The bill gates problem, p.22
The Bill Gates Problem, page 22
Rachel Lonsdale, the head of Gates’s polio communications team, contacted the outlet’s editor, noting, “We typically like to have a phone conversation with the editor of a publication employing freelancers we are engaging with, both to fully understand how we can help you with the specific project and to form a longer term relationship that could transcend the freelance assignment.”
This sounds an awful lot like an overture, like the Gates Foundation is proposing a financial relationship. To some, it might sound like a bribe. To all of us, it should sound like a power play. In journalism, this kind of communication is not normal or appropriate. There is no universe in which the target of a journalistic investigation should have private sidebars with editors to discuss coverage—or openly proposition them.
De Correspondent told me it rejected Gates’s offer because of its potential to compromise the independence and integrity of its journalistic work. Park and Fortner once again managed to get their story out. When I reported this in Columbia Journalism Review in 2020, the foundation described the episode as “normal media relations.” “As with many organizations, the foundation has an in-house media relations team that cultivates relationships with journalists and editors in order to serve as a resource for information gathering and to help facilitate thorough and accurate coverage of our issues.”
From Park and Fortner’s two episodes, we could say that there’s no actual evidence of harm. The journalists were able to publish their stories. Gates didn’t manage to kill the investigations. Yet it is unreasonable to think that every battle royale with the Gates Foundation always goes down this way. For every principled or stubborn editor or journalist, there are a hundred who will simply go with the flow and not make waves (in my experience as a journalist, at least).
The obverse story to Fortner and Park’s comes from journalists who have taken funding from Gates and who shine light on other dimensions of editorial influence from donors.
In 2018, Bhekisisa, a media outlet based in South Africa and mostly funded by the Gates Foundation, published an essay about working with charitable donors, mentioning the Gates Foundation and the German government: “Bhekisisa’s donor resources, and accompanying impact, has come at a great cost. It has radically changed staff members’ job descriptions from being mere journalists or editors to spending significant time—often up to 30 percent for reporters and 40 percent for editors—as data collectors, fundraisers, event organizers, proposal writers, conference moderators, creators of information management systems and donor-report writers.”
Adam Davidson, who cofounded the NPR show Planet Money, said he walked away from a funding deal with Gates because of the requirements it put on the journalism it funded. “When I was at Planet Money, I turned down a Gates Foundation grant because I felt their reporting requirements essentially violated journalist ethics. They wanted us to get permission for the kinds of stories we do based on their criteria,” Davidson, who is no longer with NPR, told me. Specifically, he said the foundation wouldn’t support a story on economic development in Haiti because it didn’t work on that issue in Haiti.
One source who has worked for Gates-funded journalism projects, and who asked for anonymity, offered a similar story. “What’s often happening with Gates’s funding is people are getting it for things they wouldn’t do otherwise and they don’t necessarily want to do. But that’s what the funding says they must. A couple times it’s been like, ‘We’ve just got to get this [project] out the door, because we’ve got the money, and we’ve spent the money and we need to show something for it.’ Just to me that felt like a total inversion of the journalistic process; in both cases, it was something the [news] organizations didn’t want to do,” the source noted. “To me, we have so little time as journalists and so little funding. It just bothers me that we’re running around on these box-ticking assignments for Gates. And this is the problem with so much foundation-funded journalism. The question I always have is: Would you do it [the journalism project Gates has assigned] anyway? And if the answer is no, then it’s PR.”
The source explained to me the specific mechanics of Gates’s power, including the foundation’s regular check-in calls. If you were to read a transcript of these calls, the source told me, you would be very hard-pressed to prove there was any effort at editorial control. But if you could listen in, you’d realize that you were actually part of a first-rate theatrical production. The foundation uses a variety of coded language and nonverbal signals to clearly telegraph its editorial desires. The foundation might offer an innocent-sounding question in passing—‘Do you have work coming out about [Country X]?’ And the newsroom would quickly learn to translate GatesSpeak: ‘We’re interested in seeing you do more reporting in [Country X].’”
If the Gates Foundation disapproved of a story idea, it would turn to stone, its silence conveying its disapproval. If the foundation liked your story idea, you might get an enthusiastic “Mm-hmmm.” “They made their interests known without directing coverage explicitly, which is how this has worked from time immemorial,” the source added. “I found it a bit confronting, to be honest. They were clear without being explicit.”
This source, in 2020, described the foundation’s editorial influence as a necessary evil because the dollars Gates gives are so important, allowing outlets to cover topics—essentially, reporting about poor people—that otherwise wouldn’t appear in the news. When we spoke again in 2021, the source was less sure, telling me that Gates was effectively creating reporting ghettos for specialized topics, a media landscape where the only way to get reporting on topics like global health and development was to publish it through Gates-funded reporting projects. Such a system is not sustainable or independent, and it’s not clear it’s having an impact. Yes, the Guardian’s global development beat—funded by Gates—will publish reporting about the global poor, but the Guardian isn’t creating an opening on its main news page or putting the stories in front of its biggest audience.
