The end of the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation – Part I: The news media’s subservience

Last week, if you consumed any of the daily local commercial news media, it would have been near impossible for anyone to not come across the announcement from the DeVos family. The announcement was centered around the closing of the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation, which has now ended after 54 years.

I counted 10 stories collectively from local commercial news media outlets about the sunsetting of the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation. Last Tuesday hundreds of people – family members, friends, community leaders and non-profit groups – gathered at the Amway Grand Plaza to “pay tribute to the couple’s philanthropic legacy,” according to MLive.

In many ways, the MLive article encompassed the general tone of the all the local news media stories about the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation’s history. Of course there were DeVos family members who were cited in the local commercial news coverage, along with people like former GVSU President’s Arend Lubbers and Mark Murray. Not surprising was the fact that both men had nothing but glowing words for the now deceased couple.

However, the public record is not so kind, or at least it is a bit more honest about what the legacy of the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation. For example, while producing a documentary about the history of the LGBTQ community in Grand Rapids, I discovered in 1994, when faculty and staff at GVSU were meeting with then President Lubbers over the university’s willingness to offer domestic partner benefits, word got out that this was going to happen. At the time GVSU was raising money for a proposed health education building on Michigan St and Peter Cook and Rich DeVos had pledged millions. Once DeVos and Cook found out about the proposal by GVSU to offer domestic partner benefits, they threatened to withdraw their financial support if the university would support a domestic partner benefits policy. GVSU acquiesced to the wish of DeVos and Cook. Arend Lubbers sided with DeVos on this matter, not GVSU faculty and staff. 

Another attempt to win domestic partner benefits was made in 2003, but then President Mark Murray blocked the attempt. Murray stated at the time, “As a University that has benefited from very generous support from the private philanthropic community, we must recognize the prevailing views of those who provide such support.” Translated, Murray was saying that he didn’t care about LGBTQ faculty and staff, he just wanted to make sure that members of the Capitalist Class in West Michigan – like Richard and Helen DeVos – would continue to give the university money.

Another example of how the local commercial news media treated the closing of the Ricard & Helen DeVos Foundation as some sacred entity, was a piece that WOODTV8 did, where two of the channel 8’s media personalities sat in the studio with Dick DeVos for 4 minutes. What is astounding was all of the superlatives the channel 8 people used when talking about Richard and Helen DeVos, but also how they did not question the narrative coming from Dick DeVos. Watch that WOODTV8 piece and you’ll see how subservient they are to the most powerful family in West Michigan.

In the end, the local commercial news media failed to not only include different perspectives on the legacy of the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation, they failed to provide people in this community with a more robust understanding of the function of foundations. It’s difficult to know why the news coverage was so subservient to the DeVos family, although I suspect that a great deal of it has to do with not wanting to piss off the most powerful family in the area. In addition, after methodically monitoring the local commercial Neds media for the past 30 years, I would say that the simplistic coverage of the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation coming to an end has to do with the fact that the local commercial news media – both editors and journalists – both have internalized the values of the rich and powerful, thus deferring to reporting on them as celebrities and saints.

In Part II of this series, I will explore the function of foundations, plus a more robust analysis of the 1,000 non-profits that the Richard & Helen DeVos Foundation contributed to over the passed 54 years.