rigorousintuition.ca

Belligerent Savant » Tue Jul 28, 2020 12:31 pm wrote:.

Journalism’s Gates keepers

Last August, NPR profiled a Harvard-led experiment to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to “break the cycle of poverty.” According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes—a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.

If you squint as you read the story, you’ll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll also see the editor’s note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.

NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.

And that speaks to a larger trend—and ethical issue—with billionaire philanthropists’ bankrolling the news. The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times’ reporting on education. Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, that support his conservative politics. And the Rockefeller Foundation funds Vox’s Future Perfect, a reporting project that examines the world “through the lens of effective altruism”—often looking at philanthropy.

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 foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders. A top-level finding: “There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review.” Notably, the study’s underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.

RELATED: ‘When money is offered, we listen’

Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity. Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works.

During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.

In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education to agriculture—a level of influence that has landed Bill Gates on Forbes’s list of the most powerful people in the world. The Gates Foundation can point to important charitable accomplishments over the past two decades—like helping drive down polio and putting new funds into fighting malaria—but even these efforts have drawn expert detractors who say that Gates may actually be introducing harm, or distracting us from more important, lifesaving public health projects.

From virtually any of Gates’s good deeds, reporters can also find problems with the foundation’s outsize power, if they choose to look. But readers don’t hear these critical voices in the news as often or as loudly as Bill and Melinda’s. News about Gates these days is often filtered through the perspectives of the many academics, nonprofits, and think tanks that Gates funds. Sometimes it is delivered to readers by newsrooms with financial ties to the foundation.

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.

Belligerent Savant » Thu Aug 27, 2020 4:28 pm wrote:.

Well then.

If I ask you or JRiddler to remove this thread from the forum, you'll know why..

Belligerent Savant » Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:28 pm wrote:.

Well then.

If I ask you or JRiddler to remove this thread from the forum, you'll know why..

Belligerent Savant » 17 Mar 2021 18:03 wrote:.

This thread could have been bumped many times over the last ~6 months, given the tentacles of Gates' reach.

Here, our fellow colleague comments on the article I posted upthread back in August:



https://twitter.com/brainsturbator/stat ... 47840?s=20

JackRiddler » Wed Mar 17, 2021 1:52 pm wrote:

Belligerent Savant » Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:28 pm wrote:.

Well then.

If I ask you or JRiddler to remove this thread from the forum, you'll know why..

If they tie you to this forum at all...

JackRiddler » Thu Apr 23, 2020 10:15 pm wrote:.

... I'll confess it's impossible for me to get into a video very many seconds past "Hello, Patriots," to which the only call-back of which I am reflexively capable is, predictably, Fuck You. I guess Smiley Beard doesn't want to talk to me, and surely I don't want to be lured into deconstructing him when there are so many richer fucks to deconstruct...
.

DayLite
@hash_tigre
·
Apr 2, 2020
...based on an article uncovered by @_whitneywebb
it seems very likely that Epstein's ties with Bill Gates go back at least as far as 1999, not 2011 as
@NYT reported.

These Scrubbed Reports Reveal New Secrets Into the Prince Andrew-Jeffrey Epstein Relationship

Several now-scrubbed articles reports from the 90s and early 00s reveal new details on Prince Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
mintpressnews.com

Replying to
@hash_tigre

Melanie Walker, a former senior program officer the Gates Foundation, seems to be the lynchpin between the Gates/Epstein relationship.

Walker's relationship with Epstein began in 1992, and began as early as the mid 90's with Bill Gates right hand man Steven Sinofsky

@hash_tigre
·
Apr 2, 2020

This extremely important nexus of relationships between Steven Sinofsky and Bill Gates (along with Stephanie Walker and Steven Sinofsky)...was completely (and very disturbingly) was almost completely avoided in the NYT article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/busi ... gates.html

Bill Gates’ former advisor Boris Nikolic turns down role as executor of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate

Bill Gates’ former science adviser, Boris Nikolic, has formally said he won’t serve as one of the three executors of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, according to new court papers.

The 49-year-old biotech venture capitalist — who said last month he was “shocked” to hear he was appointed to be the successor executor — turned down the position in a “Declination to Serve as Successor Executor” filed Thursday in the multi-millionaire’s estate case, in probate court in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

Nikolic would have only needed to step up to the task if the executors of Epstein’s estate, long time employees Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, had been unable to serve.

After the details of the convicted pedophile’s will were exclusively reported by The Post, Nikolic responded in a statement: “I was not consulted in these matters and I have no intent to fulfill these duties, whatsoever.”

Epstein — a former hedge-fund manager — signed his will two days before he committed suicide by hanging in a lower Manhattan jail cell last month leaving behind a $578 million fortune to a trust.

