A conservative group has released a provocative new report on ProPublica which refers to the research and news group as the "Attack Arm" of the Democratic Party. Relied upon as a supposedly unbiased source of news reporting and opinion research, ProPublica has produced numerous hit pieces on conservative and Republican office-holders, while virtually ignoring targets on the left.
Restoration of America PAC, the organization that released the report, states bluntly: "To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing."
The Left’s media-industrial complex is in full swing, and ProPublica is one more cog in that fear-spreading machine. It’s time conservatives learn the truth behind this “trusted” investigative outlet.
The report decries ProPublica's stated mission, stated on its About page:
To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.
ProPublica describes itself, at great length, as independent, non-profit, moral, and dedicated to holding power to account. Restoration of America says those repeated boasts "could not be further from the truth."
ProPublica has slowly morphed into the attack arm of the Democrat Party—a role it was arguably created to serve.
They note that a simple review of ProPublica's history and donors reveals an obvious bias that has existed since its 2007 founding, but they went further. As part of this report, Restoration of America reviewed over 700 articles published by ProPublica in 2022 and 2023 and found that they attacked Republicans and conservative groups 23 times more often than leftists. They found a majority of the 700-plus articles did not have a political slant, but of the 242 that did focus on politics, 232 attacked the right, while just 10 focused on misdeeds by the left.
Hardly holding power to account.
This is no small matter. ProPublica markets itself as a non-partisan watchdog, supplying news stories to local newsrooms all across America. Mainstream media outlets gladly gobble up their slanted reporting, all while touting the source as "independent." This is one of the growing sets of tools leftists have at their disposal to insert heavily unbalanced information into the nightly news and daily corporate news products.
Take, for instance, the activist news items surrounding the supposed "ethics violations" of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. According to the report,
ProPublica launched its first salvo in April 2023, with an assault on Thomas that alleged he’d violated the ethics laws by vacationing with longtime friend and billionaire Harlan Crow, according to ProPublica’s “ethical experts.” The publication called into question the pair’s lavish yacht trips and luxury resorts, which Thomas had failed to properly disclose.
ProPublica has published several more hit pieces, which Restoration of America characterizes as "[a]ttacking the credibility of the Supreme Court while turning a blind eye to any misdeeds by the court’s “progressive” justices."
In my 2019 book, "Behind the Curtain," I wrote about how the professional left coordinates the spending of hundreds of billions in dark money every year in America in an attempt to undermine our constitutional form of government and attack conservative values. ProPublica got a lot of my attention.
Founded by Herb Sandler, who also co-founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) with John Podesta, ProPublica seemed to serve the purpose of cleansing Sandler's conscience. After all, there's a reason he's been called "the most evil billionaire in the world." Sandler's Golden West Financial invented the subprime mortgage, which plunged us into the Great Recession after he sold his bank to Wachovia, crashing the entire financial sector. He walked away with $2.4 billion as a reward, which he used for many years to seed the most radical of progressive causes.
As the Restoration of America report notes, the Sandler Foundation has given around $1 billion in grants to every manner of radical cause since its inception in 2006, following the sale of Golden West Financial. But it all started with the Center for American Progress and ProPublica.
So one wonders how news outlets across America can accept their submissions with a straight face while disclosing their "partnership" with the "non-biased investigative journalists" at ProPublica.
Viewers and readers attuned to the language of the left will note the bias if they pay close attention. In fact, it's pretty obvious. The entirety of the corporate mainstream media complex has chosen to tell its consumers ProPublica has earned its reputation as hard-hitting investigative journalism without disclosing its obvious and severe bias.
The report goes on to describe, in great detail, the overlap between ProPublica, CAP, George Soros, Tom Steyer, Pew Charitable Trusts, The Ford Foundation (which has Henry Ford and Henry Ford, Jr. rolling in their graves), lots of extreme abortion-on-demand groups, and many other radical funders of the professional left. It's well worth a read for any conservative, and any consumer of the mainstream media.
"None of this should surprise anyone who’s followed the country’s bitter information war," the report concludes. "For decades, Democrats and their activist allies have controlled major media institutions, shaping the political narrative—and the unfolding agenda in Washington—to favor the Left. What’s clear from ProPublica’s origins is that it was always intended to be the attack arm of the Democratic Party, helping 'progressives' fight the culture war to fundamentally transform America."
It seems the corporate media outlets that partner with ProPublica share in that ultimate goal.
The author of this story is the Senior Investigative Researcher for Restoration of America. He did not contribute to the original report on ProPublica.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member