The particular brand of shrill fury with which my recent editorial has been received—not including my friend Mytheos’ rather genteel chiding—is both fascinating as well as unsurprising. In particular, those who have chastised me for criticizing Robert Allbritton ‘92 because I am a mere Argus editor have exposed quite a bit about the blind obeisance to power and shameless careerism that characterizes some of our fellow students and recent alumni. How, they ask, how could Ezra Silk criticize a trustee? Much less a very, very wealthy trustee who just donated a very expensive building to Wesleyan? Much less the proprietor of the esteemed and influential news site Politico?

Unless I have vastly underestimated his pettiness, Robert Allbritton has no interest in punishing Wesleyan because some student criticized him and his publication in the campus newspaper. This all will be easily pushed aside and Politico will chug along doing the same thing it has been doing for the last three years. Wesleyan will continue to receive money and influence from the Allbritton family and everything will remain as it has.

But is it not time to look beyond Wesleyan’s financial interest, past the endowment numbers, and past the semi-annual student soirees with the Trustees at Zelnick? The beauty of Wesleyan is not its money or connections but its fierce support of the freedom to criticize. The preservation of this principle also happens to be the core argument on behalf of saving the investigative sector of the American news media, an internationally important and politically influential industry that a place like the Allbritton Center for Public Life is theoretically meant to critique and improve.

Some of the comments on the Blargus have accused me of being “biased” and “like Fox News” in my editorial, for taking a strong position against Politico. These types of comments perfectly illustrate the confusion that sites like Politico are sowing in the public mind by confusing the boundary between editorial opinion pieces and objective news items. What I wrote was an editorial, so it can by definition not be biased. An editorial is meant to offer an opinion on a topic. The problem with organizations like Fox News and Politico is that they are not forthright about their ideological underpinnings and their unethical ties to partisan political entities, and for precisely that reason they allow biased opinions to shape their supposedly straight news coverage.

But let us get into some facts, which I admit were somewhat lacking in my brief editorial. Who is Robert Allbritton and where did he come from? Where did Politico come from and with whom do its allegiances lie? And how influential has the Politico become?

It is little use trying to understand Robert Allbritton without taking a look at his father, Joseph. Joe Allbritton, or “The Little Texan,” as he is known, was the head of Riggs Bank from 1981 to 2001. Riggs has been the biggest bank in Washington D.C. for most of the last 170 years, holding accounts for 22 American Presidents, and Joe is responsible for the bank’s current slogan: “the most important bank in the most important city in the world.”

In 1994, Joe named his son executive of Allbritton Communications, a D.C.-located media conglomerate, at the age of 25. In 2001, Joe stepped down as the chairman of Riggs, handing the title down to Robert, whom the Washington Post declared in June 2004 to be “the only child, the scion, custodian of the interwoven legacies of the father and the bank.”

Those legacies became infinitely more complex in late 2004, when Riggs was slapped with a felony charge for concealing a long-term financial relationship with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. On March 16, 2005, a bi-partisan Senate Subcommittee of Investigations report sponsored by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and then-Senator Norm Coleman entitled “Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption: Enforcement and Effectiveness of the Patriot Act” revealed that Riggs had first initiated its accounts with Pinochet, whom the report said has been accused of “involvement with human rights abuses, torture, assassinations, death squads, drug trafficking, arms sales, and corruption,” as far back as 1979. The relationship continued until 2004, the report concluded, well into Robert Allbritton’s tenure as chairman. The subcommittee found that Pinochet and his family held 28 separate accounts with Riggs amounting to over $8 million dollars, that Riggs agents had smuggled millions of dollars of Pinochet’s personal finances out of Chile in brown paper bags, and that Joe had visited Pinochet in Chile several times, writing him thank you notes that were obtained in the investigation:

“Chile is clearly a very impressive country with an excellent future thanks to you and the policies and reforms you instituted. As I expressed to you, I will be only too pleased to be of assistance to you and your country in any way I can in Washington D.C,” Joe Allbritton wrote Pinochet in a February 14, 1996 draft. “I would like to thank you for the superb cufflinks you presented to me and please know that you would be most welcome to visit my wife Barby and me at our house in Middleburg, Virginia where we raise our thoroughbred horses.”

After he had handed power down to his son, Joe Allbritton visited with Pinochet as late as 2002, according to the report, when the former dictator was under house arrest in Spain. In February of 2005, Joe and Robert Allbritton paid $8 million to a foundation for the victims of the Pinochet regime and, according to the Senate report, “in return, the Spanish court dismissed the pending criminal and civil actions against officers and directors of Riggs Bank.” The following month, on March 7, roughly a week before the Senate report was released, Robert Allbritton resigned from Riggs, ending 24 years of Allbritton family leadership at the bank. Today, Joe still holds 41 percent of the company’s stock.

Robert continued on at Allbritton Communications, and on January 23, 2007, the day of George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address, the company launched Politico. A website and three-times-weekly newsletter targeting political insiders on Capitol Hill, it was not the Allbritton family’s first foray into news journalism. Joe owned the Washington Star from 1973 to 1977, where, according to David Montgomery’s June 23, 2004 Washington Post profile of Robert Allbritton entitled “The Bank of Dad,” the elder Allbritton did not exactly come to terms with the idea of disinterested ownership.

“President Gerald Ford invited Joe and Barbara to watch the bicentennial July 4 fireworks from the Truman balcony of the White House,” Montgomery wrote. “Soon afterword, Allbritton ordered space reserved on the front page for an editorial endorsing Ford in the primary campaign against Ronald Reagan. He supplied the editorial himself.”

