Politics

Poligrafting the News: Tech CEOs and the Obama Administration

By Paul Blumenthal

Politico has an excellent round-up of the many Silicon Valley executives who orbit around the White House giving advice on a range of policy issues. One thing that the article could use is some context as it relates to the campaign contributions that went from these tech companies to the President’s campaign in 2008. One way to insert that context is to run the article through the Sunlight Foundation tool Poligraft.

Poligraft checks the names in the articles to databases of campaign finance and lobbying and prints the context along the side of the article. For this Politico piece, the article needed one simple addition for Poligraft to work properly: the name Barack Obama. With this small edit the article, for which you can see the Poligrafted version here, pops with influence information.

Now you can see that the all of the companies named in the article contributed to the President’s 2008 campaign. You can also see that they all contribute to President Obama’s chief gadfly, Rep. Darrell Issa.

Check it out.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on October 06, 2010 (boomark / email).