Fake News “Journalism” Brought to You by George Soros

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism is bought and paid for by Big Philanthropy to pump out more biased, partisan “news”

The legacy media may have murdered its own credibility, but there’s no shortage of money for churning out new left-wing activists posing as journalists to keep the charade going.

Case-in-point: Columbia University, ground zero for the pro-Hamas riots astroturfed by professional agitators in June to punish Jewish students and anyone insufficiently anti-Semitic. Columbia hosts the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, which prints screeds against everyday Americans skeptical of Big Misinformation, Inc.

“People trust themselves more than they trust the news. They shouldn’t,” sneers a recent column attacking normally people for misbelieving the fact-free “fact-checkers.”

One avenue journalists might use to encourage trust in the biased media, that article suggests, is to self-report on “the[ir] organization’s approach to revenue.” We think that’s an interesting idea—so we did it for them.

No Freedom of the Press

The Tow Center receives millions of dollars from the Left’s top foundations, including the Ford Foundation and billionaire mega-donor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. We’ve similarly traced 7-figure sums from the Knight, MacArthur, and Warren Buffett-backed NoVo Foundations, which have never met a far-left cause they didn’t want to throw money at.

The Knight Foundation, for instance, is a major backer of ProPublica, whose biased exposés Restoration News covered in a 2023 deep-dive. In July, the foundation launched a $7 million “election hub” with the Associated Press—the largest purveyor of biased news in the world—to push tinted local stories and “fortify election integrity” (read: save democracy from voters).

The Ford, Knight, and MacArthur Foundations pledged a combined $500 million last September to conquer local news with Press Forward, an initiative “to seed . . . more reporters in underserved communities” ahead of the 2024 election, code for cities brimming with likely Democratic voters.

(RELATED: ProPublica—Attack Arm of the Democratic Party)

This is part of the Left’s misinformation war to kill the freedom of the press by stifling any news outlet that doesn’t report favorable coverage of the Democratic Party.

The Tow Center, for instance, publishes a naughty list of partisan local news outlets… all but two of which are right-leaning. Missing from that list: States Newsroom network, which operates local online papers in 38 states with a $13 million budget, more than 4 times the size of the right-leaning Star News Digital Media network.

States Newsroom was spawned by the multi-billion-dollar Arabella Advisors “dark money” machine paid for by shadowy donors which today passes itself off as a trusted, middle-of-the-road news source. A 2019 job posting, however, labeled the group a “progressive political journalism startup”—something the network now wishes to hide.

What it couldn’t hide is the $1 million donation the network received in 2020 from the Wyss Foundation, the far-left philanthropy of controversial Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss created to support Democrat causes in America, since Wyss is not a U.S. citizen. Wyss himself attempted to build his own media empire in 2021 by bidding on Tribune Publishing, the news conglomerate that owns scads of major papers like the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, and Orlando Sentinel.

(RELATED: Hansjorg Wyss, the Left’s Most Secretive Mega-Donor)

But the Tow Center’s most interesting donor is the one responsible for endowing the center itself with some $5 million since 2010. The Tow Foundation boasts that it takes “action against racist, violent systems” with support for Black Lives Matter:

The Tow Foundation stands in solidarity with the Black community and its allies to dismantle the systems that have contributed to the racial injustice and deep, violent oppression in our country. We encourage our peers in philanthropy to do the same, using both their words and actions. Staying silent is not an option. The Tow Foundation is committed to highlighting the work of our grantee partners in support of a more safe, just and equitable society for all.

“We must address the harm caused by unfair systems and work to build new ones grounded in equity and justice,” the foundation says of its “commitment to racial equity and justice.”

We invest in work at the policy-change level to end mass incarceration, mass criminalization, and other harmful systems. We also fund direct service organizations working to support and empower individuals and families who have been impacted by these systems.

In practice, that means funneling 6-figure grants to “advocacy, organizing, and coalition-building” organizations, like Columbia University’s Center for Social and Institutional Change, which aims to “reduc[e] mass incarceration” and create “anti-racist, equitable and inclusive institutions.”

The Tow Foundation similarly funds leftist groups which “connect, mobilize, and enact change”—like the Connecticut Mirror, a “nonpartisan” local newspaper, or Connecticut Public Radio, which received a Tow Foundation grant for a “Tow Fellow for Youth, Race and Justice [to] cover stories that are . . . told in ways that perpetuate harmful narratives about youth of color and crime.”

The Tow Foundation describes these grant recipients as “advocacy, organization, and coalition-building [groups] dedicated to equity and justice” and “expand[ing] civic participation”—that is, voting.

One such group is the Brennan Center for Justice, a rabidly “progressive” think tank for radically transforming America’s election system to elect a permanent Democratic majority in Congress. That means abolishing the Electoral College, gutting free speech rights, and even defunding the police. Per the Tow Foundation:

This grant provides support for the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, which proposes bold new criminal justice reforms, produces essential data and advocates for national, state and local justice reform. Current priorities include increasing police and prosecutor accountability and continuing to work with law enforcement leaders to advance sentencing reform at the state and local levels.

Enacting policy change isn’t supposed to be the job of the media (or tax-exempt foundations, for that matter). Yet that’s exactly what the foundation sees its support of “nonpartisan” journalism achieving—partisan outcomes.

Americans aren’t fools. They don’t trust the “mainstream” media because the media isn’t trustworthy, and activists won’t change that.

(READ MORE: The Media Spin Behind the Buzz Words)