California Democrats are engaging in unprecedented efforts to drastically limit freedom of the press with legislation such as Assembly Bill 1821 to stonewall requests for public records and Assembly Bill 2624 to criminalize investigations of social services fraud even while the state uses non-disclosure agreements signed by elected officials to block reporting on its corruption.
Now the same political machine that blocks journalists and prosecutes is promising to aid journalism by handing out over $18 million in grants. The idea of corrupt government officials buying off newspapers and creating a friendly media is as old as Tammany Hall. Trading government ads for favorable coverage was a staple of 19th century media corruption, but the 21st century version of it has a new non-profit twist with government and tech money being funneled by partisan groups to buy reporters and newspapers, and control their coverage.
Applications for the California Civic Media Program’s $18.6 million pot will close in late August. The program, funded by California taxpayers and Google, will dispense up to $20,000 per journalist and as much as $250,000 per media outlet. In an environment where newspapers, and radio and TV stations are struggling to survive that could make a big difference.
But the agenda is not hard to spot. The draft mission statement for the program states that “the Civic Media Program aims to empower people to participate in civic life.”
The cash will be administered by the James B. McClatchy Foundation, a leftist media group focused on radicalizing the more conservative Central Valley, condemning ICE and working to build a “multiracial, multilingual democracy in the Central Valley” through mobilizing the “momentum of community-powered civic non profits during a pivotal election year.”
The McClatchy Foundation was proposed by former Clinton White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, the directress of California’s ‘journalism’ initiative, because of its focus on “equity” and “inclusion”. McClatchy’s Democracy Fund brags of a “Black Men Vote campaign” that “combined community events and strategic media to transform overlooked neighborhoods into active civic hubs, resulting in higher turnout among registered voters”.
The California Civic Media Program rules emphasize that the funds will be directed towards reporting on “inequalities among underserved communities” and “reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy”. This isn’t journalism: it’s a minority media voter turnout operation.
Despite record corruption in California government, with 576 officials convicted of corruption in the last decade, and current investigations targeting the governor, his former chief-of-staff, and the attorney general, none of the funds are being directed towards investigating corruption. But that’s only natural since it’s a corrupt governor who is under investigation and a corrupt legislature that blocked public disclosure of the money it was spending on defense lawyers that will be disbursing millions of dollars to the media and buying reporters at $20,000 a head.
What’s in it for Google? California Dems had blocked Assembly Bill 886: The Journalism Preservation Act which would have forced Google to pay out far more than $10 million to the media. Participants in the push included some of the same media figures sitting on the advisory board of the California Civic Media Program including the general counsel of the LA Times.
This would appear to be a massive conflict of interest in what is already a corrupt mess.
Assembly Bill 886 had been opposed by Free Press, a media organization founded by Robert McChesney, a Marxist who had argued that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be a part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist political economy”, arguing that most of the money would go to FOX News and other popular media, and that it should be replaced by something like the California Civic Media Program.
That’s the “revolutionary program” of state-funded media to overthrow the capitalist economy.
The model was the California Local News Fellowship, which intersects with Free Press, and which uses the UC Berkeley School of Journalism to spend $15 million a year in taxpayer money funding “local journalism” in “under-represented communities from Humboldt to the Imperial Valley”. Lest there be any doubt whatsoever that this represents absolute state media, the introduction claimed that its activist reporters “like our state lawmakers” are “holding power to account, bearing witness and documenting the stories of those who can be overlooked.”
California’s heroic “state lawmakers”, at least those yet to be indicted, funded more of the same.
Even while California businesses are fleeing the state at record rates due to the corruption and mismanagement of the political leadership, Gov. Gavin Newsom exploited the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) to set up a multi-million dollar fund to subsidize a voter turnout operation in Republican areas under the guise of helping local papers.
The other partner for the California project will be Journalism Funding Partners, a left-of-center organization that works with left-wing foundations to parachute reporters to promote its political agenda into local newspapers. For example, The Raleigh News and Observer announced that JFP and two foundations had embedded Lily Carey, a ‘climate change reporter’, into the paper where she promptly filed an article warning about the environmental impact of a data center.
The media is already heavily biased leftward and there’s nothing new about politically skewed non-profit journalism such as operations like ProPublica, which allow donors to fund hit pieces on political targets like supreme court justices, but political non-profits embedding activist reporters into established newspapers is a further corruption of what’s left of the media.
Nonprofits like Journalism Funding Partners, which was selected by Google to administer $10 million of the California media fund, are out to radicalize and corrupt newspapers while fundamentally changing their function from reporting to advocacy while in the process creating new activist fields such as ‘Climate Change Reporter’ or ‘First Amendment Reporter’.
Angele Latham, billed as the country’s “first-ever First Amendment reporter”, was embedded by JFP and the Freedom Forum into The Tennessean where she files ‘stories’ complaining that professors who defended Charlie Kirk’s murder were fired. There’s been no parallel coverage of leftist restrictions on free speech making the ‘First Amendment’ part into a partisan farce.
The work of the California Civic Media Program and Journalism Funding Partners poses a threat to the First Amendment as government officials collude to restrict and criminalize journalism that holds them accountable while offering $20,000 a piece to ‘journalists’ who will promote their political agenda. Liberal journalists used to warn about the separation of media and state, but now that the state funds them, they eagerly promote the rise of a state media.
From the LBJ administration’s Great Society relic of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to the Obama administration’s decision to allow the use of Voice of America programming domestically, state media has been a longtime left-of-center project that threatens the press.
California desperately needs journalism: instead there are a handful of reporters like Ashley Zavala at KCRA still challenging elected officials on their corruption and abuses even as the unchallenged ruling party aims to spend millions of dollars buying up reporters and outlets.
What kind of journalist will sell him or herself to the state for $20,000? We’ll find out soon.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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