The Washington Free Beacon has revealed that the Associated Press has accepted approximately $300,000 from the Danish climate extremist group the KR Foundation, which, among other things, is pushing for “a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level.”
The KR Foundation leaves little doubt where it stands on the issue of climate change. On its website, the group states that its raison d’être is to “address the climate crisis by pushing for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level. In line with the Paris climate agreement, as signed by governments, and backed by industry and society.”
And now, for the paltry sum of $300,000, it has one of the world’s largest news organizations ready to issue propaganda disguised as news on its behalf. It’s estimated that somewhere around four billion people have access to content from the AP each day.
Of course, the KR Foundation is small potatoes when it comes to the AP accepting funds from climate activist groups. Last February, the AP admitted that it’s taken at least $8 million from climate activists when it announced that it had created a new team to focus on climate-change issues.
“This far-reaching initiative will transform how we cover the climate story,” Julie Pace, a senior AP vice president, said at the time.
The AP claims that it maintains strict editorial independence, despite the enormous funding from climate-advocacy groups. A quick check of its recent headlines on the subject of climate change might give a skeptic pause to wonder at the the truth of that claim.
For instance, recent headlines include “Climate change threatens Bolivian ‘cholitas’ livelihood” on November 30; “Climate change hits women’s health harder. Activists want leaders to address it at COP28” on November 20; and “Endangered species list grows by 2,000. Climate change is part of the problem” on December 11.
A recent wrap up of COP28 lauded negotiators for attempting to “save a planet in peril,” while another seriously asked, “How did humans get to the brink of crashing climate?”
AP stories with anything positive to say about climate skepticism are scarce, if any exist at all, which makes one wonder if the New York Post editorial board was right in February of last year when it opined on the AP’s climate coverage: “Sorry: This is news-as-prostitution. Pay the media to get the coverage you want.”
Among the KR Foundation’s pet causes are an attack on banking institutions who fund fossil-fuel projects, the political influence of fossil-fuel concerns, support for what it calls “the transition to a sustainable economic paradigm,” and the aforementioned “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels at a global level.”
Whether they’ll get their money’s worth out of the AP is, of course, yet to be determined.
The climate cult is not the only left-wing cause benefiting from the AP’s relatively new obsession with providing slanted journalism in exchange for pay. For example, the AP once shared office space with the terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza. In the wake of Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on October 7, the AP instructed its reporters to avoid referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization because “terrorism and terrorist have become politicized, and often are applied inconsistently.… The AP is not using the terms for specific actions or groups, other than in direct quotations.”
While AP was once considered almost the definition of centrist in its news gathering, the media bias rating service AllSides recently changed AP’s rating from “center” to “leans left” because it offers “analysis presented as fact, subjective qualifying adjectives, word choice bias, bias by omission of views and omission of source attribution.”
