Cash for influence

Miguel Castro, CEO of Global Media Partnerships said in 2018, “we invest a lot of time and effort into research”, especially on working out “what are the levers that can be pushed and pulled to affect change? Who are the right actors? What are the media consumption habits of the populations we are trying to impact?”

According to Columbia, out of nearly twenty thousand funding grants made by the Gates Foundation in 2019, more than $250 million went to journalism. As one journalist is quoted as saying: “When money is offered, we listen”. Recipients included major news outlets like Reuters, BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, The Conversation, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, the Centre for Investigative Reporting; the New York Times, the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Centre for Journalists; to name just a tiny few.

Here in Australia, Gates and dozens of other rich Foundations provide hundreds of millions in funding to newspapers and media organisations every year to push their agendas. As the Guardian says on its website, they are “finding that grantmakers and funders are becoming strategic in their approach, looking at how causes can align with their own impact goals, or the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.