Following Tim Schwab’s investigation of financial conflicts of interest at the New York Times, Leonie Haimson describes her efforts to persuade editors at the Newspaper of Record to address a serious ethics issue at the New York Times.
Timothy Schwab has written a series of must-read pieces about the overriding influence of the Gates Foundation on public policy, and how the Foundation influences the reporting of the issues they are involved in, in part by helping to bankroll the media .
His latest analysis, published in Columbia Journalism Review, recounts how in 2016, I emailed the NY Times twice to ask why several “Fixes” columns written by their reporters Tina Rosenberg and David Bornstein hyping various Gates Foundation education projects and investments had no acknowledgements that they themselves received salaries from the non-profit they co-founded called Solutions Journalism Network, which is heavily subsidized by the Foundation.
My second email to the Times, quoted by Schwab, pointed out how “Having a NYT columnist who is funded by Gates who regularly hypes controversial Gates-funded projects without any disclosure of conflict of interest could be compared to running columns on the environment by someone who runs an organization funded by Exxon/Mobil.”
Yet I received no response of any kind. The 2016 blog post that I linked to in my emails pointed out how the columns by Rosenberg and Bornstein on Gates grantees were biased, with few if any quotes from critics, nor any mention of readily available studies showing that the Gates-funded programs they were promoting had been shown to be ineffective or had a negative impact on educational quality.
The Gates Foundation provides millions of dollars to many journalistic enterprises, which Schwab argued in an earlier 2020 piece helps to explain the kid glove treatment the Foundation has received over the last twenty years. The media outlets that get funding from Gates and regularly cover his education projects and investments include Chalkbeat, Hechinger Report, The 74, and Education Post, as well as K12 school reporting by NPR, Seattle Times, and others. The Foundation also helps to fund the Education Writers Association, which frequently features speakers friendly to various policies favored by Gates.
Gates’ support of Solutions Journalism Network started in 2011, when Bornstein and Rosenberg won a $100,000 Gates Foundation “challenge” competition “to build the first Wiki-style platform that packages solutions-journalism (specifically NYTimes Fixes columns) into mini-case-studies for educators around the world to embed in, and across, the curriculum,” in collaboration with Marquette University.
In 2012, Tom Paulson, a former Seattle Times reporter with called Humanosphere questioned this arrangement. As explained by a colleague, “Paulson’s fear was that Solutions Journalism was just a fancy way to disguise the desire (by donors, NGOs and others) for success stories, for promoting particular products or agendas.”
In response, Bornstein insisted to Paulson that neither he nor Rosenberg had received any financial benefit from this grant, as “NY Times prohibits them from accepting grant money (for work done at NYTimes) and they are unpaid collaborators with Marquette, allowing them to repurpose their columns and to help them think through the process.”
Yet whatever reservations the NY Times may have had about allowing them to receive money from Gates seems to have quickly disappeared. In 2013, Bornstein and Rosenberg incorporated Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), and the next year, the organization received $600,000 from the Gates Foundation, from which they paid themselves salaries of $75,000 each. At the same time, they continued their regular “Fixes” columns for the NY Times/
The SJN 990 for that year reports that Bornstein worked 55 hours per week for the organization as its Chair, Treasurer and CEO, and Rosenberg 40 hours a week as its Vice President, which one would think left them little time to work as NY Times reporters, though together they published at least twelve NY Times “Fixes” columns that year.
Since that time, the organization has raised $7.3 million in total from Gates Foundation. Their most recent Gates grant was $1.7 million in August 2020, and Bornstein and Rosenberg now receive six-figure salaries from the organization,according to its latest 990.
Haimson goes on to describe the indifference of editors at The New York Times, which has been quick, in other cases, to require its writers to disclose financial conflicts and/or terminate them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For the most part, the media treat Gates as if he’s some kind of prophet/saint/savant/guru and expert on all things from soup to nuts.
Bill Gates spends many millions on the media to produce the illusion that he is a saint/genius/guru.
Sadly it appears that it was money well spent. Books have been written about Bill Gates successful manipulation of the media in creating an image. A Wall Street Journal article from 1998, The year that his company, Microsoft, was embroiled in an anti-trust case that exposed the abuse of power that Bill Gates exercised in dominating an industry; yet, he was and still is revered by decision makers at the corporate level:
1988 Wall St. journal article gushes Tomorrow’s Captains of Industry Rate Gates Higher Than Mom
“The only person more of the students look up to than Mr. Gates is their father. But he beat out mom, Warren Buffett, Jesus Christ and the pope.”
