In his much decried (from the left) op-ed before the 2024 election, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos explained why his newspaper needed to be “a credible, trusted, independent voice” in American news and not endorse a candidate for president. But a month after that op-ed was published, the paper seemed to still be violating the spirit of Bezos’s comments and vison for his newspaper by continuing to outsource content to left-wing lobbying groups and passing off their propaganda as reporting.
One of the larger offenders has been Consumer Reports, which NewsBusters has been documenting for some time.
Just last week, The Washington Post published an article written by Consumer Reports’s Kevin Loria targeting the use of plastics (a common target for environmentalists) titled: “What to know about microplastics, phthalates, BPA and PFAS.”
Loria warned: “Synthetic chemicals are everywhere — including in the food we eat, the water we drink, the products we use, the dust on our floors and the air that we breathe.” He wrote about why and how to avoid them, but didn’t propose any alternatives or solution.
Other recent articles outsourced to Consumer Reports included:
- How to reduce your exposure to plastics in food (and everywhere else)
- 6 misleading food label terms and what they really mean
- How to keep your kidneys working well
And despite their financial relationship with Consumer Reports, The Washington Post doesn’t disclose it when their actual reporters write stories about them.
“Consumer Reports is calling for the removal of Lunchables from school trays across the country after discovering concerning levels of lead and sodium and a potentially harmful chemical in their packaging in products sold in stores,” Lauren Weber wrote back in April. No were in the article does it mention that Consumer Reports and The Washington Post have a relationship.
At the bottom of articles written by CR, there are Copyright notices that purport “Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization…” But that’s not accurate.
InfluenceWatch warned: “While billing itself as a nonpartisan publication, Consumer Reports also maintains an advocacy and lobbying arm, the Consumers Union Action Fund, that advocates for left-leaning consumer policies on issues such as environmentalism, food and nutrition, and subsidizing the use of electric vehicles.”
In 2019, The New York Times praised left-wing Craigslist founder Craig Newmark for gifting $6 million to Consumer Reports.
Additionally, The Washington Post had partnered with The Examination this year to publish: “As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push ‘anti-diet’ advice.” At the very bottom of the over-2,500-word article, the newspaper insists, “The Examination, a new nonprofit newsroom specializing in global public health reporting.” But the discloser doesn’t mention The Examination’s left-wing political leanings.
The Examination’s own website boasted that they launched with the help of “Bloomberg Philanthropies and a grant from the Pulitzer Center. Our fiscal sponsor is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.”
NewsBusters previously reported on the insidiousness of left-wing Bloomberg Philanthropies. Meanwhile, InfluenceWatch says this about Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors:
The Rockefeller Foundation is a major funder of liberal advocacy and public policy efforts, providing major support to New America, a left-of-center think tank; the Urban Institute, a left-of-center hybrid civil rights group and policy advocacy organization; and the Funders Committee on Civic Participation, a project coordinating left-of-center advocacy on Census and electoral issues, among other left-of-center interests.
What’s happening at The Washington Post seems similar to what NewsBusters reported back in October about The New York Times publishing propaganda sourced and written by a web of left-wing special interests. But unlike NY Times, where they seemed to have been possibly duped into publishing, The Washington Post was willfully doing it.
