Talk:Brookings Institution

message: I changed this entry to reflect what I found about this thinktank's place on the political spectrum, since that's what I was looking for when I first accessed it.  Vanu 20:49, 15 Jan 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Brookins is considered center or center left, however heritage is clearly conservative, so call them center right is fairly generous.  Just look at their own site's self-description:
http://www.heritage.org/about/
Also the wiki on Heritage describes it as conservative: 
Similarly with AEI, it is clearly conservative (Lynne Cheney is a senior fellow, Muth, the President worked for Reagan, etc.)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=4456
Compare to Brooking's about and description in sourcewatch:
http://www.brook.edu/index/about.htm
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Brookings_Institution
--OneWorld22 07:25, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Except in the modern partisan attempt to twist things, "Conservative" means "Centrist"--it favors the staus quo, rather than moving toward the right or toward the left. Of course, with the left-leaning point of view of Wikipedia, it's probably appropriate to add a dash of distortion of that meaning, so "center-right" is probably the best way to bias things. 71.200.35.243 (talk) 23:21, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Center-right?

message: Why are none of the foundations listed under Funders listed on Media Transparency's page for Brookings Institution (http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=570)?
--Slark 21:35, 2005 Apr 13 (UTC)
I agree, the list of "major" funders in this article is very inaccurate.  The major funders are:  
Alfred and Gail Engelberg 
Ford Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett 
Foundation
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The John D. & Catherine T. 
MacArthur Foundation
Government of the State of Qatar
The Rockefeller Foundation
Haim and Cheryl Saban
Leonard D. Schaeffer
John L. Thornton
James D. Wolfensohn
These contributors all gave over $1M.  By contrast, the government of Japan (through the Japan Foundation) gave less than $100K.  So why list Japan as a major contributor?  --Westwind273 (talk) 10:08, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Funders list accurate?

message: Didn't Nixon want to fire bomb this place?
:see
* http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Nixon_any_means.html
*http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/presidents/richard-m-nixon/
*http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t4523.html
*http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1436
*http://www.cnn.com/US/9710/26/nixon.tapes/
GangofOne 01:29, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Didn't Nixon want to fire bomb this place?

message: FAIR is one of a number of organizations that characterizes the political leanings of the Brookings Institution. Why is FAIR the only one in the article whose OWN political leanings are mentioned? This looks like bias to me - seems to be a veiled attempt to cast doubt on the organization's characterization of Brookings. Ianbrettcooper (talk) 22:48, 8 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Even more on Political Orientation

message: For WP:NPOV, this article should have a "Criticisms" section.  I'm not familar with the organization enough to know what criticism they have recieved but doing what they do.. I'm sure it is out there.  Morphh 13:28, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Criticisms

message: I have removed the section regarding the Nixon administration as it is highly questionable regarding NPOV and has a dubious source.  Nicholasink 02:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The comment about NPOV is flatly wrong, and the sourcing issue was trivial to fix. Raul654 04:27, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Nixon's "Hit List"

message: this whole entry reads like some brochure you'd pick up at their office.  perhaps a bit of a more neutral or dispassionate rewrite is appropriate? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Buhatkj (talk • contribs) 17:52, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Tone

message: I placed a  template on "most independent".  I don't have access to the full Encyclopedia Britannica article, so if this assertion is included there, please include a quote in the footnote.  Thanks. --Evil1987 15:41, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "Most independent think tank"

message: Someone added Sourcewatch as a source for the proposition that Brookings is a conservative organization. I don't think this really flies. Sourcewatch's website is a Wiki, so what appears on it at any given time obviously isn't rigorously fact-checked. The claims are not sourced. And even aside from the Wiki issue, Sourcewatch is clearly an organization with a political agenda, making it less credible than the NYT, WaPo, LAT, etc. We already cite FAIR as an example of what left-of-center groups think about Brookings. I don't see what adding a dubious SW link adds to the discussion. Binarybits (talk) 13:34, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, this fails as a reliable source and should not be used.  Morphh  (talk) 14:02, 01 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Sourcewatch

