Thinking Outside the Tank, But Not Inside It

The purported Heartland Institute internal documents leaked to media outlets last week were not exactly revelatory.

Collectively, the 100 or so pages describe an advocacy group going about the business of pushing its agenda and raising money to help it do so. Chicago-based Heartland has been doing that since it was created in 1984 "to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems," according to its current mission statement.

Still, the leak and Heartland's response to it are useful reminders to anyone seeking hard information about controversial issues: Words such as "institute," "center" and "council" in an organization's name do not necessarily signal impartial inquiry or dispassionate investigation. Any organization can call itself a "think tank," but sometimes spin is just spin.

When the documents first appeared on the Internet last Tuesday, Heartland quickly confirmed that some of its materials had been "stolen." On Wednesday, Heartland declared one two-page memo to be an outright fake but said the rest of the material had not yet been reviewed to see if anything had been altered.

By Thursday, Heartland chief executive Joseph Bast wrote in a blog post that the organization still didn't know if any documents had been modified. And in a letter sent Saturday to some Internet sites that had posted the documents, Heartland's general counsel said the group still was investigating whether the documents had been altered.

Authenticating the documents isn't that difficult.

Heartland created and possesses the originals, after all. If it could discredit them, it would.

One thing the documents describe is Heartland's long-running campaign to discredit the solid science of climate change. A new initiative featured in a document called "2012 Fundraising Plan" describes strategies to inject doubts about climate change into the science curricula of elementary and secondary schools. One obstacle, it says, is that "principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective."

In his Thursday blog post, Bast addressed that specific quote, which had appeared in a New York Times story. He did not deny having made the sweeping generalization; he affirmed it. "Of course most principals and teachers are biased," he wrote. "Most are liberal Democrats."

He did not cite research backing up the charge. It makes you wonder about the evidence behind other Heartland claims.

Heartland's efforts to deny the threat of climate change don't advance the interests of human civilization, but they align perfectly with the financial interests of the oil, mining, transportation and energy generation industries that oppose pollution regulations and support groups like Heartland.

Such organizations start with the conclusions they prefer — say, "free-market solutions to social and economic problems" — and try to work backward. Some "think tanks," in other words, merely are in the tank for their ideologies.

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