Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets

I mean, again, the news business is so starved for revenue that they'll, you know, they'll bend to anybody, basically. Did you see that, I mean, I know Jimmy Dore covered it, but quite a few other people have realized it now. The amount of money that Bill Gates has spent on influencing media. No, I didn't. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. He's donated to these various media organizations, which for sure has some sort of an impact on how they cover him. Right. Well, of course, yeah. And look, the once upon a time, we were, I have to say that many times, we were trained to know that, for instance, think tanks, right, like who was funding them, because think tanks are who get quoted in the New York Times and the Washington Post, right? So they're generating research that goes to journalists and like sort of surreptitiously that then ends up becoming what's covered. And so that's how like the Gates Foundation, for instance, will work its way into coverage. You know, it'll sponsor research in an area like education. That's one of the things I'm covering now. And its research becomes, you know, it gets into the news that way. But we were supposed to once have, you know, our ears up and be conscious of who was paying for all this research. Where was that information coming from? And you know, people don't really even think about it now. See if you can find that story, Jamie. I'm looking right now. I'm reading an article about someone last year actually was looking into it. Here, I'll show you. Journalism's Gatekeepers is what it's called. Columbia Journalism Review. Is that a respected publication? Yeah, I mean, look, they've had their issues, but that's the top media criticism outlet. Right. Okay. So this is last year. It says, a recently examined nearly 20,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation made through the end of June and found that more than 250 million going towards journalism. Receipts 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, Lamonde, Lamonde? Is that how you say it? Yeah, Lamonde. And the Center for Investigative Reporting, charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets like BBC Media Action, The New York Times, Nnediist Cases Fund, media companies such as The Participant, whose documentary Waiting for Superman supports Gates' 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 sub-grants to other journalistic organizations, which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates' funding into the fourth estate. Yeah, and as a reporter, you may or may not be aware of all the different ways that money will get in, you know, work its way into the business. But unconsciously, it just sort of seeps in. Right. And that's how it works. Somebody comes and tells you, well, don't cover this. Well, maybe they do now, actually. Or take this approach to covering education. What ends up happening is you just kind of get a feel based on the reaction of your editor to whatever pitch you're giving at the moment. Hey, would you be interested in the story about whether or not this approach to standardized testing worked? And if the editor says, yeah, that's interesting, maybe, then you know just never to approach that again. But if it's with, you know, in the right ideological slant, they're going to be hot for it. Interesting. Yeah, and that's how it works. That's how it works with everything. It works with foreign policy. When I worked in Russia, if you pitch the story to an American editor about how the US-based, the US-funded reform effort was working and there was a growing middle class in provincial Russia that was prospering and people were now taking vacations to Ibiza and stuff like that, you could get anybody to buy that story. But if you came to them with a story about how actually, you know, the transformation of capitalism has been really slow. People have lost their healthcare. There's an explosion of violent crime and addiction and people are more and more gravitating towards right-wing politics, you know, in large part because of the rapid changes that they weren't ready for. You could not get that story sold, right? So what ended up happening when I was in Russia is they kept sending back all these positive reports about what was happening. This was before Putin. And Americans got this idea that things in Russia were going great, you know, and the company was really prospering. In fact, you know, I was doing stories when I was there about how money didn't even exist in the villages. The only people who would actually have cash in most remote Russian villages would be pensioners because they would get it, you know, once a month from the mail system. I went to places where people actually bought and sold things with moonshine, like the Russian equivalent of moonshine, because that was like a unit of currency. They were doing subsistence farming. I mean, it was completely fucked, like life in rural Russia. But if you picked up the New York Times, what you read is, you know, the emerging middle class was doing great. You know, people have VCRs in Samar and stuff like that. And that's how it works. You get a sense of what they want. You give it to them. And, you know, over time, you just stop thinking about it. But it's not a healthy way to do it.