Tucker Carlson's Funding Model for The Daily Caller Combines Religious Right Sugar Daddy With Corporate Lobbyists' Ad Revenue

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

In case you hadn't heard, the Internets made a new site this week.

While the desperate misogyny of Matt Lebash as a sad reflection upon the identity of the conservative male, the manufactured I-wish-I-was-Ann-Coulter faux bitchiness of S.E. Cupp and the utterly inane and un-newsworthy ramblings of Tucker Carlson are all entirely boring to me in their predictability, there is one thing that interests me about the new HuffPo/Politico hybrid known as The Daily Caller.

Call me wonky, but -- while everyone seems more happy arguing whether or not the new political news site from the conservative pundit who used to wear bow ties will be right-leaning or centrist, or whether that even matters -- I'm wondering about funding.

Media watcher Howard Kurtz began his Washington Post piece on the new venture thusly:

"We need a roundup of the weirdness," Tucker Carlson shouted, walking past a row of young staffers hunched over laptops on the sort of cheap- looking teak tables that scream start-up venture.

The Fox News commentator launches his new Web site, the Daily Caller, on Monday. His partner is Neil Patel, a former Dick Cheney aide. His opinion editor is Moira Bagley, who spent 2008 as the Republican National Committee's press secretary. And his $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financier Foster Friess, a big-time GOP donor.

But Carlson insists this won't be a right-wing site: "I don't feel guilty about or ashamed in any way of saying we'll cover the people in power," he says, dismissing the capital's Republicans as "totally powerless."

You can almost see Kurtz eyes rolling.

While Carlson now spends all his time and energy insisting that the site will not have an overarching partisan bent, last spring he told the right-wing site Human Events that he envisioned the site a providing a "vital message, goal and crusade" and talked about it in terms of opposition to the "socialism" and "radical increase in federal power" he perceived as occurring under the new Obama Administration.

Regardless of political leanings, I would have written that whole second paragraph backwards, as a timely homage to the deceased inverted pyramid in a piece about the rebirth of "journalism" on the Web. Indeed, that handy J-school trick of putting the most vital information at the top of a paragraph might do us some good in this case. Allow me:

Tucker Carlson's new site has its 21-person staff, tacky start-up tables and minute-by-minute updates thanks to a $3 million cash infusion by born-again evangelical Christian investor Foster Friess, fierce opponent of immigration reform, climate change legislation, healthcare reform, the income tax and government programs of nearly every stripe.

Among the "missions" of Friess' personal Web site is the one to "Help Peaceful Muslims transcend the 7th century ideology of coercion, intimidation and violence that threatens them -- and us." He also urges his readers to support "private sector solutions that curb the increasing intrusiveness of government" and to "promote the American Dream -- not to make everyone equal, but to provide each person the opportunity and freedom to pursue the potential God intended for them."

And the top story in the "augmenting the news" section of Friess' site is at least two years old and features a Bible passage and a quote attributed to St. Christopher. But none of that matters now that Friess has a new "news augmentation" service in The Daily Caller.

Kurtz also notes that Friess is financing the site without any interest in serving as a board member. When asked why Friess isn't interested creating a board, Carlson's partner Patel dismissed it as a product of eccentricity. Friess told Kurtz via e-mail that he's partnering with the "mature, sensible" duo of Patel and Carlson to foster the opportunity to "re-introduce civility" into "the dialogue that occurs in our country that has become too antagonistic, nasty and hostile."

Mature? Civil? Has this guy ever even seen Crossfire? Does he have any clue what the name "Cheney" means in modern political discourse?

But, of course, The Daily Caller cannot exist on ideological dollars alone. Enter the corporate ad.

In an interview with paidContent.org (in which Carlson idiotically suggests that there are hardly any online political news sites and that no one had ever tried to pay online writers using ad money based on page hits), the pundit reveals the five "launch sponsors" who are paying for ad space on the new site, the majority of which are conservative lobbying groups:

The Auto Alliance (lobbyists for nine of the major car and truck manufacturers), the Chamber of Commerce, the Southern Company (an energy firm listed among the five highest carbon dioxide emitting power companies in the world), Broadband for America (a group pushing nationwide broadband access, of which Comcast is a member) and the National Mining Association (the American mining interests' lobby group).

Rather than promoting the "new" idea to turn reporters into shareholders in an online news venture (ever heard of The Examiner, Tucker? Try browsing Craigslist for writing jobs and you'll see how innovative that idea is), Carlson should be honest.

The Daily Content's real innovation is actually a synergy of funding sources. Carlson and Patel are combining the model of corporate ad revenues driving stories with the Richard Mellon Scaife funding model.

Ever since Scaife virtually created the right-wing publication The American Spectator in order to organize (and eventually publicize the findings of) the Clinton family dirt-dredging machine known as The Arkansas Project, the moneyed right have been pouring funds into conservative media. We see this strategy playing out in Friess' funding as well as in the tale of Peter G. Peterson's Fiscal Times views being printed as straight news in The Washington Post, something the paper's ombudsman later admitted "was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions."

Cloaking their entry into online news with a mission to restore dignity to political discourse, rather than with a particular partisan bent, has a new function in the age of the teabagger. Carlson's ravings against Obama's big government takeovers (as seen in the 2009 Human Events piece referenced above, before such rhetoric was turned down for the benefit of the site launch) played perfectly into an anti-government sentiment that is begging for even a semi-legitimate news source. It's tough to build a movement when the most respectful news bookmarks you have are the Freepers and World Net Daily.

With the opportunity to make money off of the popular anger of the American people while at the same time holding a good-looking megaphone up to their ideological leanings, conservatives can make a financial and political killing off of ventures such as The Daily Caller.

And so Arianna Huffington is partly right when, in her self-promotional "welcome to the neighborhood" piece for The Daily Caller, she says that this has nothing to do with the "traditional media’s obsession with looking at every issue through the cobweb-covered lens of right vs. left."

Indeed, this is about an even more ancient journalistic cliche: Follow the money.

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS