Politico Loses Millions in Government Funding. Good.

 

By Ken Klippenstein

The U.S. government has paid over $30 million in subscription fees to the news site Politico, an expenditure that the Trump administration just halted.

Trump’s spiteful attack on federal payments to what he considers the “fake news” media, whatever his motives, is a good thing. Politico is a billion dollar private company that, apart from its publicly available reporting, sells the U.S. government’s own data back to it in the form of glossy insider products. That is hardly some kind of public interest journalistic endeavor. So why should ordinary people’s taxes pay for it?

The major media refuses to answer this question and instead has gone to bat for Politico with misleading “fact checks” and compulsive repetitions of the phrase “conspiracy theory.” Here are some examples:

• CBS: “Trump makes misleading claims about government payments to Politico. Here’s a fact check,”
• New York Times: “Trump Amplifies Conspiracy Theory Over Payments to Politico,”
• CNN: “White House says it will cancel $8 million in Politico subscriptions after a false right-wing conspiracy theory spreads,” and
• TIME: “Trump and Musk Promote Misleading ‘Scandal’ About Government Funding Media.”

Headlines like these leave the impression that cutting funding to Politico is merely some kind of paranoid fever swamp reserved for Alex Jones types. This week, these and other major media stories disputed Trump’s claim that USAID had paid Politico $8 million, which indeed was fact-challenged. But not entirely off-base.

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Source: kenklippenstein.com