Tim Schwab, an independent journalist, has written several articles about the Gates Foundation and its canny strategy of subsidizing the media to assure favorable coverage. In his latest article, he describes how the New York Times has shielded two journalists with financial ties to the Gates Foundation. The Times apparently has a double standard. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed reported that Times’ columnist David Brooks was receiving a salary from the Aspen Institute while writing glowing articles about the Aspen Institute’s programs. In response, the Times required Brooks to give up his salary and retrospectively added an acknowledgement of his connection to several columns that lauded the Aspen Institute.
But for some inscrutable reason, the editors at the Times have ignored complaints about the financial relationship between the two other Times writers and the Gates Foundation.
Schwab writes:
Last summer, buried at the end of a long CJR investigation, I reported that two Times columnists, David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, had been writing about the Gates Foundation for years without disclosing that they work for an outside group, the Solutions Journalism Network, that is heavily funded by the foundation. The columnists acknowledged the undisclosed conflict and asked the Times to belatedly disclose their ties to Gates in several previously published columns. The Times never followed through. In 2020, it told me it wasn’t a priority.
In the wake of the Brooks scandal, I followed up with the paper. I contacted Kathleen Kingsbury, the editor of the opinion section. I had previously contacted Kingsbury in 2019 and got no response. Kingsbury told me that the Times was finally adding belated financial disclosures to Bornstein and Rosenberg’s previously published columns. She noted in March that new disclosures had been appended to four columns, and the Times was working through a technical hurdle to correct two additional columns.
But Kingsbury wouldn’t tell me which ones, or how the Times decided it only six needed disclosures. In my CJR investigation, I had found fifteen columns that mention Bill and Melinda Gates, their private foundation, or the work it funds. I located one corrected column, a glowing review of the Gates-funded World Mosquito Program, which I had highlighted in my CJR investigation. Yet, Rosenberg wrote about the project again in 2019, and that column remains uncorrected.
Kingsbury also wouldn’t address why the Times deemed Brooks’s financial engagement with Aspen was incompatible with his column, but Bornstein and Rosenberg’s ties to the Gates-funded Solutions Journalism Network were not. When I pushed the Times to explain, Eileen Murphy, senior vice president of corporate communications for the Times, would not provide clarification. “We’re comfortable with where we have landed on this issue,” she said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In 2016, five years ago, I noted these inherent conflicts of interest in the NYT columns of Bornstein and Rosenberg when writing about Gates’ pet projects, as well as the evident bias of these columns. I emailed the NYT twice, asking why no disclosures were made and got no response. https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2016/08/ny-times-and-solutions-journalism.html In light of Schwab’s current focus on this issue and the NYT continued refusal to acknowledge these problems, I returned to the topic again and updated my analysis with new info and new recommendations. https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2021/08/ny-times-columnists-still-financially.html
Thank you.
Gates SHMATES. Gates is a CON.
“Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.”
But for some inscrutable reason,linking Gates educational
“magic touch” with the “jab”, that doesn’t stop or prevent
the spread, escapes the narrative du jour.
“the Gates Foundation’s roughly $60 billion in assets include, among other things, shares and other forms of investments in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Sanofi, Merck, Eli Lilly and Company and Abbott Laboratories, all of which have developed or are developing covid-19 treatments and/or vaccines. They also include Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, which together have developed and marketed the most profitable vaccine in history.”
” When it comes to global healthcare, the Gates Foundation
is anything but a disinterested third party.”
“Throughout the last two decades, Gates has repeatedly advocated for public health policies that bolster companies’ ability to exclude others from producing lifesaving drugs, including allowing the Gates Foundation itself to acquire substantial intellectual property. This continues through the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The GatesFoundation’s substantial investment in pharmaceutical stocks explains why Bill Gates adamantly opposes letting companies produce generic forms of COVID vaccines that could be distributed in poor countries at very low cost.
GF is associated with the Astrazenaca vaccine, but both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have refused to share their vaccine “recipes” with pharmaceutical firms in Africa and the rest of the developing world .
And a small number of countries (in EU and Canada) have blocked a move by the vast majority of the WTO member countries (including the US) to temporarily waive patent rights to facilitate such sharing.
Moderna is actually infringing on a spike protein patent developed by NIH and assigned to the US government that is critical to both the Pfizer and Moderna patents. Pfizer/BioNTech licensed the patent but Moderna has not done so, which means they could lose every cent that they make on their vaccine if the US government chose to prosecute the infringement.
Yes Diane, but how would a generic form of a
COVID vaccine, that doesn’t prevent or stop the
spread, be the answer? When the most profitable vaccine
in history is “blessed” as it is,
“back to the drawing board” seems unlikely…
By no means are we “out of the woods” yet.
The current COVID vaccines protect the overwhelming majority who receive them from hospitalization or death. If there were a generic, there would be enough vaccines for people in poor countries that currently have very small supplies.
The jab does reduce the severity of Covid and its side effects. Is it 100% effective, of course not. But it is highly effective in protecting people from the plague.
“We’re comfortable with where we have landed on this issue” said the Times rep.
I bet they are. Really comfortable.
I think a central question here is “why do people have to effectively force (supposed) journalists to reveal their conflicts of interest?
Do these people have so little integrity that they don’t do it without being called out on it?
Some questions answer themselves.
(Have a great school year, SDP!)
The guilty benefit from a narrow definition of “conflict of interest”.
Penalties for the crime of being an intellectual prostitute (includes many public policy influencers) would be good for the country.
Unfortunately, institutions acting as bastions to preserve privilege through public policy advocacy, are able to escape the narrow legal definition of conflict of interest.
Evidently, the Boston Globe’s editor, Brian McGrory, is also “comfortable with where (his paper) landed on the issue”- just as comfortable as he was with the millions that the newspaper spent for what he described as a “noble mission”. Crux, a website of Catholic info, was the “mission” McGrory referred to and created. He said that he anticipated Catholic organization advertising and/or support would enable breakeven or profits for the site. (Taxes have positioned Catholic organizations as the nation’s 3rd largest employer.)
A Tribe’s defenders may put forward a false equivalency. In anticipation, the Globe’s venture for profits from advertising has no connection to the Spotlight team’s reporting about Church crimes.
Newspapers in states like Ohio get advertising dollars from private K-12 schools, overwhelmingly Catholic schools. Both private and public universities advertise in the papers. However, the profit opportunity newspapers seek by forcing private and public K-12 schools, (funded by local community tax dollars) into market competition is the fourth estate’s contribution to the dismantling of democracy.