"Do they own everything? Do they own the newspapers?"

[HiPointDem]

The author, Yasha levine, lives in the area of adelanto. he was shocked at the one-sidedness of the media when a local school was taken over by the forces of privatization using the so-called "Parent Trigger".

Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, described feeling that she was caught in some kind of grand conspiracy that was bigger and more powerful than anything she could imagine. “I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I’d get the article and I’d be like this has nothing to fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? (D)o they own the newspapers?”

It’s easy to paint this as the paranoia of parents who feel like the media doesn’t understand their concern about parent trigger. That was my first impulse too. And then I started reading some of the coverage. It didn’t matter if it was Fox News, NPR, the Washington Post, LA Weekly or the local right-wing newspaper: coverage of parent trigger issues would invariably have the same pro-privatization bias, even down to their use of the same stock phrases about “parent empowerment” and the need give parents the ability to “reform” a system that protects lazy public school teachers and their sleazy their union cronies.

As I wrote in my earlier piece, Rupert Murdoch has announced his plans for expansion into private education (“When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”) The Financial Times and The Economist are both owned, or part owned, by Pearson, which has huge interests in education and educational publishing. Some media organizations would barely survive without their educational arms. The parent company of The Washington Post, for example (which also owns Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine and other media properties) relied on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, for 62% of its revenue in 2012.

In these cynical times you might not be surprised to learn that News Corp, The Washington Post Company and Pearson are hugely conflicted in their education coverage. But then there’s NPR. What’s not just surprising, but actually shocking, is how far pro-school privatization interests have been able to infiltrate and corrupt the reporting at supposedly left-leaning NPR, and its affiliate public radio stations.

Consider a new NPR local news project called State Impact, which NPR describes as a “local-national collaboration between NPR and station groups in eight states that reports on state government actions and their impact on citizens and communities...” why would public radio be so willing to gush about groups like StudentsFirst and their pro-privatization agenda?

Well… it might have something to do with the fact that both NPR’s State Impact and Rhee’s StudentsFirst are funded by the same pro-privatization groups....How much of the Waltons’ $1.4 million NPR grant went specifically to fund the State Impact project is not entirely clear, but State Impact does list the Walton Family Foundation as a major donor on a “Supporters” page, hidden several clicks away from the program’s homepage...the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation... has funneled around $8.5 million to National Public Radio and its affiliate stations and networks... And a good chunk of that money was specifically earmarked for “improving” NPR’s education reporting.

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/04/24/you-have-only-a-few-hours-to-read-this-shocking-expose/

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[Fumesucker]

2. The Washington Post = Kaplan Test Prep daily

The Post owns Kaplan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan,_Inc.

Privatizing education = Big bucks for the Post.

[HiPointDem]

3. yes, it's in the article:

The parent company of The Washington Post, for example (which also owns Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine and other media properties) relied on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, for 62% of its revenue in 2012.

also:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a stake in the success of Kaplan. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. is by far the largest institutional owner of Post company stock, with a 20.5 percent share. In 2006, Buffett pledged ten million shares of Berkshire Hathaway, then worth $31 billion, to the Gates Foundation, donated over time. Thirty-eight percent of the entire Washington Post Company’s $4.72 billion revenue for 2010 came from Kaplan’s higher education component.

(Former Kaplan employees have said they were trained to inform prospective students that Kaplan is owned by the respected Washington Post company and that Warren Buffett and Melinda Gates served on the board; Kaplan officials have denied that recruiters were so trained.)

http://www.republicreport.org/2012/gates-wapo-kaplan/

[Fumesucker]

4. The point being that the Post has been losing money for quite some time now

While Kaplan is a major profit center.

[Laelth]

5. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth