Bill Gates is funding the media that is bullying people into following his lockdown orders and getting injected with his vaccine?

Is there any universe in which this isn’t one of the biggest “ethics in journalism” scandals ever?

BBC, NYT, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde… and so on. All getting Gates’ money, all preaching coronavirus lunatic hysteria, all pumping up the Gates vaccine.

This is reaching towards Gamergate levels of ethics in journalism, and truly leading me to ask questions about ethnics in journalism – if you catch my drift.

Columbia Journalism Review:

Last August, NPR profiled a Harvard-led experiment to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to “break the cycle of poverty.” According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes—a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.

If you squint as you read the story, you’ll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll also see the editor’s note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.

NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.

And that speaks to a larger trend—and ethical issue—with billionaire philanthropists’ bankrolling the news. The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times’ reporting on education. Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, that support his conservative politics. And the Rockefeller Foundation funds Vox’s Future Perfect, a reporting project that examines the world “through the lens of effective altruism”—often looking at philanthropy.

As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations—a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic—an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.

I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.

The foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders. A top-level finding: “There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review.” Notably, the study’s underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.

Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity. Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works. 

During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.

In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education to agriculture—a level of influence that has landed Bill Gates on Forbes’s list of the most powerful people in the world. The Gates Foundation can point to important charitable accomplishments over the past two decades—like helping drive down polio and putting new funds into fighting malaria—but even these efforts have drawn expert detractors who say that Gates may actually be introducing harm, or distracting us from more important, lifesaving public health projects.

…

The full scope of Gates’s giving to the news media remains unknown because the foundation only publicly discloses money awarded through charitable grants, not through contracts. In response to questions, Gates only disclosed one contract—Vox’s—but did describe how some of this contract money is spent: producing sponsored content, and occasionally funding “non-media nonprofit entities to support efforts such as journalist trainings, media convenings, and attendance at events.”

Over the years, reporters have investigated the apparent blind spots in how the news media covers the Gates Foundation, though such reflective reporting has waned in recent years. In 2015, Vox ran an article examining the widespread uncritical journalistic coverage surrounding the foundation—coverage that comes even as many experts and scholars raise red flags. Vox didn’t cite Gates’s charitable giving to newsrooms as a contributing factor, nor did it address Bill Gates’s month-long stint as guest editor for The Verge, a Vox subsidiary, earlier that year. Still, the news outlet did raise critical questions about journalists’ tendency to cover the Gates Foundation as a dispassionate charity instead of a structure of power. 

Five years earlier, in 2010, CJR published a two-part series that examined, in part, the millions of dollars going toward PBS NewsHour, which it found to reliably avoid critical reporting on Gates.

…

Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride said Gates’s money was passed on to media fact-checking sites, including Africa Check, and noted that she is “absolutely confident” that no bias or blind spots emerged from the work, though she acknowledged that she has not reviewed it herself.

I found sixteen examples of Africa Check examining media claims related to Gates. This body of work overwhelmingly seems to support or defend Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation, which has spent billions of dollars on development efforts in Africa. The only example I found of Africa Check even remotely challenging its patron was when a foundation employee tweeted an incorrect statistic—that a child dies of malaria every 60 seconds, instead of every 108.

Africa Check says it went on to receive an additional $1.5 million from Gates in 2017 and 2019.

“Our funders or supporters have no influence over the claims we fact-check…and the conclusions we reach in our reports,” said Noko Makgato, executive director of Africa Check, in a statement to CJR. “With all fact-checks involving our funders, we include a disclosure note to inform the reader.”

Earlier this year, McBride added NPR public editor to her list of duties, as part of a contract between NPR and Poynter. Since 2000, the Gates Foundation has given NPR $17.5 million through ten charitable grants—all of them earmarked for coverage of global health and education, specific issues on which Gates works.

NPR covers the Gates Foundation extensively. By the end of 2019, a spokesperson said, NPR had mentioned the foundation more than 560 times in its reporting, including 95 times on Goats and Soda, the outlet’s “global health and development blog,” which Gates helps fund. “Funding from corporate sponsors and philanthropic donors is separate from the editorial decision-making process in NPR’s newsroom,” the spokesperson noted.

…

If critical reporting about the Gates Foundation is rare, it is largely beside the point in “solutions journalism,” a new-ish brand of reporting that focuses on solutions to problems, not just the problems themselves. That more upbeat orientation has drawn the patronage of the Gates Foundation, which directed $6.3 million to the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) to train journalists and fund reporting projects. Gates is the largest donor to SJN—supplying around one-fifth of the organization’s lifetime funding. SJN says more than half of this money has been distributed as subgrants, including to Education Lab, its partnership with the Seattle Times.

