THIS Is Who They Get As An Expert??

A lesson, my friends, in how the right wing media works.

In today's Tribune-Review there's some somewhat less than exuberant reporting on the plans for the upcoming Occupy Pittsburgh demonstrations.  After setting the scene by quoting two contrasting participants (one a struggling student the other, well, not), the Trib finds an expert to give some non-partisan concerned commentary on the group.:

The movement's wide-ranging appeal could be its undoing if organizers don't focus on the right target, said Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University.

"(Occupy Wall Street) doesn't seem to have a set of demands. There is this general statement, with people feeling that they've been plundered, and that's, in my opinion, pretty fair. But they're protesting the wrong street," Davies said.

Instead, Davies pointed to government intervention in the banking and housing industry in recent years.

"It's kind of like blaming the kid because he got into the paint and painted the television, but the problem is, you shouldn't have left the paint on the floor to begin with," Davies said.

Well, that doesn't look good, does it?

Until we Google Professor Davies (what, didn't they think we would??).

Turns out our concerned non-partisan, along with being an econ professor at Duquesne is a scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Do we need to mention how much money Trib owner Richard Mellon Scaife's funnelled to the Mercatus Center?

• Media Matters charts $320,000 in funds from the Sarah Scaife Foundation from 2004-2007
• There's another $180,000 from that same foundation from 2008, 2009, and 2010.

That's half a million dollars from my friend Dick to the think tank were his paper's "non-partisan" expert sometimes hangs his scholarly hat.

That doesn't even mention his being a member of the "Council of Scholars" of the Commonwealth Foundation or the millions of dollars Scaife's funneled there either.

But that's not the big story.

The big story is how much Koch Brothers money the Mercatus Center's received. Media Matters lists it at a skosh more than $9 million between 2002 and 2008. These are the same Koch Brothers that funded a great deal of the right wing "Tea Party Movement" over the last few years.

But maybe that's just a coincidence.  Could be.  Perhaps it is and I should be fitted with a tin foil hat PDQ.

But look who spoke at a Tea Party Rally (hosted by the lovely Rose Tennent, by the way) on April 15, 2010: Antony Davies, PhD.

THIS is who the Trib gets its non-partisan commentary?  A Tea-Party guy??

This is how the right wing media works.