The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a $25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death of the two founders, the foundation owned 90% of the non-voting shares of the Ford Motor Company. Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization in the United States founded in 1983 with the stated aim of advancing democracy worldwide, by promoting political and economic institutions, such as political groups, business groups, trade unions, and free markets.
Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a US-based grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the world, with the stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. The group's name was inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is an American environmental advocacy group. LCV says that it "advocates for sound environmental laws and policies, holds elected officials accountable for their votes and actions, and elects pro-environment candidates." The organization pursues its goals through voter education, voter mobilization, and direct contributions to political candidates. LCV includes 29 state affiliates. LCV was founded in 1970 by environmentalist Marion Edey, with support from David Brower. The group's current president is Gene Karpinski. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has over two million members.
Fact-checking is the process of verifying the factual accuracy of questioned reporting and statements. Fact-checking can be conducted before or after the text or content is published or otherwise disseminated. Internal fact-checking is such checking done in-house by the publisher to prevent inaccurate content from being published; when the text is analyzed by a third party, the process is called external fact-checking.
Common Cause is a watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., with chapters in 35 states. It was founded in 1970 by John W. Gardner, a Republican, who was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson as well as chair of the National Urban Coalition, an advocacy group for minorities and the working poor in urban areas. In its early days, Common Cause focused its efforts on ending the Vietnam War and lowering the voting age from 21 to 18.
Judicial Watch (JW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit American conservative activist group that files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to investigate claimed misconduct by government officials. Founded in 1994, Judicial Watch has primarily targeted Democrats, in particular the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton's role in them. It was founded by attorney Larry Klayman, and has been led by Tom Fitton since 2003.
A publicly funded election is an election funded with money collected through income tax donations or taxes as opposed to private or corporate funded campaigns. It is a policy initially instituted after Nixon for candidates to opt into publicly funded presidential campaigns via optional donations from tax returns. It is an attempt to move toward a one voice, one vote democracy, and remove undue corporate and private entity dominance.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Network. It also operates PolitiFact.
Frank Ian Luntz is an American political and communications consultant and pollster, best known for developing talking points and other messaging for Republican causes. His work has included assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and public relations support for The Israel Project. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect, including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a German, legally independent political foundation. Affiliated with Alliance 90/The Greens, it was founded in 1997 when three predecessors merged. The foundation was named after German writer Heinrich Böll (1917–1985).
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies is an American public policy think tank headquartered in Washington, DC. According to its mission statement, the Joint Center, through research, policy roundtables, and publications, produces innovative, high-impact ideas, research, and policy solutions that have a positive impact on people and communities of color. Ranking at #50 on the University of Pennsylvania's 2017 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, the Joint Center served as the intellectual hub for a generation of post-Civil Rights era black thinkers, including Maynard Jackson, Mary Frances Berry, William Julius Wilson, Shirley Chisholm and John Hope Franklin. Originally founded in 1970 to provide training and technical assistance to newly elected African American officials, the Joint Center has since expanded its portfolio to include a range of public policy issues of concern to African-Americans, AAPIs, Latinos, and Native Americans.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a liberal or progressive nonprofit law and public policy institute. The organization is named after Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. The Brennan Center advocates for public policy positions including raising the minimum wage, opposing voter ID laws, and calling for public funding of elections. The organization opposed the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by nonprofit organizations.
PolitiFact.com is an American nonprofit project operated by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, with offices there and in Washington, D.C. It began in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times, with reporters and editors from the newspaper and its affiliated news media partners reporting on the accuracy of statements made by elected officials, candidates, their staffs, lobbyists, interest groups and others involved in U.S. politics. Its journalists select original statements to evaluate and then publish their findings on the PolitiFact.com website, where each statement receives a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for statements the journalists deem as accurate to "Pants on Fire" for claims the journalists deem as "not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim".
Charles G. and David H. Koch (1940–2019), sometimes referred to as the Koch brothers, have become famous for their financial and political influence in United States politics with a libertarian, more specifically, right-libertarian or American-style libertarian political stance. From around 2004 to 2019, with "foresight and perseverance", the brothers organized like-minded wealthy libertarian-oriented conservatives, spent hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to build an "integrated" and "stealth" network of think tanks, foundations, "grassroots" movements, academic programs, advocacy and legal groups to "destroy the prevalent statist paradigm" and reshape public opinion to favor minimal government. As of mid 2018, the media has been encouraged to refer to the "Koch network" rather than the "Koch brothers".
In politics, particularly the politics of the United States, dark money refers to spending to influence elections, public policy, and political discourse, where the source of the money is not disclosed to the public.
Arnold Ventures LLC is a limited liability company focused on evidence-based philanthropy in a wide range of areas including criminal justice, education, health care, and public finance. The organization was founded by billionaires John D. Arnold and Laura Arnold in 2008.
Fake news websites are websites on the Internet that deliberately publish fake news—hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation purporting to be real news—often using social media to drive web traffic and amplify their effect. Unlike news satire, these websites deliberately seek to be perceived as legitimate and taken at face value, often for financial or political gain. Fake news websites monetize their content by exploiting the vulnerabilities of programmatic ad trading, which is a type of online advertising in which ads are traded through machine-to-machine auction in a real-time bidding system.
The Freedom to Vote Act, introduced as H.R. 1, is a bill in the United States Congress intended to expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, ban partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders.
