In The Pay of Foundations: How U.S. power elite foundations fund a `parallel left' media network--Part 8

Gave Pacifica $23,000 To Help Fund Democracy Now! in 1990s

In The Pay of Foundations—Part 8

How U.S. power elite and liberal establishment foundations fund a “parallel left” media network of left media journalists and gatekeepers.

After the then-NY Daily News owner, who employed one of the Democracy Now! show’s co-hosts for over two decades, expressed his support, in a late 2008 television interview, for using public funds to bail out the Wall Street banks, whose involvement in unethical subprime mortgage lending helped trigger the Great Recession of 2008, Wayne Barrett noted, in a Nov. 25, 2008 Village Voice article, that “when Zuckerman isn’t running his media properties…he’s the chairman of Boston Properties, the largest office real estate company in the country;” and “that Citigroup rents more than a million square feet from Zuckerman’s company — trailing only the federal government and Lockheed Martin on its list of top 20 tenants.” So one reason Mort Zuckerman argued on television that “we cannot allow a major institution like” Citigroup “to collapse,” and his NY Daily News newspaper argued in an a November 2008 editorial that the U.S. government should “prevent major banking houses like Citigroup from collapsing,” was apparently because the commercial rental income that Zuckerman’s real estate dealmaking firm gained from its Citigroup tenant would be lost if Citigroup, despite having made $300 billion in unethical “toxic” subprime mortgage-related loans, was allowed to collapse, according to Barrett’s Voice article.

When Zuckerman had purchased his NY Daily News newspaper in 1993 for $36.3 million [equal to over $64 million in 2018], his personal worth was then $265 million [equal to over $468 million in 2018]. And during the 20 years that the weekly salary of the part-time co-host of the “parallel left” Democracy Now! show was being provided by Zuckeman’s tabloid corporate newspaper, Zuckerman’s personal wealth increased to around $2.8 billion by early 2018. But, not surprisingly, not many news segments examining how Zuckerman, who also sat on the board of trustees of both NYU and New York City’s WNET-TV affiliate of PBS during these two decades, was accumulating more personal wealth through his commercial real estate dealmaking firm while the gentrification of the Big Apple intensified, were apparently aired or broadcast on a sustained, regular basis by the Democracy Now! producers during these two decades. Yet in just the one year alone of 1999, the gross profits of the NY Daily News owner’s Boston Properties’ firm jumped by 50 percent.

After moving into his NY Daily News office in early 1993, Zuckerman immediately “fired 180 out of 540 members of the Newspaper Guild” at the NY Daily News, “axed two-thirds of the African-American reporters, including all Black males,” and “dismissed [the now-deceased] veteran reporter Dave Hardy, who was one of the Black journalists who won a racial discrimination suit against the newspaper in 1987” when it was still owned by the Tribune media conglomerate, according to the Daily News Workers Campaign for Justice. So, not surprisingly, the Daily News Workers Campaign for Justice then urged people in New York City to boycott Zuckerman’s NY Daily News in 1993. Yet one of the “parallel left” Democracy Now! show’s co-hosts continued to work as a columnist for Zuckerman’s newspaper until 2016; in the year before Zuckerman, a Canadian immigrant, who didn’t become a U.S. citizen until he reached the age of 40 in 1977, finally sold the NY Daily News in September 2017, while still continuing to own his U.S. News and World Report corporate media outlet.

A year after the Carnegie Corporation of New York gave Pacifica the $25,000 grant in 1996 to launch the Democracy Now! show, the J.M. Kaplan Fund foundation, in 1997, gave Pacifica a $13,000 [equal to over $20,000 in 2018] to “support Democracy Now! show;” and in 1998 an additional $10,000 [equal to over $15,000 in 2018] grant to help fund Democracy Now! was given to Pacifica by the J.M. Kaplan Fund foundation. And, not surprisingly, few radio or cable tv segments examining either how the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s founder obtained the money he needed to establish his foundation or how the J.M. Kaplan Fund historically acted as a conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency [C.I.A.] during the Cold War era were aired by Democracy Now! during the last two decades.

Yet as U. of California-Santa Cruz Professor G. William Domhoff noted in his 1970 book The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America:

“The CIA did not exhaust its labor organizing efforts with its involvement in unions and training organizations related to the AFL-CIO. It also speculated in the activities of the `democratic left.; Through the J.M. Kaplan Foundation, which was founded originally through the beneficence of the president of Welch Grape Juice Company, the CIA gave $1,048,940 between 1961 and 1963 to socialist Norman Thomas’ Institute of International Labor Research…”

In a Sept. 3, 1964 article, titled “Kaplan Fund, Cited as C.I.A. `Conduit,’ Lists Unexplained $395,000 Grant,” the New York Times also observed:

“Charges that the J.M. Kaplan Fund Inc. of 55 Fifth Avenue has acted as a `secret conduit’ for transmission of funds abroad for the Central Intelligence Agency has met a wall of silence at the fund.

