The takeover of news outlets, especially newspapers, at a local level has become a major leftist project. In the past, I covered the embedding of leftist activists into local news organizations through Report for America.
Report for America’s model is finding young activists and parachuting them into local communities to purse some narrow political agenda. That’s not journalism. 6 of the activists from RFA’s current class will be covering ‘climate change’, 9 will be covering poverty, and 4 will be covering prisons.
Facebook has often been accused of spreading fake news. Here it, along with the Google News Initiative, which kicked in $400,000, is literally financing a fake news project which pays half the salaries of the reporters it embeds in local newsrooms, while its own funding comes from wealthy left-wing groups.
Facebook has claimed that its Journalism Project will fight fake news, instead it’s funding it. If the social media monopoly giant wanted to support journalism, it could do so in any number of ways. By financing Report for America’s activism, it’s helping fund papers on the condition that they run propaganda.
And then there was Acronym and Courier Newsroom which set up fake local news operations. Now Soros is getting into that game.
A new public benefit corporation backed by billionaires Reid Hoffman, George Soros, and others is launching Tuesday to fund new media companies and efforts that tackle disinformation.
Why it matters: Good Information Inc. aims to fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information. As part of its mission, it plans to invest in local news companies.
The group will be led by Tara McGowan, a former Democratic strategist who previously ran a progressive non-profit called ACRONYM.
Good Information just sounds like Courier Newsroom rebranded.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Acronym also planned to invest $25 million in a progressive news effort called Courier Newsroom, which set up eight different websites with seemingly nonpartisan, homespun names like “UpNorth News” in Wisconsin and “Keystone” in Pennsylvania. The publications routinely featured Democratic candidates in favorable lights, and Courier spent millions to promote the articles in Facebook ads.
In other words, a local fake news machine. Good Information is more ambitious, but essentially another phase.
The new push will consist of two entities, according to the document: A 501(c)(3) public foundation called the Good Information Project, which will grant money to nonprofit media companies, and a public benefit corporation (a so-called B Corp) called Good Information Inc., which will invest in for-profit media companies.
So Soros Inc. will get its tentacles into non-profit and for-profit media and dictate content to them. Because somehow the media isn’t extreme enough. But the first part of the plan is to put more money into her existing fake news machine.
“PGI’s first investment in this arena will be to help scale Courier Newsroom, a network of 8 local online properties that reach subgroups of Americans most vulnerable to disinformation with local, values-driven news and content developed specifically for their social newsfeeds, mobile apps and email inboxes,” the PGI document reads.
Obviously.
Although backed and launched by progressives, McGowan says the group could make investments in entities across the political spectrum so long as their editorial standards support fact-based information.
She points to The Bulwark, a center-right news site founded in opposition to Trumpism, as an example of the type of center-right news outlet it could fund.
The Bulwark is not “right” in any sense of the word. It’s a left-wing project funded by uber-leftist billionaire Pierre Omidyar which employs some former conservatives. The upshot is that whatever the McGowan-Soros project calls itself, it’s a political operation.
While Soros and lefties build a massive fake news machine, the media whines about conservative “fake news”.
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