The campaign against the American Legislative Exchange Council is a case study of the powerful liberalecho chamber at work: left-wing non-profits empower activists to target the organization, media outletsreport on those efforts, and “experts” offer quotations to lend those reports additional weight.

The upstart group Color of Change has spearheaded the campaign against ALEC, calling for boycotts bysome of the organization’s largest private sector supporters. About 10 companies have dropped theirsupport for ALEC in the face of that opposition.

Color of Change is one of the many left-wing groups which receive money from George Soros’s Open SocietyInstitute. And it’s not the only one involved in the anti-ALEC campaign with that distinction.

On Monday, the Center for Public Integrity, which has received about $1.8 million in funding from theOpen Society Institute since 2009, led with a story about ALEC. The organization’s communicationsdirector blasted a pitch for a story purporting to expose “the questionable doings of the AmericanLegislative Exchange Council.”

The story, by Center for Public Integrity reporter Paul Abowd, examines support for ALEC by beer andwine distributors, which have reportedly also given money to state legislators that have backed voter IDlaws in their various states.

Abowd hints at cronyism by way of ALEC, but he never gets around to saying exactly what interest, ifany, the alcoholic beverage industry has in voter ID legislation.

The National Beer Wholesalers Association and the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America have bothsat on ALEC’s recently-disbanded Public Safety and Elections task force, but their work on the panelaimed “to foster efforts aimed at preventing underage drinking,” according to Abowd. Neither wouldsay how they voted when the task force considered ALEC’s voter ID model legislation. Both the NBWAand the WSWA deny having any interest in the voter ID issue.

Abowd notes that the two trade associations have given money to ALEC member legislators who havebacked voter ID bills, but he also notes that both groups are very active politically. Given their extensivepolitical operations, it seems presumptuous (to say the least) to attribute campaign contributions tothose legislators’ stances on a single issue, especially when the two organizations deny any stake in thatissue.

The only evidence Abowd offers that either of these organizations supports voter ID laws comes fromone individual who can’t make the assertion with any authority or certitude:

Not everyone is convinced. Among the skeptics is Edwin Bender, executive director of the NationalInstitute on Money in State Politics. “If you see this happening in several states, that’s someindication that there’s a strategy there, especially if they’re giving money to ALEC members,” saidBender.

The National Institute of Money in State Politics also receives significant funding from the Open SocietyInstitute – more than $2.1 million, according to a 2010 report by the American Justice Partnership.

So the instigators of the campaign against ALEC, the organization reporting on the campaign, and thesource of allegations against it are all backed by the same left-wing group.

The Open Society Institute and like-minded groups have helped create a sophisticated apparatus todrive the efforts of fringe activists into the mainstream political conversation. Abowd’s piece on alcoholdistributors also appeared in the Huffington Post.

The Center for Public Integrity bills itself as a nonpartisan investigative organization and it often livesup to the label. But its work on ALEC is so devoid of factual reporting that it can only be seen as anextension of this insular, self-referential political attack machine.