Fox News host Jesse Watters ripped apart the Associated Press (AP) for accepting funding from eco-extremist donors while still painting itself as an impartial news service.
Watters tore into the AP for accepting funding from leftist groups to expand its climate coverage during the Jan. 2 edition of Jesse Watters Primetime, while asking if media outlets have just effectively become “guns for hire.” After discussing just how powerful the AP is, Waters asked if the leftist outlet had been bribed.
He called out how, “they wouldn't call it a bribe, but the AP takes millions of dollars in grants from left-wing foundations. Don't you see it's not a bribe, it’s just a donation. Radical left-wing foundations donated millions to the Associated Press and the Associated Press agreed to pump up their climate change coverage. They said ‘Now, we’re going all in on climate change’ and hired 20 new reporters just to focus on global warming.”
In fact, the AP received $8 million from a number of leftist non-profits in 2022 and promised to expand its climate coverage. During the twelve months following the announcement, an MRC Business study found sixty-four articles where the AP pushed radical ESG and climate change alarmism talking points. The AP has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the radical Danish KR Foundation, which bemoans any resistance to the destruction of cheap American energy.
Watters added, “And do you think the global warming coverage is going to be balanced? It’s not. It only goes one way. Liberal money is literally getting global warming stories planted on the front page of America's papers.”
After listing glaring examples of bias in its coverage, Watters laid into the AP again. “The AP claims to be straight news. They say they’re unbiased. They just happen to gobble up a gargantuan sum of money from anti-oil groups that support population control. And even take foreign donations,” Watters rebuked.
Watters went on to hang the AP with it's own press release. “The AP claims it’s clean, but a VP at the company admitted in a press release that ‘Funders’ weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve. ‘This is a mutually beneficial arrangement.’ And the AP isn’t the only one. The New York Times, NPR — they take bribes, I mean grants from liberal foundations, too. A half a billion bucks is going to local news across the country. Is the news for sale? Kind of sounds like it”
Watters went on to dissect the leftist bias of legacy media coverage of environmentalist issues with Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger.
Shellenberger said that the Associated Press had “really sold out. It has become basically a propaganda platform rather than a place of journalism.” Shellenberger called the outlet out for promoting disinformation around the issue of whale deaths attributed to wind turbines.
Watters would also ask Shellenberger about struggling local news organizations turning into “nonprofits so they can receive donations from left-wing foundations” and whether they were becoming “guns for hire.” Shellenberger agreed, saying that “it’s a vicious cycle. They’re losing readers because nobody trusts them. And they take money from biased interests and then do biased stories and then they lose more public trust. It’s a downward spiral–for Associated Press and a lot of these news media outlets.”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact the Associated Press at 212-621-1500 and demand it stop acting as a mouthpiece for the climate change activist lobby.
