News outlets have been exposed for having been paid by the U.S. government in the wake of the closure of USAID. The New York Times and Politico are in the hot seat right now.
Search for these organizations at USASpending.gov shows that they both received a lot of government money. Politico has received $8 million since 2016. The New York Times at least $1 million.
Politico editors say that this money was not for content. It was for a “professional subscription” that “provides both private and public sector clients with granular, fact-based reporting, real-time intelligence, and tracking tools across key policy areas.” Defenders of this say that the pro version offered “legislative tracking” and that it is a valuable tool, to the tune of $10,000 per year subscriptions. The US government’s own websites do that too so why did they need Politico to offer a dashboard? Even if the tool is that valuable, it still makes Politico a government contractor, which is an inherent journalistic conflict.
A search for the New York Times shows a similar pattern, taking money not just from USAID but also the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation. Honestly, after how The New York Times lied to lead the American people into the Iraq war, I don’t know how anyone would be surprised by this.
Former State Department whistleblower Mike Benz made this cautionary note: there is “a distinction between USAID paying for premium prescriptions for its own staff vs USAID paying the media outlet to produce news…USAID does both, but the latter is obviously much more pernicious than the former.”
Wikileaks reports that “USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 ‘media’ NGOs, including nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine.”
