Expect to see climate-change alarmists ramp up their tirades in coming months, as the Associated Press (AP) adds more than two dozen journalists to cover the global-warming charade. The news outlet credits philanthropic grants for funding its expansion.
“The announcement illustrates how philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism — at the AP and elsewhere — at a time when the industry’s financial outlook has been otherwise bleak,” wrote David Bauder in February. He quoted AP’s senior vice president and executive editor, Julie Pace, who bragged, “This far-reaching initiative will transform how we cover the climate story.”
Five organizations are funding this $8 million grant over three years. Each is notorious in its ongoing support of left-wing radicalism.
The Five Funders
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation “has been financing America’s social revolution for decades,” Bill Jasper reports for The New American, noting that the organization funds news outlets that take “the left side of virtually every issue: pro-abortion, pro-LGBT, pro-immigration amnesty, anti-border security, anti-gun rights, anti-capitalist, anti-police, pro-racial agitation.” For example, its website brags of a recent partnership with the Omidyar Network in which they are “reimagining capitalism” from its “failing” conventions to “how economies should work in the 21st century” (read: socialism/communism), through $40 million in grants to left-wing universities such as Harvard, Howard, Johns Hopkins, and MIT.
(Incidentally, Omidyar is not funding the AP’s current $8 million windfall, but it deserves mention as the philanthropic investment firm established by eBay founders Pierre and Pam Omidyar. It helps fund the World Bank’s ID4D intiative to develop global digital health IDs. A generous donor to Democrat congressional and senatorial campaign committees and neoconservative activists, Omidyar has also spawned The Democracy Fund. DF’s Public Square program claims to transform “media to better serve people,” and Bauder quotes its director, Joshua Sterns, admitting the role of philanthropic support in liberal journalism. “Funders are seeing news and information about the issues they care about dry up,” Sterns alleged, “and in place of that are seeing disinformation.”)
Next on the list of AP boosters is the Quadrivium Foundation, founded by Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and media mogul James Murdoch, the son of fellow CFR member and Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. The younger insider is a Clinton Foundation supporter with a history of scandal. In 2021, his Quadrivium linked up with financial behemoth BlackRock to fund green-energy infrastructure, effectively funneling U.S. investments to Communist China and thereby helping to drag the United States further into energy crisis.
The Rockefeller Foundation hardly needs introduction. Since 1913 that family has, through its foundation, funded programs aiming toward a new world order. The late David Rockefeller bragged about their legacy in his 2002 autobiography Memoirs: “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is named for a troubled, scandal-ridden, drug-addicted mogul whom Wired magazine compared to Jeffrey Epstein and quipped that the institute would not exist “if very rich men didn’t want to” launder their reputations. HHMI partners with The Rockefeller University to conduct biomedical research and maintains ties to China’s infamous Wuhan Institute. Bauder reports that HHMI has been generously funding AP’s Covid pandemic coverage.
The Walton Family Foundation (WFF), the philanthropic arm of Walmart begun by company founder Sam Walton, is a major funder of Teach for America, a non-profit that the American Enterprise Institute condemns for its “woke ideology.” An outspoken proponent of the leftist Common Core curriculum, WFF is also known for the company it keeps, often co-sponsoring educational initiatives promoted by the leftist Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The organization’s environment program accepts climate change as a foregone conclusion and looks for “solutions” to address it.
Great Green Plans
Could accepting grant money from the likes of these donors pose a conflict of interest? Bauder isn’t concerned about that. He said AP has been receiving grants such as this since the mid-2010s to “boost coverage in health and science, religion, water issues, and philanthropy itself.” About 50 of his colleagues’ paychecks already rely on such grants.
He whitewashes the issue saying that “until the past two decades,” news organizations were “financially secure enough not to need help.” Without addressing the obvious question of why the well is running dry now, he points to successful leftist muckrakers such as ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Seattle Times, which he praises for pioneering non-profit endeavors.
To squelch charges of bias, Bauder quotes his own vice president, who supervises partnerships and grants. “AP accepts money to cover certain areas but without strings attached,” said Brian Carovillano. “The funders have no influence on the stories that are done.”
But in an Orwellian about-face, the VP admitted that it took time to get “used to the idea that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve.” However, he called it a “mutually beneficial arrangement,” which makes sense based on AP’s proven record of supporting radical agendas.
“The climate funding is a big boost after years where the AP was frustrated that the company’s ambitions were bigger than its capabilities to achieve them,” he said. Things are going so well that AP is “building its own department headed by former global business editor Lisa Gibbs, to work on securing outside support and partnerships for its work.”
Everything Old Is New Again
AP is not alone; other news outlets are flourishing in the droppings of generous leftist radicals. In December 2020, The New York Times announced support from Rockefeller, Hewlett, and the long-time progressivist-backing Ford Foundation and Stavros Niarchos Foundation for Headway, its “journalism initiative to investigate global and national challenges,” including environmental news.
Also bolstering increased environmental hysteria is Covering Climate Now (CCNow), a collaboration that calls climate change “the defining story of our time” and professes to “help our news media colleagues cover” it “with the rigor and urgency it deserves.” From the site, journalists can access resources and content-sharing to glean “as wide an audience as possible.” Some of the re-publishable stories available offer headlines such as “You Can’t Isolate the Food Crisis from the Climate Crisis” and “Putting the Ukraine Story in a Climate Context.”
The group boasts “460+ news and media partners,” including wire services, news agencies, television, radio, podcasters, newspapers, magazines, journals, and institutions. Some of the big names on the roster are Reuters, Bloomberg, The Guardian, Agence-France Presse, Al Jazeera, PBS, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, Princeton University, and the major news networks ABC, NBC, and CBS. CCNow’s inaugural 2021 Journalism Awards honored alarmist coverage from leftist outlets such as CNN, Rolling Stone, ProPublica and The Atlantic, along with reporting from some of its own members.
CCNow’s funders make a list of usual suspects in promoting radical environmentalism. Many of them feature prominently in the 2014 U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report “The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA.” It’s proof positive that they’ve been feeding climate hysteria for much longer than Bauder’s claim of the past decade. In the “Billionaire’s Club” are CCNow supporters: the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Park Foundation. (Rockefeller, Hewlett, and Walton also make the inauspicious club.)
All of the above rank in the report’s list of top 10 donors to environmental causes, which also includes the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The latter happens to finance CCNow’s fiscal sponsor, the deceptively named non-profit Fund for Constitutional Government.
Each of these foundations is a member of the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA), formed in 1987 to coordinate the distribution of grants supporting anti-industry environmental activism. It quickly grew to dictate the agenda of the U.S. environmental movement by deciding which groups get money, prompting the report authors to declare EGA as “unquestionably the funding epicenter of the environmental movement.”
They’ve obviously been effective. In response to the continual barrage of media climate alarmism, the West has suppressed so-called fossil fuels to the point that the war in Ukraine is now posing major risks to energy security and causing skyrocketing prices across the globe. Even so, Biden’s climate czar, former Secretary of State John Kerry, told BBC Arabic that his main concern about the war is that it will have “massive emissions consequences” and distract people from the climate crisis. With the Billionaire’s Club ramping up its efforts, he needn’t worry. But we should.