SJN acknowledges on its website “that there are potential conflicts of interest inherent” in taking philanthropic funding to produce solutions journalism, which SJN cofounder David Bornstein elaborated on in an interview. “If you are covering global health or education and you are writing about interesting models,” Bornstein said, “the chances that an organization [you are covering] is getting money from the Gates Foundation are very high because they basically blanket the whole world with their funding, and they’re the major funder in those two areas.” Asked if he could provide examples of any critical reporting about Gates emerging from SJN, Bornstein took issue with the question. “Most of the stories that we fund are stories that look at efforts to solve problems, so they tend to be not as critical as traditional journalism,” he said. 

That is also the case for the journalism Bornstein and fellow SJN cofounder Tina Rosenberg produce for the New York Times. As contract writers for the “Fixes” opinion column, the two have favorably profiled Gates-funded education, agriculture, and global health programs over the years—without disclosing that they work for an organization that receives millions of dollars from Gates. Twice in 2019, for example, Rosenberg’s columns exalted the World Mosquito Project, whose sponsor page lands on a picture of Bill Gates.

…

My cursory review of the Fixes column turned up fifteen installments where the writers explicitly mention Bill and Melinda Gates, their foundation, or Gates-funded organizations. Bornstein and Rosenberg said they asked their editors at the Times to belatedly add financial disclosures to several of these columns, but they also cited six they thought did not need disclosure. Rosenberg’s 2016 profile of Bridge International Academies, for example, notes that Bill Gates personally helps fund the project. The writers argue that SJN’s ties are to the Gates Foundation, not to Bill Gates himself, so no disclosure is needed.

“This is a significant distinction,” Rosenberg and Bornstein stated in an email.

That’s a significant distinction, goy.

You see the distinction there – or are you too much of a dumb goy to see that distinction?

I sure wish the media would report on this massive scandal, but uh… that’s kind of the issue itself.

Anyone who has had an interest in politics over the years has always known that politicians feed stories, often false, to the press. One of the most infamous examples is Lyndon Johnson, who when running for congress told his campaign manager to spread a rumor to the press that his opponent was a “pig-fucker.”

The campaign manager said “Lyndon, you know he doesn’t do that!”

Johnson replied, “I know. I just want to make him deny it.”

There never was a dirtier politician than LBJ, and the DNC has practiced these techniques ever since, always refining the methods and going lower into the sewer.

Only one man can stop Crooked Hillary, but he needs our help tomorrow!

But now something new is happening. Instead of just making allegations and hoping the press will pick up on them and ask questions like “Your opponent says you’re a pig-fucker, is there any truth to this?” they actually feed questions to their fellow conspirators in the MSM, and then the reporters ask the questions as though they thought of them.

Washington Examiner:

Newly released emails from WikiLeaks suggest that the Democratic National Committee colluded with CNN in devising questions in April to be asked of then-Republican primary candidate Donald Trump in an upcoming interview.

In an email to DNC colleagues on April 25 with the headline “Trump Questions for CNN,” a DNC official with the email username DillonL@dnc.org asked for ideas for an interview to be conducted by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

“Wolf Blitzer is interviewing Trump on Tues ahead of his foreign policy address on Wed. … Please send me thoughts by 10:30 AM tomorrow.”

The sender of the email would seem to be DNC Research Director Lauren Dillon, (her twitter @llcdillon)  who was identified in previous reports of DNC emails released by WikiLeaks in July.

What we have here is one of the worst examples of the alleged “watchdog media” making a farce of the news – and reality itself – by creating the false illusion that these issues are just “out there,” and need to be addressed by the candidate because the people deserve to know, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

The unbiased media. Gotta love it!

It doesn’t take a psychologist to know that when a journalist asks these questions it gives them a lot more credibility than if they were asked by officials from the opponent’s campaign.

Several hours after the first email was sent, Dillon said in a follow-up email that the interview had been cancelled, “as of now,” but shared a list of questions thought up by the DNC that she said could be used for the next interview.

Some of the questions included: “Who helped you write the foreign policy speech you’re giving tomorrow? Which advisors specifically did you talk to? What advice did they give you? Did they give you any advice that you chose not to take?” Others explored Saudi Arabia’s alleged involvement in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a pre-preemptive strike against North Korea and court martials for members of the military who didn’t follow orders.

A separate email from Dillon that same day said “CNN is looking for questions” for then-GOP primary candidate Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and “maybe a couple on” former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

So it’s not even a passive thing on Dillon’s part, she is actively requesting the DNC to feed her “gotcha questions” to ask their political opponents.

