FIRST WATCH / From the Oklahoma Watch Executive Director
Oklahoma followed Florida, making PragerU content available in public schools. State Superintendent of Public Education Ryan Walters filmed a 9-minute video with PragerU’s CEO, Marissa Streit, praising the self-described free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education for telling history the way it was.
PragerU is short for the nonprofit’s full name, Prager University Foundation. Prager refers to cofounder Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host. The company is neither a university nor a foundation.
According to company’s 2022 tax return, PragerU had income of $65.5 million and expenses of $45.5 million, increasing its net assets to $77.4 million. Streit was paid $978,263, Prager collected $442,845 in salary and his consulting firm, Kansas & Brooklyn, was paid $493,333. Prager’s co-founder, Allen Estrin, who reported working 30 hours per week, was paid $327,500. PragerU spent spent more than $16 million marketing their products through Facebook and Google properties and another $1.2 million with Fox News and acknowledged that executives fly first class on long or late-night flights.
The organization calls itself the world’s leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds.
Fact-checking service NewsGuard gave PragerU a score of 57/100, warning that the website fails to maintain basic standards of credibility and accountability.
Numerous media reports have criticized PragerU’s content for denying climate change science, minimizing slavery, and likening gender identity to diseases such as schizophrenia.
In a story published yesterday (September 6), The Guardian criticized a PragerU video about Christopher Columbus discovering America in which a cartoon Columbus says, “Slavery is as old as time, and has taken place in every corner of the world, even amongst the people I just left. Being taken as a slave is better than being killed. I don’t see the problem.”
The character goes on to say that he is delighted humanity has denounced slavery but that judging the actions of those who lived 500 years earlier by modern standards, “is stupido.”
Forbes published a similar report yesterday, also pointing out that another video described George Floyd as a “Black man who resisted arrest.”
An NBC News report last month included a description of one video in which a cartoon version of Frederick Douglass describes slavery as a compromise between the Founding Fathers and the Southern colonies for the benefit of the U.S. TIME pointed to a 2023 video featuring an animated young Polish girl compares taking a stand against green energy to fighting Nazi oppression.
“PragerU shapes the narrative,” CEO Streit said in the company’s biannual report published this year. “We start conversations that other conservative organizations have never been able to tackle in media or culture. We drive conversations the left doesn’t want to talk about. We’ve built an industry of young, pro-America personalities and content to do it.”