“A copy of the report made by the Kaplan Fund…for 1963, however, shows an unexplained grant of $395,000 [equal to over $3.1 million  in 2018] for that year to an Institute operated by a man who has long been identified with anti-communist causes in Europe and Latin America. The grant was by far the largest made by the Kaplan Fund last year in a total of $1,645,390 [equal to over $13.2 million in 2018].

“The recipient of the $395,000 was the Institute of International Labor Research Inc….Its secretary-treasurer is Sacha Volman…For years in Paris he headed a group called Free Trade Unions in Exile that worked with underground anti-communist forces in Eastern Europe…Norman Thomas is listed as chairman of its board of directors…Mr. Volman denied by telephone from Washington last night that he knew of any C.I.A. connection…It was his recollection that the fund had also made grants in 1960, 1961 and 1962…

“The charge that the New York…organization was being used as a `secret conduit’ for C.I.A. funds was made…by Representative Wright Patman…The Kaplan Fund has been under investigation both by the House and by the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Patman had charged the fund with using some of its monies in business operations…”

In his 2012 book, Philanthropy In America: A History, University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor of History Olivier Zunz (who was “grateful also for the support” he “received from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation”—while writing a book about foundations like the ones supporting him) indicated why Rep. Patman initiated his Congressional investigation of foundations like the J.M. Kaplan Fund in the 1960s:

“Patman pursued his investigation of foundations throughout the 1960s. He argued that the proliferation of foundations was evidence not of increased…generosity but rather of growing fiscal abuse, which removed `over $11.5 billion [equal to over $91.9 billion in 2018]’ from taxation. He was determined to expose philanthropy as yet another pretext the wealthy used to avoid inheritance taxes, keep control of companies from one generation to the next, and receive handsome tax deductions when dumping unwanted assets. He also believed philanthropy was a means to avoid antitrust legislation, hide dubious financial transactions from scrutiny and influence the public through the funding of media…Patman was…the first person to reveal that the CIA had been using private foundations as fronts to channel money to anti-communist activities in Europe…Embarrassed, the White House quickly pressured the congressman to abandon that part of his investigation…”

The J.M. Kaplan Fund that gave Pacifica $23,000 in grant money in 1997 and 1998 to help fund Democracy Now! was established in 1945 by a former New School for Social Research/New School University board of trustees chair and former Freedom House trustee named Jacob “Jack” Kaplan, who lived between 1893 and 1987; and “much of its asset base came from the sale in the 1950s of the Welch Grape Juice Company, long headed by Mr. Kaplan, to a grape growers’ cooperative in New York State and Pennsylvania,” according to the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s website. From the sale of his Welch Grape Juice Company corporate stock in 1956, for example, Kaplan received $28.5 million [equal to over $259 million in 2018].

A historical profile of Kaplan’s company posted on the fundinguniverse.com website recalled how the Kaplan Fund’s founder increased the Welch Grape Juice Company’s profits during World War II and first gained control of the Welch Grape Juice Company:

“…Jacob `Jack’ Kaplan…had garnered…a multi-million dollar fortune in commodities trading and retailing in the early 20th century. In 1933, Kaplan and his brother Maurice [purchased]…the grape processing operation of the Chautauqua and Erie Grape Growers Cooperative (CLE) in Brockton, New York…He changed the company name to National Grapes Corporation [in 1939]…In order to circumvent wartime restrictions on corporate profits and price controls, Jack Kaplan spearheaded the creation of a large grape growers cooperative in 1945. The new organization would not only be immune from federal corporation taxes and pricing dictates, but would also guarantee his processing company a reliable supply of grapes…Kaplan and his team convinced 900 growers to join the newly formed National Grape Co-Operative…Jack Kaplan purchased a controlling interest in [Welch’s parent] company [American National]…By the mid-1950s, National Grape farmers—whose numbers had swollen to over 6,000 in the meantime—were supplying 90 percent of the grapes processed by Welch…”

According to Frances Stoner Saunders’ 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters book, the same year that Kaplan sold his Welch Grape Juice Company stock for the $28.5 million, from which much of the J.M. Kaplan fund’s asset base was derived, he secretly offered his services to the Central Intelligence Agency. As The Cultural Cold War recalled:

"In 1956...J.M. Kaplan, president of the Welch Grape Juice Company, and president and treasurer of the Kaplan Foundation (assets: $14 million), wrote to Allen Dulles offering his services...Dulles subsequently arranged for a CIA `representative' to make an appointment with Kaplan. The Kaplan Foundation could soon be counted as an asset, a reliable `pass-through' for secret funds earmarked for CIA projects, amongst them the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and an institute headed by veteran socialist and chairman of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Norman Thomas.”

