They're Doing It Again

And by "it" I mean, they're omitting their conflict of interest.

And by "they" I mean, of course, the editorial board at Scaife's Tribune-Review.

Take a look:

North Korea appears to have the ability to launch nuclear warheads atop ballistic missiles that can reach the United States. Yet the Obama administration, bent on eliminating nuclear weapons, downplays that growing threat.

Sounding the alarm in the journal Comparative Strategy is National Institute for Public Policy scholar Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon strategic analyst and policy official. He writes that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) last year publicly expressed “moderate confidence” that North Korea has nuclear warheads for its ballistic missiles. But Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and other administration officials maintain its nuclear-strike capabilities are untested or limited.

The omission is about the National Institute for Public Policy.

According to the Bridgeproject, the NIPP has received a total of $6,554,065 in foundation support.  Guess how much of that came from foundations controlled by the Trib owner, Richard Mellon Scaife?  $3,450,000 or just under 53% of the total.

And the journal Comparative Strategy?

That's "sponsored by" the NIPP.

And the story?  The DIA's report "Dynamic Threat Assessment 8099: North Korea Nuclear Weapons Program (March 2013)" is about a year old. This is from Time Magazine, April 11, 2013:

The news flashed around the world late Thursday afternoon, East Coast time, after Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican from Colorado, read a mistakenly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) excerpt aloud at a congressional hearing

And this is what he said:

DIA assesses with moderate confidence the North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles. However, the reliability will be low.

At the time, though, the Pentagon issued a statement that contained this sentence:

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the North Korean regime has fully tested, developed or demonstrated the kinds of nuclear capabilities referenced in the passage.

And Time goes on:

The U.S. government is taking the North Korean threat seriously. Kim Jong Un no doubt watched Lamborn’s clip, over and over again, chortling at the impact his efforts, viewed through the always distorting prism of U.S. intelligence, are having on the U.S. Over the past month, the Pentagon has boosted missile defense throughout the western Pacific and announced plans to boost a West Coast missile shield designed to protect the U.S. mainland from North Korea attack.

Time also said:

The DIA was saying similar things about Iraq slightly more than a decade ago. That turned out to be flat-out wrong — just like how U.S. intelligence failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks.

So where does this leave us and the Scaife funded research by the NIPP?

I'll let you answer that yourselves.