The USAID Scandal Continues to Unfold: It Gave Internews, A Climate Cult Enabler, $472 Million

Ever heard of the Internews Network? Probably not. It is an international NGO founded over 40 years ago and says it’s all about supporting independent media around the world, which means it was most likely some sort of CIA initiative.

That is probably why we learn this from Wikileaks:

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives. The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi.

It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN. Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at http://archive.org.

Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors.

In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Bourgault launched a $10m IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The IN page showing a picture of Bourgault at the CGI has also been deleted. IN has at least six captive subsidiaries under unrelated names including one based out of the Cayman Islands. Since 2008, when electronic records begin, more than 95% of IN's budget has been supplied by the US government.

What may be especially interesting to readers is the fact Internews includes an “Earth Journalism Network,” which lists USAID as a funder, along with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a slew of other fractivist NGOs, the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and numerous other leftist outfits.

The Earth Journalism Network also engaged Deakin University out of Australia to prepare a report titled “Covering the Planet: Assessing the State of Climate and Environmental Journalism Globally.” And, here is some of what we paid for through not only USAID, but our State Department, the World Bank and tax-exemption given to all those NGOs:

[T]his study has found that more funding, training, access to experts, collaboration and opportunities for mentorships can indeed empower climate and environmental journalists and amplify their work. This study has established that the economic assistance that media support NGOs and other international philanthropic funding bodies provide is fundamental to the thriving of many individual journalists and newsrooms in LMICs [low and middle-income countries]. While training, fellowships, and philanthropic funding are also crucial to supporting the work of covering climate and the environment in higher income country settings, we heard from journalistists in this study that much reporting on climate and environment in LMICs would not be produced at all without international funding.

“Give us more money,” in other words. Then, there are these sly recommendations (emphasis added):

Funders may need to develop a more nuanced approach to ‘objectivity’ and ‘advocacy’:

Many journalists well understand how to navigate the fine line between advocating for their communities and for policy action, and journalistic objectivity. A requirement not to advocate should not be a condition of funding climate and environmental journalism.

Media outlets should publish and broadcast more climate/environment stories and make them more prominent:

Audiences take cues from the volume and prominence of media coverage as to which issues in the news are most important. Newsrooms need to scale up climate/ environment coverage and put it on the front page. Reporting about climate and environmental issues should not be tied only to disasters or climate-related events.

Journalists should not provide a platform for sources that deny climate science:

The science on climate change is settled. Journalists need to understand the science and report accordingly. Journalists should not quote ‘skeptic’ views alongside credible climate science sources.

Climate justice perspectives should be highlighted in climate change reporting:

Responsibility for causing and responding to climate and environmental harms is not equal across the planet. Journalists should address differential responsibility and climate justice perspectives in their climate change reporting.

• Journalists need to consider their own, and their media outlet’s, position on the spectrum between ‘objectivity’ and ‘advocacy’:

Each journalist should consider their own stance on objectivity in journalism versus advocacy for action. They may not be mutually exclusive, especially when reporting on climate/ environment (e.g.: avoiding extreme global heating is objectively better than the opposite, so it is not ‘unobjective’ to advocate for this position).

The quotes speak for themselves. We are funding climate advocacy dressed up as completely false “independent journalism” and it’s dirty. This USAID scandal just keeps mushrooming, revealing how corrupt all our institutions truly are.

#USAID #Internews #EarthJournalismNetwork #Scandal