In the 21st-century, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, that helped fund Pacifica’s Democracy Now! in late 1990s, was still controlled by members of Jack Kaplan’s family (whose last names were now more frequently “Davidson” or “Fonesca” rather than “Kaplan,” as a result of marriage by Kaplan’s daughters, including the oldest one, Joan Davidson, who still owned an 85-acre estate in Germantown, New York in 2013). In 2010, for example, eleven grandchildren, children or other relatives of Kaplan were each being paid between $4,000 and $9,000 for only 3 to 5 hours of “weekly work” sitting on the J.M. Kaplan Fund board of trustees, according to the foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2010. And in 2016, Kaplan’s surviving children and grandchildren were now being paid between $5,000 and $10,000 for only 3 to 5 hours of “weekly work” sitting on the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s board, according to the Form 990 financial filing for 2016.

The market value of the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s assets in 2010 still exceeded $139 million, including its investments of over $72 million in limited partnership shares, over $56 million in corporate stock and over $800,000 in corporate bonds. Over $16 million of the foundation’s inherited wealth was now invested in Westgate Associates, over $13 million in Brookside Capital and over $8 million in Emerging Markets Growth Fund, for example, by the J.M. Kaplan Fund; and the dividends and interest obtained from the corporate securities owned by the “non-profit” foundation produced a net investment income of over $2.1 million in 2010.

In 2010, the J.M. Kaplan Fund apparently used some of the money it obtained from investments in corporations that exploit working-class people and middle-class consumers around the globe to provide “charitable grants” to U.S. university book publishing firms like Princeton University Press, University of North Carolina Press and Penn State University Press, as well as to “parallel left” publishers like The New Press (which was given a $5,000 grant “for `The World According To Monsanto’), according to its 2010 Form 990 financial filing.  And during that same year, the “non-profit” J.M. Kaplan Fund paid $459,000 to Brandywine Management Services “for investment services” (of apparently speculating with the foundation’s money on stock markets around the globe) and paid a total annual compensation of over $291,000 to the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s executive director, according to the same 2010 financial filing.

In 2016 the market value of J.M. Kaplan Fund’s assets still exceeded $130 million, including the over $97 million it invested in hedge funds, according to its 2016 Form 990 financial filing. From its investments in the stocks and bonds of corporation and governments that still exploit working-class people and middle-class consumers around the globe, the J.M. Kaplan Fund received over $1.8 million in dividends and interests in 2016. According to the same 2016 financial filing, the market value of J.M. Kaplan Fund’s investment in the Brandywine Mutual Strategy hedge fund exceeded $54 million and the market value of its investment in the Brandywine Global hedge fund was over $35 million in 2016; and, in that same year, J.M. Kaplan Fund paid the Brandywine Management Company stock and bonds speculation firm $563,934 for its “investment services” on behalf of the “non-profit” foundation.

Since the J.M. Kaplan Fund gave a $10,000 grant to Pacifica in 1998, Brandywine Management Company/Brandywine Global Inc. has been a subsidiary of Legg Mason Inc., that, with its 9 subsidiary investment affiliates managed over $779 billion worth of assets in early 2018, including over $216 billion worth of stock in corporations that exploit workers and middle-class consumers around the world. As the Brandywine Global website notes:

“Brandywine Global incorporated in 1986 as Brandywine Asset Management, LLC….In January 1998, Legg Mason, Inc., a New York Stock Exchange-listed company which has been providing investment services to institutions and individuals since 1899, acquired Brandywine Asset Management…. “

In late 2017, over $74 billion in corporate stocks, corporate bonds, corporate senior notes and government bonds were being managed by Brandywine Global; and in late December 2017, $7.4 million worth of Apple stock, $7.4 million worth of JP Morgan Chase stock, $7.2 million worth of Citigroup stock, $6.3 million worth of Disney/ABC corporate media conglomerate stock, $6.3 million worth of Comcast corporate media conglomerate stock, $4.4 million worth of United Technologies stock, $3.9 million worth of Goldman Sachs stock, $3.9 million worth of Lockheed Martin stock, $2.7 million worth of General Dynamics stock, $2.4 million worth of Exxon Mobil stock, $2 million worth of Chevron stock and $2.1 million worth of CBS corporate media conglomerate stock were contained in the stock portfolio that provides “investment services” for the J.M. Kaplan Fund which helped fund Democracy Now! in 1997 and 1998. (end of part 8)

In The Pay of Foundations: How U.S. power elite foundations fund a `parallel left' media network--Part 5

NY Daily News Owner Mort Zuckerman: Paid Democracy Now! Co-Host's Salary

In The Pay of Foundations—Part 5

How U.S. power elite and liberal establishment foundations fund a “parallel left” media network of left media journalists and gatekeepers.

By the early 1990s, the producer at Pacifica’s WBAI radio station in Manhattan who had produced the stations’s late 1980s daily evening news show, Amy Goodman, was, instead, now the producer of WBAI’s daily morning news show in New York City. According to the former Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio journalist who was program director at WBAI between 1989-1994, Andrew Phillips, he “instituted substantial program changes” at WBAI during this period, “including moving Amy Goodman to morning drive.”

