Public Universities Allegedly Giving Millions to Anti-Trump News Site
“For the latest fiscal year, this represents about 25 percent of the outlet’s funding.”
Is there not already enough anti-Trump content in the media? It’s everywhere.
The College Fix reports:
Public universities give $2 million to anti-Trump news site: analysis
A news site that promises “academic rigor” with “journalistic flair” has received millions of dollars from public universities while regularly running anti-Trump articles.
The Conversation is a decade-old news site that aims to take academic research and turn it into understandable news stories. It has a wide reach, explaining on its website that “the Associated Press distributes our content daily to thousands of newsrooms.”
However, while promising a “fact-based and editorially independent forum, free of commercial or political bias,” research by The College Fix shows that about half of the website’s coverage of Trump is negative with little to no positive. This coverage is underwritten by universities, many of them public, collectively contributing more than $2 million per year. For the latest fiscal year, this represents about 25 percent of the outlet’s funding.
The Fix reviewed 53 articles about President Donald Trump between Jan. 9, 2025, as he prepared to return to the White House, and Feb. 14, 2025. About 60 percent of the articles were considered negative toward Trump and none were explicitly positive.
The methodology involved close readings of each article, specifically looking for emotionally charged language that indicated a particular stance. Words like “dictator,” “authoritarian,” “bully,” or “fascist,” or direct comparisons of Trump to these concepts, were flagged as indicators of explicitly negative bias, moving beyond neutral journalism.
In fact, The Conversation itself highlighted its role on Jan. 28 of this year in educating the public about how “autocrats” operate, in reference to Trump.
“The Conversation U.S. has published several articles – many from Donald Trump’s first term as president – that spell out how autocrats, and those who want to be autocrats, behave and why,” Editor Jeff Inglis wrote, along with comments from six professors. The website does regularly run articles that compare Trump’s actions to authoritarianism.
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Comments
This has to be illegal. It certainly is offensive. This is unless the money is in the form of ads in which case I would think they could spend it better.
Clearly, universities contributing to this are receiving too much money from government, it is time to cut their funding by 10 x their contributions.
I’ve read some articles at The Conversation. They are moderately informative but the tone tends to be a bit pompous. I’m not surprised they are anti-Trump or that the higher ed folks are looking for ways to finance The ResistanceTM.
“Public Universities,” “giving millions.”
The academic budgeting process…
good!!!!
now maybe someone other that trump will take correct financial action against them
The problem with this “news” site is that while it takes science years to sort things out but this site wants to publish current “findings”. Take for example the article, “Pediatricians’ association recommends COVID-19 vaccines for toddlers and some older children, breaking with CDC guidance”. This is clearly a premature, at best, recommendation and probably is not addressing all-cause mortality. Of this “Reverse discrimination? In spite of the MAGA bluster over DEI, data shows white Americans are still advantaged”. These are opinion pieces dressed up as neutral news articles.