A Think Tank is an organization that claims to serve as a center for research and/or analysis of important public issues. In reality, many think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors; in the words of Yellow Times.org columnist John Chuckman, “phony institutes where ideologue~propagandists pose as academics … [into which] money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising’s suffocation of genuine debate”.
see http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Think_tank for more info