Triangular Strategy

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was our destination for the start of our second week. CSIS, a bipartisan think tank dedicated to three top areas of national security, foreign policy and global challenges, such as health care and food distribution. So what is a think tank and where do they fall among the political spectrum of influence and policy making? A think tank focuses on day-to-day operations of government and conducts research that becomes translated into reports of scholarly intelligence that is then made available to the media and government officials for guidance.

Think tanks, journalists and policy makers have a triangular relationship. Unlike the trade organization and lobbying firm we visited last week, think tanks focus on areas of public policy that many legislatures cannot focus on since they spend a majority of their time seeking re-election. From an idea for a report on a specific topic comes the actual report that explains and clarifies the issue and makes conclusions about the end result or current state of affairs. Journalists then read the report and incorporate it into their stories about the topic, which policy makers in Washington inevitably read and consume, and therein lies the influence. However, CSIS is bipartisan and therefore remains as centered as possible in their studies and analyses, though many think tanks lean slightly or mostly to the left or right.

An example of the somewhat complicated triangular relationship is the Smart Power Commission, which was explained to us as the “integration of soft and hard power,” soft power being economic and diplomatic power and hard power being military force. For instance, this commission studied global health with smartglobalhealth.org and sought sponsors for the project, which received funding from a foundation. This initiative received media attention and reached policy makers, in turn affecting legislation.

Since CSIS is a “bottom-up” think tank, versus a “top-down” think tank that has a sizeable endowment to fund scholarly work and projects, it must raise most of the money project-to-project and issue-to-issue, just like the global health issue.

To further explain how a think tank like CSIS works, a journalism comparison was made during our visit. A news story contains the heart of the content in the first few paragraphs, followed by the translation and explanation of the featured content in the remaining paragraphs. Think tanks are like the later paragraphs because they often become the explainers as well as the drivers behind policy because of the level of analysis they engage in.

I left CSIS with a broader view of the relationship of how think tanks and media work together, but feel like I could still seek to better understand how they remain so centered in their analysis besides just aiming to be so, and if they ever do appear to lean in one direction, I wonder how they counter or explain that to the press.