Democrats advised CNN on interview questions for Donald Trump, according to new WikiLeaks release https://t.co/QTsrguZXWu

— The Independent (@Independent) November 7, 2016

It’s all so cozy, and so casual, and they would have gotten away for it if it weren’t for the courageous work of Hero Julian Assange!

This machine kills crooked reporting

As a kid growing up during the cold war, I remember everyone making fun of Soviet Russia’s state mouthpiece, Pravda. The joke was generally something like “those poor, stupid Russkys, they can never know the truth because their news is controlled by the commies!”

But who is controlling the West’s mainstream media?

Obviously, the left, or as Lenin called them “idiots to be used.”

Now that we realize this, the only remaining question is: Who are the idiots, and who is being used?

Kyle Rogers
CofCC
November 27, 2013

Daily Beast, Slate, Think Progress, and more other far-left news site all published articles claiming that black racial mob violence is a myth.

The extreme far-left staff at Daily Beast wrote that so-called “knockout game” violence by black mobs is “overblown panic over a crime wave that doesn’t exist.”

I guess this is why Daily Beast is losing millions of dollars per year. If your going to write fake news, it has to be really funny for people to actually want to read it.

Another high profile far-left website, Slate.com, wrote that black racial mob violence is “a myth.” They attacked the “right-wing media” for perpetrating this alleged myth.

Think Progress, which is run by a former Obama White House staffer, also joined in. That website claimed that black racial mob violence “might not be real.”

Actually, Think Progress published one element of the truth.

This website has repeatedly reported that the term “knockout game” started as a euphemism for black hate crime violence by the St. Louis, MO area media. The term “knockout game” was used to conceal the racial nature of the attacks. It was one of numerous regional euphemisms used by left-leaning reporters. In Philadelphia, media has commonly called it “flash mobs.” In England, the media has commonly called it “happy slapping.” In New York City, it has been called “wilding.” Using the phrase “attempted robbery,” is another common euphemism used by media all over the country to conceal black racial violence.

Think Progress correctly identifies the St. Louis media as creating the term “knockout game.” However, this is where they fly off the rails. Think Progress claims that “conservative” and “racist” websites popularized the term. In reality, the websites Think Progress is referring to have been fighting the media’s use of euphemisms such as “knockout game.”

We have been telling you straight up that the attacks are racially motivated mob violence by young blacks targeting non-blacks, especially whites. Think Progress flips reality upside down.

Think Progress claims conservatives are attributing values to the “knockout game” to distort public perception of the crimes. In reality, “knockout game” was coined as a propaganda euphemism by left-wing reporters to distort public perception of the crime! Conservatives are trying to strip off the layers of media propaganda.

What Think Progress, Daily Beast, and Slate are doing is tantamount to libel against the victims of black racial mob violence. This is no different that falsely claiming that a war crime never happened, because you support the party or ideology that perpetrated the war crime.

Josh Barry, of Camp Hill, Penn., wants to know why the president of the local teacher’s union thinks he’s a neo-Nazi after he complained about a classroom assignment that he believed to be biased.

“I’m Jewish and my wife is half-black, half-white,” Barry told me in a telephone interview. “I am the furthest thing from a neo-Nazi.”

Last week, his daughter’s eighth grade American History class at East Pennsboro Middle School was asked to analyze a New York Times story about the recent government shutdown.

Barry, who said he is a registered independent, read the story and then read a list of questions his daughter was required to answer and he immediately determined the assignment was “grossly slanted.”

The worksheet included questions like “To what issue do House Republican leaders insist on tying the federal budget?” and “Whom do you hold most responsible for the government shutdown?”

Barry fired off letters complaining about the assignment to his daughter’s teacher as well as the school board. But a few days later, he was shocked to discover that the head of the local teacher’s union was making calls around town – asking if he was a neo-Nazi.

The story was first reported on the website Examiner.com.

“It is safe to say that I am less than pleased with your non-objective approach to education when it pertains to current political discussions in the classroom,” he wrote. “You have a duty to be objective and your information you provided my child was not only grossly slanted but it is incompetently incomplete.”

He pointed out the questions in the lesson were loaded with political ideology and “pre-loaded with incorrect premises.”

The teacher responded by explaining that the lesson was not about politics — it was about literacy.

“The objective was not to promote any political agenda but to work on non-fiction reading skills,” the teacher wrote in an email obtained by Fox News.

Barry was not satisfied with the explanation.

“You will not indoctrinate my child,” he wrote. “If you are going to present articles with a  slant to one side you are morally and ethically required to present the opposing views, to give an opportunity for the student, your captive audience, to come to their own conclusions.”

