StickWithANose

I generally like Steve Benen’s work at Washington Monthly. However, like all professional bloggers, his job often entails highlighting the issues being pushed by the organization for which he works, often issues with which he obviously has little to no expertise. What caught my eye yesterday was that on the same day that Steve published a post on the purging of heretics taking place in conservative think tanks he also commented on Washington Monthly’s annual college rankings by linking approvingly to authors [1][2] that represent one of the most disciplined think tanks in D.C.: The Education Sector. My point here is not to throw bombs at Steve; he’s just doing his job. My overall point is that public discourse in the U.S. is becoming increasingly polluted by what I would call a Knowledge Industry. It is an industry funded by private interests, in the case of Education Sector that would be primarily the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, seeking to shape public policy  by constructing commonsensical understandings of issues facing the nation so as to further the interests of their funders. The job of a think tank scholar, and I use that term loosely, is to be a public intellectual that “gets the message out” through articles, commentary, and blogging in targeted media. Scholarship and critical thought are most certainly not the primary function of conservative, progressive or whatever meaningless label you attach to these kind of policy institutes. They are a manifestation of political power in the early 21st century. We need to see them as such…

[UPDATE] The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has published a well-researched article on two of the biggest polluters of public discourse… the Koch brothers.