"Independent" news or government propaganda?

The Internews Network is an "independent" NGO news organization funded by USAID. Sound suspicious?

“Propaganda” is a curious word.

Propaganda is often misleading information promoting a particular political cause, ideology, or agenda. It is typically disseminated through various media channels, such as advertisements, speeches, posters, films, or social media, to influence public opinion, shape perceptions, or encourage specific behaviors. Propaganda often uses emotional appeals or selective presentation of facts while omitting other relevant truths. In rhetoric, this is viewed as sophistry, or eristic dialogue.

In plain English, we know it as bullshit.

Most of us think we have good bullshit detectors. We know when someone has been pissing down our legs and told us it’s raining. But honestly, do we? Do we take the time to check the facts of a story, carefully weigh the sources, view both (or many) sides of an issue and decide which is gospel … or do we just read the snippets of news, note the headline in passing, and move on with our day?

Think about it.

One thing we don’t understand or can wrap our heads around is how big and foreboding the purveyors of propaganda can be.

Case in point: the brouhaha over the recent takedown of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and its cognoscente Elon Musk. USAID, with an annual budget of $44 billion, is (was?) the U.S. government's primary foreign aid agency, responsible for “directing billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance, economic development, and health initiatives worldwide.”

A noble cause, eh?

But Musk and his young band of merry Musketeers — one of them who carries the waggish online name “Big Balls” — recently audited the USAID budget and revealed what DOGE believes is a lot of riff-raff, shenanigans and monkey business. They discovered a shell game, spreadsheet trickeration, a sort of budgetary three-card monty — for all the “save-the-starving children” causes USAID funds there are five dubious ones. Examples:

• $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces

• $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland

• $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia

• $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru ¹

There are thousands of such suspicious line items in the USAID budget. But how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? I posit that many of these listings are illusory and that the money is funneled to some even darker, more nefarious forces.

That remains to be seen. Perhaps it will be sorted out at some future date.

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Internews Network

This brings us to another line item in the USAID budget — Internews Network (IN). Internews is a government-funded NGO (Non-Government Organization) that works with “independent” news organizations in 80 countries around the world. It is listed as an international 501c3 nonprofit by the IRS focused on supporting independent media and access to information, often in emerging democracies.

Founded in 1982, IN was working with private donations and other philanthropic organizations until USAID began funding it in the late 1990s. Since then, as DOGE discovered, IN has received $472.6 million from John Q. Taxpayer, including $93 million in 2024.

Internews “supports” activities such as training journalists, producing broadcasts, and working with media outlets globally. IN boasts that it has worked with 4,291 media outlets, produced 4,799 hours of broadcasts, and reached up to 778 million people in 2023. It has also supported social media censorship initiatives.²

The operation claims offices in 30 countries, with main offices in the U.S., London and Paris, and regional offices in Kiev (Ukraine), Bangkok and Nairobi (Kenya), all under the banner of promoting freedom of the press.

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But wait … Independent?

Sounds proper. But then my pre-frontal cortex and cerebrum start asking questions. The word “independent” sticks out as rather suspect. Independent means free of outside influences, or shielded from bias. How can an independent news organization be funded by the government? Was Edward R. Murrow given a stipend by Uncle Sam? Did Walter Winchell get a bonus from the government? Were Woodward and Bernstein on Nixon’s payroll? Does “independent” square up with “government funded?”

Suspicion arose further when I saw where the U.S. office is listed by both IN contracts and the IRS … 876 7th St., Arcata, CA 95521.

This is 876 7th St., Arcata CA 95521 … ³

Does this look like the headquarters of a legitimate news organization? And what about the six captive subsidiaries under unrelated names, including one in the Cayman Islands?

Finally, why is it that such a gargantuan global news network, funded by millions of taxpayer dollars with an imprint all around the globe, is an entity nobody has ever heard of until uncovered by DOGE and “Big Balls?”

Accountability?

So who is monitoring Internews and what it has been doing for the past 30 years that it has been funded by USAID? Why was it buried in the opaque tangle of budgetary mishmash? Who is held accountable for $472.6 million of government largesse?

Apparently, nobody.

NGO’s like Internews Network run on their own. The U.S. Government doesn’t ask, and IN doesn’t tell. It just shells out the cash. There is not a Constitutional Crisis so much as there is a Bureaucratic Crisis.

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Journalism … or propaganda

Internews President and CEO Jeanne Bourgault is married to Ray S. Jennings, a high-profile regime change specialist for USAID. (Yes, “regime change.” I wonder about that too).

According to her bio, she is an expert on the role of information and media and post-conflict, and “fragile countries.” She speaks on issues of global news, information technology and media development. She worked in the former Yugoslavia, serving as a strategic advisor for media development in post-war Kosovo as well as media projects in Serbia and Montenegro. She also worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development, including three years at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

Jeanne Bourgault

In other words, this is a career bureaucrat, or as I like to call them government spook.

Wherever the U.S. is trying to manipulate the outcome of various political conflicts around the world … places like Ukraine, the Congo, Bangladesh, even Afghanistan and Gaza … Internews is there, supporting independent journalism and pushing “free speech.” Of course, it is her version of free speech as long as it’s aligned with U.S. foreign policy goals. Not surprisingly, Bourgault specializes in combating “misinformation” and promoting the de-amplification of dissenting voices.

In other words, censorship.

Internews operates as a tool for U.S. geopolitical influence rather than purely independent journalism. It has worked to control narratives by promoting "approved" news sources and manipulating advertising revenue to favor certain media outlets.⁴

Bourgault once gave a talk about “building trust and combatting misinformation” in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a “really beautifully unified COVID-19 message,” vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87 percent, but when “mixed information on vaccine efficacy” got out, she bemoaned, hesitancy grew.

Bourgault is being paid handsomely (salary $451,000) to train journalists, yet she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote “unity” or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s not journalism, that’s propaganda.

Bourgault also said that to fight “bad content,” we need to “work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists” and “really try to focus our ad dollars” toward “the good news.”

The fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having the government sponsor “exclusion lists.”

If you do, you shouldn’t be getting a penny in taxpayer money, let alone $472.6 million.

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Jim Geschke was inducted into the prestigious Marquis “Who’s Who” registry in 2021.

1. Source: The White House via DOGE

2. Speech by Internews Network President and CEO Jeanne Bourgault, World Economic Forum, Jan. 18, 2024

3. Source: Google Earth

4. Source: ReclaimtheNet.com