WHYY Duped by Fake Research Director at Fake Think Tank Citing Fake Poll
I grew up in Philadelphia, so I’ve got a ton of respect for WHYY, the local NPR and PBS affiliate (perhaps best known nationally as home to Terry Gross’ award-winning Fresh Air). Which is why I was so sorely disappointed to see WHYY’s “Newsworks” website give op-ed space to fake-think-tank anti-minimum wage shill Michael Saltsman: “ Op-ed: Raising minimium wage won’t flip the Senate .” I mean, for chrissakes, why not just print a goddamn press release? Saltsman claims to be the research director at the mendaciously-named Employment Policies Institute, which likes to describe itself as a “ non-profit think tank ” while in fact being neither. Indeed, Saltsman’s faux-think-tank is actually just one of several profitable front groups run out of the DC-offices of lobbying and PR firm Berman and Company . And if the editors at WHYY think I’m exaggerating, they might want to listen to this 2014 interview with Terry Gross , in which the New York Times‘ Eric Lipton explains how this scam works: LIPTON: Yeah, I was – you know, set up an interview with the research director. I got the address of his office. I went to the eighth floor of the building on Vermont Avenue, like four blocks from the White House. The elevator opens, and it’s Berman and Company. And I go in and, you know, there’s a bunch of awards on the wall, advertising awards, public relations awards that Berman and Company has won for its work, you know, doing ad campaigns on behalf of various industry groups. And so I didn’t see any evidence at all that there was an Employment Policies Institute office. And in fact when I started to interview the people there, they explained that there are no employees at the Employment Policies Institute and that all the staff there works for Berman and Company, and then they sometimes are just detailed to the various think-tanks and various consumer groups that he operates out of his office. And he bills them, sort of like a
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