From the Russia Hoax to Biden's Dementia, the Liberal Media Gets Its Narratives from Harvard's Shorenstein Center

Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy deserves scrutiny as a media narrative architect. News coverage of the Russia collusion hoax, the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, and President Donald Trump’s deportations remind the public that mainstream media exists to help the Democrat Party maintain institutional power rather than report the news.

Harvard University’s recent defiance of President Donald Trump’s administration’s commonsense requests to stop discriminating against white people underscores its commitment to leftist ideals and its history of championing the far Left—a history reflected in the Shorenstein Center’s mission and actions.

The Makings of an Academic-Media Cartel

The Shorenstein Center, founded in 1986 and best known for its Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, has deep ties to established media. The parents of Joan Shorenstein—a former producer for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather—gave the seed money to found it after her death. It then received input from a veritable Who’s Who of 1980s liberal media and political elites. 

In addition to Rather—whom CBS later fired over dishonest reporting on President George W. Bush—early advisors included Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler, Boston Globe publisher William Taylor II, and former Democrat presidential advisor Richard Neustadt. 

Shorenstein’s parents initially named it the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center. After her widower—current Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone—drifted to the Right, they quietly had his name removed.

In addition to the Shorensteins’ $15 million donation, the Center initially raised funds from media-connected donors like the Boston Globe Foundation, Cox Enterprises, and Walter Cronkite. 

As the internet democratized media, causing the Left to lose its narrative grip, the Center received increased support from left-wing nonprofits to combat perceived “misinformation.” These included George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Today, the Center’s connections to liberal media and the nonprofits that fund that media remain pervasive. 

On its advisory board sits Marty Baron, who led the Washington Post’s resistance against Trump’s first term and called the paper’s refusal to endorse Kamala Harris "a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.” Other advisors include Katie Couric; former Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll; Peter Hamby of CNN, Puck News, and Vanity Fair; the Bulwark publisher and arch-Never-Trumper Sarah Longwell; Daily Beast CEO Ben Sherwood; and Craig Newmark, a major funder of left-wing journalism.

Some of the influential liberal journalists the center has mentored and collaborated with through fellowships include: 

• Ann Cooper, NPR;
• Brian Stelter, CNN; 
• Judy Woodruff, PBS NewsHour;
• Alexis Gelber, former Newsweek and Daily Beast editor; and
• Jennifer Preston, New York Times journalist and Vice President for Journalism at the aforementioned Knight Foundation.

The "Journalist’s Resource"

One of the most potent resources the Center offers is its Journalist’s Resource, which aims “at bridging the gap between journalism and academia.” It publishes left-leaning articles, mostly summarizing academic studies, and boasts “over 50,000 journalists, policy makers, educators, and others subscribe to the project’s weekly e-mail.” Like First Draft, it provides narratives to journalists to follow, including wrong-think refutations. 

In one email blast, the Journalist Resource’s managing editor Denise-Marie Ordway blamed “conservative politicians and advocacy organizations” for politicizing school board elections and offered guidance on how to report on them. She reminded journalist subscribers that academic studies show when Democrats win seats, academic results improve, and schools become less segregated. She closed by summarizing an academic study showing that even in Florida, “teacher-union interest groups remain . . . the ones to beat,” not-so-subtly suggesting journalists should remind unions that their endorsements remain the best defense against conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.

Trump’s Election Forced the Cartel Out of the Closet

The center always accepted the assumptions of liberal academia as the starting point in all journalistic recommendations on politics. But after Trump won in 2016, its publishing became increasingly partisan.

• In 2016, the center’s post-election report blamed the media for creating a false equivalency between Clinton and Trump. It claimed the press’ critical tendency “helps the right wing” and complained that only in the waning days of the campaign did editorial rooms ring the alarm bell about Trump. 
• In 2018, the center hosted an event entitled “How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.”
• During COVID-19, a study in its Misinformation Review claimed right-leaning media consumers held “inaccurate beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination.” One of its findings held that “people who tend to vote for Democrats consume more reliable media on average than people who tend to vote for Republicans.”

After the Jan. 6 Capitol protest, the center’s faculty and researchers called for increased social media censorship. They told the Harvard Crimson, “The role of digital platforms in catalyzing the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol Wednesday exposed an acute need for media accountability.” Then-Research Director Joan Donovan chided news and social media companies for not acting more biased and authoritarian than they did during the Trump administration.

Donovan recently made the news as the author of the Tesla Takedown campaign, which the FBI and Justice Department have labeled domestic terrorism. The campaign has so far resulted in nearly $500 billion in damages.

