The Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday released a report on the importance of USAID’s donations to approved journalists at home and abroad.
According to CJR, USAID spent $268 million to fund over 6,000 approved journalists. Obviously, these were the leftwing variety of journalist who did not question COVID, elections, climate change, DEI policies, etc.
Already, though, the new administration’s approach to USAID has had sharp consequences all over the world—after taking office, Trump signed an order freezing virtually all American aid spending for ninety days, grinding dependent humanitarian operations to an immediate halt across a dizzying array of different project areas. Journalists have been among those affected: according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the aid freeze appears to have put a hold on $268 million that was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries—and yet, RSF notes, the full impact of the freeze is hard to measure, since many recipients are “hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.”
This is a stunning admission.
The CJR report wants you to feel sadness that these approved media outlets in 30 countries, including the US, will no longer be receiving your taxpayer dollars to publish their globalist propaganda.
Here is what Columbia Journalism Review forgot to mention.
At the same time USAID was funding 6,000 approved journalists – USAID was also spending MILLIONS to silence populist and conservative outlets like The Gateway Pundit.
Here are a few examples of how USAID was funding censorship organizations that targeted The Gateway Pundit and others.
In 2020, Newsguard, a so-called media ‘fact-checking’ organization that targets conservatives and independent media, started targeting the Gateway Pundit in 2020, along with other conservative outlets.
TGP later found out that Newsguard was funded, in part, by the US Defense Department and was awarded $749,000 in 2021. These were reportedly indirect donations.
Since that allegation was made, Newsguard insisted that they were not receiving direct funding by USAID. Instead, it appears it was money given by USAID through several channels before it reached Newsguard.
In 2021, liberal activists were successful in having Google ban the Gateway Pundit completely from their Google Ads program. They all cheered this development.
Internet sleuth Bad Kitty Unleashed released an explosive report this week on how the Center for Countering Digital Hate partnered with the US taxpayer-funded Restless Development organization to counter, blacklist, censor and silence Covid “disinformation” in 2021 and beyond.
Imran Awan, the CEO at The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), bragged about getting conservative news orgs such as the Gateway Pundit, the Federalist, and Zero Hedge reported to social media AND demonetized! Especially from Google Ads, a prominent advertiser online.
According to to Bad Kitty Restless Development is funded by numerous big money leftist groups and government agencies, including:
- Obama Foundation
- USAID (United States Agency for International Development)
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- Clinton Health Initiative
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- United Nations
- The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA)
- Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (NOREC)
- Irish Aid
- Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
- Ford Foundation
- Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA)
Here is their complete list of donors:
According to the CCDH and Restless Development, their reports have been produced from this collaboration have been used in US Congress, UK Parliament, in gov briefings and media reporting across the world, particularly influencing the deliberations surrounding the Online Safety Bill and the scope of online harms.”
The CCDH and Restless Development “Stop Funding Hate” campaign also included “blocklists” that contained websites and platforms they created to blacklist and defund targeted websites like The Gateway Pundit.
The Stop Funding Misinformation campaign also carries blocklists.
Here’s a sampling:
- The Gateway Pundit
- Zero Hedge
- The Federalist
- Breitbart
- Rebel News
- American Greatness (AM Greatness)
Here is the full list:
The Stop Funding Misinformation collaborative are very happy with their work to destroy certain COVID “misinformation offenders.”
In fact, Imran Ahmed bragged during testimony in front of the UK Parliament that his group had successfully spurred Google to stop monetizing The Gateway Pundit!
Imran said this during testimony in front of the UK Parliament in September 2021, when he bragged about successfully working for over a year to push Google to demonetize The Gateway Pundit.
Imran Ahmed: Another problem with the Bill is that it does not deal with the advertising market. Google has two parts to its advertising business. The first part is a display network and websites.
Google has about a third of all additional ad revenue, but 95% of the sites that you ever see that have ads on them have ads placed there by Google.
Google has chosen breadth over expense. They have an enormous display network and they gobble up sites and put them in there, including Gateway Pundit, which was spreading election misinformation—“The Big Lie”—Covid disinformation, and all sorts of malignant and anti-black narratives (what?), really horrific racist nonsense.
We found that, thanks to Google ads monetisation—Google takes advertising revenue from everywhere; I think we found Democratic Party adverts placed on Gateway Pundit, a viciously far right site, which just goes to show that, even for the advertiser, it is a terrible waste of money, and most of them are utterly frustrated when they find out about it—Google has become a primary funder of malignant, violent, racist, anti-Semitic, and Covid disinformation content on the internet.
I can give you an example of a site I first heard about through the Home Office’s counterterrorism office and which we targeted last year. It was covered in adverts for household brands.
We contacted each of those brands and got all their adverts taken off, and the site shut down after the ads disappeared. It just goes to show you that the advertising revenue from Google is vital to the proselytisation of hatred in our society.
Counterterrorism told us that they were concerned about it. Gateway Pundit raised millions of dollars of revenue from Google ads—$1.1 million in just seven months.
I am very proud to tell you that after our campaign Stop Funding Misinformation, that story was featured in Forbes magazine in the USA.
I think it was last weekend when Google took them off their display network after a year of campaigning by CCDH, and they are now demonetised, which means that they will not be able to spread their nonsense any further or at the scale and speed at which they were able to before. That is another thing that I am very proud of my team for.
There is even video of this Imran Ahmed’s testimony before the UK Parliament about how glad he was to push Google to demonetize The Gateway Pundit after a year of campaigning Google to do so.
Here is the Imran testimony—via Bad Kitty:
The Stop Funding Misinformation website also included The Gateway Pundit in their “blocklist” of racist propaganda because we did not support the George Floyd movement.
The Stop Funding Misinforamtion Campaign bragged about demonetizing The Gateway Pundit after a year-long campaign.
Sometime around 2023, the Department of Homeland Security created the Stanford EIP Censorship Group, The Gateway Pundit was the most targeted website by this censorship group created by the US government.
In March 2020 a partnership was created called the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) between Big Tech and legacy media to exclude rival publishers from the dominant internet platforms. The partnership was launched by BBC Director-General Tony Hall, with the agreement that members of the TNI “work together to . . . ensure that disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.” This coordinated effort is, by definition, a classic form of a “group boycott” to damage the ability of smaller publishers to compete or even survive.
Members of the TNI include legacy media outlets the BBC, The Washington Post, Reuters, and Associated Press, along with social media and tech giants—Twitter, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft, Google/YouTube, and LinkedIn. TNI members collectively hold 90% of the overall social media market, 90% share of the social networking market, 75% of the video hosting market, and over 90% of the search-engine market.
The lawsuit alleges these outlets partnered with several Big Tech firms to “collectively censor online news,” including stories about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election that were not aligned with official narratives regarding those issues.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Children’s Health Defense, Robert Kennedy Jr., Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Ty and Charlene Bollinger (founders of The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines), Erin Elizabeth Finn (publisher of Health Nut News), Jim Hoft (founder of The Gateway Pundit), Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor.
There are proven indirect connections between USAID and the BBC and other members of TNI.
It is likely that USAID was funding several more organizations that were used to silence populist, conservative websites like The Gateway Pundit.
Don’t fall for the Columbia Journalism Review’s propaganda piece. USAID was doing as much to silence voices on the right as it was funding approved globalist and leftwing operations.
We will continue to follow this story.
The post USAID Was Spending $268 Million to Fund Over 6,000 Approved Journalists – While at the Same Time Spending MILLIONS to Silence Conservative, Independent Media appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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