The organization that placed a billboard at Harvard University accusing some students of antisemitism amid the fight between Israel and Hamas is part of a network of rightwing media organizations being funded by a major conservative donor via a shadowy new foundation.
The single largest identified donor last year to Accuracy in Media (AIM), which placed the billboard, is the Informing America Foundation (IAF), formed in 2021, which has already dished out at least $8m to rightwing nonprofit and for-profit organizations, according to IRS filings.
In turn, the IAF’s biggest donor is the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a longstanding funder of rightwing causes whose founder and namesake sits on the IAF’s board.
Last Wednesday, AIM parked a truck with a billboard affixed to it on Harvard’s campus, and the organization’s president Adam Guillette went on X, formerly Twitter, to brag about the action.
The billboard featured photographs of students who are members of student groups that had signed a statement after Hamas’s attacks on Israel with a caption describing them as “Harvard’s biggest antisemites”. The organization also set up a page at a special URL, harvardhatesjews.com, to fundraise off the action.
The statement drew criticism for saying it held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. University leadership then came under fire from a former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, for not denouncing the student statement and for failing to make a stronger condemnation of Hamas.
The billboard action was just the latest billboard stunt from AIM under Guillette, who has taken the 55-year old organization in a more confrontational direction.
In recent months the organization has also mounted billboard campaigns against pro-Democrat social media influencer, Harry Sisson, and targeted lawmakers in Loudon, Virginia, who subsequently accused the group of harassment.
AIM also publishes media criticism of outlets it considers progressive, and its columnists exhibit a preoccupation with outlets such as video news outlet Now This, Vice News and Teen Vogue.
According to AIM and IAF tax filings, IAF donated $166,666 in contributions to AIM in 2022, more than 18% of the $908,474 in contributions and grants AIM declared for that year. Tax filings from the Vanguard Charitable Foundation indicate a separate contribution of $300,000 to AIM but the contributor is not identified, leaving IAF as the most significant identified donor. (Donor-advised funds are not required to disclose the identity of donors in tax filings and have thus been criticized as vectors of “dark money” to political nonprofits).
But the Guardian can reveal that AIM is just one node in a network of rightwing media and activist organizations IAF is bankrolling, according to its filings.
According to the publicly available tax returns, the organization has submitted since its founding in 2021, IAF has handed out more than $8m to rightwing for-profit and nonprofit organizations.
In 2022, according to its tax documents, IAF donated $900,000 to Empower Oversight (formerly Empower Whistleblower Center), a nonprofit founded in 2021 to assist whistleblowers and run by three former staffers of Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. That organization’s mission statement says it is a “nonpartisan educational organization dedicated to enhancing independent oversight of government and corporate wrongdoing”.
The Guardian emailed Empower Oversight for comment. In response, a spokesperson wrote that the organization was “a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization” that “works with whistleblowers regardless of their political affiliations” and holds accountable “officials from both major political parties”, pointing out that the Biden administration had appointed Empower president Tristan Leavitt to the Merit Systems Protection Board before he joined the organization in 2023.
Other organizations on IAF’s donor list have a far more ideological edge, however. They include Star News Digital Media, a for-profit company that operates a network of so-called “pink slime” news sites that present themselves as local media outlets, but mostly recycle slanted stories and rightwing talking points across the network.
The network was founded by three former Tea Party activists in 2017, and its outlets across 15 states have been called “Baby Breitbarts”.
Real Clear Foundation, a news nonprofit, received $250,000 from the IAF in 2022. Like Empower Oversight, the 501(c)(3) organization presents itself as a nonprofit, but most of the aggregated news and original investigations on the foundation’s site at the time of reporting were directed at Democrats and specifically Joe Biden.
A New York Times investigation in 2020 detailed how coverage in sites run by the Real Clear Foundation swung right during the Trump era, fueled by donations from rightwing foundations and dark money.
The Guardian emailed a Real Clear Foundation spokesperson for comment but received no response.
The IAF’s largest donation was to Bentley Media Group, which operates a rightwing media site called Just The News. According to Washington DC company records, Bentley Media Group’s directors include John Beck, also listed as chief operating officer of Just The News, and John Solomon, a former Washington Times, the Hill and AP reporter who is also listed as Just The News’s editor-in-chief.
Beyond funding Bentley Media and Just The News, IAF’s otherwise bare-bones website highlights years-old stories from the website, and lists the two organizations together in the footer of the site.
The precise relationship between the for-profit Bentley Media Group and the IAF was not clear on the site or in filings from the organizations.
The IAF supported 12 rightwing media and activist organizations in 2022 according to its filings; the average donation was around $425,000.
IAF chief executive Debbie Myers has a long history in the entertainment industry, with stints at a CBS affiliate and the Discovery Channel. More recently, according to her LinkedIn and contemporaneous reporting, Myers was president and chief executive of Gingrich 360, a media company founded by the Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista.
The IAF itself has benefited from remarkable donor largesse in the short time since it was founded, receiving $14.3m in just two years, per its tax filings.
Those filings indicate that its largest single donor is the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation (DDSF), whose founder, executive chairman and namesake Diana Davis Spencer also sits on the IAF’s board.
The DDSF gave the IAF $1.5m in 2021, according to its tax filing for that year, the most recent one that is publicly available.
The DDSF was reportedly instrumental in funding a network of voter suppression groups in the wake of the 2020 election and is a successor organization to foundations founded by Spencer’s parents, who were also sponsors of rightwing organizations.
Spencer’s father, Shelby Cullom Davis, was an investment banker who served as the US ambassador to Switzerland under the Ford and Nixon administrations and was later chairman of the board of the rightwing Heritage Foundation from 1985 to 1992.
