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On Friday Facebook announced that it has hired former journalist and ardent school privatization advocate Campbell Brown, who has deep ties to Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education, as head of its news partnership division, raising a series of concerns about how Facebook could help mainstream media shift even further to the right at the dawn of the Trump administration.
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Described by Alternet editor Kali Holloway as “a key media operative in the billionaire-backed effort to push the idea of school privatization,” Brown’s role at Facebook will be to “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook,” according to a Facebook post announcing her appointment.
After leaving CNN in 2010, Brown founded several anti-union, pro-school privatization organizations, most recently the education news website The 74, which is partially bankrolled by billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary who has been widely blamed for the destruction of the Detroit public school system.
Brown has publicly defended DeVos- criticized as a dark-money billionaire with extensive ties to the Christian right- calling her “a friend” and claiming that “the suggestion that Betsy’s work with children is ideologically or financially driven” is false.
However, Brown’s defense of one of her key funders runs counter to DeVos’ own proud admission of attempting to buy influence and impose her conservative ideology through the privatization of the education system. In 1997 DeVos wrote, “I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment.”
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While some in mainstream media speculated the Brown’s appointment is part of Facebook’s ongoing attempt to deal with the issue of “fake news”, Brown, described as a “charter school propagandist,” has a long history of less-than-factual advocacy.
In her role as founder of the rabidly anti-union Parents for Transparency group in New York City, she ran a series of attack ads during the 2013 mayoralty campaign which made multiple false claims about the role of teachers unions. Further still, in op-eds she wrote about the crisis in public education, she failed to disclose her own personal ties to school privatization lobbying groups.
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Given Facebook’s increasingly important role in the news industry, Brown’s politics and her ties to the Trump cabinet raise further alarm bells about the mainstream media’s normalization of the far-right in anticipation of a Trump presidency.
Earlier this week NBC announced that it was hiring former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who has been widely condemned for a series of anti-Black race baiting segments, while MSNBC announced that it was giving a show to another former Fox News host, Greta Van Sustern. Former Fox News president Roger Ailes became a key advisor to Trump’s campaign after he was dismissed from the network over allegations of sexual harassment.
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