Right Web

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Ideas in Action is a weekly TV program produced by the George W. Bush Institute and Grace Creek Media.[1] Launched in early 2010, this Sunday morning talk show is described as a “weekly series on ideas and their consequences.” Appearing on PBS affiliates as well as on internet channels such as RIGHTNETWORK,[2] the program typically features prominent conservative academics and political actors commenting on domestic and foreign affairs. Guests have included Jeffrey Gedmin, a former AEI scholar who heads Radio Free Europe; Dan Senor, cofounder with William Kristol and Robert Kagan of the Foreign Policy Initiative; AEI’s Thomas Donnelly; Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security; former secretary of state George Shultz now based at the Hoover Institution; and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson.[3]

Ideas in Actionis hosted by James Glassman, founding executive director of the Bush Institute and veteran journalist. As former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in the George W. Bush administration, he led the “government-wide international strategic communications effort."[4] Glassman was also a senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He co-authored, with Kevin A. Hassett, the ill-timed 1999 book, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, which erroneously predicted that the stock market was “undervalued” and would continue to rise sharply in ensuing years.[5] Glassman is well known on the political talk show circuit, having hosted TechnoPolitics for PBS, MoneyPolitics for Washington's ABC affiliate WJLA, and Capital Gang Sunday for CNN.[6]

Ideas in Action appears to combine elements of Glassman's previous shows and serve as an on-air successor to the now-defunct Tech Central Station (TCS). As an internet magazine, TCS was a platform for a number of high profile hawks and neoconservatives, many, of whom played key roles building public support for an aggressive “war on terror” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Contributors included Carol Adelman, Ken Adelman, Henry Cooper, Newt Gingrich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider Jr., and James Woolsey.

Glassman launched TCS in 2000 as a "virtual think tank," covering everything from the war in Iraq to Milton Friedman's views on health care reform. Its mission statement read: " The collision of technology and public policy has enormous implications for our lives and our future. Tech Central Station is here to help provide the right answers to many of those questions with the news, analysis, research, and commentary you need to understand how technology is changing and shaping our world, and how you can make sense of it all."[7]

A December 2003 Washington Monthly article about TCS  described it as "journo-lobbying"—a new innovation in lobbying "driven primarily by the influence of industry. … The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups."[8]

According to the Washington Monthly, soon after ExxonMobile was listed as a sponsor, TCS began running articles attacking the Kyoto accord and the science of global warming. After the pharmaceutical lobby PhRMA hired TCS's then parent company, DCI group (a public affairs firm), TCS columnists opined against legislation that would allow the reimportation of drugs from Canada.

In 2006, TCS was purchased by its then-editor Nick Schulz, becoming TCSDaily.[9] In 2008, Schulz, a former political editor on Fox News, became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, editing AEI’s in-house magazine The American.[10] In 2010, TCSDaily began operations as a discrete project of the Ideas in Action website.[11]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.