Day Seventeen of Stengel-gate: The National Constitution Center Sends Me Mail, We Talk about Who is Paying for This, and We Talk About Accreditation…
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]
Update: I have to apologize for forgetting to thank Mandy Nagy, a.k.a. Liberty Chick, for helping with much of the research on this.
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Background: a few weeks back Time magazine published, as its cover story, an article by Richard Stengel. Reading it, I was stunned to discover fourteen clear factual errors in his piece, and I have been on a bit of a crusade since then to force Time to either correct or retract the article. And I have been examining how other media outlets and organizations have treated Stengel.
Particularly I was troubled by his relationship with the National Constitution Center, despite his evident cluelessness about the Constitution he was the President and CEO at one time and still worked with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”
So yesterday you saw how I finally got them to make a response, of sorts, where they tried to pretend to be neutral about the accuracy of statements such as “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so” But sharp readers surely noticed that they didn’t answer a crucial question: “what is Mr. Stengel’s exact role in the National Constitution Center? Specifically, does he teach others about the Constitution?”
Well, I emailed them two days ago asking for clarification on this question, and this morning I got this response from Ashley Burke, Director of Public Relations:
Mr. Stengel was President and CEO of the Center from 2004-2006. He currently serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution. In this role, he does not interact directly with our Jennings Fellows, but rather provides recommendations to National Constitution Center staff regarding our annual Jennings Project conference. As a nonpartisan institution, the Center welcomes speakers and advisors with diverse viewpoints; therefore, we are happy to have Mr. Stengel remain in this role.
That is encouraging. At least he doesn’t actively teach, although I don’t know how someone so clueless about the Constitution could serve as an advisor in figuring out how to educate others. So I took my objections about his qualifications directly to her in response:
I’m not objecting to his opinion. I think you are right to welcome a variety of viewpoints.
But isn’t there a minimum knowledge requirement? Shouldn’t he be required to know, for instance, that there are explicit limitations in even the original, un-amended Constitution? Or that the 13th amendment, and not the 14th, emancipated the slaves? These are not matters of opinion, but of fact.
I’ll let you know if she or anyone else responds.
But as I mentioned yesterday, it is significant to know who is paying for this. Now I could talk about liberal contributors such as the Pew Center giving $75,000 to them, the Knight Foundation giving $200K, the Ford Foundation giving $600K, and the Annenburg Foundation giving them a whopping $6.4 million, which specifically funded the Peter Jennings Center where Stengel served as an advisor. And I could talk about the conservative group that has also given to them for balance.
But the most significant donor is… you. Every single one of you (at least if you pay federal taxes) contributes to this museum. That is right they are also being funded by your tax dollars. According to the government’s own USASpending.gov, you and I have contributed $19 million to the National Constitution Center. So in the middle of a debt ceiling crisis, these people think they can take our money and then use that money to spread disinformation about our founding document. And it also means that this museum is subject to Congressional oversight. We the people deserve to know this organization is an “exemplary steward of public dollars, but of the artifacts in their collections, which preserve our heritage for future generations.”
That phrasing (“exemplary steward…”) is not just my words, but that of the National Constitution Center when announcing that it had received accreditation by the American Association of Museums:
Accreditation is the highest national recognition for a museum, and has been achieved by less than 5% of museums in the nation.
AAM accreditation is the field’s primary vehicle for quality assurance, self-regulation, and public accountability, reflecting a museum’s commitment to excellence on all levels….
Visitors benefit from this achievement since accredited museums can more easily secure funding from other institutions, thus allowing them to offer a wider range of public programs and exhibitions. Accreditation also ensures that a museum is not only an exemplary steward of public dollars, but of the artifacts in their collections, which preserve our heritage for future generations.
They also explain that
Accreditation is a strict, formal process that examines all aspects of a museum’s operations, including governance, collections stewardship, educational programs, financial stability, high professional standards, and continued institutional improvement.
(emphasis added.) All of which led me to wonder… what would the American Association of Museums think of the National Constitution Center’s blasé attitude toward the falsehoods being spread by one of its members, about the Constitution itself? And for that matter, I wonder what its board of trustees, particularly the lawyers working for them, would think…
I think I feel some correspondence coming on.
To be continued…
[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]
Peter Jennings Center you’re effing kidding me
happyfeet (3c92a1) — 7/14/2011 @ 9:30 pm==I think I feel some correspondence coming on==
Does it feel anything like when you know you’re coming down with a cold, or does it feel different than that? More exhilarating, maybe?
elissa (8bb103) — 7/14/2011 @ 9:43 pmWhat does that Canadian Marxist Peter Jennings know about the Constitution?
