The power of the biased establishment media in America would have shrunk to near-insignificance had it not been for woke philanthropy bailing them out.
Commentary
When the internet, at the end of the last century, began flowering as a source of information that could
give conventional, left-leaning journalistic institutions a run for their money, some saw the dawn of a new era in which the power of the long-standing bias favoring the Democratic Party, which permeates print and broadcast, was coming to an end.
Leading conservative news website PJ Media took its name from comments by a former CBS executive furious about blogs discrediting—within hours—false documents the powerful Dan Rather used to smear President George W. Bush’s Texas National Guard service shortly before the 2004 election. Mocking ordinary people using computers to compete with the establishment media amounted to “the multiple layers of checks and balances [at ‘60 Minutes’]” being challenged by “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas,” the executive
contended.
Changes did unfold, but not quite as predicted. Instead, media geniuses such as Fox’s Rupert Murdoch and Newsmax’s Christopher Ruddy used cable to compete toe-to-toe with the Big Three networks and tycoon Ted Turner’s CNN. Fox took only a few years to achieve
dominance, and the younger Newsmax has overtaken past cable giants ranging from CNBC and MTV to Fox Business and Fox Sports. Reorganization within Fox has even shown Newsmax to be a serious long-term
threat to the former home of hosts who commanded their time slots, such as Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson.
“Scientia potentia est,” Sir Francis Bacon famously wrote, loosely translated as “information is power”; his words immediately following are less remembered: that this maxim is only true when such knowledge has “utility.” Information controlled by a major media long disposed against the conservative principles of small government and traditional values, and lurching even further left in the “woke” era, empowers only its favorites. For others, information is suppressed or twisted.
How can establishment media organizations retain or recover such power, now that upstart sources of information have ended those outlets’ days of monopoly? Competing on the level playing field of honest businesses isn’t an option, something the media have known for many years. So the hats have been passed around to sympathetic “philanthropists” who made big money in high-tech and other fields having little if anything to do with journalism. Like Chrysler and the savings and loan industry, obsolete journalism needs bailing out.
“Fighting Online Lies and Deception Requires Large-Scale Philanthropic Response,” a Chronicle of Philanthropy headline
screamed last month, with “politicians and far-right activists spouting lies about the economy, immigration, voting, and more.” It urges that “grant makers should focus on creating a healthy information ecosystem that doesn’t exacerbate lies and falsehoods, limits their proliferation in the first place, and ensures a steady supply of quality information.” The publication also complains that “the United States lags behind other countries when it comes to regulating tech platforms and the way they spread information.”
Apparently not having heard of the First Amendment’s protections of free speech, the Chronicle believes “our data and information systems,” i.e., the establishment media, ought to be classified under the law as “public goods that should be protected from propagandists and other nefarious actors who spread disinformation.”
The MacArthur Foundation’s “Press Forward” initiative is giving more than $500 million to news organizations. Its president, John Palfrey, who had been finance director for a statewide Democrat campaign in Massachusetts and who was
hired to the Harvard Law School faculty by then-Dean Elena Kagan, now an Obama-appointed Supreme Court justice, says that “progress on every other issue, from education and healthcare to criminal justice reform and climate change, is dependent on the public’s understanding of the facts.”
The MacArthur initiative
partners with 20-plus other donor entities on the left, such as the Ford Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Outrider Foundation. Climate extremism and nuclear disarmament rank high among many of these foundations’ priorities.
San Francisco’s $14 billion Hewlett Foundation, a major financial backer of Planned Parenthood, and which is
at war with fossil fuels, in particular natural gas and coal,
lamented during President Donald Trump’s first year in the White House that “twisted interpretations of real news ... blend fact and opinion in ways that are impossible to regulate in a nation committed to free speech norms.”
This powerful source of cash for left-wing causes understands in precise terms the threat to the left’s journalistic power: “The fragmentation of former journalistic monopolies has enabled the rise of cable news, talk radio, and websites with distinct ideological positioning. Simultaneously, audiences are inundated with news from a wide variety of sources, with bloggers and opinion columnists now appearing alongside more traditional news outlets.
“Perhaps the biggest disruption is the degradation of journalism business models. With more than 40% of journalists laid off over the last decade, local newsrooms are weakened, which further erodes mainstream media’s ability to serve the public and maintain trust.”
The strategies recommended by the Hewlett Foundation included efforts “to deter or punish fake news distributors” via the establishment of “independent watchdogs or rating mechanisms to put pressure on those disseminating ‘fake news’; tech platforms suspending or banning questionable accounts; efforts to list and boycott advertisers who post on biased news sites in order to remove the profit motive” and outing anonymous sources of information so they would be vulnerable to lawsuits.
Fast forward to 2020: Tech platform Twitter suppressed the New York Post’s exposé on Hunter Biden’s laptop under false pretenses, and the
tendentiousness of “independent watchdogs” such as PolitiFact and The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler became impossible to deny. The Hewlett Foundation’s approach is, quite obviously, in motion.
The Hewlett Foundation also
suggests discrediting threats to mainstream media early in life by “incorporating news literacy into the K-12 system” and imposing a Consumer Reports-like “seal of approval” or ratings system for news outlets. Its
$10 million spent from 2018 to 2020 was targeted at “grappling with the growing problem that digital disinformation poses for U.S. democracy” and considered “the role of government including agencies such as” the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Apparently, this $14 billion progressive powerhouse considers the expansion of free speech that the internet has made possible to be a threat to free self-government. Better that the voters’ minds be spoon-fed what their betters approve.
As Richard J. Tofel
noted on Substack last month, five for-profit news organizations “got more than a million dollars each from Facebook over the last five years, while another nine got more than $100,000. From Google, there were eight receiving at least a million dollars, and another seven taking in more than $100,000 ... that’s at least $14.5 million in large gifts from these two companies, likely quite a bit more.”
Mr. Tofel was digging deep into a new
study by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, “Journalism and Philanthropy: Growth, Diversity, and Potential Conflicts of Interest.” The study found that most nonprofit and for-profit news outlets “have seen increases in philanthropic funding.” NORC surveyed some 164 for-profit news organizations, 138 of which “have received donations or other direct philanthropic giving in the last five years or participated in philanthropic-funded training and leadership programs.”
It asked them, “Even without any explicit conversations taking place, would you say your organization’s relationship with a funder has ever influenced coverage in any of the following ways?”
Four said, “At times, we’ve avoided covering certain issues that might have a created conflict of interest with a funder’s other activities.” Ten of the news organizations stated, “We increased coverage of certain issues that we knew were of interest to a funder.” Eleven said they didn’t know or weren’t sure. Mr. Tofel rightly called such paying cash to change news reporting “appalling.”
Pair that with the intentional lack of transparency: Some 67 of the for-profit news outlets don’t “set a level of financial contribution above which it discloses the name of the donors,” and none of them reports all donations. The NORC’s surveyers opine that “the highest risk for conflicts of interest” are “when funders underwrite journalism on specific issues on which they are seeking to influence policy or change public behavior,” noting that “fifty-seven percent of funders say they have financed news in areas where they were working to influence policy or change public behavior.”
The power of the biased establishment media in the United States would indeed have shrunk to near-insignificance in the market of the news and information business, as had been expected, had it not been for woke philanthropy executing a concerted strategy to bail them out.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
