The Press Payola Series: Introduction
The Strategy to Fund Journalists to Manufacture News for Special Interests
25 years ago, fear campaigns were multiple and short-lived. The media had a short attention span for end-of-days flash in the pan campaigns so we would shuffle through threats like the hole in the ozone layer, Y2K, dioxins, mad cow disease, acrylamide, tainted French blood, gender bending frogs… At that time, global warming was emerging as the next big issue to scare people (deftly pivoting from the previous Ice Age fear). At the time, I gave that activist campaign a maximum of five years until it would run its course (soon to be forgotten like some University of East Anglia email).
That was 25 years ago.
What gave climate change the legs to keep in the media focus for more than two decades? How was this issue able to define the narrative, frame every weather event and leave an entire generation disillusioned and anti-capitalist? Climate researchers will be the first to admit that the warming campaigns excessively exaggerate the science and worry about how closed the discussion has become.
The Firebreak has shown how the media has received large, regular capital inflows from climate special interest groups to report every issue as a climate issue. Activists rebrand themselves as freelance investigative reporters, have no difficulties securing funding and publication sources for their work with support from well-coordinated foundations (often working together through fiscal sponsors). This can be called “Press Payola” and as activists have seen its effectiveness, it is expanding beyond the climate issue. This is the subject of a new Firebreak series.
The Foundations of Virtue or the Virtue of Foundations?
In the last two decades, the business of foundations has dramatically changed. A significant amount of new funds and philanthropic organizations came into the foundation world from four cycles of massive wealth creation. This included newly minted billionaires from the dot-com, Web 2.0, crypto and AI revolutions being expected to give back their easy money.
With this massive accumulation of wealth came a new generation of “philanthropic advisors”, bottom feeders who have developed new tactics for organizing politically-driven campaigns and an emerging consulting class to manage the passive foundation wealth management billions. And as the philanthropy process became philo-narcissismus, with groups like Effective Altruism turning philanthropy into a cult to recruit young entrepreneurs, a certain class of privileged moral zealots became empowered to change (and control) the world.
The climate issue was propped up with foundation funding – a lot of it – and not only for NGOs, tort lawyers and activist influencers to relentlessly attack industry and any pragmatic politicians. Foundations were also pumping climate-tagged funds either directly to large mainstream media groups like The Guardian or The AP or by creating new organizations that were literally paying journalists to report their stories with a climate edge. The Firebreak looked at cases of how foundation millions were channeled into newly created groups like Covering Climate Now to pay off journalists who kept climate change as the key issue in the news.
If a group of well-funded, passionate zealots can control the narrative with a media onslaught, a dialogue vacuum is created. At the academic level, people who dare question the claims, at best, don’t get published, and are generally ostracized by some “consensus” body, denied career opportunities and research funding. Even journals like Nature and Science get sucked into the bias vortex. Without voices of dissent, complex arguments become simplified facts and scientific inquiry is stifled. And if leading experts are challenged or disrespected, the courts kick in to further muffle dialogue.
Pitchforks and witch-hunts easily follow when sociopaths have ample funding, followers and a passive media who only ask the questions people pay them to ask. It is even easier when activists call themselves reporters, cementing the cycle of bias.
No one asks basic questions like:
Who is funding this group?
What are their interests?
How reasonable are their arguments?
These questions are only asked when someone is challenging the consensus and the narrative pressure often suppresses such open thinking. In such an environment, no one even questions the ethics of the press payola. Should the mainstream media receive payments to write articles on certain subjects?
But how long will foundations continue to be associated with generous philanthropy? How long will their non-transparency and corrupted shadow organizations be tolerated? As long as they continue to pay off the media, we can assume that the answer will be: “Quite a long time!”
Before anyone thinks the media has been innocent and merely deceived by some manipulative opportunists, far from it. They have cashed in on the game, taking money and returning favors. Press payola is so common that no one questions it (so long as most foundations maintain a fragrant smell).
Mainstream media’s business model has changed in these same last two decades that witnessed foundation wealth expansion. As online services ate into their traditional revenue streams (subscribers, want ads and advertising), they needed new funding models to continue reporting. Foundations and campaign sponsoring are now a significant part of many news organizations’ financial survival strategy.
A Freelance Journalist’s Foundation Funding Bonanza
Like scientists, freelance journalists now write as many grant applications as they do articles. It certainly beats a journalist’s salary and foundation media slush funds are abundant enough to supply an ample cashflow for them to forward their ideological dogma. Take for example an activist researcher like Carey Gillam (who has been paid by NGOs for the last decade but calls herself a journalist). Through the foundation media funding scheme, she is able to be remunerated at least five times for the same article.
For Gillam’s article on the Bonus Eventus attack, for example, she:
Was first paid by the Lighthouse Reports (who received $800,000 from the Oak Foundation to spend at least a year investigating and promoting this story).
The article and the leaking of documents her tort lawyer associates “left on her doorstep” were published on an Environmental Working Group website (where she is employed as an activist).
This same article is reprinted in the Guardian under a program where foundations pay the Guardian for articles earmarked on certain issues. You would have to click on a discreet side link misleadingly called “Supported by theguardian.org” to find out who is paying Carey to reprint her Environmental Working Group campaign material (see image below).
As most of the foundations funding groups like The Guardian are using anonymous donor-advised funds, it is highly likely that the tort law firms who will benefit handsomely from Carey’s activism (and have in the past with her Monsanto Papers when she was an activist under the pay of US Right to Know) are almost certainly pumping seed capital into this scheme.
Then there are the book royalties as well as consulting and speaking fees…
This, however, does not get into how much the tort law firms benefiting from Carey’s work pay her in research, consulting or advisory fees. But this could only be made public if Carey were to be deposed in some lawsuit and someone with no research integrity broke journalistic codes of conduct (like Carey often does) and releases her testimonies made during sealed depositions.
Not too bad for writing a single article on a non-existent issue. Carey is getting very rich, and this may explain her exuberance in compromising her integrity.
The Climate Cash Tactic Taken Forward
If foundations can provide the means for every story, every weather event, every product sold in the market to be reported as a climate event, then our narrative can easily be defined by the climate stories the media is relentlessly reporting (and earning nicely from).
Just imagine if you could replicate this media manipulation strategy and have the foundation billions directed toward a large number of journalists to induce reporting and investigations into an industrial chemical like PFAS. Could this check-book journalism - this press payola - shape our fear narrative toward a decades-long campaign to eliminate an important group of chemicals used in many essential chemical processes? The public fear from such a media strategy would lead to billions in lawsuit settlements, bad regulations and further scientific illiteracy.
As an aside, we need to question the press payola strategy of getting foundations to create organizations to pay off journalists to cover other issues (vaping, plastics, food additives, aquaculture, chemicals, pesticides…). Groups like the Oak Foundation claim they are supporting investigative funds, but it is simply an extension of NGO activist campaigns posing as mainstream media “reporting”. We need to ask whether having interest groups, via foundations, paying off a large number of journalists to amplify their activism, globally, should be tolerated from an ethical perspective.
There is a group of experienced activists calling themselves freelance journalists, who have recently launched themselves, with a suitcase full of foundation funding, to report on the widely used chemical family known as PFAS, to make the public very afraid and to spread activist campaign objectives that will meet their special interest paymasters ambitions. They have the playbook, they have the passion and they are certainly ready to lie. The Firebreak, in Part 2 of this series, will take a look at who is paying which journalists, how much and why. The third part will look at how a dozen American foundations are influencing the media reporting on the aquaculture debate in Chile.