message: I condensed the opening paragraphs to make them a better "introduction" to Brookings and the content that follows.
- Adjusted the phrase about the range of media descriptions of Brookings (formerly "from liberal to conservative").  One of the first things a reader wants to know about any think tank is the general political orientation of its scholars and their output, if one clearly exists (and I can't think of a case where it doesn't).  In this case, it confuses the issue to suggest that mainstream media outlets have such widely varying opinions about Brookings, since the term "conservative" appears to have been applied to Brookings only by the Sourcewatch wiki (see above for issues with this as a reference) and FAIR, which makes no pretense of being a channel of objective reporting and suggested the "conservative" label only backhandedly more than a decade ago in a piece that complained Brookings was hardly liberal enough for FAIR's liking (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1436).  We can debate the biases of various news sources as the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LAT, CNN, etc., but in the case of self-defined "non-partisan" think tanks such as Brookings, it's useful to derive some general consensus from the shorthand labeling those mainstream (widely read/viewed) sources use over time.  In the past few decades, that consensus has spanned "liberal to centrist," but has not crossed to "conservative."
- Removed the content regarding criticisms from "some U.S. pundits" of "the work of Brookings' foreign policy scholars for being too supportive of Bush administration positions."  Featuring that issue in the introduction gives undue prominence to a narrow debate being waged by a pair of liberal commentators on an issue (a Brookings scholar's attitudes regarding Bush Iraq policies) that is quickly receding into the political archives.  That debate is already covered more appropriately in the article's "Political stance" section.  Cometolearn (talk)  03:37, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Introduction Edit

message: User stag05 added the statement that the NYT found that "that the variety of views at the organization made labeling impossible." I can't find this in any of the sources cited. Am I missing it? Binarybits (talk) 14:00, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Political Stance

message: Most articles about organizations do not have long lists of projects and fellows (Cato is an exception which I am about to change). This is simple Listcruft and I am deleting it. If anyone is interested, it is always possible to create a "List" article, but such lists don't belong here. Academic38 (talk) 05:40, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Lists in article

message: Someone seems to have gone through the article and re-written key passages to obfuscate the fact that most media sources consider Brookings a center-left institution. Most egregious is the claim that the NYT calls Brookings conservative, when we cite several articles, all of which call it liberal. Someone also inserted the irrelevant commentary that the Post "usually does not characterize the institution and has quoted both Republican and Democratic scholars." This is blatant POV. Conservative/liberal is not the same as Republican/Democrat, and the fact that the Post doesn't always label Brookings doesn't invalidate the labels it has given, which are invariably left or center.
Finally, I restored the initial paragraph characterizing Brookings in the lead. All of Brookings' sister institutions (Heritage, AEI, Cato, CAP) have ideological labels, and Brookings should too, as we've discussed previously. Binarybits (talk) 20:20, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Political leaning

message: How is "a token number of conservatives" not an opinion? It is stated here as a fact. TheRealJoeWiki (talk) 23:49, 11 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: "Token"?

message: I've made a start on the Robert Litan/Senator Warren controversy. It ought to have a place here, and perhaps an article of its own as well. --Christofurio (talk) 16:49, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Robert Litan

message: This article does not follow wikipedia lines.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.221.197.9 (talk) 02:29, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Neutrality

message: In light of the NYT article, should this article have such a section? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 06:48, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Controversy section 

message: When did Brookings change its name from Institute to Institution, and why? --Webmgr (talk) 23:40, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Institute vs. Institution  

message: The paragraph on the Robert Litan scandal needs a serious rewrite due to lack of citation as well as the extensive use of weasel words, all of which obscures the nature of the original issues. If you want a clear demonstration of what I mean, compare the dubious paragraph with this summary of how Litan came to part ways with Brookings (from Paul Krugman's review of Elizabeth Warren's book):
"A case in point, recounted in “This Fight Is Our Fight”: Back in 2015 there was a congressional hearing on the Labor Department’s proposed “fiduciary rule,” requiring that investment advisers act in the interests of their clients. (No, that wasn’t already the case — and kickbacks for giving bad advice were a regular part of the scene.) When a prominent financial economist associated with the Brookings Institution, Robert Litan, testified against the rule, Warren did what most politicians wouldn’t: She pointed out that his research supposedly making the case against was effectively a piece of paid advocacy on behalf of a big mutual fund manager. (Litan ended up severing his ties with Brookings, which said he had broken the rules.)"
Ask yourself, which of these two accounts clearly outlines the issues? Which one uses unsourced claims to obscure and excuse Litan's behavior, or smears those who questioned his impartiality, or even make clear that Brookings parted ways with their fellow? I humbly suggest that the current paragraph on this scandal fails miserably to clarify any of these issues, i.e. Congress proposes to outlaw one example of widespread corruption and, when a Brookings fellow suggests Congress should instead sit on its hands, Brookings lets him go after it is exposed that the fellow's testimony is linked to the money of vested interests who are comfortable with the corruption.
Can someone please find the relevant, unbiased citations and write a new paragraph which clearly, accurately, and impartially reflects the facts about why Robert Litan departed Brookings.110.22.7.108 (talk) 02:09, 5 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The questionable paragraph has been removed per WP:BLP, pending reliable sources being found. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:58, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Robert Litan scandal 