“Do I think it’s bad that Bill Gates funds media?” the source said. “Probably not, but the way it’s done is so nontransparent and so secretive, and with no accountability and no accounting for conflicts of interest, so it’s hopeless. So, I don’t know if there’s a better way for Gates to be involved. For the moment, it’s a hopelessly conflicted situation which nobody seems bothered about changing.” The source added, “The sense that I get is that most people are just hugely grateful for the funding and don’t really question it.”
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WHILE BILL GATES is widely celebrated as the most generous man on earth, during his tenure as the world’s leading philanthropic donor, he has managed to nearly double his personal wealth. If journalists have failed to shed light on this contradiction, it may be because Bill Gates has been so effective at showing how widely economic gains have been shared, how everyone is getting richer.
“In 1990, more than a third of the global population lived in extreme poverty; today only about a tenth do,” Gates wrote in Time magazine during his stint as a guest editor. (Bill Gates has also played guest editor at Wired, the Verge, MIT Technology Review, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, the Times of India, and Fortune.) “A century ago, it was legal to be gay in about 20 countries; today it’s legal in over 100 countries. Women are gaining political power and now make up more than a fifth of members of national parliaments—and the world is finally starting to listen when women speak up about sexual assault. More than 90% of all children in the world attend primary school. In the U.S., you are far less likely to die on the job or in a car than your grandparents were.”
Through Bill Gates’s rose-colored lens, we see a world that is constantly becoming a better place. Creative capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalism are lifting all boats. Billionaires are giving back through philanthropy and saving millions of lives. Sure, there’s room for improvement. No, the world isn’t perfect, but we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We must stay the course. The business-as-usual track we’re on is working, more or less.
The Gates Foundation has leaned hard on its founder’s positivism, even trademarking the term “impatient optimist.” And when Bill Gates forcefully argues the case for optimism, or invites us to take a victory lap on the social progress that civilization has made, he makes it known that it’s “backed by data.”
Bill Gates likes to publish charts and graphs that he believes show radical improvements in the human condition. He boasts of data showing major drops in poverty, for example, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day. “The problem with this line is that, remarkably, it has no empirical grounding in actual human needs,” Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the University of Barcelona and the London School of Economics, told me. “Indeed, we now have very strong evidence to show that people living at this level, or even double this level, often cannot even access enough food, to say nothing of meeting other basic needs such as housing, health care, clean cooking fuel, et cetera.”
Hickel cited data from the United Nations showing that the number of people who don’t have enough food to eat is nearly three times higher than the number of people who supposedly live in poverty. “Food security is not a luxury; it should be central to any robust definition of poverty,” Hickel said. “While incomes and consumption have been increasing at the bottom, the gains have been very small, very slow, and not enough to lift most people out of actual poverty. The daily incomes of the poorest half of the world’s population have been increasing by only a few cents per year over the past four decades. And this despite extraordinary, unprecedented global economic growth.”
If we took a fairer and more honest accounting of what poverty really looks like, Hickel told me, we would see that there are more people living in poverty today than ever before. His analysis raises damning, if not existential, questions for Bill Gates’s worldview. It forces us to ask if the world is well served by an economic system in which men like Gates can acquire $100 billion fortunes while more than a billion people struggle to feed themselves. It requires us to interrogate whether Bill Gates’s $54 billion private foundation can help deliver equity or should be seen as Exhibit A of the inequality that defines the world today.
Bill Gates has a different take. He insists that economic and social progress is real but is the victim of cynicism, which has seeped into journalism. “Why does it feel like the world is in decline?” he asks. “I think it is partly the nature of news coverage. Bad news arrives as drama, while good news is incremental—and not usually deemed newsworthy.” And Gates’s solution to the bias he sees has been flooding the media with funding to report out narratives of progress and stories of hope.
In 2009, the Gates Foundation launched the Living Proof Project, aimed at telling stories showing “the progress that is being made on the ground in the fight against extreme poverty” and the lives saved through interventions around HIV/AIDS. “By reporting success stories back to the people who funded them—American taxpayers and their representatives—we hope to reframe the current global health conversation,” the foundation said, later adding more nuance to its mission: “It’s not about saying everything is great; it’s certainly not about saying all aid works. But it is about telling the stories that are too often ignored.”
At some point, the foundation realized it didn’t need to tell these stories through marketing campaigns. It could simply fund journalists. This included amplifying a burgeoning new brand of reporting called “solutions journalism,” which challenges journalists to jettison their doom-and-gloom focus on waste, fraud, and abuse and to focus their reporting, instead, on what’s working in the world, where we’re seeing progress, and how we can bring about more change. The organizing hub for this new philanthro-journalism movement is a nonprofit group called the Solutions Journalism Network, run by David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg. When I spoke to Bornstein and Rosenberg in 2020, the group’s largest all-time funder was the Gates Foundation, which has given at least seven million dollars. The Gates Foundation also reports giving millions of dollars to other outlets for work on solutions journalism, including Grist and the Stichting European Journalism Centre.
