The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration wants reporters to take lessons on producing unbiased journalism from the Poynter Institute, a liberal journalism academy.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media paid Poynter $23,500 through March 31 for the class.
The agency’s networks include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Open Technology Fund.
Poynter receives funding from George Soros (what a shock), Bill Gates, Tim Gill (his husband is Biden’s ambassador to Switzerland), Craig Newmark, and Pierre Omidyar.
Poynter is not non-partisan:
In 2019, Poynter released a “blacklist” of conservative news organizations, including the Washington Free Beacon, deemed “unreliable.” Poynter retracted the list, called “UnNews,” after widespread criticism. Poynter’s fact-checking site, PolitiFact, often displays pro-liberal and anti-conservative bias. A Free Beacon analysis found that of PolitiFact’s fact-checks of politicians, 62 out of 86 targeted Republicans. The site has also retracted numerous fact-checks later deemed inaccurate, including one in 2020 that said the theory that the coronavirus emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, was “inaccurate and ridiculous.”In September 2020, Poynter executive Kelly McBride took part in a tabletop exercise held by the liberal Aspen Institute to plot how journalists, social media executives, and others would handle the hypothetical “hack and dump” of First Son Hunter Biden’s emails. The working group advised participants to treat any release of Biden documents with skepticism and to consult with other news organizations and intelligence officials before publishing stories based on the records.Poynter appeared to follow the advice after emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop appeared in October 2020, when the organization lauded news organizations for ignoring the story. “Hardly any media outlets, except for conservative ones, are giving the story any credence at all,” crowed one Poynter writer. McBride, the working group participant, is chair of Poynter’s Craig Newmark Center for Ethics & Leadership. Newmark, a major Joe Biden donor, contributed $5 million to Poynter and millions more to the Aspen Institute.
In March 2022, Republican lawmakers called out VOA “and its Persian affiliate” over its “biased coverage of Iran and partisan advocacy in favor of President Joe Biden”:
The lawmakers seek information pertaining to how and why the Biden administration rehired Sieg to lead VOA Persian. Sieg was fired by the Trump administration for “misusing / squandering / wasting nearly $1 million in agency funds, and lying about her credentials that claimed she held a doctorate from the Sorbonne,” according to the letter, which cites media reports about Sieg’s tenure at the agency.Whistleblowers say that under [Setareh Derakhshesh] Sieg’s leadership the Persian News Network became known as the “voice of Tehran, not the voice of America.” A 2016 report from the Office of Personnel and Management further disclosed that more than 60 percent of VOA Persian employees under Sieg’s leadership “believe that arbitrary action, personal favoritism, and coercion for partisan political purposes are tolerated at VOA Persian.”The Republican lawmakers want copies of “any and all records, including any audits, reports, memoranda, drafts, or emails (including those from personal email accounts) regarding concerns with Setareh Derakhshesh Sieg’s leadership of the VOA’s Persian News Network.”
Poynter has also pressured social media companies to weed out so-called disinformation. It told Facebook to ban President Donald Trump from the platform.
Poynter persuaded YouTube to moderate misinformation. YouTube and Google, its parent company, “gave a $13.2 million grant to Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network to help users identify misinformation.”
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