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by coliveira 632 days ago
They are funded by NGOs controlled by billionaires, so in the end there is a number of things they cannot investigate if they want to maintain the NGO money.
2 comments

Hopefully there are multiple organizations with different funding sources who aren’t beholden to each other, so they can fill whatever gaps in coverage they see. That would be a better outcome than everyone refusing journalism as a career because you will always have a conflict of interest with whoever is paying you.
That's not how grants work, they don't come with a "you can't report on us specifically" clause.
While this is technically correct, it is the wrong response to GP.

Yes. ProPublica is biased to look in certain directions. Every single reporter, editor, publisher, is biased in this way. The answer to this is more, not less.

FIRE rose from decisions the ACLU took about representing cases. This is a fundamentally good thing, speaking as a diehard ACLU supporter.

Speaking as a huge fan of ProPublica, I'm hoping that they're investigating all of the supreme court justices (for example), because we won't pass laws to reign in judicial corruption without bipartisan action. But if they aren't, I desperately hope that there's a market for a conservative-focus investigative outfit that can stick to the facts like ProPublica.

There is no such clause because that would be unlawful, but there is certainly the "unwritten clause" of whether the NGO likes your work or not.
It's common wisdom that you "don't bite the hand that feeds you".
But it could be that if you don't follow the unwritten rules, you don't get another grant next year.