Herb and Marion Sandler

WASHINGTON – With newspapers dropping dead like the flies they once swatted, a new non-profit riding to the rescue with free, ready-made "independent investigative reporting" is accepting money from a billionaire couple with a far-left agenda and dubbed "the king and queen of toxic mortgages."

Herb and Marion Sandler, who sold their Golden West Financial Corp. to Wachovia and nearly bankrupted the buyer with its portfolio of subprime loans, committed $10 million to Pro Publica Inc., the non-profit that promises underwritten hard-hitting investigative journalism that has a "moral force" to newspapers facing cutbacks in staff and elimination of editions.

But, according to a report by Capital Research Center, the Sandlers have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to MoveOn.org, George Soros' Democracy Alliance, David Brock's Media Matters, John Podesta's Center for American Progress, the William J. Clinton Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Institute for Public Policy, the Natural Resources Defense Council and two affiliates of the voter-fraud tainted ACORN, the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now – and many other groups and causes with a portside tilt.

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Time magazine named the Sandlers in its list of "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis." The Sandlers company "offered several ways to back-load your loan and thereby reduce your early payments, with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements," Time reported. Then the Sandlers dealt the company to Wachovia before the subprime loan crisis hit.

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Even "Saturday Night Live" mocked the Sandlers, accusing them of pushing the bad loans on to Wachovia. That show was even tougher on the couple than Time, captioning the characters playing them with these words: "People who should be shot."

Capital Research Center say Pro Publica has not lived up to its non-partisan, non-ideological billing.

Rather than investigating ACORN last fall, when accusation of voter fraud were being widely revealed, Pro Publica began probing the background of the public affairs group that blew the whistle on ACORN.

Pro Publica also invested resources in investigating Sarah Palin's "pork history" and her connection to the "road to nowhere." There was no similar interest in Barack Obama's ties to Bill Ayers or Rev. Jeremiah Wright or any other similar controversies during the presidential campaign, notes the center.

Capital Research Center sees Pro Publica as another front in the battle by "progressive" organizations in promoting a left-wing policy agenda through the media – noting on-going efforts to silence talk radio, intimidate dissent through groups like Media Matters and even bail out newspapers.

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