Foreign Government Contributions to American Think Tanks

From the first article linked to below, you would think that The New York Times had never reported on how money can taint research in think tanks. That is hardly the case. Still, the articles below do provide some interesting information about the contributions of foreign governments to American research groups. What is not really discussed, however, is how the money can affect outcomes. To use terms from The Critical Assessment of Research, is it a matter of what gets disseminated, the paradigms that are used or the very research itself? One sentence in the first article seems to suggest it is the actual research: ” Some scholars say they have been pressured to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research.”

http://nyti.ms/WrPy6h
http://nyti.ms/1qrTa4U

State Department’s Report on the Environmental Impacts of Keystone XL: Who Did the Research and Was it Unbiased?

On March 1, 2013, the US State Department released a Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement on the environmental effects of the proposed building of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The report concludes reassuringly that “environmental and climate change impacts are manageable.”  As reported in InsideClimateNews, the relatively benign conclusions of the report on the environmental impact of the Keystone proposal were based on analyses provided by companies with significant ties to the oil and pipeline industries.

On June 11, 2013 the The Huffington Post reported that the Sierra Club is sufficiently alarmed about these industry ties that it has filed a lawsuit against the State Department. The lawsuit alleges that the State Department is withholding crucial documents related to its Environmental Impact Statement, including “evidence related to potential conflicts of interest.”

Do the ties between the companies involved in preparing the report and the energy industry cast serious doubt on the independence of their conclusions? The Critical Assessment of Research (see Chapters 3 and 5) discusses the various ways in which the financial interests of researchers or the sponsors of research can affect the conclusions of the research.  Is this another case where financial self-interest trumps our need for disinterested research?

Bradley Foundation, Political Advocacy and the Funding of Research

Before the 2012 presidential election, anonymous billboards sprung up in battleground states warning voters that voter fraud was a felony. These billboards were placed in areas where minorities live in Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been widely assumed that the intent was to frighten minority voters and to suppress their vote, which would likely be heavily Democratic.  More recently it was learned that these billboards were funded by the Bradley Foundation (http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/176675811.html), whose president, Michael Grebe, was the campaign manager for Scott Walker, the controversial right-wing Republican governor of Wisconsin (http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/11/11834/bradley-foundation-bankrolls-controversial-billboards-treading-controversial-new-).

What many people may not be aware of is the Bradley Foundation’s role in supporting the writing of the influential scholarly work, The Bell Curve, which claimed that IQ is a genetically inheritable trait, directly related to socioeconomic success.  Charles Murray, one of the authors, was given $800,000 over a period of 10 years by the Bradley Foundation to support his work on this book (The Critical Assessment of Research, 35).   Many reviewers of The Bell Curve, both in the mass media and scholarly periodicals, lauded the book.  It was  called “a landmark study,” “meticulous,” and “honest,” with findings that “cannot be easily dismissed” (The Critical Assessment of Research, 29-31).  However, given its advocacy of hard right wing positions (see http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/from-local-roots-bradley-foundation-builds-conservative-empire-k7337pb-134187368.html and http://www.jsonline.com/news/134079498.html), is it likely that the Bradley Foundation was funding research whose findings were anything but a foregone conclusion from its very inception?