Up until now, I'd been under the impression that a free and independent press is a must-have for any credible democracy.

Isn't that what groups like, say, Freedom House, have told us for a number of years?

Wasn't a state-controlled press the sort of thing the Soviets, the Chinese, the Cubans, and other communists did to trash civil liberties, along with a lot of petty dictators?

Weren't we Americans supposed to be unlike them -- what with a free, transparent, independent press and all?

Eat your hearts out, Pravda, TASS, RT, Xinhua, Granma, etc.

Turns out we had a state-controlled press, too, and I'm not talking about NPR or Voice of America, which are up front about their funding. Big chunks of the rest of the supposedly independent press were too, except that they went those communist places one better by not telling their readers. They took aid from USAID and became the state-controlled presses, too, and all you had to do was look at their "product." Any questions as to why they were so biased?

According to Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

Now that the US DOGE Service (USDS) ... has begun number-crunching federal outlays, this corrupt arrangement has become much clearer. Beege wrote about Politico's income from its absurdly priced Politico PRO subscriptions, but a new pass through the data shows that both the New York Times and even the BBC had seven-figure income streams from USAID, too:

USAID funding:

New York Times $3.1M
Politico $32M
BBC $3.2M (approximate)

h/t @StormTorx pic.twitter.com/3AKQydP4Oo

— David Procino (@APBIOonly) February 5, 2025

 

The BBC? Why is a state-owned media outlet in the UK receiving American government funding at all? The UK forces British subjects to underwrite the BBC through license fees, which calls the BBC's credibility into question as a watchdog already. American taxpayers shouldn't be forced to participate in that activity, too.

Here's another, far more inscrutable look at this data on the NYT:

When using the upcoming tools to search for media outlets, note that LLCs and PACs are not included in the data. To find relevant results, search for prominent media names, the names of editors or owners, or nonprofits affiliated with the media outlet. Grok or ChatGPT can assist… pic.twitter.com/2MgOZe7dbl

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) February 5, 2025

Morrissey notes that Reuters also took a large sum through a non-news division.

Other reports have noted that Bill Kristol, who mysteriously changed his party line, moving from right to left, also took a lot of USAID cash through intermediary organizations.

When you take the king's penny, you do the king's bidding, right?

A similar dynamic has been seen with NGOs such as Catholic Charities taking large amounts of federal money -- and becoming staunch supporters of the Biden stance on open borders and illegal immigration, promoting it with religious righteousness even though everyone can see that it's the money, honey. The bishop at the National Cathedral who scolded President Trump at his inaugural services also had her snoot in the federal trough for illegal alien projects. She just didn't tell anyone at the time.

Even Freedom House of all places took a lot of USAID cash.

Fact is, USAID's budget has more than doubled since Joe Biden took office, to $42 million for such projects, suggesting that the bankrolling of the media is a typical Biden pay-to-play scheme, where Biden put media outlets on his string in exchange for their total loyalty to him. Morrissey calls it the 'protection racket.'

And as the media took the federal dollars -- through a variety of means, all deniable to outsiders should they become known -- from inflated subscriptions, to donations to newspaper charities, to cash to non-news parts of the operations, the quality of the press ended up getting lower and lower and lower, and the public began to shun it for its bias.

Combine this with the Biden administration's involvement in the censorship rackets, such as the State Department's Global Engagement Center, or the Pentagon's contracts to "disinformation"-detecting groups like NewsGuard that sought to shut down politically disfavored outlets and it's pretty obvious that a grotesque movement to buy out the mainstream press, and crush the independent press was underway from Biden and company, and now DOGE, which exposed the Twitter files, has managed to use its formidable tech skills to expose and end the clearly illegal, illegitimate and unsavory assault on the First Amendment by Big Government.

As big media outlets took the king's penny and did the king's bidding, they ended up with an unfair advantage in a free marketplace of ideas, while those media outlets who didn't take the king's penny shriveled, not only from not having the positive cash stream from the feds, but beset by groups like NewsGuard, which by coincidence, always gave their highest imprimatur to those media outlets taking the federal cash, and of course, the government-directed censors at pre-Musk Twitter and Facebook. One hand washes the other. One big happy family.

As Ed noted:

Transparent? Like a black hole.

So no wonder outlets like Ace of Spades has thrown this thought out:

The feds under Biden favored some outlets over others and effectively secured their total loyalty, which speaks pretty poorly of the press as an industry, given that none of them ever told their readers. No wonder the public hates them; it's the exact same hatred seen in socialist countries where the state-controlled press dominates.

It's a sorry picture indeed that explains why so many of them are fighting like tigers to take down Musk and his DOGE engineers. But thanks to DOGE, the lid has been blown off, the genie is now out of the bottle, and these outlets are never going to be looked at the same way by the public again.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License