Then, two years after accepting a “silver baton” duPont-Columbia award of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund-subsidized Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation at the ceremony in Columbia’s Low Library, Goodman joined with a columnist of neo-con real estate developer Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News non-alternative, mainstream daily newspaper, Juan Gonzalez, to produce and co-host the new Democracy Now! daily radio news show that the Pacifica network launched in early February 1996—with the $25,000 in grant money Pacifica obtained from the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation in 1996.

Prior to being appointed Secretary of State by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, former Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee Warren Christopher was the chairman of the “Clinton Transition Team,” that helped determine, before the Democratic president’s Jan. 20, 1993 inauguration, which people should be appointed U.S. federal government posts during the first term of the Clinton administration. Another early 1990s Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee, then-Goldman Sachs co-chair Robert Rubin, was appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary by Clinton in 1995, a year before the Carnegie Corporation of New York grant to launch Democracy Now! was given to Pacifica.

According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 1995 Annual Report, a $200,000 [equal to over $329,000 in 2018] grant was given between 1994 and 1995 to the WNYC Foundation on whose board sat then-Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee Wilma Tisch; and 5 grants, totalling $2.7 million [equal to over $4.4 million in 2018], were given during the same period to Stanford University, whose then-provost was Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee Condoleezza Rica and whose university board of trustees included then-Carnegie Corporation of New York trustee Henry Muller.

Yet since 1996, Democracy Now! listeners and viewers have not been provided with much specific information about the role the Carnegie Corporation of New York and its trustees have, historically, played in U.S. political and economic life; or how the foundation’s board of trustees has, historically or currently, obtained and distributed its grant money.

While continuing to write columns for the corporate media world’s New York Daily News mainstream newspaper and continuing to collect a regular paycheck from Zuckerman’s newspaper during the next two decades, Gonzalez also remained the part-time co-host on over 1,000 radio broadcasts of the “parallel left” Democracy Now! radio show during the same two decades; including the years after 2001 when it became a “parallel left” cable television show as well.  And, not surprisingly, during the past twenty years, few radio or tv segments that were specifically critical or unflattering about either Mort Zuckerman, Mort Zuckerman’s specific historic real estate business operations or the specific news content of Mort Zuckerman’s stable of non-alternative media reporters were aired on Democracy Now!.

But between 2001 and 2003, for example, the Canadian-born Zuckerman was the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations anti-Palestinian self-determination rights lobbying group; and during most of the 21st-century the New York Daily News owner who employed Gonzalez was the honorary president of the American-Israel Friendship League [AFIL] whose “sole purpose is to make friends for the State of Israel through activities intended to improve the general perception of Israel,” according to the AFIL’s website. The same website also posted an article indicating how Zuckerman became involved in this pro-Israeli government group:

“The teamwork forged between Zuckerman, [American-Israel Friendship League Chairman Kenneth] Bialkin, and the rest of the AIFL team coalesced almost two decades ago, when a high-level request came in. ``Sometime in the late ‘90s each of us was contacted by the [Israeli] consul general of New York to ask if we would come in to help with the promotion of the AIFL,’ Bialkin remembers.

"Zuckerman views the work of the AIFL, in fostering better understanding between Israel and America, as a vital element in keeping the world safer. `I’ll put it this way: I think it is very important that there is more than one audience we should focus on. Number one: senior government officials. Number two: public opinion. Some would say the latter is the foundation of what affects the former. We need to continually develop that relationship.’”

An article by Christopher Walsh, titled “Pro-Israel Pundits Speak Out on Middle East,” that appeared in the Sept. 4, 2014 issue of the East Hampton Star, described how the New York Daily News owner, whose newspaper Gonzalez continued to work for while co-hosting Democracy Now! for two decades after 1996, supported the Israeli war machine’s 50-day war against people in Gaza in the summer of 2014 (that killed 1,462 Palestinian civilians, including 551 Palestinian children, according to a June 2015 UN Human Rights Council report):

“…At the Jewish Center of the Hamptons… pro-Israel panelists from the worlds of media and academia discussed the seven-week war in Gaza…Mortimer Zuckerman, an East Hampton resident who is the publisher of the New York Daily News and editor in chief of U.S. News and World, expressed the panelists’ united defense of the Israeli military’s conduct in the war….He also sought to provide context to reports that more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war by noting that 378,000 German civilians and 580,000 Japanese civilians were killed in World War II. `This is not a moral strike against Israel,’ he said….”


