01.10.11
Gemini version available ♊︎Bill Gates Pays National Television (This Time PBS) for Self-Serving Propaganda
Summary: Public Broadcasting Service (US) becomes another instrument with which Bill Gates is advancing his personal goals after a large sum payment
IS THERE any major television channel left which was not paid by Gates for some timely bias? Any list of such channels sure is running short. It’s not only a US issue by the way. In Britain too Gates pays The Guardian, for example, to do this. As for Microsoft UK staff, let us not forget what they did in the national broadcasting company. The MSBBC keeps getting more Microsoft-biased and Channel 4 too becomes captive. In the US, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is the latest victim of Gates’ PR offensive, which got covered in a lot of sites including this one which calls it “Gates Foundation Grant” rather than what it actually is. Some critics call it a bribe and since Gates also paid NPR (public radio) for similar work, trust is voided even in the national media.
PBS has received a nearly $500,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create new, educational multiplatform digital content to advance math achievement in partnership with New York City Department of Education’s experimental School of One (So1). New content will be created specifically for the personalized classroom instruction platform pioneered by So1 and distributed through the PBS Digital Learning Library (DLL).
Here is a site which calls it an investment:
Government budget-cutters may be hungrily eyeing funds for noncommercial TV and radio, but Bill Gates is investing in the service.
There is growing “[u]nease about the Gates Foundation support of media” and Paulson does it again, as we mentioned in the previous post:
Tom Paulson ‘gets it’. And a few others in Seattle ‘get it’. The development-philanthropy complex was not mentioned by Ike in his farewell address. How could he have imagined it? But now that it is a reality, there are a few critical and dissenting voices. Here is one.
Paulson’s writeup about the PBS funding was noted in the previous post and later on he discussed ABC News in a separate new post about old news. “Gates-funded ABC series raises concerns about global health … and media” says the headline and to quote parts of his article:
But what may trouble others more were all the many references on the ABC web site to the Gates Foundation — including numerous video clips of Bill and Melinda Gates. Also, much of this series actually sounds like — and is — a pitch for donations to numerous charitable causes.
You may well ask: So Mr. Cranky, why are either of these a problem?
Well, for starters, not everyone agrees with Bill and Melinda when it comes to identifying either the primary problems or the best solutions in global health. That’s inevitable, and fine, but journalists have an obligation to remain independent of anyone’s agenda.
[...]
The Gates Foundation steers clear of such hot-button political issues and we’ll see if ABC News does as well. Another example of a potential “blind spot” is the Seattle philanthropy’s tendency to favor technological solutions — such as vaccines or fortified foods — as opposed to messier issues involving governance, industry and economics.
Will these messier issues get covered and, if so, will the Gates Foundation’s critics believe they are being represented fairly and adequately by independent observers?
When a “Public Broadcasting Service” becomes a Gates-funded service it’s easier to explain who runs the country. █
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