message: I removed this paragraph and heading because it seems WP:UNDUE and verging on WP:PROMOTION in the absence of an independent source commenting on this item. Wikipedia articles should not be extensions of an organization's website or other marketing efforts. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:25, 2 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Public policy tools 

message: Senior Fellow Stephen P. Cohen and Vanda Felbab-Brown[106] are also affiliated with 21CDI.[107]  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gizziiusa (talk • contribs) 17:25, 23 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cohen passed away in 2019, and this needs to be updated. 

message: Deicas (talk) 22:27, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Is the   template, just above, being transcended correctly?  It doesn't look that way  to me.  What am I getting wrong here? Deicas (talk) 22:32, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed the nowiki tags, so it should work now. I hope you don't mind me editing those tags out of your post. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 22:40, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: @ScottishFinnishRadish:  Thanks for fixing it.  I seem to have chronic problem in with pasting templates in a fashion that includes nowiki tags. Deicas (talk) 04:46, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Might be a visual editor bug. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 10:19, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  BLP Notice Board filing on "... Igor Danchenko]] as "indicted [[Steele dossier]] source ...""  

message: Thé Wikimedia map associated with this article is blatantly wrong. Lake Huron is not depicted in blue, nor is Lake Erie nor Lake Ontario. It makes Michigan look like a sock, rather than a mitten. Very poor map. As a Michigander, it was quite shocking to me. 
Wish I knew how to attach a screenshot of the map. 2600:1700:37A0:6970:647B:A921:40C4:1631 (talk) 03:15, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Map? There’s no map in this article. Acroterion (talk) 03:27, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Map is inaccurate. 

message: About half of the references on this page are to Brookings - this primary sourcing is A LOT. Iskandar323 (talk) 06:13, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Primary sourcing 

message: * Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (2014)
* Divided Politics, Divided Nation: Hyperconflict in the Trump Era, 2019
* Power Politics : Trump and the Assault on American Democracy 2022
* Nanotechnology promises powerful new applications for the Internet of Things
Darrell M. West & Jack Karsten
*Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, 2020
* Digital Government: Technology and Public Sector Performance, 2011
* Biotechnology Policy across National Boundaries: The Science-Industrial Complex, 2007
* Going Mobile: How Wireless Technology is Reshaping Our Lives, 2014
* The Next Wave: Using Digital Technology to Further Social and Political Innovation, 2011
* Digital Medicine: Health Care in the Internet Era 2009
* Megachange: Political and Social Disruption in the 21st Century, 2016
* Brain gain: rethinking U.S. immigration policy, 2010
* Evaluating Campaign Quality: Can the Electoral Process be Improved, 2007 
* The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment 2001
* Digital Schools: How Technology Can Transform Education, 2012
* The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation, 2018
* Dirty Tricks in the Digital Age, 2019
* Making campaigns count: leadership and coalition-building in 1980, 1984
* Congress and economic policymaking, 1987
* Celebrity politics, 2003
* Checkbook democracy: how money corrupts political campaigns, 2000
* The future of work: robots, AI, and automation, 2018
* The sound of money: how political interests get what they want, 1998
* Air wars: television advertising in election campaigns, 1952-1992, 1993
* Patrick Kennedy: the rise to power, 2001
* Running on empty?: political discourse in congressional elections, 2004
:3MRB1 (talk) 19:05, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Darrell M. West: author :?!...