Barry also reached out to the principal, who defended the teacher’s assignment and allegedly told him The New York Times story was not slanted.

On Friday the story took a bizarre turn.

A friend of Barry’s received a telephone call that he says came from Cydnee Cohen, the president of the East Pennsboro Education Association. Barry’s friend was a mutual friend of Cohen’s.

“We’re having some problems with a parent in our school district,” Cohen allegedly told Barry’s friend. “I would like to know — some of it seems like he’s a neo-Nazi.”

Barry’s friend, who he declined to name, sent Cohen a text message, refuting the charge.

Read More

When BBC employees aren’t raping little kids, they are making sure the Jew wars run smoothly.

Transcript:

“The following report contains disturbing images”

This is how the BBC website introduces a report by its BBC Panorama’s Syria correspondents Ian Pannell and Darren Conway on August the 30^th, 2013. The story contained a video, ostensibly shot near Aleppo, Northern Syria, by an anonymous school headmaster, and documenting the aftermath of a napalm attack on his school, supposedly perpetrated by the Syrian armed forces on August 26^th. According to the story, the “evil” forces of Bashar al-Assad, at a time when they had just about established their strategic advantage over the anti-government rebel forces and the foreign mercenaries they had been fighting for over two years, had found nothing better to do than attack a school, a target which presented no military interest whatsoever, with napalm – no less – just so the international media, and BBC Panorama in particular, could pick the story and broadcast it to Western audiences, in perfect timing to coincide with the British Parliament’s vote on the so-called “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, which was being pushed for by Prime Minister David Cameron, ostensibly to prevent precisely this kind of atrocities.

Were Assad’s forces really that stupid? Of course not.

It did not take long before several international commentators and observers pointed out the many implausibilities in the video and the story in general. Among them, Italian author Francesco Santoianni, showed how incongruent the whole story was, sparking the suspicion that the entire video might have been a fabrication. What follows is his analysis.

First of all, Napalm is a substance which generates temperatures between 800 and 1,200 degrees Celsius: in other words, no one has ever survived direct exposure. These physical characteristics mean that when Napalm was utilised in theatres of war, it was primarily used to defoliate areas covered with thick vegetation, and not urban areas, where white phosphorus is more often used, as the United States Armed Forces did in Falluja in 2005, and the Israeli Defence Forces did in Gaza in 2008. Nevertheless, the BBC expected its viewers to believe that Assad’s forces had employed the obsolete napalm on a school. Of course, a school with no teaching resources in sight, but somehow a swimming pool in the back. Oh, and a swing. Case closed: it MUST be a school. Although, we are told by our sources in Syria that the school year did not start until September 15: so what exactly were all those people doing in a locked-up school?

In the video, we were also shown a pair of winter shoes – not clear how they ended up there: it was after all August – and a woman’s shoe. Was all this footwear worn by the victims? How did it remain intact?

Almost every British newspaper which reported the story informed us that “The attack killed more than ten pupils and left many more seriously injured”: and yet, despite the warning against graphic images, we are not shown the bodies, or the grieving parents.

There is – to be sure – a child, seeing shaking in one scene. His skin is actually intact, and so is his hair: certainly not consistent with napalm, or anything like it. And what is the white stuff on his body? Surely, it cannot be the chemical fired from the fighter jets – that wouldn’t have left his hair intact – therefore we must assume that it’s some kind of first-aid ointment, of sorts? Whoever administered it could not even be bothered to remove the watch from the kid’s wrist. In fact, no one seems to be attending this child: the only person with some kind of interest is the cameraman.

Somewhat less convincing is a couple, seen in the video going through the well-rehearsed motions of cursing in Arabic. There is a problem though: the woman’s face is covered in that same white stuff: and the couple has just arrived to the so-called hospital, so it cannot be “some kind of first-aid ointment”. It must be the “napalm-like chemical”. We are expected to believe that a “napalm-like” chemical, fired from a fighter jet, somehow ended up sprayed on this woman’s face leaving her veil intact?

We also see what is supposed to be a makeshift hospital. On the floor, five adult males are shaking – three of them still have their clothes perfectly intact, of course – although one of them at some point stands up and walks off, having presumably decided that he’s had enough.

By the way, we keep seeing paramedics from the so-called charity Hand in Hand for Syria supposedly handling chemical burns victims without any gloves on – but wearing gas masks, for some reason. And even a dust mask: what’s that? The woman in question is of course Dr. Rola, the star of this video [segment introducing Dr. Rola]

Then, of course, we get the obligatory segment showing a distraught local, venting his powerless rage at the International Community, invariably denounced as inefficient and perennially locked in futile negotiations. The Public Relations rules dictate that such a character must be somehow connected with the tragedy (no details given), and that, when he addresses the camera, he must not speak in the local language – which would only sound like terrorist gibberish to most Western audiences: rather, he has to produce an impromptu speech in an impeccable English, so impeccable to the point of sounding scripted and well-rehearsed, or even read off a prompter. After all, these PR rules did work for Libya.