Go after the “conservatives” who are funding this garbage and make them explain themselves. Maybe they’ll cut them off.
j curtis (797bee) — 7/14/2011 @ 9:46 pmWe shall soon learn that after “We the people,” is the clause “of the true, strong and free North.”*
*take off on lyric from “Oh Canada.”
Ed from SFV (7d7851) — 7/14/2011 @ 9:51 pmIt is the constitutional right to be funded with tax dollars, and once funded, you can never taken away said funding.
JD (318f81) — 7/14/2011 @ 9:58 pm“According to the government’s own USASpending.gov, you and I have contributed $19 million to the National Constitution Center.”
Get the heck outta here.
A left wing propaganda outlet funded by the federal government?
I’m shocked.
Dave Surls (6b5f5a) — 7/14/2011 @ 10:38 pmAll these charitable foundations are initially funded from the estates of capitalists and eventually have a board of trustees that are all socialists funding liberal causes. The law mandating how much they are required to disburse each year needs to be changed to force liquidation with in a definite time period a increasing amount of the assets be spent each year like 5% the first year and 5.5% the second year and and a half % increase each year thereafter. these foundations under current law usually get larger each year when the investment returns exceed the grants.They evolve from public benefits into public nuisances.
dunce (8dd87b) — 7/14/2011 @ 11:02 pmSo…the federal government flips $19 million to the National Constitution Center, which then spends my tax money to award medals to guys like Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, Kofi Annan, Bono, King Hussein of Jordan and other great defenders of the United States Constitution.
No wonder the federal government is going broke.
Pardon me, but I want my money back.
Dave Surls (6b5f5a) — 7/14/2011 @ 11:18 pmPeter Jennings was a friggin’ CANUCK. Now, I don’t mean that in a pejorative general sense, but naming a project regarding the US Constitution, which he repeatedly and regularly showed massive cluelessness about, after him, somewhat shows how equally clueless this organization is likely to be.
Unless it acks (which I seriously doubt) what a clueless butthead Jennings was regarding the Constitution and its purpose, and claims to aim to correct that in other journalists (which I seriously doubt), this organization is certain to be utterly laughably biased in the direction of zero clue.
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (c9dcd8) — 7/14/2011 @ 11:26 pm(Emphasis added):
1) Wouldn’t the proper word here be “devolve”?
2) They’re rather clearly liberal twits. Doesn’t that make the bolded term rather a pointless repetition? And hence negate the idea of any change — evolution OR devolution — actually occurring at all ??
Smock Puppet,, Grammatical Analyst III (c9dcd8) — 7/14/2011 @ 11:31 pmPeter Jennings was a notorious booze hound. A famous story making the rounds a few years ago was that on one particularly memorable occasion he got so drunk that he slept with his own wife.
ropelight (416004) — 7/15/2011 @ 5:53 amWhat… no special funding from Marlboro?
Huey (ddf1a4) — 7/15/2011 @ 8:11 amIt’s ‘O’Sullivan’s law,’ anything that isn’t explicitly conservative. slides to the left.
ian cormac (d380ce) — 7/15/2011 @ 8:26 amWhy is this organization about the Constitution named for a Canadian high school dropout?
East Coast Chris (c31a9b) — 7/15/2011 @ 10:47 amBecause he’s an “American Journalistic Legend”?
AD-RtR/OS! (7d3578) — 7/15/2011 @ 11:06 amHe certainly didn’t find international fame and fortune working for the CBC.
“Jennings fellows.” Yet another fate worse than death.
Glen Wishard (2167a4) — 7/15/2011 @ 11:56 pmWhen are they going to open the Peter Jennings Smoke Two Packs A Day And Die 25 Years Prematurely Center?
Icy Texan (0db5b1) — 7/16/2011 @ 1:44 amI happened to be reading the latest issue of Time while getting my hair cut yesterday, and the letters to the editor section actually mentioned that there was an “online controversy” about the article.
They went on to pull rank by mentioning that Stengel was the former what’s-it for the National Constitutional Center, while also failing to actually present any of the points made by the nameless, link-free critics from unspecified web sites (even their own.)
So they took the approach of doubling down on smug ignorance. And I suppose they can get away with it, since their primary audience seems to be 80 year olds killing time at the doctor’s office.
Ernst Blofeld (f90f0a) — 7/17/2011 @ 10:10 amAnyone interested can look into the provenance of the Jennings Center. Guess who founded it? It was some of the namesake’s old MFMSM pals, conveniently established nearby, along with his widow.
ropelight (8b6994) — 7/17/2011 @ 10:37 am