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On Feb 17, 2025, at 12:12 PM, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:--US government gaslights world with massive media subsidies
Elon Musk’s DOGE is still adding up the billions of dollars doled out by likes of USAID to so-called ‘independent’ media
by David P Goldman and Uwe Parpart February 17, 2025USAID has provided funding to media groups worldwide. Image: X Screengrab
How much of USAID’s US$40 billion annual spending and the budgets of the National Endowment for Democracy and other government agencies bought the cooperation of journalists worldwide?
The nearly $270 million in payoffs to “independent media” in the 2025 federal budget – a staggering sum compared to the editorial budgets of the world’s news organizations – may be a small fraction of the total subsidy once payments to so-called charitable foundations are tallied up.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations and other private entities subsidized the same media, bringing the grand total into the billions.
One of the key objectives of USAID funding is to buy media support for the US-supported Ukraine war effort. The agency funded nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine until the Trump administration turned off the tap earlier this month.
One Soros-allied “charity,” the East-West Management Institute, received $278 million from the US government, according to the official website usaspending.gov:
Source: usaspending.gov
Politico, owned by Germany’s Springer Verlag, received at least $34 million in funding from various US government agencies, according to the federal government’s website.
Source: usaspending.gov
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set out to cut government waste and potentially stumbled upon the biggest covert operation in the history of the West, dwarfing previous US intelligence operations like the Cold War’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.
The enemy against which hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of US dollars were directed, though, was not an adversary like the Soviet Union, but domestic political opponents in friendly countries.
And the agenda was not military victory, but a political and cultural transformation of the West itself: The so-called green agenda, diversity, open borders, the elimination of traditional notions of gender and the ascent of globalist institutions at the expense of national sovereignty.
Few if any major news organizations will emerge unscathed from what could be the biggest corruption scandal in the history of journalism. “The skeletons just keep tumbling out of the closet,” tweeted Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs February 13, claiming $9 million of US Defense Department payments to Reuters, the world’s largest news agency, for research on “large-scale social deception” operations.
The payments are listed on the federal government’s website; a screenshot is below.
Source: usaspending.gov
How dependent is the “independent” media on USAID and related funding? According to Reporters Sans Frontieres, a Paris-based press freedom advocacy group, the suspension of USAID support “throws journalism around the world into chaos.”
The press organization complained in a recent post that the Trump administration’s freeze of USAID payments “has plunged NGOs, media outlets, and journalists doing vital work into chaotic uncertainty.” RSF’s executive director Clayton Weimers added:
USAID programs support independent media in more than 30 countries, but it is difficult to assess the full extent of the harm done to the global media. Many organizations are hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.
According to a USAID fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023, the agency funded training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media. The 2025 foreign aid budget included $268,376,000 allocated by Congress to support ‘independent media and the free flow of information.
Reporters sans Frontieres added, “In Ukraine, where 9 out of 10* outlets rely on subsidies and USAID is the primary donor, several local media have already announced the suspension of their activities and are searching for alternative solutions.”
Other US agencies provide substantial funding for media and non-governmental organizations overseas. The National Endowment for Democracy makes 2,000 grants per year averaging $50,000 each, or $100 million per year.
Foreign governments that failed to comply with Washington’s war policy in Ukraine were special targets of USAID covert operations. Hungary, a NATO member, has been a prominent critic of American policy in Ukraine, and its Prime Minister Viktor Orban has advised President Trump on possible negotiated solutions.
A February 12 “flash report” from Hungary’s Sovereign Protection Office states that the scale of USAID funding of anti-government media and related entities is still under investigation. Entitled “The Role of USAID n Exerting Global Political Pressure,” the report states:
“Since its creation in 1961, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been part of the machinery that implements US national security strategy. The agency complements the work of the secret services, using covert and overt pressure through payments disguised as aid and grants. It uses a global network, which it has already helped to set up, as a tool for this purpose. The pressure network operates by taking over the civil, economic, political and media sectors in each country.”
Citing direct USAID funding of several prominent entities in the political option, the Hungarian Sovereign Protection Office added that “an essential element of the organization of the network maintained by USAID is to conceal the origin and the true extent of the resources used by the actors.”
The Macedonian newspaper Republika reported, “Media outlets in Macedonia are publishing reports on USAID spending in the country, on politicized, left-wing programs and media outlets.”
Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic claimed last week in a television interview that the US government has spent more than $3 billion during the last ten years in an effort to undermine his government.
Biden’s USAID administrator Samantha Power, a senior National Security Council official in the Obama administration, stridently defended the agency in a February 6 New York Times op-ed. “U.S.A.I.D. has become America’s superpower in a world defined by threats that cross borders and amid growing strategic competition,” Power said, accusing her critics of doing the bidding of “Moscow and Beijing.”
Former USAID officials have started dozens of their own foundations that act as cutouts for the USAID agenda. Jeanne Bourgault now heads Internews Network, which she founded after two stints with USAID in Moscow and Kosovo. Internews received $418 million from USAID, according to the usaspending.gov website, “whose mission is to empower local media and the free flow of information worldwide,” in the foundation’s self-description.
According to medium.com, “This funding has enabled the NGO to establish a sprawling global footprint, working with 4,291 media outlets, producing 4,799 hours of broadcasts in a single year and training over 9,000 journalists — all under the banner of promoting press freedom. However, critics argue that these initiatives are little more than an extension of US foreign policy, shaping narratives to align with Western geopolitical interests.” Bourgault is paid $491,000 a year.
Bourgault’s agenda includes putting pressure on advertisers to withhold funding from media outlets that report news that USAID doesn’t like. She told the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, “We have to work with the global advertising industry, because a lot of dollars to go pretty bad content. And so you can work really hard on inclusion lists and exclusion lists and really try to focus on ad dollars and challenge the global advertising industry all around the world to focus ad dollars to the good news and information.”
Liberal billionaires, meanwhile, subsidize major media directly. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $5,437,294 to Germany’s Der Spiegel, the country’s top left-wing news outlet.
MintPress reported in 2021, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects. Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS, and The Atlantic.”
“Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera,” the MintPress report said.
Asia Times could not independently confirm the nature or amount of the “sponsorship” granted to each individual media outlet.
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