To start with right now in America there about 6 corporations which control approximately 90% of the media in America. Those companies are comcast, Disney, CBS, Viacom, News corporation and AT&T.
What this means is when you dig into the ownership structure of many of these news outlets in the United States you find the almost all of them are owned by one of these six corporations.
However some members of the ultra-wealthy in the united States have been using various strategies to buy news outlets outright or to quietly donate millions of Dollars in order to potentially get more favorable coverage.
For example Jeff bezos bought the Washington Post back in 2013. Of course there are many ways to look at this type of incident but the silver lining is that most people know that Jeff bezos owns the Washington Post. So people can take that into consideration when we reading the Washington Post. However when we come to Bill Gates unlike Jeff bezos who purchased a media outlet out right Bill Gates has taken a different route. According to a phenomenon research project conducted by Mintpress they shifted through over 30,000 grants and they found that the Gates Foundation has bankrolled hundreds of Media outlets to the tune of 319 million dollars.
Here are a list of some of those recipients:
Awards Directly to Media Outlets:
- NPR- $24,663,066
- The Guardian (including TheGuardian.org)- $12,951,391
- Cascade Public Media – $10,895,016
- Public Radio International (PRI.org/TheWorld.org)- $7,719,113
- The Conversation- $6,664,271
- Univision- $5,924,043
- Der Spiegel (Germany)- $5,437,294
- Project Syndicate- $5,280,186
- Education Week – $4,898,240
- WETA- $4,529,400
- NBCUniversal Media- $4,373,500
- Nation Media Group (Kenya) – $4,073,194
- Le Monde (France)- $4,014,512
- Bhekisisa (South Africa) – $3,990,182
- El País – $3,968,184
- BBC- $3,668,657
- CNN- $3,600,000
- KCET- $3,520,703
- Population Communications International (population.org) – $3,500,000
- The Daily Telegraph – $3,446,801
- Chalkbeat – $2,672,491
- The Education Post- $2,639,193
- Rockhopper Productions (U.K.) – $2,480,392
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting – $2,430,949
- UpWorthy – $2,339,023
- Financial Times – $2,309,845
- The 74 Media- $2,275,344
- Texas Tribune- $2,317,163
- Punch (Nigeria) – $2,175,675
- News Deeply – $1,612,122
- The Atlantic- $1,403,453
- Minnesota Public Radio- $1,290,898
- YR Media- $1,125,000
- The New Humanitarian- $1,046,457
- Sheger FM (Ethiopia) – $1,004,600
- Al-Jazeera- $1,000,000
- ProPublica- $1,000,000
- Crosscut Public Media – $810,000
- Grist Magazine- $750,000
- Kurzgesagt – $570,000
- Educational Broadcasting Corp – $506,504
- Classical 98.1 – $500,000
- PBS – $499,997
- Gannett – $499,651
- Mail and Guardian (South Africa)- $492,974
- Inside Higher Ed.- $439,910
- BusinessDay (Nigeria) – $416,900
- Medium.com – $412,000
- Nutopia- $350,000
- Independent Television Broadcasting Inc. – $300,000
- Independent Television Service, Inc. – $300,000
- Caixin Media (China) – $250,000
- Pacific News Service – $225,000
- National Journal – $220,638
- Chronicle of Higher Education – $149,994
- Belle and Wissell, Co. $100,000
- Media Trust – $100,000
- New York Public Radio – $77,290
- KUOW – Puget Sound Public Radio – $5,310
When you actually go through those grants you find the generally this money was directed towards issues that at least publicly Bill Gates has expressed an interest in.
The gates Foundation has also given nearly 63 million to charities closely aligned with the media outlets including nearly 53 million dollars to BBC media action, over 9 million to MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation, and $1 million to the New York Times neediest cases fund. While not specifically funding journalism donations to the philanthropic arm of a media player should still be noted. It almost goes without saying that such donations very likely influence how various Media outlets cover Bill Gates.
