny, who is on ProPublica’s board of directors.

They included Charles Rockefeller of the famed dynasty and his wife, Emily Shippee; venture capitalist and former Condé Nast executive Joy Marcus; Sheila Spence, Spotify’s vice president of corporate development; and Lawrence Rand, chairman emeritus of the Kekst & Co. p.r. firm and a visiting professor at Brown University.

One observer noted that they all looked as if they came “straight from Park Avenue, Newport and Hobe Sound.”

“The sanctimony of ProPublica is a bit much considering they’re bankrolled by left-wing donors yet they dress themselves up as being all about purity and transparency,” one of the conservative tipsters told The Post.

“Having a high-end salon in an extremely wealthy financier’s home to fund journalism that has a certain ideology where the funding is not all disclosed and it has a certain ideological bent is pretty hypocritical.”

The longtime Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, whom ProPublica has called “a key architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority,” has been a central figure in a number of unflattering ProPublica articles.

“ProPublica brands itself as seeking transparency and accountability when here they are having a private dinner with billionaire donors from the New York financial community,” Leo told The Post.

“It begs the question: who’s influencing what ProPublica does and what are the special interests that those people represent? They’re taking money from tremendously influential financiers in our country, and we have no idea who they are and what they are getting in return.

“I’ve been the subject of ProPublica reporting largely around the subject of anonymous giving within the conservative movement,” Leo added. “So I’m happy to see they’re having dark-money dinners because now maybe they’d be in favor of anonymous giving.”

Said one conservative source: “ProPublica has built a franchise on reporting on the lack of transparency involving Supreme Court justices. At the same time, ProPublica will not disclose whether its donors have their own conflicts of interest due to business before the Supreme Court.”

Giving liberally

ProPublica lists some of its biggest donors on its website — including the Abrams Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Dyson Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund — and includes tax information for many donors on its site.

The biggest donor to ProPublica in 2021 was Crankstart, the San Francisco-based family foundation of Sequoia Capital founder Michael Moritz, a prominent supporter of former President Barack Obama. The foundation donated $3 million to the nonprofit.

Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who is worth about $26 billion, gave $2 million via her “social change” investment firm Emerson Collective. Powell Jobs is a well-known supporter of liberals, having given more than $2 million to Democrats in 2020.

At the same time, ProPublica has not shied away from calling out Jobs. A 2021 ProPublica piece about how more than half of America’s richest people avoided paying estate taxes noted that Jobs was among them.

The Abrams Foundation, run by David and Amy Abrams, gave ProPublica $1.55 million in 2020.

The group also gave Brown University a $1.25 million grant last year so students can work “with partners to collect personal stories that reveal how slavery and colonialism shaped societies across the globe.”

In 2021, George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society gave the news site $175,903, according to ProPublica’s IRS filing.

In 2019, a Soros foundation gave $353,000 to the site. There was no donation from a Soros-affiliated entity in 2020.

In response to The Post’s queries, a ProPublica spokeswoman emailed a statement that said: “The funding you cite was reported publicly on our 2022 audited financial statement. Every year, on our IRS Form 990, we list the donors who contributed $5,000 or more, which provides readers with more transparency about the sources of our funding than the IRS requires of nonprofits. Our 2022 Form 990 will be published this fall, as is our standard practice.”

When asked to provide some transparency about donations listed anonymously on their most recent 990 disclosure, ProPublica declined to comment.

According to ProPublica’s 2020 IRS filings, the number of anonymous donations totaled more than $4.9 million. In 2021 it was $1.399 million, totaling $6.3 million over two years.

In December, ProPublica said it would return $1.6 million donated by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The site said the funds will be moved to a separate account until a bankruptcy judge or another legal authority decides where the money should be returned, according to Reuters.

Journalistic ethics

Timothy M. Andrews, who was an editor at The Wall Street Journal more than 30 years ago and now runs the Philadelphia-based Advertising Specialty Institute, was a guest at this week’s fundraiser. He told The Post that editors did not give any hint about future investigations at the event, and said he considers the outfit squeaky clean.

“I’ve been a donor for a decade, and never once have they said anything about what they’re working on in the future,” Andrews told The Post outside the Manhattan soiree Monday night. “If anyone asks, they always decline, they give zero hint about their future coverage. The ethics of ProPublica . . . everyone should adopt.”

Andrews disputed claims that ProPublica leans too far left.

“I don’t think they lean left. They had a lot of coverage during the Obama administration that was not always flattering. I think they tell the truth from both the left and right side,” he said

Colodny, a former reporter for Fortune magazine, told The Post that he is “proud to be a longstanding supporter of ProPublica and believe in their mission and the important work they have done over many years. I support ProPublica because I have long been concerned about the crisis in funding for journalism in the US.”

Lawrence Rand also spoke to The Post — although he gave a false name when asked who he was — and echoed what Andrews said about ProPublica’s blemishfree ethics.