Businessman
Peter G. Peterson a controversial Wall Street billionaire who uses his wealth to underwrite numerous organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, founded
The Fiscal Times by providing the initial funding for the publication in 2009 and 2010.
Jackie Leo, former editor-in-chief of ''
Reader's Digest'' was selected to be the publication's editor-in-chief. Other journalists involved in the launch of the publication included former
Washington Post budget reporter Eric Pianin, who became the publication's Washington editor, Ann Reilly Dowd from
Fortune magazine, and
Merrill Goozner, former chief financial writer for the
Chicago Tribune. The publication was to launch in early 2010, but began
content partnership programs with organizations including
The Washington Post in 2009. Some liberal advocacy groups accused Peterson of having a political agenda for funding the start-up organization. On 31 December 2009, the
Washington Post published a news article, "Support grows for tackling nation's debt," created by
The Fiscal Times as part of a content partnership agreement with the Post. The liberal
media watchdog group
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) issued an "Action Alert" in reaction to the story, saying that the
Post had taken "special-interest 'propaganda' and passed it off as a news story."
Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, responded to what he described as an "uproar" from critics, criticized his paper's "glaring lack of transparency" on the partnership and wrote that the piece "was not sufficiently balanced," but nonetheless defended
The Fiscal Times partnership, writing that Peterson had told him that his funding of
The Fiscal Times had "no strings attached." FAIR also criticized the
Post for publishing another
Fiscal Times article that FAIR criticized as a "soft profile" of two members of the
White House deficit reduction commission. FAIR questioned whether the piece entertained "serious criticism of the ideas being advanced so far by the commission (cutting Social Security, most notably)." Economist
Dean Baker of the progressive
think tank the
Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote in April 2010 that the publication's news articles displayed pro-deficit-reduction bias. ==Staff==