It wasn’t clear how close Epstein and Nikolic had been. But Nikolic was excited about advice Epstein — who was fascinated with genetic research — had given to bankers about the public offering of a gene company that Nikolic had a $42 million stake in, Bloomberg reported at the time.

Years after serving jail time, Jeffrey Epstein found a way to meet with Microsoft’s Bill Gates to discuss philanthropy

Key Points

Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke more than once with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier accused of child sex trafficking, to discuss ways to increase philanthropic spending, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Epstein’s discussions with Gates included at least one meeting, which took place in New York in 2013, while Gates was still Microsoft’s chairman, these people say.

The discussions occurred years after Epstein served a 13-month sentence for a charge of soliciting an underage prostitute.

A spokeswoman for Gates did not deny that the former Microsoft CEO met with Epstein. But she says that Epstein did not perform any official financial advisory work for Gates.

Sweden Scraps Bill Gates' Geoengineering Plot To Block The Sun

The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) released a statement saying that the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which also had secured Harvard funding, will not go ahead as planned in June.

“SSC has had dialogues this spring with both leading experts on geoengineering and with other stakeholders, as well as with the SCoPEx Advisory Board,” the statement reads, adding “As a result of these dialogues and in agreement with Harvard, SSC has decided not to conduct the technical test flight planned for this summer.”

It also notes that:

“The scientific community is divided regarding geoengineering, including any related technology tests such as the planned technical balloon test flight from Esrange this summer.”

The Gates funded idea would have seen the release of calcium carbonate, essentially chalk dust, into the atmosphere from a high-altitude balloon to observe the effect it has on sunlight reaching the planet surface.

The ultimate goal of the study was to reduce the temperature on the planet in an effort to stave off global warming.

However, not surprisingly, the notion of blocking out the Sun proved somewhat unpopular, with environmental groups warning of potential “catastrophic consequences.”

The Saami Council, an advocate group for Sweden’s indigenous population, warned that the Gates experiment “essentially attempts to mimic volcanic eruptions by continuously spewing the sky with sun-dimming particles.”

The group also pointed out that SCoPEx could have “irreversible sociopolitical effects” and would do nothing to reduce Carbon emissions, which are touted as the leading cause of climate change.

Essentially, the whole idea comes off as a weird vampirish effort to starve the planet of sunlight, the driver of all life, with little scientific logic behind it at all.

Bill Gates, who is flogging a book about climate change, has poured millions into geoengineerng, funnelling at least $4.6 million to the lead researcher on SCoPEx, Harvard applied physics scientist David Keith.

While the project was given a red light by Sweden, it doesn’t mean it is going away.

David Keith told Reuters that it is only “a setback,” and suggested the project could move to the US, where the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently published a report calling for $100-200 million to be pumped into solar geoengineering over the next five years.

Many have connected SCoPEx research into the use of stratospheric aerosols for geoengineering with so called ‘chemtrails’, suggesting that a spraying program has been ongoing in secret for years.

@commieleejones
2016: Nature Magazine criticizes Moderna for excessive secrecy in its research and data (we now know they were receiving DARPA funding for 5 years by that time, from when Bancel became CEO in 2011) and wonders “whether they can be trusted.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3488

@commieleejones
·
21h
Despite its secretive DARPA-funded research, Moderna received “$240 million upfront from AstraZeneca in 2013, $125 million from Alexion in 2014 and, just last month, $100 million and $20 million for vaccine deals with Merck and the Gates Foundation, respectively.

@spencerlatu

The cover Bill Gates is receiving by the fake left denouncing “CoNsPiRaCiEs” and Twitter algorithms boosting this Gates defence force is fascinating. The ruling class war on humanity is so thinly veiled that intelligence has come up with controlled opposition narrative for Gates

@FreyjaErlings
It's a grand fucking irony of our age that people think Bill Gates is trying to implant us all with microchips when the actual conspiracy he is behind and which is completely open and on record is preventing open source vaccines, preserving copyright and slowing vaccinations

@spencerlatu
·
2h
In clockwork fashion, days after 60 minutes explains that yes there are COVID-19 microchips, the fake left trolls have a new story about Gates. No matter what these LOL CIA Twitter trolls say, we know what’s really going on

@cordeliers
Pentagon would like to implant a microchip in your body that supposedly would detect COVID infections.

Pentagon scientists invent microchip which senses COVID-19 in the body
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medica ... r-BB1fy3y7
·
Apr 12
Replying to
@cordeliers
The “LOL microchips” snark on this site and elsewhere provides cover for actual, highly sinister DARPA and Gates projects.

@cordeliers
·
Apr 13
"The work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and came about because of a direct request from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates himself."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... accinated/
Invisible Ink Could Reveal whether Kids Have Been Vaccinated

@ClearVision99
·
Apr 12
Replying to
@cordeliers
But....but.. Izn't THiS a c0N$piRaCy ThE0rY??