As Bornstein explains it, “The main way that the news harms democracy is by providing a view of the world that is largely deficit framed. We are amply informed about what’s going wrong, about what’s ugly, about what’s corrupt. But because we don’t have a similar amount of information about what’s growing, what are the new possibilities emerging, we have a very flawed, kind of one-sided view.”
The Solutions Journalism Network bills its mission as to “legitimize and spread solutions journalism,” and it claims to have trained and collaborated with more than five hundred news outlets and twenty thousand journalists. When SJN evangelizes its progress-forward worldview, it is inarguably changing the lens of journalism. It’s creating an opening for reporting that sometimes exalts structures of power instead of challenging them. Gates-funded “solution journalists” at times profile the Gates Foundation’s good deeds and innovative solutions, for example. In an interview, I asked Bornstein if he could provide examples of any critical reporting the Solutions Journalism Network had helped produce on the Gates Foundation. He took issue with the question. “Most of the stories that we fund are stories that look at efforts to solve problems, so they tend to be not as critical as traditional journalism,” he said.
The group acknowledges on its website “that there are potential conflicts of interest inherent” in taking philanthropic funding to produce solutions journalism, which Bornstein elaborated on in our interview. “If you are covering global health or education and you are writing about interesting models [of change],” he said, “the chances that an organization [you are covering] is getting money from the Gates Foundation are very high because they basically blanket the whole world with their funding, and they’re the major funder in those two areas.” But if your journalism model, by design, takes funding from Gates and then elevates the voices and perspectives of Gates-funded groups, how do we differentiate it from public relations?
Bornstein and Rosenberg are not only the world’s leading evangelizers of solutions journalism, but also its leading practitioners. For years, they wrote a column in the New York Times called Fixes, where they several times favorably profiled Gates-funded projects in education, agriculture, and global health. Twice in 2019, Rosenberg’s columns exalted the World Mosquito Program, whose sponsor page on its website, at one point, landed on a picture of Bill Gates. In my nonexhaustive review of the six hundred Fixes articles published in the Times between 2010 and 2020, I found fifteen examples where Bornstein and Rosenberg wrote about Bill and Melinda French Gates, their foundation, or work their foundation funds. I wasn’t the first person to notice this bias, or to bring it the attention of the New York Times.
In both 2013 and 2016, Tina Rosenberg wrote long, mostly favorable profiles of Bridge International Academies in her Times column. Bridge is a private school system in several African nations that Bill Gates personally invests in outside his work with the foundation. The schools have proven controversial not just because they seek to privatize education but also because of the questionable teaching model used in these for-profit institutions. Teachers receive little training, and their in-class instruction amounts to reciting word-for-word lesson scripts, delivered on such a tight schedule that there isn’t always time for questions.
Leonie Haimson, a reader of the Times and head of the advocacy group Class Size Matters, was taken aback by Rosenberg’s undisclosed conflict of interest—reporting on a Bill Gates–funded private school system without disclosing that she works for an organization funded by Bill Gates’s private foundation. Haimson says this financial relationship introduced bias, and she cites, as an example, Rosenberg’s editorial decision to cite Bridge’s own self-published performance data as evidence that the academies’ educational model “probably” works. Rosenberg also soft-pedaled the widespread criticism surrounding these schools to arrive at a conciliatory review: “The project should have been envisioned sooner, and the process should have been fairer. But if experimentation is justified anywhere, it’s there,” she wrote in 2016. “It’s hard to look at Liberia’s educational system and say: Do nothing new.”
Haimson, realizing that Rosenberg had written other columns that seemed aligned with the Gates Foundation’s education agenda, contacted the Times with her concerns, citing the newspaper’s own ethical guidelines, which stress the importance of independence. “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,” she wrote in one letter to the Times that she shared with me. She never got a response.
When I first reported on Bornstein and Rosenberg in 2020, the authors defended the independence of their work but acknowledged to me that they should have been publicly disclosing to readers their ties to the Gates Foundation in columns they wrote about foundation-funded projects. They asked their editors to belatedly add disclosures to several of their columns. It was more than a year later, after I repeatedly reached out to the Times, that the news outlet finally issued corrections to a few of their columns.
Similar ethical questions have followed solutions journalism to other corners of the media landscape. When the Gates Foundation and the Solutions Journalism Network partnered with the Seattle Times on a reporting project called EDLab, University of Washington professor Wayne Au criticized how the resulting reporting supported Gates’s agenda. In an online forum in 2014, Au cited two “puff pieces” the Seattle Times had published about Teachers United, “a local Gates funded astro-turf group that is all aboard the corporate ed machine.” “What is striking to me is the thin political range of the [Seattle Times’s] Ed Lab. I see mainly ‘safe’ stories about mainstream stuff almost no one would question, and then I see stories like the two PR pieces about T[eachers] U[nited]. A lot of this has to do with what you and the Times count or value as ‘what works’ or as a ‘solution.’”
