The list of billionaires with media empires includes familiar names like Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and, most recently, Elon Musk. But, “While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well-known, the extent to which [Microsoft co-founder Bill] Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not,” Alan MacLeod wrote for MintPress News in November 2021.
MacLeod examined more than 30,000 individual grants from the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and found it had donated “more than $319 million to fund news outlets, journalism centers and training programs, press associations and specific media campaigns, raising questions about conflicts of interest and journalistic independence,” Project Censored summarized.
“Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation Grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and belong to a press association funded by Gates,” MacLeod wrote.
“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,” he reported.
“MacLeod’s report includes a number of Gates-funded news outlets that also regularly feature in Project Censored’s annual Top 25 story lists, such as the Solutions Journalism Network ($7.2M), The Conversation ($6.6M), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism ($1M) and ProPublica ($1M) in addition to the Guardian and The Atlantic,” Project Censored noted. “Direct awards to news outlets often targeted specific issues, MacLeod reported. For example, CNN received $3.6 million to support ‘journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world,’ according to one grant. Another grant earmarked $2.3 million for the Texas Tribune ‘to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.’ As MacLeod noted, given Bill Gates’ advocacy of the charter school movement — which undermines teachers’ unions and effectively aims to privatize the public education system — ‘a cynic might interpret this as planting pro-corporate charter school propaganda into the media, disguised as objective news reporting.’”
“[T]here are clear shortcomings with this non-exhaustive list, meaning the true figure is undoubtedly far higher. First, it does not count sub-grants — money given by recipients to media around the world,” because there’s no record of them, MacLeod reported.
“For a tax-privileged charity that so very often trumpets the importance of transparency, it’s remarkable how intensely secretive the Gates Foundation is about its financial flows,” Tim Schwab, one of the few investigative journalists who has scrutinized the tech billionaire, told MintPress.
Also missing were grants aimed at producing articles for academic journals, although “they regularly form the basis for stories in the mainstream press and help shape narratives around key issues,” he noted. “The Gates Foundation has given far and wide to academic sources, with at least $13.6 million going toward creating content for the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.” And more broadly, “even money given to universities for purely research projects eventually ends up in academic journals, and ultimately, downstream into mass media. … Neither these nor grants funding the printing of books or establishment of websites counted in the total, although they too are forms of media.”
“No major corporate news outlets appear to have covered this issue,” only a scattering of independent outlets, Project Censored noted. This despite the fact that “as far back as 2011, the Seattle Times published an article investigating how the Gates Foundation’s ‘growing support of media organizations blurs the line between journalism and advocacy.’”