Chuck Ross at the Washington Free Beacon exposed the latest example of how government-funded media lines up neatly with liberal media. According to a federal spending database, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and other government news outlets, paid the Florida-based Poynter Institute to train reporters on "balanced and bias-free" reporting and storytelling.
The first and funniest part of this is Poynter is best known for PolitiFact, which is not balanced or bias-free in any way. The second funny part is humorless Poynter heads falsely accusing us of somehow trying to profit by creating a fake Poynter-mocking website.
Ross noted
Poynter may not be the best choice to teach journalists the art of unbiased and balanced reporting. While the organization bills itself as "nonpartisan," it is funded largely by wealthy Democratic donors George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Bill Gates, and Tim Gill, an LGBT activist whose husband is Biden’s ambassador to Switzerland.
In 2019, Poynter released a "blacklist" of conservative news organizations, including the Washington Free Beacon, deemed "unreliable."
The list also included Breitbart, CNSNews.com, Daily Signal, Daily Wire, Judicial Watch, LifeNews, LifeSiteNews, LifeZette, LiveAction News, the Media Research Center, PJ Media, Project Veritas, RedState, The Blaze, Twitchy, and the Washington Examiner.
Poynter's Tom Jones wrote on their website against CNN moving to the center, that airing both sides can be a terrible idea: "Sometimes, the other side shouldn’t be given a voice, particularly if that side’s argument is based on lies or pushes harmful agendas."
"Bias-Free" Poynter's Kelly McBride moonlights as the Public Editor of NPR, and she suggested to Brian Stelter that all conservative criticism of NPR can be dismissed as "disingenuous."
So it's not surprising that NPR -- now run by CEO John Lansing, who came over from this U.S. Agency for Global Media -- used NPR to wage war on his replacement, Trump-appointed Michael Pack, who wanted to root out leftist bias. As he touted all the outrage from the Left, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik took a moment to admit that Pack "pounced" on a story by VOA's Urdu service (for Pakistan) that simply promoted Joe Biden's comments to Muslim voters, promising to end Trump's "Muslim ban on Day 1," with Biden quoting "Hadith from the Prophet Muhammad instructs, whomever among you sees a wrong, let him change it with his hand." Folkenflik admitted: "Let's be clear -- by almost all accounts, the story was flawed. It lacked context or analysis and sounded like it was just boosting Biden."
Byron York at the Washington Examiner listed other controversies from Pack's brief tenure at AGM/VOA, including this:
During the 2016 campaign, the VOA Ukrainian Service translated actor Robert De Niro’s rant against Donald Trump in which De Niro called the Republican presidential candidate a punk, a dog, a pig, a bulls--- artist, and an idiot, adding, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” The Ukrainian Service posted the video, with translation and VOA logo, on its Facebook page, without any balancing material from Trump.
No one should really be surprised that a government-broadcasting agency under a Democrat president is going for "education" from fellow Democrats at the Poynter Institute, which is funded by leftists like George Soros and Craig Newmark. But no one should attach "balanced and bias-free" to it.