Three decades later Bill (Who had by then added added a partner in crime: his one time general manager of information products at Microsoft, Melinda French [Gates]) was still near and dear to the tiny hearts of our business leaders.
Fortune 2019: “Bill and Melinda Gates Top Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders List”
I am proud to say that Bill Gates told a journalist that I was his “chief adversary,” a calumny that thrilled me.
For most of us, it takes years of study to accumulate knowledge. Not today’s wealthy. All it took for them was the removal of an income tax that took 94% of everything earned over $400,000 dollars.
Identified first with knowledge, then later, as with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, wisdom, those we depend upon to dispense facts, such as reporters, gather around money as students gathered around Socrates.
Individualism as a natural outgrowth of contributions to community is pushed aside by among other things, Ayn Rand’s virtue of selfishness.
From the valley in the shadow of John Galt, out crawl those such as Bill Gates, who, on occasion, I must admit, mouths that the rich should pay higher taxes, yet continues to obscenely profit from the actions of those to whom he makes political contributions.
Proud you should be, Diane, to be cast as Bill Gates’ most troublesome adversary. If you have one of those dolls, continue to stick pins it it, if not continue to make make him think you do.
Congratulations!
The Fog Lifter
The Billyanaire was beaten
By lady with a blog
Who managed to defeat him
By dissipating fog
…although I seriously doubt Gates even recognizes it.
But I bet Melinda does.
Actually , Bill Gates’ biggest adversary is Bill Gates.
My respect for Melinda increased immeasurably when I read she was divorcing Bill.
Come to think of it, maybe Malinda is now his chief adversary.
I am proud to just be a regular visitor to the website of someone that Bill Gates told a journalist was his “chief adversary”.
Sickening. Money talks; bs walks.
Wish Bill Gates would just GO AWAY as take his “hair-brained” ideas with him. Gates doesn’t know what he doesn’t know or understand.
Not related, but prompted by your comment.
I shall always think of Trump’s policies, as coming from “hair-trained” ideas.
In all his endeavors, Bill Gates has exercised dominance over the news media for decades. It was chronicled in this book:
Feeding the Media Beast: An Easy Recipe for Great Publicity
By Mark Mathis
P.112: “In September 1998, now defunct Brill’s Content published an exhaustive investigative piece on Gates. It was called “the making of Bill, how Bill Gates PR machine helped make him master of the universe. And why it’s failing him now.“ In the article, reporter Elizabeth Leslie Steven’s detailed Microsoft’s obsession with the news media. One conclusion of the story was that the methodical manipulation of reporters was a significant factor in the software manufacturer’s astounding success. Gates learned early on that making journalists lives easier is the key component of winning positive publicity and ultimately greater market share. Stevens quoted David Kirkpatrick, a member of fortunes magazines board of editors, who said, “Microsoft doesn’t control coverage in a conventional way.” Instead the company does it “through massive attention to reporters.”
Shouldn’t there be some analysis in ed reform of the failure of the Common Core?
Are we just going to bury this massive, hugely expensive experiment that failed?
They all promoted it. The same exact ed reform echo chamber members who sold it all retain their jobs and get promoted and we just never discuss it again? Is there a recorded instance where any of the ed reform leaders have ever been held accountable in any way?
They’re all pushing universal vouchers now. Given their poor performance with the Common Core, should the US public again invest billions of dollars in their latest “reinvention” with absolutely no analysis or evaluation of any kind?
The Common Core failed. Its architect, David Coleman, claimed that the CCSS would raise test scores and close achievement gaps so that all students would have the same high test scores. None of these claims came true. NAEP scores for the poorest students went down.
Vouchers are already a failure. We know from multiple studies that voucher schools have a high attrition rate and kids lose ground academically when attending voucher schools.
NAEP scores suffer all the same invalidity issues identified and proven by Noel Wilson. They are as vain and illusory as the rest of the standards and testing malpractices.
No one who was involved is ever going to acknowledge that it failed, that is for certain.
The great thing about America is that you can screw things up catastrophically (Common Core, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, 2008 financial meltdown, etc) and continue to be in high demand with Congress and the media as an expert.
And, of course Vietnam, for which Henry Kissinger is the poster child “expert”
Henry “Power is the great aphrodisiac” Kissinger’s main problem was that the head he used for thinking was not on top of his neck.
It completely horrified me that journalists would continue to call on war criminal Kissinger. If there were any justice in the world, he would have ended up in the dock at the Hague.
