Cursor, Inc.
420 N. 5th St. #707
Mpls, MN 55401
editor@cursor.org
(612) 332-8414

September 18, 2001

Mr. Bill Moyers
The Schumann Foundation
33 Park Street
Montclair, NJ 07042

Mr. Moyers,

Thank you for your interest in helping Cursor Inc. (publisher of Cursor.org and MediaTransparency.org) obtain funding. For your convenience I’ve attached my previous correspondence with you to this letter.

I’ve also included two copies of a new brochure we have produced to introduce MediaTransparency.org to potential funders -- the rationale for the website, and how we intend to go about/have gone about realizing our mission.

The goal of MediaTransparency.org is to provide a research tool for journalists and the general public to see how conservative philanthropies, through their funding patterns, shape public discourse in the United States. Mediatransparency.org is a project of our 501(c)(3) organization, Cursor, Inc. Cursor.org, Cursor, Inc.’s other project, is a more generalized media criticism website.

In just two short years MediaTransparency.org has become a very popular website. Everyday hundreds of people from media institutions, universities and governments around the world use it to research the conservative movement’s funding, institutions, ideas and people. Hundreds of websites link to it. It has been used as a primary source in dozens of news stories and reports. We have helped reporters from the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Minneapolis Star Tribune and others with reports on conservative funders and recipients.

Our on-line, free, searchable database presently contains over $1 billion in grants to 2,000 recipients in 16,000 grants. Our aim is to eventually include grants going back to 1985 for a set of conservative philanthropies, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, the Earhart Foundation, and a few others.

MediaTransparency.org also maintains information about the recipient organizations and people, and points out where they appear in the mass media. Some of the sources we link to include the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Working Assets, and many others.

We have written a number of our own reports, and have republished on the Internet previously published stories that were not available on-line.

Because the conservative philanthropies are not eager to share previous years’ financial information, or annual reports, for that matter, we still have some holes in our grants database. We recently sent a request to the IRS for a set of previous years’ 990s for one of the conservative philanthropies, and we are also trying to find hard copies at libraries around the country.

In short we’ve begun to realize some of our original goals, but we still have a long way to go. Additional funding would help us fill out our grants database, and allow us to do more research into the impacts of the conservatives.

If you should need any more information, please write, phone or email.

Rob Levine
www.Cursor.org
“Patrolling the Media”
www.MediaTransparency.org
“The Money Behind the Media”