Yet during the over two decades that Zuckerman owned the New York Daily News, antiwar and Palestinian solidarity movement activists in the United States were rarely invited to appear on Democracy Now! to specifically highlight and criticize the role that Zuckerman may have personally and specifically played, historically, in supporting Israeli militarism and war crimes in the Middle East. (end of part 5)

Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'-`NY Daily News' Media Power Historically

Under U.S. anti-trust law, it may not have been really legally proper in the 1990s for just one multi-millionaire to monopolize ownership of both a two-million-plus circulation newsweekly magazine and a supposedly competing major New York City metropolitan daily newspaper—with the same corporate executives running both mass media properties. Yet Mort Zuckerman was allowed to use about $36.5 million of his surplus wealth to take over the New York Daily News in the early 1990s. So you aren’t likely to read many satirical expose’s of U.S. News & World Report in the Daily News.

After moving into his New York Daily News office in January 1993, Zukerman then immediately “fired 180 out of 540 members of the Newspaper Guild,” “axed two-thirds of the African-American reporters, including all black males” and “dismissed veteran reporter Dave Hardy, who was one of the black journalists who won a racial discrimination suit against the newspaper in 1987,” according to the Daily News Workers Campaign for Justice, which was urging people in New York City to boycott Zuckerman’s Daily News in 1993.

One reason why NBC News may not have been too interested in talking too much in the early 1990s about either how Zuckerman acquired his $265 million or about U.S. News & World Report’s historic FBI connection was perhaps because U.S. News & World Report also had a business relationship with the supposedly competing NBC in the late 1980s. In its Oct. 18. 1989 issue, the Wall Street Journal noted that “The Consumer News and Business Channel cable network and U.S. News & World Report have formed a joint venture to produce cable program versions of special issues of the magazine” and “CNBC is a joint venture of the National Broadcasting Co. and Cablevision Systems corp.” The Wall Street Journal also reported that “the program will be written and produced by CNBC, with background and research provided by staff for U.S. News & World Report.”

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 4

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See Parts 1,2 and 3 of article below.)

Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report has never been particularly noted for the way it fights to end institutional sexism in the United States. Yet the multi-millionaire member of the White Corporate Male Power Structure who was the boyfriend of Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem during much of the 1980s was apparently U.S. News & World Report Owner Mort Zuckerman. In a 1985 article on Zuckerman, Fortune magazine noted that Zuckerman “currently spends a lot of time with Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of Ms. magazine.” And in its 1992 article on Zuckerman, New York magazine revealed that Zuckerman’s “most famous love affair was with Gloria Steinem” and quoted Jeffrey Steingarten as recalling that Steinem and Zuckerman “were very much in love for a long time.” One Newsday gossip columnist in 1992 also reported that U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman has apparently indicated that he lent money to Steinem’s Ms. magazine during the 1980s, when Ms. magazine was experiencing financial difficulties.

Downtown telephoned Ms. magazine in early 1993 four times, requesting an official response to the question of whether there has ever been any connection between Ms. magazine and U.S. News & World Report Owner Mort Zuckerman since the early 1980s. But nobody at Ms. magazine was willing to officially comment on its past or present connection to U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman, and Downtown was then told that “Gloria Steinem’s office will be getting back to you.” Not surprisingly, however, “Gloria Steinem’s office” apparently decided not to get back to Downtown in 1993 to discuss past or early 1990s connections between U.S. News & World Report and Ms. magazine.

Coincidentally, few satirical exposes’ of either Zuckerman’s male chauvinism or U.S. News & World Report’s institutional sexism were apparently published by Ms. magazine during the 1980s.

In addition to apparently being closely connected to U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman during the 1980s, Ms. magazine founder Steinem was also accused by Evergreen Review during the 1980s of having been closely connected to a CIA-linked organization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In an article entitled “Allard Lowenstein’s CIA: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” by Richard Cummings, which appeared in 1984, Evergreen Review stated the following:

“While Lowenstein worked for Senator Humphrey in the late Fifties, he did things like go to a dinner given by the Council Against Communist Aggression and help organize the effort to send American students to disrupt the Moscow-backed International Youth Festival in Vienna in 1959. In that particular effort, he had collaborated with Gloria Steinem, Smith graduate and Fulbright scholar to India, who founded the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, an organization that became the Independent Research Service, a CIA-funded operation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was used to get the anti-communist Americans to Vienna.”

Although U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman’s close friend of the 1980s—Gloria Steinem—has carved out a lucrative career for herself by posing as a champion of equality for working-class women, U.S. News & World Report’s top managers in the early 1990s were still mostly male. The editor-in-chief, the executive editor, the deputy editor, the editor-at-large, the special projects editor, the art director, and the photography director at U.S. News & World Report as late as 1993 were all men, as were at least 16 of the Establishment magazine’s 22 Senior Editors. Although the majority of people who live in Washington, D.C. are African-American, Downtown was unable to determine whether the majority of editorial employees at the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. News & World Report were yet African-American in 1993. Downtown was also unable to determine how many open lesbians and gay males were employed at U.S. News & World Report in 1993.

