To the Editor:
The Chronicle of Philanthropy failed with its posting of the Business of Giving’s interview with the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. That failure hurts.
The director of the center, and the center itself, has been roundly discredited by other nonprofits, researchers, and journalists for manipulating or misstating data. The center is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (the CIS has responded by filing charges against the SPLC under RICO laws). The CIS was founded by a white nationalist. It promotes the use of “extreme vetting” of immigrants, pushes for laws to prevent people from rejoining family members, and decries the idea of birthright citizenship.
The director even attempted to redirect the nativist “birtherism” that was used against President Obama against vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris (see the New York Daily News, August 15, 2020 — no need to link to racist lies).
All that information can be found in a very quick search of the internet. Yet none of it was mentioned or asked about by the interviewer, Denver Frederick, host of the Business of Giving podcast. Nor did the Chronicle of Philanthropy provide any of this information — or any information — to contextualize the interview before posting it to its website or in the editor’s subsequent letter about the interview.
This context matters. Why highlight the opinions of such an organization? If the goal is to provide different perspectives on an issue, don’t choose an organization that manipulates data and lies. Was it to highlight a nonprofit that is having influence over public policy? If so, say so and make sure that the nature of that political success is examined and brought forward, especially given the claims about data manipulation. The interview failed to address any of the above context, so the point could not have been to show how public policy is based on manipulated data and a white nationalist agenda. U.S. nonprofits and philanthropy need to reckon with the role the sector plays in supporting and advancing white nationalism; but that’s not the material that was published.
The nonprofit sector and philanthropy are home to a wide range of ideological beliefs on all issues, by design. But neither a respect for pluralism nor even a pursuit of balanced journalism is justification for raising the profile of an organization that traffics in hate speech and misinformation. Furthermore, legitimizing the latter makes it harder to benefit from the former.
The ideas espoused by the CIS inform government policies that are dehumanizing, dangerous, and deadly. The organization’s nonprofit status does not give it a pass on these positions or on the effects of its ideas; influencing public policy is the organization’s self-declared “gold standard.”
There is a dearth of media focused on nonprofits and philanthropy. No one should be asking harder questions about nonprofit organizations and donors than those dedicated to the sector. And all of us should expect nonprofits, philanthropists, and the media that covers them to rely on accurate data, provide complicated context, and invite public scrutiny.
Lucy Bernholz
Director, Digital Civil Society Lab
Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society