The Gates Foundation Vast Largess to News Media Suggests Influence over News Content

Could this immense amount of money influence what news media reports (and refuses to report)? Tim Schwab was concerned about this in his article at Columbia Journalism Review, "Journalism’s Gates keepers." Here’s an excerpt:

As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations—a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic—an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.

I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate . . .

The Gates Foundation declined multiple interview requests for this story and would not provide its own accounting of how much money it has put toward journalism.

This trend continued. At the Grayzone, it was reported that "Documents show Bill Gates has given $319 million to media outlets to promote his global agenda."

A look at the database of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reveals how the oligarch influencing the global pandemic response has bankrolled hundreds of media outlets to the tune of at least $319 million.

While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not. After sorting through over 30,000 individual grants, MintPress can reveal that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects.

Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.

Again, how much control does this give Gates over these corporate news outlets? $300M divided by 100 outlets (I’m making up that number) = 3,000,000 per outlet, which could explain why those news outlets listed so often march in lockstep when they report (and, again, fail to report) stories. According to the Grayzone, in 2021, the biggest recipients of Gates’ money included:

NPR- $24,663,066 The Guardian (including TheGuardian.org)- $12,951,391 Cascade Public Media – $10,895,016 Public Radio International (PRI.org/TheWorld.org)- $7,719,113 The Conversation- $6,664,271 Univision- $5,924,043 Der Spiegel (Germany)- $5,437,294 Project Syndicate- $5,280,186 Education Week – $4,898,240
More to come on this topic . . .

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The Transgender Religion

In his 2021 book, Woke Racism, John McWhorter made the strong claim that Wokism is a religion. Not like a religion. It was literally a religion. At pages 23-24 he writes:

Something must be understood: I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism. Language is always imprecise, and thus we have traditionally restricted the word religion to certain ideologies founded in creation myths, guided by ancient texts, and requiring that one subscribe to certain beliefs beyond the reach of empirical experience. This, however, is an accident, just as it is that we call tomatoes vegetables rather than fruits. If we rolled the tape again, the word religion could easily apply as well to more recently emerged ways of thinking within which there is no explicit requirement to subscribe to unempirical beliefs, even if the school of thought does reveal itself to entail such beliefs upon analysis. One of them is this extremist version of antiracism today. ... Early Christians did not think of themselves as “a religion,” either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems, whatever they chose to call themselves. In addition, in our times, it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. It also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. ... To make sense of it, we must understand them—partly out of compassion and partly in order to keep them from destroying our own lives. This can happen only if we process them not as crazed, but as parishioners.

Abigail Shrier, is the unfairly attacked author of Irreversible Damage (2021), has stated that gender ideology (which many people consider to be part of the Woke movement) should also be considered to be a religion. Not like a religion, but an actual religion. Shrier sets forth her reasons at her Substack, in an article titled: "Little Miss Trouble Why I’m Not Waiting for the Gender ‘Pendulum’ to Swing Back."

Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly. Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school. There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course.

Because it is a religion, gender ideology "is not a tide, and it will not turn with the gravitational pull of the moon." According to Shrier, the very occasional sparkles of honesty we have seen in the corporate media were "pawn sacrifices" by the movement. It is her opinion that the ground-swell of Believers filling our sense-making institutions will not give any real ground until forced to do so.

So no, I don’t love the sensation of young people screaming in my face. But there is something I fear more than the furor of hundreds of zealots, blaring horns and banging bass drums: the world they aim to create, where truth finds no foothold and fairness, no purchase.

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Megyn Kelly Interviews The Fifth Column (Excerpt)

Excerpt of Megyn Kelly's interview of the three hosts of The Fifth Column Podcast (which I follow and recommend). Two topics here: A) The refusal of some key advocates for social justice" to debate their views publicly, and B) Acknowledgment that several of the participants to this discussion initially fell for the Trump-Russia propaganda.

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Jeffrey Sachs Discusses the Death of the Washington Post

Jeffrey Sachs:

I had a chat with a longtime friend and actually a classmate of mine from Harvard from decades ago, who was a senior reporter at one of the most important newspapers. I said, "You know what? I think the US did it." And he said, "Of course, the US did it. Who else?" And I said, Hmm, maybe your paper could mention something like that, but just today said "The Russians did it." He said, "Come on, Jeff, come on!" I said, "Are you kidding? Could we have a serious discussion of this?" And he said to me, "You know, the editors not so interested in that."

This is a friend from decades. I said, "You know, when I was young, I turned to your newspaper, because of Watergate, because of the Pentagon Papers. And I loved it. And he said to me, "That paper is so dead and gone, Jeff, you have to understand that."

This a really talented guy. A lead journalist and he's telling me the paper that I love is dead and gone.

If you asked me why, I really cannot figure it out why your paper doesn't want to beat the government over the head when it tells ridiculous stories like "Nord Stream was was was blown up by six people on a boat," like they tried for one day. Okay, come on. This was this was put out by serious media because it was almost a joke from the intelligence agency. Why these media are so in line with official narratives? I don't fully understand. I know all the theories, money, advertising, power and many other things. But the truth is, it's dreadful compared to what it was 40 years ago. Dreadful. And it's gotten a lot worse.

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The Durham Report Should Destroy all Remaining Beliefs that Trump Colluded with Russia–But it Won’t

The Confirmation Bias is strong. Almost none of the millions of people who spent years convincing themselves that Donald Trump colluded with Russia is willing to read the 12-page Executive Summary of the Durham Report, which methodically dismantles their cherished world view. They would much rather ingest the soft-pedaled versions of the report offered by corporate media outlets that lavished themselves with awards for for engaging in journalism malpractice. I don't actually know all these millions of people, of course, but based on several conversations I've recently had with "True-Blue" people, they want to continue believing what they believe.

Those of us who have been following independent media (e.g., Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi) are not surprised by the conclusions of the 316-page Durham Report.

One more thing . . . at Racket News, Susan Schmidt summarizes the main points of the Durham Report. Here article is titled: "Eight Takeaways From the Durham Report" Perhaps the overall headline could have been "U.S. Intelligence Agencies Attempt to Tip the Election in Favor of Hillary Clinton, Whose Campaign Paid for and Received False Intelligence to Lead the Way." Something like that. Here are Schmidt's eight takeaways:

1. There was no valid predicate for the investigation, and the FBI knew it.

2. “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”

3. “It’s thin”; “There’s nothing to this.”

4. The Trump campaign investigation was premised on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence,” and U.S. intel agencies possessed no “actual evidence of collusion” when the probe began

5. Sensational stories published in the New York Times in February and March 2017 claiming Trump associates were in contact with Russian intelligence agents were false.

6. FBI Director James Comey pushed heavily for an investigation of Carter Page, starting in April 2016 when Page was a government witness in an espionage investigation of Russian diplomats in New York.

7. At the direction of the FBI, confidential human source Stefan Halper recorded lengthy conversations with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in which each denied the campaign had any involvement with Russian officials.

8. Durham was highly critical of the FBI’s “startling and inexplicable failure” to investigate the so-called “Clinton Intelligence Plan.”

[More . . . ]

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