In its Nov. 18, 1988 issue the Wall Street Journal also reported that one of Zuckerman’s top managers, then-U.S. News & World Report President and Chief Executive Officer Fred Drasner, “was loudly booed at a lawyer’s convention when he made a remark about women lawyers that many in the audience considered offensive.” Ironically, Zuckerman named Fred Drasner to be the chief executive officer and co-publisher of the New York York Daily News after Zuckerman purchased this newspaper in the early 1990s. (end of part 4)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 3

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See Part 1 and Part 2 of article below.)

At the time Mort Zuckerman purchased U.S. News & World Report Inc. in 1984, its magazine employed 205 people on its editorial staff. More than 10 of these editorial employees ended up becoming instant millionaires as a result of selling their stock in U.S. News & World Report Inc. to Zuckerman in 1984. By October 1984, Zuckerman had moved into the U.S. News & World Report magazine executive offices in Washington, D.C. and began to replace top U.S. News & World Report editorial managers with his own editorial people.

As Fortune magazine noted in an Oct. 14, 1985 article, “Zuckerman bought U.S. News out of his personal real estate fortune in order to call the shots at the magazine;” and one year after his 1984 purchase of U.S. News & World Report, Zuckerman “put himself on the masthead as editor-in-chief”—although he had originally “promised” when he purchased U.S. News & World Report that “he would never be editor-in-chief,” according to the January/Feb. 1993 issue of F.A.I.R.’s Extra! magazine. Zuckerman continued to be the U.S. News & World Report editor-in-chief in the 1990s.

The Oct. 14, 1985 Fortune magazine article also observed that in the U.S. News & World Report editorial offices at that time Zuckerman was “all over the magazine—hiring, suggesting stories, reviewing covers, conferring daily by phone with [then-U.S. News & Report editor Shelby] Coffey, even helping to interview subjects for articles.” Zuckerman also told Fortune magazine in 1985 that “the country is becoming more conservative,” “he is conservative in fiscal matters and defense” and “he supports U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador.” And in 1992, Zuckerman told New York magazine that “he has devoted two-thirds of his time” to his U.S. News & World Report property since he purchased it. In its Oct. 5, 1992 issue, New York magazine estimated that U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman’s personal worth in the early 1990s was $265 million.

As U.S. News & World Report’s Editor-in-Chief, Zuckerman hasn’t provided much job security for his editorial employees. Between 1984 and 1989, for example, Zuckerman hired and fired “five editors in his first five years” and by 1989 “80 percent of the entire news staff had left” at U.S. News & World Report, according to the January/February 1993 issue of Extra!. The same magazine also noted that “Zuckerman has seemed to use his power of ownership” at U.S. News & World Report “to influence coverage of issues that he had a personal stake in” as when a U.S. News & World Report “story on the decline of California’s real estate market was reportedly scaled down after concerns were raised that the story could cause further harm to…a market that Zuckerman’s development company, Boston Properties, has a sizable stake in.” Extra! also reported that “Under Zuckerman, U.S. News had a contract with a dubious Israeli news service called Depth,” that helped Zuckerman utilize U.S. News & World Report to support Israeli government policies during the 1990s.(end of part 3)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 2

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See below for Part 1)

By early 1984, the employee-owned U.S. News & World Report Inc. had evolved into a company whose major assets were its magazine publishing operation, its Downtown Washington, D.C. real estate holdings, its radio programming service business and its Publisher Services International typesetting subsidiary. From its sale of U.S. News & World Report ad space at about $44,000 per full-page in each issue, around $94 million was earned by the magazine in 1983. Another $47 million was taken in during the early 1980s from the sale of the magazine to around two million subscribers. When founded by David Lawrence in 1948, U.S. News & World Report initially had only about 380,000 subscribers. In the early 1980s, though, only about 78,000 copies of its magazine were sold by U.S. News & World Report Inc. on U.S. newsstands, each week.

From the U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s Publishers Services International typesetting subsidiary—which assembled Newsweek, Business Week and other publications, as well as U.S. News & World Report--$18 million was earned in 1983. In addition, in 1983 U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s four acres of Washington, D.C. land surrounding its magazine’s building and its 50 percent ownership of a Downtown Washington, D.C. real estate development project were estimated to be worth about $45 million. The pretax profits of U.S. News & World Report Inc. in the early 1980s equaled about $4 million per year.

The real estate business partner in Washington, D.C. of the then-employee-owned U.S. News & World Report Inc. since 1981 had been the Boston Properties real estate development firm of the then-multi-millionaire owner of The Atlantic monthly magazine—Mort Zuckerman. In 1981, Zuckerman had announced that on U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s Washington, D.C. land his Boston Properties was going to “construct a new 160,000 square-foot headquarters building for the magazine, a 233-suite luxury hotel and a hotel annex with more rooms, a 300,000 square-foot office building, and two residential complexes totaling 200,000 square feet,” according to the March 16, 1984 issue of The New York Times.

Coincidentally, in May 1984 the seven-member corporate board that represented the employees who owned U.S. News & World Report Inc. decided to sell their magazine and their other assets to their real estate business partner, Zuckerman, for about $168 million. The deal was subsequently almost unanimously approved by the U.S. News & World Report Inc. employees.

