Feds pay Soros-funded Poynter to train 'journalists'

FPI / April 17, 2023

Team Biden has essentially already co-opted most corporate media but is going even further in its effort to counter alternative media and  control the narrative by funding the training of leftist "journalists," reports say.

The Biden administration helped bankroll a training course at the leftist Poynter Institute for so-called "reporters" on how to create "balanced and bias-free" journalism, the Washington Free Beacon reported on April 10.

Poynter, an organization that once promoted a "blacklist" of conservative media outlets, is funded largely by deep-pocketed Democrat donors George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Bill Gates, and Tim Gill, an LGBT activist whose husband is Joe Biden’s ambassador to Switzerland.

"The Poynter Institute's training course was part of a contract with the U.S. Agency for Global Media, according to a federal spending database. The agency, which paid Poynter $23,500 for the course through March 31, oversees Voice of America and other government news outlets," the Free Beacon noted.

In 2019, Poynter released a "blacklist" of conservative news organizations, including the Washington Free Beacon, deemed "unreliable." Poynter retracted the list, called "UnNews," after widespread criticism.

Poynter’s fact-checking site, PolitiFact, often displays pro-leftist and anti-conservative bias. A Free Beacon analysis found that of PolitiFact’s fact-checks of politicians, 62 out of 86 targeted Republicans.

The site has also retracted numerous fact-checks later deemed inaccurate, including one in 2020 that said the theory that the coronavirus emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, was "inaccurate and ridiculous."

The Poynter Institute also cheered media outlets which refused to report on the content in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. "Hardly any media outlets, except for conservative ones, are giving the story any credence at all," crowed one Poynter writer.

The Global Disinformation Index has also received funding from the Biden State Department. The organization advised companies to pull advertising from conservative websites, according to a Washington Examiner report.

Poynter and other organizations in the Global Disinformation Index network "have pressured social media companies to crack down on what they dub to be disinformation, raising concerns that doing so could lead to censorship of unpopular viewpoints," the Free Beacon noted. "That pressure campaign has been lucrative for Poynter, which in 2021 urged Facebook to permanently ban former president Donald Trump over his comments about the 2020 election."

Last year, Poynter called on YouTube to bolster its moderation of what the leftist organization deems "misinformation," claiming the video-sharing company was allowing its platform "to be weaponized by unscrupulous actors to manipulate and exploit others." YouTube and its parent company, Google, subsequently gave a $13.2 million grant to Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network to help users identify misinformation.

The Free Beacon noted that the International Fact-Checking Network, which has received funding from the State Department, "pulled a similar coup on Facebook. After offering to 'engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,' Facebook partnered with the Network and Politifact to provide misinformation analysis."

Facebook now relies heavily on PolitiFact, the Poynter subsidiary, to fact-check news articles on its platform.

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