1/ Months ago, I was asked to be a co-reporter on this story. I declined b/c the #GatesFoundation was a funder, which I knew would make it impossible to rigorously examine Gates's role in Covax. This story is a case study in the perils of Gates-funded journalism. 🧵Read on & RT:
https://twitter.com/Laurie_Garrett/status/1446501812283101186
2/ Co-reported by @statnews/@TBIJ, the story amplifies a message that Gates had an extremely small role in the failures of Covax (to send covid vaccines to the global poor). This is misleading. False, really. And it hurts the ability of independent journalists to tell the truth
3/ The @TBIJ story offers useful reporting about the failures in Covax---unaccountable power, missing risk analysis, country-club mindset. This is all true---yet also deeply misleading when placed in a context where Gates's very important role in these failures is obscured
4/ The article doesn't mention Gates until the 83rd paragraph. And it only reports 4 graphs on Gates---incl a quote from Gates. Again, this is a story about a failed covid initiative that Gates played an outsize role in leading/shaping. Why would @TBIJ bury Gates's role?
5/ This editorial decision---to minimize and obscure the very significant role the Gates Foundation played in the failures of Covax ---aligns perfectly with @TBIJ's funder, the Gates Foundation. Unbelievably, @TBIJ did not clearly disclose its financial conflict to readers
6/ The Gates Foundation has given (at least) $1,068,169 to @TBIJ "to report regularly and in-depth on global health security issues." That's a huge sum for any newsroom & appears to be more than half of TBIJ's annual budget.
7/ @TBIJ chose to obscure their financial conflict of interest, hiding at at the very bottom of a 5500-word article (no one reads to the very end)----instead of disclosing inside the article, the first time Gates is mentioned, as is customary in journalism 
8/ After I contacted @TBIJ, they acknowledged their failure to clearly disclose their financial conflict. Whoops. They corrected the disclosure, which now appears at first reference to Gates. Day late, dollar short. That disclosure needed to be there Day 1---not Day 6.
9/ Gates's funding appears to account for virtually all of @TBIJ's reporting budget on global health, including the Covax story. The only other listed funders of TBIJ's global health reporting are Gates-funded groups @ejcnet and @VitalStrat. thebureauinvestigates.com/blog/2020-02-1…
10/ Unfortunately, the ethical failures are endemic. @statnews, @qz, @el_pais & @Ojo_Publico also published the @TBIJ story on their websites, pushing it out to their zillions of readers----without disclosing that the GatesFoundation helped fund the story statnews.com/2021/10/08/how…
11/ Disclosure isn't enough. Journalists cannot honestly report on companies/actors that directly/heavily fund their newsrooms. The Society of Professional Journalists (& common sense) says, journalists should, in the first place, avoid financial conflt of interest @spj_tweets
12/ The job of journalists is to hold the powerful to account. This means following the money and challenging the powerful forces behind Covax. @TBIJ doesn't get there, and the lack of courage in its reporting is stunning. And demoralizing.
13/ I don't believe Gates told @TBIJ what to write. I think @TBIJ implicitly, if subconsciously, knew they had to find a way to tell this story that didn't target their funder. The biasing effects of financial conflicts are complex but very real and reliable
14/ So why would the Gates-funded @TBIJ invite me---a reporter who has won journalism awards for putting a critical lens on Gates--- to be a co-reporter? My guess is that they had good intentions, but they didn't fully realize their constitutional limitations.
15/ I wrote about the damaging effects of Gates's funding of journalism in @CJR last year. If you start to follow the money, you realize Gates's financial influence is everywhere---NYT, Guardian, BBC, AlJazeera...cjr.org/criticism/gate…
16/ In a follow-up story I wrote, @nytimes acknowledged its own repeated failures to manage financial conflicts of interest in its reporting on the Gates Foundation. The outlet issued corrections, but whose going to see these belated disclosures? No one.cjr.org/analysis/confl…
17/ The @TBIJ episode is really painful for me because, as a lowly freelancer, being part of a large, collaborative reporting project like this would have been a a big break & really important opportunity for my career. I can't imagine how much money went into this investigation
18/ An oft-quoted criticism raised around philanthropy is whether it is doing more harm than good. Gates's money is clearly causing great harm in journalism because it's distorting what we know about the pandemic & how we think about the next one. It's revising history.
19/ If we really want to understand the failures of the pandemic response, and think about a better way forward, we need to think very hard about the Gates Foundation's failed leadership. @TBIJ's reporting makes it hard to do that. It encourages us to do the very opposite
20/ If you want a different perspective on Gates's role in the global effort to deliver vaccines to the global poor, from someone who will never take funding from the Gates Foundation, please read my articles in @thenation: thenation.com/article/econom… thenation.com/article/societ…
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