Bill Gates now bribing media companies: "media partnerships" = biased global health coverage

[Hannah Bell]

How Ray Suarez Really Caught the Global Health Bug:

How did PBS NewsHour correspondent Ray Suarez catch the global health bug? Simple, he said in a recent talk answering that exact question. Suarez explained: “The executive producer of the NewsHour, Linda Winslow, came into my office and asked me if I was interested in covering global health for the program and I said ‘yes.’ ”

But the actual reason is, following that conversation, Suarez wrote a proposal for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation resulting in $3.6 million of funding for NewsHour programming on global health... He defended the arrangement as giving an under-reported subject increased coverage while preserving “complete editorial independence...” But could Suarez’s own internal process for selecting stories and storylines be susceptible to influence? Certainly there are no stories thus far that seem contrary to foundation views. On the other hand, hardly every Gates-funded story examines an issue high on its agenda -— obesity in China, for example...

In October 2008, the same time it awarded the NewsHour funding, the Gates Foundation granted the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) $2 million with a remit to “inform policy making and program development and implementation” for U.S. global health policy... In key instances, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s global health news coverage suggests bias both in story selection and preferential treatment of the Gates Foundation...

I used to write about the Gates Foundation for the Seattle-based Crosscut. I stopped in November of 2009 after Crosscut, following financial struggles and a switch to non-profit status, announced it had received a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation...The episode is suggestive of the ubiquity of Gates funding in the media, from unknown Crosscut to the PBS NewsHour. The subject of Gates funding is uniformly uncomfortable to those receiving it—which should perhaps suggest that something is wrong...

http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/how_ray_suarez_really_caught_t.php?page=3


The Web Grows Wider

The independence of the Guardian’s global health journalism has a new guarantor: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Manchester, U.K.-based paper recently announced a global development section co-sponsored by the foundation. Such non-profit funding deals are not unusual in the media today and, like many others, the partnership agreement states that the Guardian has editorial independence.

The Gates Foundation is not just any foundation, however. It is the largest charitable foundation in the world, and its influence in the media is growing so vast there is reason to worry about the media’s ability to do its job... In the press release, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger described the sponsorship arrangement as compensating for declining coverage. “...it is essential to have a place where some of the biggest questions facing humanity are analysed and debated..."

Yet the Guardian has ignored an important, long-term story: the ascendancy of the Gates Foundation in setting global health policy and orchestrating media coverage...Many first tier news outlets now fly the Gates Foundation flag. With similar highly leveraged investments in the policy world, the foundation has been able to unilaterally set global health policy in areas like malaria, moving the focus from containment to eradication with a single speech in 2007. With what is certain to be only partial attainment of the UN Millennium Development Goals, the Gates Foundation stands to be portrayed as the savior of a failing system. The story could also be viewed as the Gates Foundation attempting to wrest control of the goals from the multilateral institutions and elected governments... Not only does Gates Foundation sponsorship close off large expanses of storyline, it appears to have altered the Guardian’s coverage...

Increasingly, the measurement and coverage of global health are funded by the Gates Foundation in a closing loop while, correspondingly, the capacity for objective assessment is shrinking.

http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_web_grows_wider.php?page=2

[Starry Messenger]

1. k & r

[Hannah Bell]

2. k

[leftstreet]

3. I'm beginning to wonder if Gates is mentally ill

And I don't mean that in terms of making fun of him or anything

Either that or he's letting his organization front for interests that are downright creepy

Food interference
Education interference
Health interference

on a global scale

:scared:

K&R

[maryf]

4. It's scary...

that pie in the face set him off, perhaps...

K&R this OP

[Hannah Bell]

5. :>)

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. But he's curing malaria!!

On a global er I mean African scale.

[Starry Messenger]

7. You mean that nice man might be a megalomaniac?

I hear he's so nice to kitties. Why do you hate teh kitties???