Dark Money, Media, and Online Creators: Parsing the Chorus Controversy
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Recently, there’s been significant online discussion about the “Chorus Creator Program,” a mentorship initiative funded by the 1630 Fund, a nonprofit with progressive donors. Critics, including Taylor Lorenz in Wired , framed it as a secretive program paying creators to stay silent on Israel and enforcing a partisan line. After reviewing the reporting and responses from creators, this framing is misleading and reflects a broader problem in online media: weaponizing “dark money” to create controversy while omitting critical context. What Chorus Actually Is The Chorus Creator Program, founded by Brian Tyler Cohen and Stuart Perelmuter, was designed to support smaller creators by pairing them with more established ones. Public statements from participants make it clear that mentorship, not content production, was the program’s primary goal. There were no required deliverables, and creators were not censored. For example, David Pakman, a progressive YouTube creator with millions of monthly...