To gain control of U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s magazine, real estate properties, typesetting subsidiary and radio programming service, Zuckerman agreed to pay its employee-owners about $3,000 per share of stock for stock that had previously been valued at only $625 per share. He also agreed to pay $25 million to purchase an additional 2,400 shares of stock that were owned by the seven individual corporate board members of the previously employee-owned magazine company who apparently arranged the deal with Zuckerman. (end of part 2)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 1

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown.)

Between 1948 and 1973, the editor of U.S. News & World Report was a politically conservative journalist named David Lawrence. Between 1948 and 1959, Lawrence also was the president of U.S. News & World Report. And between 1959 and his death in 1973, Lawrence was the chairman of the board of U.S. News & World Report.

Given the way Hoover’s FBI apparently was allowed to use U.S. News & World Report as a propaganda tool between 1948 and 1972, it is not surprising that U.S. News & World Report editor and chairman of the board Lawrence received in 1964 an FBI special award “in appreciation of his friendly and sympathetic assistance to the FBI,” according to The National Cyclopedia of American Biography. The same book also revealed that Lawrence also “received from Richard M. Nixon in 1970 the Medal of Freedom.”

Lawrence had established U.S. News & World Report in 1948 by combining his commercially successful United States News magazine with the commercially unsuccessful World Report magazine, under the U.S. News & World Report title. The commercially unsuccessful World Report had been launched by Lawrence in 1946.

United States News magazine had originally been published by Lawrence as a weekly newspaper between 1933 and 1939, before Lawrence turned it into a weekly magazine in 1940. Before starting to publish United States News as a weekly newspaper in 1933, Lawrence had published an editorially similar Washington, D.C. daily newspaper called United States Daily between 1926 and 1933, which attained a peak circulation of about 40,000.

In addition to assisting the FBI as U.S. News & World Report editor, president and chairman of the board, for many years, Lawrence also was able to assist the FBI in his role as a nationally-syndicated U.S. Establishment columnist. In 1968, Lawrence’s nationally-syndicated column was published in 325 different newspapers of the U.S. White Corporate Male Power Structure.

Prior to founding the U.S. News & World Report magazine in 1948, Lawrence had graduated from Princeton University in 1910 and worked for the Associated Press and the New York Post as a Washington, D.C. correspondent. He had also “became a pioneer in radio news broadcasting in the early 1920s” and “broadcast over the NBC network a weekly series of 15-minute radio talks on the topic `Our Government’ from 1927 to 1933,” according to The National Cyclopedia of American Biography.

After Lawrence realized that his children were not interested in running U.S. News & World Report, he decided to sell the magazine in 1962 to his U.S. News & World Report employees. Although Lawrence continued to be the U.S. News & World Report editor and chairman of the board until his death in 1973 at the age of 84, between 1962 and 1984 U.S. News & World Report was an employee-owned, pro-Establishment magazine, operated on an employee profit-sharing basis. Around 62,500 shares of U.S. News & World Report Inc. stock were owned by its employees and, in late 1983, each share of stock was worth about $625. (end of part 1)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report' As FBI Propaganda Sheet Historically--Conclusion

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See below for Part 1 of article).

A 1990 book, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From The FBI’s Secret War Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, described how the FBI and U.S. News & World Report also historically collaborated on projects which were designed to red-bait U.S. Baby-Boom Generation New Left radical groups and anti-war groups, such as the publication, under the “editors of U.S. News & World Report byline, of the book Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up To Now:

“Both the FBI and the `friendly journalists’ to whom it habitually fed information at U.S. News & World Report persisted in confusing both the CP, USA’s campus-based W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the SWP’s Young Socialist Alliance with new left organizations for some time…Probably the best example of this is Editors of U.S. News and World Report, Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up To Now, Collier/Macmillan Company, London, 1969, in which the anonymous authors (thought to include several FBI `public relations specialists’) worry at great length about the…influence of Bettina Aptheker, head of the Berkeley DuBois Club and daughter of CP, USA historian Herbert Aptheker, on `the antiwar movement’…

A U.S. News & World Report article was also used by FBI agents in the 1980s to justify their visits to U.S. librarians in order to secure information about which people borrowed certain library books. As the book Alien Ink: The FBI’s War On Freedom Of Expression by Natalie Robins recalled:

“Fifteen libraries across the country had been targets of FBI inquiries from 1982 to 1988…These libraries had a total of 22 visits from FBI agents…Librarians said that agents invoked `national security,’ `counter-intelligence,’ aid against `hostile foreign agents,’ or `antiterrorism’ in asking for cooperation. One agent flashed a copy of a 1982 U.S. News and World Report article entitled `Drive to Keep Secrets Out of Russian Hands.’”

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report' As FBI Propaganda Sheet Historically--Part 1

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown.)

