NPR’s Salmon Scandal: Bought and Paid For

Billionaires Bankroll Reporter, Sources, and NPR in Anti-Aquaculture Hit Piece

National Public Radio (NPR), once a beacon of earnest, if occasionally sanctimonious, reporting, has sunk to a new low, as uncovered by The Firebreak’s latest investigation. The outlet’s bias, long an open secret, now appears more insidious than even its sharpest critics imagined—a vertically integrated scheme where reporter, sources, and NPR itself are all bankrolled by the same clique of billionaire foundations. This isn’t journalism; it’s a transaction, a betrayal of the public’s trust dressed up as news.

The case in point: a June 8, 2025, hit piece by NPR’s John Bartlett on Chile’s salmon industry, which reveals a cozy financial nexus that would make even the most jaded observer blush.

Let’s examine the sordid details. Bartlett, posing as a disinterested scribe, is a paid operative of the Earth Journalism Network’s Dialogue.Earth project, a group explicitly dedicated to shaping narratives for environmental causes. His patrons? The Packard Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts, which have funneled millions into NPR—$1 million from Walton, $2.5 million from Pew since 2015—while simultaneously funding anti-aquaculture activism, including Seafood Watch, a source Bartlett leans on heavily.

His other sources, like marine biologist Claudio Carocca and activists Leticia and Reinaldo Caro, are similarly tethered to this network through Patagonia and Greenpeace. This isn’t a newsroom; it’s a conveyor belt of agenda-driven storytelling, with NPR, its reporter, and his sources all cashing checks from the same deep-pocketed ideologues. The result is a narrative so skewed it mocks the very idea of independent journalism.

Everybody’s on the take

The story begins with a June piece Bartlett penned for NPR titled “Chile’s Indigenous fishermen say the salmon industry threatens their way of life.” While the article itself is suffused with factual errors and other distortions, the core issue lies in the financial ties linking the reporter, his sources, and NPR itself to a network of billionaire-backed foundations with a clear anti-aquaculture agenda.

Bartlett, as we noted last year in response to a story he authored for the New York Times, is a paid participant in the Earth Journalism Network’s (EJN) Dialogue.Earth project, an activist organization that openly aims to shape media narratives to advance environmental goals, as confirmed by EJN executive director James Fahn in a donor message last year. “We saw that … even as ecosystems were collapsing, so too were newsrooms, press freedoms and quality information,” Fahn declared. “We could no longer rely on the market to provide the environmental and climate coverage our civilization needs.”

Not only is EJN driven by ideology, it’s funded by organizations like the Packard Foundation, which also supports Seafood Watch—a key source in Bartlett’s story—through the Monterey Bay Aquarium with over $100 million. This same network, including the Walton Family Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts, has donated millions to anti-aquaculture campaigns and, crucially, to NPR itself, with at least $1 million from Walton and $2.5 million from Pew since 2015 going to the public news agency.

Bartlett’s sources, including marine biologist Claudio Carocca and activists Leticia and Reinaldo Caro, are not the grassroots figures portrayed. All three have collaborated extensively with Patagonia, a major supporter of environmental activism in Chile. Additionally, the Caros appeared in a Greenpeace documentary funded by over $3 million from Packard, which falsely claims contamination in Kawésqar National Park is due to salmon farming. Rewilding Chile, led by former Patagonia CEO Kristine Tompkins, has received over $400,000 from this network to push for removing salmon concessions, a fact glossed over in Bartlett’s glowing January 2025 NPR profile of Tompkins.

These conflicts are severe enough to raise questions about the integrity of any news outlet, yet they were concealed from NPR’s audience—a clear violation of established journalistic standards.

“Green imperialism”

Beyond the ethical lapses, the article is riddled with inaccuracies. Most shamefully, Bartlett frames his story as reflecting the perspective of “Chile’s Indigenous fishermen,” yet it ignores Indigenous communities, like those led by Juan Carlos Tonko Paterito of the Kawésqar Indigenous Community in Puerto Edén, who oppose the “green imperialism” of US environmental NGOs and their donors. In a recent open letter, Tonko criticized US activists for meddling in indigenous territories and using some of his people as pawns to advance their colonialist goals:

“We have seen how imperialists show their tentacles in our territories. Now its form is more surreptitious and typical of our time. It is no longer about putting the boot on top, but about meddling in the communities, creating some [indigenous people] on demand, acclimatizing them and, then, beating the cloths through social networks and … media to legitimize them as the only and authentic [indigenous people] because they are friends of the settler.

…

“The new Yanaconas are now digital and globalized by the hand of the green colonialists … It cannot be that we are at the mercy of organizations of which we know little or nothing about their interests and for which Chilean citizens have not voted to govern our destinies as they are doing … Today we demand that the Government of Chile set its territorial policy in Magallanes, not that it be dictated by these organizations and their local allies.”

The salmon farmers themselves have highlighted their industry’s $5 billion annual contribution and 70,000 jobs to Chile’s economy as evidence that Bartlett’s framing doesn’t represent the perspective of the local community. Surely these voices deserve to be heard, and yet NPR saw no need to consider the lived experience of the peoples it claims to speak for.

Factual Errors and Omissions

Bartlett’s work is further sullied by the long list of factual errors running through his story. For instance, the article claims salmon farms “pump” tons of antibiotics into the sea, but antimicrobial use has dropped significantly in recent years under strict Chilean and US regulations—a fact even Seafood Watch, Bartlett’s source, acknowledges. He left that striking detail out of his story, however.

The assertion that salmon escapes threaten Chile’s native wildlife is also baseless, as no wild salmon population exists in the country’s waters, and studies (e.g., 2023 research) show escaped farmed salmon have low survival and reproductive capacity. Claims of “record algal blooms” caused by salmon farm pollution likewise lack evidence, with experts attributing blooms to climate change and pre-existing natural cycles, not aquaculture. Even reporting from the Walton Foundation-funded Pulitzer Center repudiates Bartlett’s allegation about algal blooms.

Bartlett also fails to note that salmon farming occupies just 0.04% of Chile’s coastal waters in northern Patagonia, while the government protects areas 10,000 times that size. This context was omitted, further skewing the conservation narrative.

What happened to journalism ethics?

Such glaring mistakes could have been prevented had NPR done even the most basic fact-checking, for example, by giving the industry a chance to address these allegations. Bartlett claims the Chilean Salmon Council (CSC) declined to comment, but the reality is that the industry was never given an opportunity to address specific claims prior to publication, despite repeated written requests. We know that because we did our due diligence and spoke with representatives from the CSC.

CSC shared emails with us showing that the industry contacted NPR and detailed the many flaws in Bartlett’s piece, requesting a formal correction and a disclosure of the myriad conflicts of interest that biased the story. NPR never replied, before or after Bartlett’s article went to press.

We also contacted NPR before this story went online. We offered them the chance to comment on the situation and address CSC’s complaints. We were also ignored.

Call for Accountability

This pattern of undisclosed funding and factual errors suggests a coordinated effort between foundations and outlets like NPR to malign an entire industry—not because it has done anything wrong, but because it has offended the progressive sensibilities of American billionaires.

With Congress summarily stripping NPR of $1 billion in federal funding, US taxpayers are no longer forced to subsidize the news outlet’s botched environmental reporting. Nevertheless, NPR continues to market itself as a source of “unparalleled cultural, informational, and educational programming,” and the network therefore has an obligation to live up to its own hype—by providing transparency and balanced reporting, not narratives shaped by hidden agendas.