How Funders Can Protect Grantees — and Themselves — From Civil Society Attacks

Many of us seeking funding for nonprofit media organizations use a simple argument — lively, fact-based journalism is a cornerstone of healthy civic life and vital to making good policy.

The Knight Foundation developed a persuasive mantra to draw more funders to the cause: Whatever your number one philanthropic priority is, journalism should be your number two. If the public isn’t informed about your pet issue, you’ll never achieve the change you’re after.

The argument seems to be working. More than 1,400 funders gave to nonprofit media in 2023, including national grant makers, community foundations, and corporations. And that was before Press Forward really got going. The $500 million initiative, led by the MacArthur and Knight foundations, aims to increase philanthropic investment in local news.

Small-dollar donors are also stepping up. The number giving to nonprofit newsrooms easily exceeds 100,000, according to leaders of several nonprofit media organizations I spoke with.

This is great news for the nonprofit news business. As the former president of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit media outlet covering criminal justice, I know what it’s like to fight for every dollar. But the challenges today go far beyond fundraising. As the Trump administration escalates its vitriolic attacks on independent political thought generally, and on media outlets specifically, journalists are increasingly under threat. And many of their supporters are wondering whether those threats extend to them as well.

Grant makers are growing concerned. A year ago, only 17 percent of those surveyed by Media Impact Funders, a membership association, said they were worried about journalists’ security. Now most journalism donors express such concerns, says executive director Vince Stehle.

Countering Attacks

Threats to media include doxxing, defamation suits, and even physical violence, including reporters who were injured this summer with rubber bullets while covering protests of immigration raids in Los Angeles. Many newsrooms are boosting their protections, offering training to staff, reviewing their insurance plans, and putting media lawyers on speed-dial. Funders and board members should make sure their grantees have such preparations underway.

The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, for example, has paid for several of its journalism grantees to undergo a full security audit, conducted by the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. The Democracy Fund checks in with its media grantees to make sure they’re connected to peer networks, security and legal services, and even therapy and trauma support for staff. Last month Press Forward announced a $22.7 million investment in local newsrooms and journalism service organizations to improve infrastructure, including security and legal services.

When it comes to preparation, “the boring stuff matters,” says Dale Anglin, the director of Press Forward. Bylaws, tax forms, and board minutes must all be in order. People with a lot less power than Donald Trump can take advantage of any irregularities to file a lawsuit, or even just a massive request for documents that can tie a nonprofit newsroom up in knots for months. It’s time to work with insurance agents to evaluate the fine print of a media outlet’s defamation insurance.

Funder Protections

How far grant makers should go to protect themselves is a matter of debate.

On one side, funders of international media in places such as Russia, Hungary, or Myanmar recognize an authoritarian playbook when they see one. Drew Sullivan is publisher of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a nonprofit whose newsroom works in some of the world’s most repressive countries. He thinks donors should start considering taking media grantees off foundation websites and asking those grantees to remove the funder’s name and logo from theirs.

More than one foundation I reached out to is using intermediaries, including donor-advised funds, to make funding less visible. If a media outlet is accused of “supporting terrorism” in line with other Trump administration and congressional attacks on progressive nonprofits, U.S. banks may well shut down its accounts even if the charge remains unproven. “Diversify the locations of your bank accounts,” advises Sullivan. “The way they shut you down is by the banks.”

Hold on a minute, cry the defenders of media ethics. Financial transparency helps differentiate legitimate news organizations from partisan hit groups spreading fake news on social media. “I don’t know that I want to take transparency out of our tool kit,” says Kelly McBride, the senior vice president of the Poynter Institute. “We would have to go a lot further down this road before we would be willing, in the media industry, to consider the possibility of making funders secret.”

In a sector that demands transparency from government and public figures, it’s not a good look for media outlets to start acting like they have something to hide. The same is true for funders who should be prepared to stand behind independent media as an essential public good. “I see a lot of foundation boards that are overly preoccupied with risk,” said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. “I’m not so sure it’s a good thing to act like we’re in Hungary.”

Foundations, however, might want to at least consider some new strategies. Those already committed to giving multi-year grants, for example, could go a step further and give all the money upfront to their media grantees. That way, they can use the funds where and when they’re needed most.

Grant makers might also take the route of at least one major foundation, which asked not to be identified: Abandon some formal grant agreements, especially for anything connected to diversity, equity and inclusion, in favor of less complicated “gifts.” How does that help? The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was used for decades to buttress DEI, may now be interpreted as forbidding grants based on race, as demonstrated in a case last year brought against the Fearless Fund. A gift to a nonprofit newsroom with a strong commitment to DEI, according to this view, is less of a contract than a grant agreement would be.

Board members of nonprofit media organizations should also think about protecting themselves. One media CEO who was doxxed advised her board to practice “digital hygiene for this very complicated world we’re in.” Still shaken, she asked me not to use her name. She urges board members to set all their privacy settings “to the most restrictive” and “lock all social media down so that you’re only dealing with people you know.”

In the end, the best protection for funders may be the very thing that’s sometimes hardest to persuade them to follow — keeping their hands off the journalism. At the Marshall Project, I encountered donors who were new to journalism funding and, subtly or not, wanted to know if a grant would ensure our glowing coverage of their other grantees. Nope!

Donor acceptance policies, which make clear that the grant won’t influence a media outlet’s coverage, might be a funder’s salvation. If dragged before a judge to account for their role in a grantee’s controversial story, the answer is clear: We had no role.

A Chilling Effect

For a relatively new field of philanthropy, the prospect of legal challenges could have a chilling effect on funder support. If a deep-pocketed parent corporation such as Paramount won’t stand up to political pressure on a crown jewel like CBS News, can a local news start-up be sure that its donors will stay the course?

Supporting media has never been an anodyne endeavor. Journalists are troublemakers. They routinely uncover wrongdoing and make people in power angry. They may, indeed, make their funders angry. “Getting new funders to support journalism is doable, but it’s a tough sell,” said John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, who spent years persuading donors to support Press Forward. “Some of them may balk at donating to journalists who turn right around and criticize them. The risks of today’s political environment certainly aren’t making things easier.”

Yet a healthy democracy is impossible without a free press, especially as other truth-seeking institutions such as universities face mounting threats. “If funders think that they are scared, they should think about how their grantees are feeling,” says Joe Goldman, president of the Democracy Fund. “They need to know that we’ve got their backs.”