Billionaire Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, says he wants to advance “investigative journalism.” So, he’s lavishing millions on the same left-wing publications and Deep State media operatives that epitomize Fake News. Newmark spoke at a National Press Club Headliners Luncheon on Monday, September 24, just a day after announcing he would be investing $20 million in a new investigative journalism nonprofit called The Markup. Two of the founders of the new outfit — Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson — are veteran scribblers at the left-wing muckraking site ProPublica. The other founder, Sue Gardner, is a former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Newmark told the National Press Club (NPC) that investigative reporting, which has traditionally come from print publications “is vital given the rise of deception and misinformation that often comes from the highest levels of government.” “For what’s done in print journalism, that’s specifically and most of all investigative reporting, I think that’s more and more important,” he said. “Because journalism, and investigative journalism more than anything, is the immune system of democracy. We do need reporters to keep people honest, and that is never going to end.”
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That all sounds good, and is true, as far as rhetoric goes. However, Newmark doesn’t explain how funding “journalists” who have proven records as radical partisans and coverup artists for corruption and subversion is going to fulfill his prescription to “keep people honest.” Consider ProPublica, for example. Prior to funding The Markup, Newmark has been a major donor to ProPublica, which predictably takes the left side of virtually every issue: pro-abortion, pro-LBGT, pro-immigration amnesty, anti-border security, anti-gun rights, anti-capitalist, anti-police, pro-racial agitation. It’s hardly surprising then that Newmark’s fellow funders of ProPublica comprise the usual suspects of the big Deep State tax-exempt foundations that have been financing America’s social revolution for decades: Ford, Carnegie, Soros, Sandler, Pew, Hewlett, Casey, etc.
One could hardly expect the ProPublica sleuths to expose any of the operations of their generous benefactors. Their posturing as social-justice crusaders who “speak truth to power” is ludicrous; they are the complicit, submissive servitors of the greatest wielders and abusers of power. So, naturally, they are not going to expose the connections of Soros, Ford, and other big foundations to the revolutionary activists of ACORN, Black Lives Matter, MoveOn.org, etc. They are not going to report on massive bribery and corruption at the Clinton Foundation or Hillary Clinton’s ties to Vladimir Putin and her Uranium One transfer to Russia of 20-25 percent of America’s uranium resources. And they will look the other way at Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of aborted baby parts.
While posing, on the one hand, as outsiders, as alternative media, fighting for the little guy, on the other hand the ProPublica champions boast of their connections to the Big Media organizations that have rightfully become known as Fake News. ProPublica claims over 100 “publishing partners” that assist its crusade, including: ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, PBS, NPR, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Newsweek, TIME, Slate, Vice, Vox, Salon, The Daily Beast, and more. That hardly fits ProPublica’s carefully crafted image of nonpartisan, independent, underdog, anti-establishment truth tellers.
Another indication that Newmark’s new venture, The Markup, will follow the same leftward direction as ProPublica, is his financial support for Mother Jones, the San Francisco-based far-left magazine that has been a bible for the Marxist, socialist, Castroite, anti-American activists for decades. It seems most likely that The Markup will continue the radical tradition of Newmark beneficiaries ProPublica, Mother Jones, the Poynter Institute, and the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate School of Journalism, which has been renamed as the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
And there’s more. According to the NPC, Newmark told its Headliner luncheon that the “spirit of co-operation will be key and may involve engaging with big technology companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter on how they can stop the kinds of misinformation campaigns that the country’s intelligence community agreed Russia waged before the 2016 election.” All of which points to The Markup joining the rest of Big Media in support of Big Tech’s censorship of conservative and non-politically correct media that oppose their “progressive” agenda. Newmark isn’t the only rich lefty supporting The Markup. “In addition to Newmark’s contribution,” reports The Hill, “the organization’s funding sources include the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which gave $2 million, and the Ford Foundation and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.”
“I’m proud to back The Markup and support people whose work I’ve followed and admired for a long time,” Newmark said in a statement. “As a news consumer, I look for journalism that I can trust, and by producing data-driven, rigorously fact-checked reporting on the effects of technology on society, The Markup is helping to fill a largely unmet need.”
A more honest assessment: The Markup will prove to be yet another cog — along with CNN, PBS, NPR, CBS, New York Times, etc. — in the globalist Fake News machine.
Photo of Craig Newmark: Pete Forsyth
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