In its mass media program, Hoover’s FBI apparently utilized U.S. News & World Report historically as one of its secret propaganda tools. Among the pro-FBI articles published by U.S. News & World Report between 1948 and Hoover’s death were the following:

1. “Is FBI’s anti-spy evidence wasted?” (Aug. 27, 1948 issue);
2. “Fight for secrecy of FBI files,” (June 24, 1949 issue);
3. “Spy trials cripple the FBI” (July 8, 1949 issue);
4. “55,000 Communists”—excerpt from Hoover speech in New York (May 12, 1950 issue);
5. “How Communists Operate”—interview with Hoover (Aug. 11, 1950 issue);
6. “FBI Director Hoover tells how Communists work”—interview with Hoover (June 23, 1950 issue);
7. “Communist Threat in U.S.”—interview with Hoover (March 30, 1951 issue);
8. “Hoover Speaks Out On Spies After Years Chasing Them”—(Nov. 27, 1953 issue);
9. “What J. Edgar Hoover Did About White”—article by Hoover (Nov. 22, 1953 issue)
10. “U.S. Communists hide deeper”—article by Hoover (Feb. 19, 1954 issue);
11. “People of the Week: Hoover portrait” (April 2, 1954 issue);
12. “Communism And Schools”—transcript of Hoover’s speech (Nov. 26, 1954 issue);
13. “Why crime is dropping”—interview with Hoover (Sept. 30, 1955 issue);
14. “Why U.S. uses ex-reds as informants” (Oct. 14, 1955 issue);
15. “How U.S. reds use pseudo-liberals as a front—excerpts from Hoover’s testimony before a subcommittee of House appropriations committee (April 13, 1956 issue);
16. “Hoover’s warnings: be alert to fanatics”—excerpt from Hoover speech (Dec. 16, 1963 issue);
17. “J. Edgar Hoover speaks out on reds in the Negro movement”—excerpt from Hoover testimony before house subcommittee (May 4, 1964 issue);
18. “Forty years as FBI Chief: no interest in retiring” (May 18, 1964 issue);
19. “FBI and civil rights; J. Edgar Hoover Speaks Out”—excerpts from Hoover news conference (Nov. 30, 1964 issue);
20. “Dispute between Hoover and King: the FBI’s answer to criticisms” (Dec. 7, 1964 issue);
21. “What J. Edgar Hoover says about pressure groups”—excerpt from Hoover speech (Dec. 7, 1964 issue);
22. “Enforcing the law”—interview with J. Edgar Hoover” (Dec. 21, 1964 issue);
23. “Sex books and rape. FBI chief sees close link” (March 11, 1968 issue);
24. “Reversing the crime trend”—interview with Hoover (Aug. 26, 1968 issue);
25. “New Left terrorism: a warning”—excerpt from Hoover report (Jan. 13, 1969 issue);
26. “U.S. unrest, as FBI chief sees it”—excerpt from Hoover report on 1969 (Jan. 12, 1970 issue);
27. “FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover report on a turbulent year”—excerpt from Hoover report (July 27, 1970 issue);
28. “Guerrilla warfare in the U.S.: FBI report” (Nov. 9, 1970 issue).

After Hoover’s death in 1972, U.S. News & World Report continued to apparently act as an FBI propaganda instrument. In its Feb. 18, 1980 issue, for example, it published an article titled “New FBI Swings Into Action.” And in its April 22, 1985 issue it published an interview with Reagan Administration FBI Director Webster, titled “Banks, drugs, terrorists: FBI picks its target.” (end of part 1)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

`U.S. News & World Report' & Mort Zuckerman's Hidden History

“…The new publication was called U.S. News & World Report. Lawrence was editor until his death, publisher until 1958, and chairman of the board until 1973…He received the National Press Club of Washington’s Certificate of Appreciation in 1963 and a special award in 1964 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in appreciation of his friendly and sympathetic assistance to the FBI.” (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography)

For most of the 20th Century, the U.S. White Corporate Male Power Structure’s Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] secret police operation was not too popular with U.S. political dissidents. But for most of the 20th Century the FBI was treated like a sacred cow by U.S. Establishment magazines like Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report. And U.S. News & World Report apparently also acted covertly as a propaganda instrument of J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI between 1948 and 1972.

In a 1993 telephone interview, Downtown asked then-U.S. News & World Report senior vice-president for Communications, Sherrie Rollins, if U.S. News & World Report has ever acted as a public relations tool of the FBI since 1948?

“No. I’ve never heard anything like that. To my knowledge, U.S. News & World Report has never acted as a PR tool of the FBI,” replied the official spokesperson for U.S. News & World Report in 1993. She also said she was unaware of the existence of any past relationship between former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and U.S. News & World Report founder David Lawrence.

Yet in 1973, the book Investigating The FBI revealed that “Over the years, Hoover maintained extremely close ties with several magazines—U.S. News & World Report and Reader’s Digest being perhaps the closest.”

(Downtown 4/14/93)