Bill Gates Bribes Media to fix Vaccine Narrative
credit to Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets (mintpressnews.com)
Awards Directly to Media Outlets:
- 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
- WETA- $4,529,400
- NBCUniversal Media- $4,373,500
- Nation Media Group (Kenya) – $4,073,194
- Le Monde (France)- $4,014,512
- Bhekisisa (South Africa) – $3,990,182
- El País – $3,968,184
- BBC- $3,668,657
- CNN- $3,600,000
- KCET- $3,520,703
- Population Communications International (population.org) – $3,500,000
- The Daily Telegraph – $3,446,801
- Chalkbeat – $2,672,491
- The Education Post- $2,639,193
- Rockhopper Productions (U.K.) – $2,480,392
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting – $2,430,949
- UpWorthy – $2,339,023
- Financial Times – $2,309,845
- The 74 Media- $2,275,344
- Texas Tribune- $2,317,163
- Punch (Nigeria) – $2,175,675
- News Deeply – $1,612,122
- The Atlantic- $1,403,453
- Minnesota Public Radio- $1,290,898
- YR Media- $1,125,000
- The New Humanitarian- $1,046,457
- Sheger FM (Ethiopia) – $1,004,600
- Al-Jazeera- $1,000,000
- ProPublica- $1,000,000
- Crosscut Public Media – $810,000
- Grist Magazine- $750,000
- Kurzgesagt – $570,000
- Educational Broadcasting Corp – $506,504
- Classical 98.1 – $500,000
- PBS – $499,997
- Gannett – $499,651
- Mail and Guardian (South Africa)- $492,974
- Inside Higher Ed.- $439,910
- BusinessDay (Nigeria) – $416,900
- Medium.com – $412,000
- Nutopia- $350,000
- Independent Television Broadcasting Inc. – $300,000
- Independent Television Service, Inc. – $300,000
- Caixin Media (China) – $250,000
- Pacific News Service – $225,000
- National Journal – $220,638
- Chronicle of Higher Education – $149,994
- Belle and Wissell, Co. $100,000
- Media Trust – $100,000
- New York Public Radio – $77,290
- KUOW – Puget Sound Public Radio – $5,310
these donations total $166,216,526. These donations come with attachments: the $3.6 million to CNN is to help “report on gender equality with a particular focus on least developed countries, producing journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world,”
Texas Tribune received millions “to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.” Given that Bill is one of the charter schools’ biggest supporters , a cynic might interpret this as planting pro-corporate charter school propaganda into the media.
$63 million to charities closely aligned with big media outlets, $53 million to BBC Media Action, $9 million to MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation, and $1 million to The New York Times Neediest Causes Fund. While not specifically funding journalism, donations to the philanthropic arm of a media player should still be noted.
Gates continues to underwrite a wide network of investigative journalism centers as well, totaling just over $38 million, more than half of which has gone to the D.C.-based International Center for Journalists to expand and develop African media.
In addition to this, the Gates Foundation also plies press and journalism associations with cash, to the tune of at least $12 million. For example, the National Newspaper Publishers Association — a group representing more than 200 outlets — has received $3.2 million.
The list of these organizations includes:
- Education Writers Association – $5,938,475
- National Newspaper Publishers Association – $3,249,176
- National Press Foundation- $1,916,172
- Washington News Council- $698,200
- American Society of News Editors Foundation – $250,000
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press- $25,000
This brings our running total up to $216.4 million.
The foundation also puts up the money to directly train journalists all over the world, in the form of scholarships, courses and workshops. 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 to belong to a press association funded by Gates. This is especially true of journalists working in the fields of health, education and global development, the ones Gates himself is most active in and where scrutiny of the billionaire’s actions and motives are most necessary.
Gates Foundation grants pertaining to the instruction of journalists include:
- Johns Hopkins University – $1,866,408
- Teachers College, Columbia University- $1,462,500
- University of California Berkeley- $767,800
- Tsinghua University (China) – $450,000
- Seattle University – $414,524
- Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies – $254,500
- Rhodes University (South Africa) – $189,000
- Montclair State University- $160,538
- Pan-Atlantic University Foundation – $130,718
- World Health Organization – $38,403
- The Aftermath Project- $15,435
Media projects supported by the Gates Foundation:
- European Journalism Centre – $20,060,048
- World University Service of Canada – $12,127,622
- Well Told Story Limited – $9,870,333
- Solutions Journalism Inc.- $7,254,755
- Entertainment Industry Foundation – $6,688,208
- Population Foundation of India- $5,749,826 –
- Participant Media – $3,914,207
- Réseau Africain de l’Education pour la santé- $3,561,683
- New America – $3,405,859
- AllAfrica Foundation – $2,311,529
- Steps International – $2,208,265
- Center for Advocacy and Research – $2,200,630
- The Sesame Workshop – $2,030,307
- Panos Institute West Africa – $1,809,850
- Open Cities Lab – $1,601,452
- Harvard university – $1,190,527
- Learning Matters – $1,078,048
- The Aaron Diamond Aids Research Center- $981,631
- Thomson Media Foundation- $860,628
- Communications Consortium Media Center – $858,000
- StoryThings- $799,536
- Center for Rural Strategies – $749,945
- The New Venture Fund – $700,000
- Helianthus Media – $575,064
- University of Southern California- $550,000
- World Health Organization- $530,095
- Phi Delta Kappa International – $446,000
- Ikana Media – $425,000
- Seattle Foundation – $305,000
- EducationNC – $300,000
- Beijing Guokr Interactive – $300,000
- Upswell- $246,918
- The African Academy of Sciences – $208,708
- Seeking Modern Applications for Real Transformation (SMART) – $201,781
- Bay Area Video Coalition- $190,000
- PowHERful Foundation – $185,953
- PTA Florida Congress of Parents and Teachers – $150,000
- ProSocial – $100,000
- Boston University – $100,000
- National Center for Families Learning – $100,000
- Development Media International – $100,000
- Ahmadu Bello University- $100,000
- Indonesian eHealth and Telemedicine Society – $100,000
- The Filmmakers Collaborative – $50,000
- Foundation for Public Broadcasting in Georgia Inc. – $25,000
- SIFF – $13,000
Total: $97,315,408
$319.4 million and (a lot) more
Added together, these Gates-sponsored media projects come to a total of $319.4 million. However, there 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. And while the Gates Foundation fosters an air of openness about itself, there is actually precious little public information about what happens to the money from each grant, save for a short, one- or two-sentence description written by the foundation itself on its website. Only donations to press organizations themselves or projects that could be identified from the information on the Gates Foundation’s website as media campaigns were counted, meaning that thousands of grants having some media element do not appear in this list.
A case in point is the BMGF’s partnership with ViacomCBS, the company that controls CBS News, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and BET. Media reports at the time noted that the Gates Foundation was paying the entertainment giant to insert information and PSAs into its programming and that Gates had intervened to change storylines in popular shows like ER and Law & Order: SVU.
However, when checking BMGF’s grants database, “Viacom” and “CBS” are nowhere to be found, the likely grant in question (totaling over $6 million) merely describing the project as a “public engagement campaign aimed at improving high school graduation rates and postsecondary completion rates specifically aimed at parents and students,” meaning that it was not counted in the official total. There are surely many more examples like this. “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 not included are grants aimed at producing articles for academic journals. While these articles are not meant for mass consumption, they regularly form the basis for stories in the mainstream press and help shape narratives around key issues. 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.
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