BY VICTORIA TAFT | P J MEDIA
Source:
reportforamerica.org
Big Tech billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, who
already censor comments and news they don’t like, are now coming after your
local paper.
The group Report for America is placing its hand-selected
woke reporters into local newsrooms across America to cover “under-reported”
stories such as climate issues, Census Bureau block parties, how vaccines are working, and hating Donald Trump.
Newspapers are delighted with the cut-rate help. “We won
a grant from Report for America so we can better cover our (city, town, state,
county),” they enthuse.
Such is the way Report for America (RFA) couches its
“gifts” to local newspapers around the country. The gift is a reporter or
multiple reporters who belong to a larger “corps” of reporters.
Screenshot
from Report for America website
RFA is based on the ideas of its two founders, Steven
Waldman and Charles Sennott, reporters with what they call The GroundTruth
Project. The organization has been placing their hand-picked “emerging”
reporters (read: newbies) since 2018. The green recruits are trained and
mentored by like-minded, older journalists and placed into American newspaper
and public radio station newsrooms.
Zuckerberg’s company, Facebook (now called Meta), and his
and his wife’s charitable foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are
pouring millions into this effort.
And it ain’t beanbag. They expect results. Zuckerberg and
Priscilla Chan spent $300,000,000 taking over elections
offices in 2020 with the Center for Tech and Civic Life to tip the
election to hapless Joe Biden, who conducted his campaign practically bound and
gagged in the basement of his house.
For those who insist Zuckerberg is doing these
things out of the goodness of his heart to combat COVID — the cover story for
the election effort — open your eyes.
Election offices were turned into Biden get-out-the-vote
efforts, as I reported for PJ Media last March:
Beginning last year, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook joined
with Google and other high-tech companies and NGOs to grant hundreds of
millions of dollars to fund already taxpayer-funded elections across the
country, with the express purpose of defeating Donald Trump. A public-interest
law group says those dollars were used to take over election offices and use
local government apparatus to turn out Democrat voters to get rid of Trump. As
previously reported in December by PJ Media colleague J. Christian Adams, this
was done to great effect on behalf of Joe Biden in multiple cities and counties
throughout the swing and other states.
Besides Zuckerberg’s election office caper, there
are other real-world examples from like-minded billionaires, who are, like him,
a cadre of “unelected monarch[s]” “shaping our public life,” as one
writer put it.
Billionaire George Soros bankrolled woke district
attorneys and Secretaries of State candidates to remake the justice system and
change elections laws. Catching Soros’s vision, another Facebook swell donated
millions to elect far-Left DAs through the Accountable Justice Action Fund and
Justice PAC. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg bought — yes, bought — apparatchiks
and installed them at State Attorneys General offices to “bring politically motivated lawsuits.” They’re still there.
Isn’t it odd that all of a sudden laws aren’t being enforced,
bail is virtually gone, seemingly every difference of opinion is suddenly
criminalized, bodies are piling up, and crime rates have
skyrocketed? But this isn’t a case of “you break it, you buy it.” It’s
exactly the opposite: they bought it to break it. The resulting
dysfunction isn’t an anomaly; chaos is a feature of their
plan.
These titans are putting their money where your mouth is,
complete with a ball gag.
Here are just a few of the RFA big rollers:
- Meta
Journalism Project – $5.5M
- Knight
Foundation – $5M
- Natasha
and Dirk Ziff
- Joyce
Foundation – $1M
- Craig
Newmark Philanthropies – $855,000
- Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation – $750,000
- Corporation
for Public Broadcasting – $648,912
- Peter
and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation – $625,000
- Tow
Foundation – $600,000
- Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative – $550,000
- Conrad
N. Hilton Foundation – $500,000
- Heising-Simons
Foundation – $500,000
- Lumina
Foundation – $500,000
- Microsoft
– $500,000
You might be wondering why the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting is re-gifting taxpayer largesse to this program. Me too.
The way it works is that news outlets agree to take
“corps members” and RFA agrees to fund half their salary, “up to $25,000,
one-third the second year, and one-fifth the third year.” The newspaper agrees
to pay 25% and then has to hit up local NGO’s and charities for the final 25%
of the salary in what they call a new model “for shared investment in local
reporting, increasing the chances of sustaining public service journalism, for
the community, by the community.” Reporters are also encouraged to “volunteer”
at a local charity, perhaps even the one funding their position.
This is an effort to dismantle the connection between
local capitalism and news and put it into the hands of woke Leftists and the
government. You know, like Pravda.
As an added incentive, if Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better”
bill is passed, smaller news outlets will get a tax write-offs and subsidies. This was RFAs idea as well.
By capturing local news, Big Tech will become the total
gatekeepers for news content while using their fake news checkers in the
Trusted News Initiative to tell you vaccines are infallible, Hunter Biden is a
pious artist, Trump was a Russian Secret Agent, it was an “insurrection”
without seditionists, and there was no funny business in the 2020 election.
The information cartel already consists of The Associated Press, The
Washington Post, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, Facebook, Financial
Times, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Reuters, Twitter, and The Wall
Street Journal.
Now they want to gather up local newspapers to silence all differences
of opinion.
Big Tech “monarchs” won’t sit by while an RFA-associated
paper writes a screed against them, any more than The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation would support a health organization that ever said a nasty word
about their disastrous African polio shots. Any more than Tony Fauci would fund
a program that said AIDS isn’t caused by HIV or admit he funded Wuhan
gain-of-function research.
And these woke tycoons will have their way with the one
subset of news outlets most closely aligned with small-town America. They’re
going for the burgs and fly-over country now. Billionaires have already
made moves to block out differing — conservative — points of view on their
platforms. They’ll think nothing of censoring a story in the local newspaper.
Next time: How it’s going.