(RELATED: The Radicals Coordinating the $460 Billion Tesla Terror Attacks)

Shorenstein Center’s Narrative Control and Censorship in the Age of Trump

The center’s attitude toward censorship mirrors that of many European Union countries, which suppress speech to prevent the rise of the “Far Right.” Thanks to the First Amendment, globalist liberals in the U.S. must rely on hacking public opinion by controlling narratives. As the Center’s leaders acknowledged in the Harvard Crimson, a free internet makes this more difficult. After Trump’s election, the Center collaborated with likeminded organizations and created in-house programs to find ways to censor online free speech and lock down politically incorrect news that could hurt the Left. 

First Draft News

In 2017, Harvard invited First Draft News to move its headquarters to the Center, where First Draft founder Claire Wardle worked as a fellow. She also sat on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Information and Entertainment. 

First Draft originally formed as a collaboration between social media conglomerates—brought together by Google News Labs and funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), Newmark’s foundation, the Ford Foundation, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's left-wing Democracy Fund. It controlled media spin through its program CrossCheck, which gathered journalists and influencers together to form narratives around breaking news. It also offered training on how to respond to threats to its narratives on the internet. In one summer alone, it trained over 3,700 people on several continents.

After First Draft left in 2019 over branding disputes, a center spokesperson stated: “First Draft was affiliated with the Shorenstein Center . . . as part of our work to better understand how mis- and disinformation is spread online. While it is once again an independent organization, their work continues to be very important in the field.”

According to the Twitter Files, that “important work in the field” included a September 2020 mock news cover-up of scandals involving the Biden family, which social media companies perfected in real life the following month with the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Journalist Matt Taibbi reported that Wardle was included in email conversations with defense and intelligence officials during the laptop story’s suppression. 

Information Disorder Lab

Shorenstein ran its own program to control narratives called the Information Disorder Lab (IDLab), led by current National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) CEO Cameron Hickey. The center designed IDLab to “track and analyze the spread of misinformation and disinformation on the internet” and to share “non-partisan” research with newsrooms, internet platforms, academics, and other “stakeholders.” 

Hickey went on to create the Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI) within NCoC to act similarly to IDLab. ATI created a Stasi-like program called the “Civic Listening Corps.” It trained private citizens to spy on family and friends in group chats beyond the reach of government censors and their private sector collaborators to report politically incorrect speech back to the censorship industry and tech companies’ content moderation departments.

Technology and Social Change Project 

Donovan led the Center’s Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC), which compared misinformation to secondhand smoke. It stated, “The TaSC team studies the true costs of misinformation by using a “burden of disease” framework, which refers to analyzing the health, social, political, environmental, and economic factors to determine the cost of that disease to society.” 

In 2022, TaSC hosted a “True Costs of Misinformation Workshop” with dozens of academics and leftist think tank researchers to discuss the “misinformation” pathology. Visiting University of North Carolina professors claimed, “The far-right’s endorsement of white supremacy holds normative precedent in the United States” and compared “Far-Right” Americans becoming radicalized online to 9/11 jihadi terrorists. Other workshops included “What is Driving Conservatism’s Post-Democratic Turn in America?” and "#Girlboss misinfo: Vaccine misinformation for profit in the age of MLMs, alternative health, and influencers.” 

But the conference didn’t limit itself to American “misinformation.” Speakers also discussed ways to overcome forces opposed to the U.S. State Department’s preferred political outcomes abroad, particularly in India and Brazil. Organizations represented included the USAID, the Center for Democracy and Technology—a key Zuck bucks recipient during the 2020 election—and the National Democratic Institute, which, before 2025, worked hand-in-glove with USAID to prepare civil society groups abroad for State Department-led coups and political domination by Democrat-aligned foreign actors.

Digital Platforms & Democracy Project

The center’s Digital Platforms & Democracy Project aimed at building political support for regulating social media’s “misinformation, hate speech, and digital advertising,” claiming “the rules and regulatory bodies of yesterday are ill-equipped and unsuited to the rules of internet capitalism today.”

The narrative coaching the Shorenstein Center offers liberal journalists and its pro-censorship programs stem from the belief that journalism’s raison d'être is to defend and preserve democracy. If political movements threaten democracy—as liberal academia believes Trump’s MAGA movement does—then the Center sees itself as a tool to help journalists destroy them. Thankfully, programs like First Draft News, IDLab, TaSC, and the Digital Platforms & Democracy Project lost much of their power when Musk bought Twitter. But as Harvard continues to resist the Trump administration’s academic reforms, the Shorenstein Center remains a potent symbol of the information cartel that exists between academia and mainstream media.

(READ MORE: What Will Democrats Do Now?)