Think Tanks in America

Some commentators on the Left have been raising alarms about the lethal combination of money, power, and education that they claim the right wing has used to develop ideological infrastructures to produce its own narrativeand thereby to control debate in the public sphere.Something like $3 billion has been spent over 30 years to build a network of conservative public intellectuals, think tanks, and media outlets.Names like the Heritage Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, are just a sampling of the organizations linked to this movement.Tom Medvetz here deals with think tanks on both the right and the left.He tracks the rise of a different style of think-tank production starting in the 1960s, when many of them started to become advocacy tanks, more oriented to the mass media, alert to the need for rapid response production of short synthetic materials as opposed to scholarly research.Even the venerables, like the Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations, moved toward the faster, shorter, more media-oriented production. How did this process evolve, and what are we to make of the world of think tanks now in our midst?Medvetz gives us a timely book, brilliantly succinct and extremely instructive about the cultural landscape of knowledge and policy production in America."