The New Hidden Lobby

How a 'fake grassroots' lobbying firm now owns an internet magazine and an influential pundit.

Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now.

Glassman convinced individual corporations and trade associations to supplement their handshake lobbying with advertisements in the pages of Roll Call, promoting or attacking pending legislation. "It was a singular business insight," says Glenn Simpson, an early Glassman hire who now writes for The Wall Street Journal. "You have a captive audience of 535 of the most powerful people in the world and their 10,000 staff members who all read you closely, and then you have all these people who want to influence those people." Within a year, circulation more than doubled and Roll Call's ad pages increased sevenfold.

As he became more successful, the onetime student radical and McGovernik also moved right. In 1995, by then a business columnist for The Washington Post, Glassman began moonlighting for the op-ed page; there, during the height of Gingrichism, he assailed federal student loans, defended high C.E.O. pay, and agitated for the flat tax. In the fall of 1996, he was named a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank and a kind of government-in-exile for Republican officials from the first Bush administration.

Tech Central Station was launched in early 2000, with a smattering of content and one sponsor, AT&T. But Glassman had bigger plans. As he explained during a speech in Los Angeles not long after the launch, "We concentrate on such issues as Internet taxation, broad-band dissemination, privacy, biotechnology, high tech trade, and so on," serving as "a kind of watchdog in an area in which few people seem to be doing long-term principled thinking on public policy." Glassman exulted, "I think in a sense we kind of invented a new sort of institution."

But what sort of institution, exactly? At first glance, TCS does resemble a think tank-cum-opinion magazine--indeed, a successful one. TCS brings all of this off with a relatively small staff, drawing on the brainpower of established think tanks rather than housing and paying its own fellows and scholars, and publishing their arguments in its own "magazine" rather than hawking sound-bites to print reporters and columnists. "We can get the word out much more quickly [than a traditional think tank]," says Glassman, "and it's a lot less expensive not having a lot of bricks and mortar."

TCS combines all the strengths of a modern advocacy think tank with the reach and accessibility of a successful political magazine.

Tech Central Station is organized as a limited liability corporation--that is, a for-profit business. As an LLC, there is little Tech Central Station must publicly disclose about itself save for the names and addresses of its owners, and there is no presumption, legal or otherwise, that it exists to serve the public interest.

On closer inspection, Tech Central Station looks less like a think-tank-cum-magazine than a kind of lobbying practice. Which makes sense: Four of the five co-owners of TCS are also the co-owners of the DCI Group, the Washington public affairs firm founded by Republican operative Thomas J. Synhorst. TCS's fifth owner is Charles Francis, who is also a senior lobbyist at DCI and is listed on TCS's phone directory. And as it happens, three of TCS's sponsors--AT&T, General Motors, and PhRMA--have also retained DCI for their lobbying needs.

Like its publishing arm, DCI's business is to influence elite opinion in Washington. But instead of publishing articles, DCI specializes in what's known as "corporate-financed grass-roots organizing," such as setting up front groups to agitate for a client's position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians.

After ExxonMobil became a sponsor the site published a flurry of content attacking both the Kyoto accord to limit greenhouse gasses and the science of global warming--which happen to be among Exxon-Mobil's chief policy concerns in Washington.

TCS's articles have also complemented work being done by DCI. During 2000, Microsoft contracted with DCI to perform various services, among them generating "grassroots" letters opposing a breakup of Microsoft and launching Americans for Technology Leadership, an anti-breakup group funded in part by Microsoft and run out of DCI's office. Meanwhile, down the hall, Tech Central Station went on the offensive, inaugurating an "anti-trust" section that over the coming months would publish little except defenses of Microsoft and attacks on the software maker's corporate and governmental antagonists, with occasional detours into the subject of lawsuit reform.

I asked him whether or not TCS published opinions that contradicted the policy views, of, say, AT&T. "Frankly, we think that other points of view are well represented everywhere else," he responded cheerfully. "To have one point of view on an issue like telecom is something that we don't have a problem with." He added, "We're an advocacy group. There's no doubt about that. I don't think we ever had pretenses of being an academic think tank."

James Glassman has recognized a new and largely untapped opportunity for his journalistic talents. If his past is any guide, two things are likely to happen. Other journalists and pundits will follow suit, touching off a growth market in Washington journo-lobbying--and then that market will crash.

Link from Josh.