Joe came to terms with Reagan, however, eventually donating the presidential portrait of him that hangs in the White House today. He has maintained close ties to Republican royalty, approving Riggs 1997 purchase of J. Bush & Co, the banking company of George W. Bush’s uncle, Jonathan, who now sits on the Riggs board.

Robert has maintained close ties to the Republican establishment as well. Frederick J. Ryan, the current president of Politico, served in the Reagan White House for all eight years, ascending to the title of Assistant to the President in 1987. From 1989 to 1995, Ryan was Reagan’s post-chief of staff, and was responsible for designing, planning and funding the construction of the Reagan Presidential Library. Besides his job as the president of Politico, Ryan is also currently on the Board of Riggs as well as the Board of the Reagan Library, whose mission is “preserving Ronald Reagan’s legacy.”

Since its inception in early 2007, Politico has rapidly gained power and influence. This past March, The New Republic declared that “if the 2004 campaign belonged to the blogs, this year’s presidential contest was defined by the rise of the Web-print venture founded by banking scion and emerging media mogul Robert Allbritton.” In September of 2008, during the height of the campaign, Politico attracted 4.6 million viewers.

Politico’s ascent has come shockingly quickly, and the type of influence that it is exerting became quite clear during its shining moment in the campaign of 2008. The two most high-profile stories that Allbritton’s site broke were Sarah Palin’s six-figure shopping spree and John McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he had. These two pieces dominated the media cycle for days and came to define the stunning incompetence and incoherence of the McCain-Palin ticket.

These types of stories are routinely featured at the top of Politico’s front page. On January 29, 2009, Politico devoted an 897-word story to analyzing the meaning of the way Obama touches people when he greets them, or as reporter Andie Collier, calls it, “The Touch.”

“Obama’s admonishing touch can be almost as nuanced as his oratory,” Collier wrote. “Take for example his infamous meeting with Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher in Toledo, Ohio, last year. Joe got a friendly, encouraging slap on the side of the shoulder from Obama as he began to ask whether his company would have to pay higher taxes under Obama’s plan. But when Joe tried to interrupt Obama’s lengthy response, Obama subdued him with a gentle pat on the top of the shoulder, explaining, ‘I just want to answer your question.’ The gesture read, ‘Please don’t interrupt me,’ but it also said, ‘Hear me out, friend.’ ”

Engaging, yes. But important? These sorts of analytical features stories, imbued with opinionated tone, are often Politico’s most prominently placed pieces. All too often Politico reporters frame stories within the dichotomy of Republican versus Democrat back-and-forth, habitually interviewing political consultants and pollsters about the way media memes will play out, as if Politico’s own coverage has no effect on the media environment. In the Politico Universe, there is no such thing as an event that is either good for Republicans and Democrats, or bad for both parties. Partisan politics are everything.

Politico signaled that it was moving away from purely political reporting and toward more substantial coverage of policy when they hired former New York Times reporter David Cloud this past January as their chief foreign policy writer. Cloud resigned in July, however, citing his displeasure with the frantic pace of the Politico newsroom and the obsessive need to view every story through the lens of “What does this mean for Obama?”

“Partly what I found, having come from the New York Times, there weren’t [enough] resources,” Cloud told The New Republic on July 1st. “They needed someone to cover the waterfront: foreign policy, defense, Obama’s position in the world, which are all important things. I didn’t want to be the sole person opining or reporting on these matters. It was too much of a burden at that point in my career.”

On the first day after this summer’s Iranian elections, which Al Jazeera English described as “the biggest unrest since the 1979 Revolution,” Politico’s main story was not on Iran, though there were surely numerous ways to pursue the Washington angle of the election protests. Instead the front page featured a lengthy story commemorating the one-year anniversary of the death of Tim Russert, the former host of “Meet the Press.”

“Despite the water cooler chatter of who might be ‘the next Russert,’ it’s clear to most everyone that Russert will always be irreplaceable,” wrote Politico reporter Patrick Gavin.

Politico, despite its contribution to Barack Obama’s victory last year through its widely disseminated (and revenue-driving) coverage of the character flaws of Sarah Palin and John McCain, is an organization biased toward entrenched special interests through and through. Besides being intimately linked to one of the most powerful and conservative banks in the world, it has ties to key figures in the Republican Party. By catering to the cable networks and micro-analyzing Washington political calculations to the point of cynically approving of them, Politico is one of the most powerful defenders of the American political status quo in the world. Why would it not be? After all, how would actual political reform affect Riggs’ stock?

Robert Allbritton may in fact be a perfectly amiable person. Profiles suggest that he has charisma. This is all good and well. What Allbritton should know, however, is that donating a high-minded Center for Public Life at his alma mater is nothing less than a band-aid on the wound that he has inflicted upon this country by lording the sneaky and disingenuous Politico over American politics.

There is time for this to change. By all accounts Politico is here to stay, and will surely play an influential role in upcoming elections. Allbritton has a staff of experienced reporters who know what they’re doing. If he really wanted to turn Politico into the premiere voice on American politics, Allbritton would cut off Politico’s ties to Riggs and the rest of the conservative establishment and direct some of its reporting clout towards investigating real corruption in Washington as opposed to dissecting, disseminating and inflating the despicable culture of “spin” that came to its inglorious nadir in the era of Karl Rove. This would vastly increase Politico’s legitimacy while only moderately diminishing its hits and revenues (a pitfall which Allbritton can almost certainly afford), help to improve the state of American politics, and hopefully set the future of journalism in the right direction—not to mention giving Wesleyan an alumni-run news organization we can be proud of.

What do you say, Mr. Allbritton?