The site ThinkProgress, long a stalwart among left-leaning news organizations, was shuttered last week by its owner, the Center for American Progress (CAP), who laid off the remaining members of the staff that hadn’t been absorbed into the larger company. The site’s closure, however, was brief. Days later, CAP announced that ThinkProgress would continue publishing material by its in-house think tank staff at a new version of the site—becoming, in essence, an institutional blog. It was quickly pointed out to CAP’s top brass that this amounted to firing the entire unionized staff and running the site with scabs, and so the plan was canceled.

These events were consistent with CAP’s funding model. For the most part, our donor class is simply indifferent to journalism. Go ahead and try to get some rich liberals interested in funding a left-wing media project that isn’t directly tied to one of their other pet issues (gun violence, or criminal justice reform, say). If the effect of good journalism can’t be quantified in the language of nonprofit “impact”—less “our reporting got this person off death row,” more “our collective body of work influenced the way a lot of people thought about politics and power”—these funders can’t see the point. (This indifference is distinct from the impulse that leads men like Jeff Bezos to buy a newspaper, or Pierre Omidyar to start a media company: There’s a bit more glory in being the owner, and not a mere institutional supporter.) And big political donors interested in a “media play” simply want vulgar propaganda (see: Brock, David).



These tendencies have only been reinforced in the Trump era. The chief goal of one sort of person who donates to organizations like CAP is to bring about the downfall of Donald Trump. If you’ve been taking your money to CAP with that outcome in mind, what happens when you examine the work CAP is doing with that money and discover some independent journalism that cannot be perceived as devoted solely, on a full-time basis, to the task of ousting Trump? Given the fact that you, like most of these donors, are old, hidebound, and have the attention span—on a good day—of a mayfly, you might tire of funding something that’s not yielding the instant gratification you crave. (Indeed, you might tire of funding various things that could help the cause of making the country more just and small-d democratic and simply run for president yourself, after your expensive campaign to impeach the president with cable news ads fails to achieve the desired effect.)

ThinkProgress was not shuttered because it loses money. It certainly did lose money—political journalism is not exactly a cash cow!—but it was not a business of any kind: It was an arm of an extremely well-funded nonprofit think tank. If the Center for American Progress, as an institution, was interested in sponsoring journalism, CAP would’ve sponsored it. CAP isn’t, and here we are.



ThinkProgress was notable for its editorial independence from its think tank parent (which its editorial union had enshrined in their contract), and for how often that editorial independence got the site in trouble with its think tank parent, which on a few occasions led that parent to violate the spirit of that editorial independence.