All these absurdities were exposed almost immediately after the release of the video on the BBC’s channels. So why talk about them again now?

Well, one reason is that the BBC itself, presumably after receiving dozens of complaints from viewers who didn’t appreciate their intelligence being insulted, decided to salvage what little they could from the story, and delete the biggest blooper of all. And this is where it gets creepy. Because what follows leads one to believe that this was not the case of the BBC naively buying into a story packaged and sold to them by the anti-Assad PR machine (it wouldn’t have been the first time), but rather that the BBC itself actively created a product that was intended to steer the public opinion towards a more interventionist position. For such a product, there can only be one definition: propaganda.

What happened was that Human Rights activist Craig Murray, among others, realised that, between the first and the second release of the video, something was different in the lines spoken by Dr. Rola. Listen to the original one, containing references to napalm.

The reference to napalm has disappeared in the redacted version.

Both audio clips have the same identical sound quality: of course, there is very little that cannot be accomplished with the kind of technology that’s available to the British Broadcasting Corporation, thanks in part to the fact that Dr. Rola was wearing her exaggerated dust mask, which conveniently did away with all the challenges involved in dubbing, lip-synch, etc. However, the redacted audio clip must have been added at a much later stage, for reasons we have just explored, which prompts us to ask: how can we even be sure that the original audio clip was not scripted and recorded in a studio? Also, Robert Stuart, writing on the Media Lenses Forum, points out that Dr Saleyha Ahsan, featured in the new version of the video, is a filmmaker with a military background: a former Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and a freelance current affairs journalist. Was she involved in packaging this product?

The background of Dr. Rola herself is also interesting. Of course, she’s no stranger to the BBC:here she can be seen appearing on a political programme, advocating for the bombing of Syria.

Also of interest is the fact that the Charity Hand in Hand for Syria, where Dr. Rola supposedly works as a volunteer medic, happens to sport a flag of the French colonial era on its logo – a flag now adopted by the Anti-Assad Coalition. This is an affiliation which the BBC did not see fit to disclose to its viewers.

For those who still believe in whatever is left of the BBC’s reputation for upholding the mediatic standards of fair and balanced reporting, here is some useful information about another so-called “charity”. The BBC Media Action (formerly the BBC World Service Trust), with its catchy slogan: “Transforming Lives through Media around the World”.

In an interesting report available on its website, BBC Media Action explains: “In 2008, BBC Media Action launched its three-year project ‘Socially Responsible Media Platforms in the Arab World’ with funding from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Syria News was the official Syrian partner, endorsed by the Ministry of Information on behalf of the BBC. The project aimed to set up an interactive online training platform, the Ara2 [opinions] Academy, for Syria’s journalistic and blogging communities, creating networks between the two. This reflected the changing status of bloggers in the regional media and responded to their aspiration to be seen as credible social commentators. The project also supported Syria News as an example of a sustainable independent media organisation, with managerial staff taking part in study tours in London and in business development training. BBC Media Action did not work with a local partner on blogger training, as this could have alienated and excluded parts of the blogging community. Instead, the BBC collaborated with an informal network of bloggers from across the country and recruited mentors for the distance learning system (the Ara2 Academy) who were trained at workshops in London and Damascus”.

One could not have wished for a clearer description of a Trojan horse, funded by one government in order to destabilize another. Just to go over the timeline again: the three-year BBC Action Syria Project started in 2008. The “Syrian uprising” began in February 2011.

The Dutch media has exploded with fake claims that members of Geert Wilder’s PVV are using a “Nazi symbol, or “Nazi linked flag.”

The claim is completely false and none the media outlets are even showing what the so-called “Nazi linked flag” even is.

The symbol in question is the “Princes’ Flag,” which has been used on again off again by Dutch people since 1587. It was originally used on Dutch ships as a naval ensign.

Two PVV members of the European Parliament flew the flag in their offices. The media is calling it a “Nazi linked flag” based on the fact that one of numerous political groups to use it over a period of hundreds of years was a pro-Nazi Dutch party in the 1930s.

The flag is also the basis for the flags of New York City, Albany, and Nassau County in New York. The flag was also used by the Dutch East India Trading Company.

The bogus accusations by the far-left media simply demonstrate how desperate they are.