Thread by @AlanRMacLeod

[Thread] My new @MintPressNews investigation reveals the depth to which Bill Gates is funding our media. The Gates Foundation has spent at least $319 million sponsoring press around the world, including NPR, NBC, CNN, The Guardian, the FT, the BBC, PBS...
mintpressnews.com/documents-show…

The Gates Foundation also sponsors a myriad of investigative journalism bureaus, press associations, and pays for reporters around the world to be trained.

Is this purely altruistic? Hardly. These outlets are generally funded to promote causes Gates believes in, some of which (such as chater schools) are highly controversial.

For someone who is so rich, powerful and has so many questionable ties, Gates is treated extremely well by the media, who present him as a well-meaning geek out to help the world. The Guardian even once unironically called him “Saint Bill”.

Is this money complicating how the media cover him? Recently, @TimothyWSchwab, one of the few journalists to truly scrutinize him declined to co-write a story in a Gates-funded outlet b/c he knew he'd be expected to toe the pro-Gates line.

https://twitter.com/TimothyWSchwab/status/1448321233326592007

@TimothyWSchwab With other billionaires like Omidyar or Bezos, their connections to certain media outlets are obvious.

But Gates has gone another way, drip feeding 100s of media orgs. The effect is subtler and harder to quantigy but he's likely got far more bang for his bucks than Bezos.