ThinkProgress, a news media subsidiary of the Center for American Progress (CAP) — a left-wing and partisan Democrat political organization founded by Clinton insider John Podesta — has shut down due to financial insolvency, reported the Daily Beast on Friday.
The Daily Beast wrote:
The outlet, which served as an editorially independent project of the Democratic Party think tank Center for American Progress, will stop current operations on Friday and be converted into a site where CAP scholars can post. Top officials at CAP had been searching for a buyer to take over ThinkProgress, which has run deficits for years, and according to sources there were potentially three serious buyers in the mix recently. But in a statement to staff, Navin Nayak, the executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said the site was ultimately unable to secure a patron.
ThinkProgress’s claims and content are regularly featured by news media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, HuffPost, the Guardian, and similar platforms. Their personalities have often appeared on podcasts, cable news programs, and radio shows to offer political commentary.
ThinkProgress alumni include Judd Legum, who left the outfit to launch a political newsletter, and Lee Fang, who is now with the Intercept. The Daily Beast also listed some of ThinkProgress’s alumni as evidence of the operation’s “success”:
A testament to its success is found in the list of prominent alumni currently working in politics and journalism. That list includes Faiz Shakir, who now serves as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager; Amanda Terkel, the D.C. bureau chief of the Huffington Post; Nico Pitney, the political director at NowThis; Alex Seitz-Wald, a top campaign reporter for NBC News; Ali Gharib, a senior news editor at The Intercept; and Matt Yglesias, one of the founding members of Vox.
The Daily Beast made no mention of either Bill or Hillary Clinton in its article on ThinkProgress’s closure despite CAP’s founding by Podesta. Jennifer Palmieri later worked as CAP’s CEO before joining Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as its communications director. Neera Tanden, CAP’s current CEO, has held varying political roles with both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Despite ThinkProgress being an arm of CAP, it describes itself as “editorially independent” of CAP.
CAP made no mention of its closure via its website or social media profiles at the time of this article’s publication.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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