Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy has long served as an anchor for the alliance between left-wing academia and mainstream media, prioritizing liberal narratives over objective reporting. The center conspires with media, liberal think tanks, and Big Tech to shut down opposing viewpoints to further damage journalism’s integrity.

Founded in 1986 with ties to liberal media elites, the Shorenstein Center evolved into a hub for liberal narrative control and coordination. The parents of the deceased journalist Joan Shorenstein, the center’s namesake, even removed the name of her widower, Michael Barone, from the center’s name because he became a conservative pundit. 

Its advisory board includes liberal figures such as Katie Couric and the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron. Liberal donors include George Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Former Shorenstein fellows include prominent liberal journalists like NPR’s Ann Cooper, CNN’s Brian Stelter, PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, Newsweek’s Alexis Gelber, and the New York Times’s Jennifer Preston.

The center’s Journalist’s Resource website reflects this liberal influence in its goal of “bridging the gap between journalism and academia.” It sends weekly email blasts to over 50,000 subscribers, whom it describes as journalists, policymakers, and educators. The Journalist’s Resource’s articles advise journalists on covering news topics by summarizing relevant academic studies with a left-leaning slant.

For example, the managing editor Denise-Marie Ordway once advised journalists to highlight academic findings favoring Democrat school-board victories while subtly suggesting journalists emphasizing teachers union endorsements could halt the political influence of conservative groups like Moms for Liberty.

The center’s shift toward overt partisanship became more pronounced after President Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Its postelection report criticized media for treating Clinton and Trump as equals, arguing critical coverage of politicians in general “helps the right wing.” In 2018, it hosted an event claiming Russian interference secured Trump’s victory. 

The center also became increasingly obsessed with the idea that "misinformation" drives the public to elect right-leaning politicians. It sought to collaborate with other universities, liberal think tanks, the entrenched bureaucracy, and Big Tech to find ways to amplify liberal establishment narratives and shut down online free speech. 

Its Misinformation Review labeled right-leaning media consumers as prone to “inaccurate beliefs” and claimed Democrats consume “more reliable” media. After the January 6 riot, Shorenstein faculty repeated the 2016 accusation that mainstream media wasn’t biased enough. Research Director Joan Donovan—who recently helped to inspire the violent “Tesla Takedown” campaign—blamed social media companies for not censoring the right.

The center’s censorship efforts included collaboration with programs like First Draft News, which it hosted in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. Founded by Google News Labs and funded by Soros and eBay’s left-wing founder Pierre Omidyar, First Draft’s CrossCheck program coordinated with journalists to shape breaking news narratives and trained thousands to counter “misinformation.” 

The Twitter Files later revealed First Draft’s role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. 

Similarly, the center’s Information Disorder Lab, led by Cameron Hickey, tracked online “disinformation” and fed “non-partisan” research to newsrooms. Hickey later started a “Civic Listening Corps” at the Algorithmic Transparency Institute to train citizens to monitor private group chats for politically incorrect speech.

The center’s Technology and Social Change Project, under Donovan, treated “misinformation” as a public health crisis. It hosted a workshop with academics, left-wing think tank scholars, and taxpayer-funded bureaucrats, comparing “far-right” Americans to 9/11 terrorists and seeking ways to counter conservative movements globally. 

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Likewise, the Center’s Digital Platforms & Democracy Project advocated government regulation of social media to curb “hate speech” and “misinformation.”

The academic-media collusion that the center facilitates starts with the assumption that journalism’s purpose is to defend the leftist ideals behind academia’s warped view of democracy. It began as a base to reinforce liberal media narratives with leftist academic research. After Trump’s election showed that the internet can overcome institutional gatekeeping, the center panicked. This resulted in institutional collaboration with other leftists, crafting methods from deeper narrative collusion to private sector censorship of online speech.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s hostile takeover of the intelligence agencies greatly undermined the left’s ability to gatekeep online discourse. Still, the Shorenstein Center remains a potent force on the institutional left—backed by Harvard, the only Ivy League university to resist the Trump administration’s reforms targeting left-wing discriminatory practices. Its collaboration with media elites, funding by leftist authoritarians, and continuing role as a media narrative architect show the dangers of institutional collusion between left-wing academics and mainstream media.