They are now also treating George Dumbya Bush as some sort of elder statesman.
It does not matter how wrong these people were or how many people died because of them.
Our media organizations have a very short memory, if they indeed have any memory at all.
Or what is far more likely, they simply don’t want anyone to remember, because they were themselves cheerleaders for the policies of Bush, Kissinger and others.
Kissinger is undoubtedly the inspiration for Jabba the Hutt.
“Power if the great aphrodisiac!”
Jowla the Butt
It’s actually hilarious that the news organizations are now providing Kissinger a forum to give his ” brilliant” analysis of what went wrong in Afghanistan.
Pay no attention to that man behind the Vietnam curtain.
Jowls are the great aphrodisiac!
Far from being a “realist” (advocate of Realpolitik), by and large, Kissinger has entertained and acted on delusional ideas that had nothing whatsoever to do with reality (eg, the idea that carpet bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos would lead to Vietcong “surrender”). The man was and still is essentially a DENiER of reality (even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that contradicts his position) which rarely (if ever) leads to the “planned” (to say nothing of “desirable”) outcome.
https://www.salon.com/2015/11/10/henry_kissingers_genocidal_legacy_partner/
I resent how we’re always ordered to be “grateful” to the billionaires.
I’m not on their payroll like the rest of these people. I don’t accept that I must be “grateful” to unelected, unaccountable people who direct so much of what happens in my country. No.
Gush over them all you want but don’t bring the rest of us into your career plans.
Obama gushed so much over Gates, he awarded Gates the “Medal of Freedom.” Now, there’s irony. A charitable plutocracy operates in opposition to democracy. Billionaires get tax credits and write offs to socially engineer the projects they support while at the same time ignoring what people want….like public education.
I believe that was a typo and that what he actually received was The Medal of Fiefdom ..or maybe Thiefdom
Obama also gushed over Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, whose banks (JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) perpetrated billions of dollars worth of fraud on the public and were directly involved in bringing the world economy to the brink in 2007.
Though the banks were fined for their “indiscretions”, the Obama administration declined to prosecute the individual perpetrators.
Where people got this notion that folks like Obama give a damn about ordinary Americans is anyone’s guess, but it’s pure myth.
Bill Gates is a perfect example of: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” – Lord Acton
Good work, Diane! I didn’t know you had hounded the Times about this corruption.
I didn’t hound The NY Times about their lack of ethics. Leonie Haimson did. She is relentless in demanding journalistic integrity and public transparency and honesty from government agencies.
Oops! Good work, Leonie!
Gates buys a lot of PR. You have to do that if everything you create a) stinks or b) does a lot of damage. Fortunately for him, he lucked onto a money machine early on (and I definitely mean that he “lucked onto” it). He became the richest man in the world via dumb luck followed by utter ruthlessness, but ofc, his PR machine as turned that into “via his vision and genius.”
To see for yourself what might well be the ultimate distillation of toadying, tune into the Netflix “documentary” Inside Bill’s Brain, if, that is, you have a strong stomach. Only the half-hour fawning fest (over Jabba the Trump) that Mikey Pence the Dense indulged in at one of the cabinet meetings comes even close to this. If there were an Academy Award for obsequiousness, for sychophantic, fawning, meretricious kow-towing, Inside Bill’s Brain would deserve it. Probably the most extreme example of this of all time. It’s so fawning and it crosses the line into hilarious. In other words, it is self-parodying. It’s the King Lear of puff pieces, in its own way, a masterwork.
Here’s an idea: make the blood suckers pay a LOT MORE in taxes.
cx: It’s so fawning that it crosses the line into unintentional comedy.
You know what, I could have sworn taking bribes was against some sort of law. I respect the heck out of Leonie, on par with even Diane, but why does she have to be the one investigating crimes such as bribing public officials and the press? Shouldn’t the FBI be doing that job? Its job? Why is the New York Times editorial board not in handcuffs? Why are these shmucks able to say publicly they’re perfectly comfortable with accepting money to support anti-democratic ideas and actions? Do we even have a government?
Good question!
Do we even have a government? Well, we have long had two governments, one for ordinary people and one for the wealthy and their sycophants.
It used to be that the elite tried to hide their contempt for our laws and principles (and for the rest of us), the but now they wear it out on their sleeve like a badge of honor.
Trump was just the most vocal example of this who happened to have a different political slant than the NY Times, but make no mistake, these elite all have nothing but contempt for us “ordinary” people.
I have to add how engrossing and sickening reading and clicking all the links are. Bill Gates is beyond description.