The revelation that The New York Times and Politico received millions collectively in taxpayer dollars from a slew of US government agencies sparked public outrage. But a new investigation by MRC Business will make the scandal of government-funded media even worse.
MRC Business found that the Poynter Institute for Media Studies — which houses the notoriously censorial International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) — was a recipient of at least $2.4 million in obligations from the U.S. government between 2013 and 2025. Notably, the majority of the funding occurred after April 2020 and throughout the Biden administration years. This is the same IFCN whose certified fact-checkers (including Poynter’s PolitiFact) were originally employed by Meta to censor conservative viewpoints across Facebook and Instagram over those years.
This directly implicates government involvement in that Orwellian censorship enterprise before CEO Mark Zuckerberg rolled that program back. Moreover, Poynter’s IFCN was also funded by leftist billionaire and censorship fanatic George Soros to the tune of $492,000 between 2016 and 2019 alone.
The top Poynter funders, according to USAspending.gov, included the following government agencies:
- Small Business Administration ($1.67 million)
- U.S. Agency for Global Media ($423,781)
- State Department ($367,435)
But it gets worse!
Poynter drew massive backlash in 2019 when it tried to “blacklist” at least 29 conservative news outlets as “UnNews.” The list prominent right-leaning news sources such as Breitbart, Daily Signal, Daily Wire, Free Beacon, Judicial Watch, LifeNews, LifeSiteNews, LifeZette, LiveAction News, PJ Media, Project Veritas, Red State, The Blaze, Twitchy, and the Washington Examiner. The public outcry was so fierce that Poynter retracted its “blacklist.”
In 2023, MRC Free Speech America also revealed that Poynter’s then-associate director, Cristina Tardáguila, was on the advisory panel of the anti-conservative media, government-backed Global Disinformation Index (GDI) representing Poynter and IFCN. And if that wasn’t bad enough, both censorship giants Google and YouTube had launched a $13.2 million partnership with the ICFN in November 2022 to launch the “Global Fact Check Fund.”
This was after Poynter’s IFCN published an open letter earlier that year decrying YouTube’s lack of censorship on its platform. One of its recommendations involved YouTube “acting against repeat offenders that produce content that is constantly flagged as disinformation and misinformation.” They demanded YouTube give them money, “entering into a meaningful and structured collaboration taking the responsibility and systematically investing in independent fact-checking efforts around the world.”
Poynter, which ironically bills itself as the “gold standard” of journalism, also has a sordid history of pushing extreme wokeism on reporters' stories.
Poynter published guidance for journalists in January 2022, that sought to obliterate the standard of using gendered language in reporting. In an article tagged under “Ethics & Trust” with the headline, “Why using gender-nonspecific language in reporting extends beyond the page,” author Liana DeMasi railed at how “not dismant[ling] the norm of gendered language in reporting on topics like paid family leave is to work to perpetuate and safeguard discrimination.” Poynter dubbed DeMasi a “queer, Brooklyn-based writer” with “they/she” pronouns.
DeMasi took aim at NBC’s Today show for daring to publish a November 2021, article on MSNBC anchor Katy Tur’s motherhood. The article used gendered language to talk about paid parental leave. “Tur, a straight cis-woman, calls herself a ‘mother,’ ‘mom,’ and ‘parent,’ referencing her husband several times,” DeMasi complained. “[Tur’s] usage of ‘moms’ implies that a birth-giver must always be a mother. After this distinction, Tur uses the term ‘partner,’ a gender-neutral and inclusive term, one that she could have substituted throughout her dialogue.” DeMasi pushed in her rebuke of Tur that normalizing leftist “gender-neutral” language in reporting could eventually lead to directly influencing the lawmaking process:
And guess what: the U.S. government was funneling tax dollars into Poynter’s “independent” apparatus the entire time.
Paging Elon Musk and DOGE!
Methodology: MRC Business used the search term “Poynter Institute for Media Studies” on USASpending.gov to keep the parameters as specific as possible to avoid tallying any unrelated spending.
