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By Jo Nova
The media is totally bought and sold
A bunch of giant Foundations (run by billionaires that also invest in renewable energy) gave Associated Press (AP) $8 million dollars last year to push the climate propaganda even harder than it has been running for the last 20 years.
In return AP, which calls itself a not-for-profit news agency took the grant and then ran 64 climate crisis or ESG stories in the next year. They called this surge a “sweeping climate journalism initiative”.
Sixty four stories doesn’t sound like much but AP stories are repeated in 1,300 newspapers and broadcasters. So 64 stories could really mean 83,200 stories.
The money came from the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium (James Murdoch, who is son of Rupert), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Looks like, smells like, advertising money for Renewable investors disguised as a grant?
At least some of these Billionaires may be paying for media stories that could improve the return on their green investments. According to InfluenceWatch, two years ago Quadrivium Foundation committed to invest $250 million US in BlackRock Inc for “green energy infrastructure”. Likewise the Rockefeller heirs invested in renewables years ago, and the Walton family have made hundreds of millions of dollars from solar power.
STUDY: AP Pushes Woke Terms Across 64 Climate Stories After $8M Grant from Leftist Orgs
Joseph Vazquez and Luis Corneli, Newsbusters
AP announced Feb. 15, 2022, that it would “significantly expand its climate coverage” with the goal to “infuse” the media landscape with climate journalism backed solely by private interest groups. AP called the new development a “sweeping climate journalism initiative” and claimed in its press release that it would retain “complete editorial control of all content.” AP also claims on its “About Us” page that it is in the business of “unbiased news,” which is little more than a pathetic joke. The so-called “journalism” AP has been doing on climate involves behaving like the de facto mouthpiece for its major left-wing donors who have an obsession with pushing apocalyptic climate narratives on the internet.
It’s a parody of journalism: AP said the money came “without strings”
AP summarized Carovillano’s claim that “AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached; the funders have no influence on the stories that are done.” Carovillano, in this particular case, called the activist investment a “‘mutually beneficial arrangement.’”
And if politicians got free houses or holidays from companies they made laws about, they could just say it was a “mutually beneficial arrangement” right? And we would laugh out of town, any politician that said that.
“The AP is supposed to be a newswire service, reporting hard news,” Legal Senior Policy Fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute Steve Milloy told MRC Business. “But it has deteriorated into a climate propaganda outfit for left-wing foundations. The AP routinely reports just one side of any climate story. If it lets its readers know there is another side, that only occurs via bogus ‘fact-check’ articles that are intended for use by climate activists to get other outlets to censor climate skeptics.”
Because AP stories are run in many other news outlets, the propaganda is amplified but the payoff money gets laundered through the other outlets, which don’t mention the conflict of interest.
[Steve Milloy] continued: “The AP imagines that its corruption of the news is excused because it discloses on its website that it is being paid to report one-side of every climate story. But its stories are run by other media outlets who don’t make the necessary disclosures.”
Climate Depot founder Marc Morano also ripped apart AP’s unashamed partnership with left-wing groups in comments to MRC Business:
The media is not only ideology in sync with the climate agenda of our government, international organizations, academia, and the billionaire class, but they are also quite literally being paid to promote the climate scare. AP has received millions from ‘philanthropic grants’ to toss out all objectivity and balance in their reporting. The AP and the corporate media engage in paid press release journalism. The media has zero obligation to serve as watchdogs over government claims or policies and instead regurgitate the approved messaging of their paymasters.
It’s Climate hush money — it buys silence
The big problem with the current media is the total lack of any critical research or backgrounding, or cross-checks on the stories. When the IPCC says we are all doomed, AP says “we’re all doomed” — they don’t interview the Nobel Prize winners who disagree, or the men who walked on the moon, or any of the 30,000 scientists who can point out the flaws in the UN hyperbole.
AP News was founded in 1846. The original founders must be rolling in their graves.
If climate skeptics got $8m in funding from anywhere, the media would be all over it. But when one of the core groups of the media world sells out journalism to politically motivated vested interests most of the most lauded reporters in the world won’t even notice…
h/t to Charles, and Climate Depot