Union leader representing news industry joins group that shuns news coverage
Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, is a member of the Democracy Alliance, a Democratic donor network that has raised more than $30 million. CWA senior director George Kohl joined the network last year.

The group is highly secretive and goes to great efforts to prevent any reporters from covering its activities. At a recent gathering in Chicago, alliance members called security on Politico reporter Kenneth P. Vogel for trying to interview a member.

That is pretty ironic because one of the groups that CWA represents is … reporters. Its website boasts that its members include workers at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC andNBC, among others. The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents about 34,000 news industry workers, is part of the CWA.

The guild's constitution states that part of its mission is to "Raise the standards of journalism and ethics of the industry." That would seem to pretty clearly conflict with Cohen's membership in the Democracy Alliance.

The CWA is itself part of the AFL-CIO labor federation, an aggressively partisan union. It has made more than $36 million to political contributions since 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Of that, 99 percent has gone to Democrats. It has spent more than $43 million on lobbying over the same period....