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The MacArthur Foundation, for instance, in addition to its $500 million Press Forward initiative, also provided funding for the National Trust for Local News and The American Journalism Project. Long known for funding left-wing causes, MacArthur endorsed one of the most politically controversial works of advocacy journalism in the last decade. The foundation awarded one of its generous $800,000 “Genius Grants” to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which claimed that the year enslaved people were first brought to Virginia was the “true founding [date] of America,” not 1776. The 1619 Project received scathing criticism from some of America’s most eminent historians and one of the 1619 Project’s own fact-checkers, and entire essays in the project were so factually incorrect that there were calls for them to be retracted entirely.
The MacArthur Foundation also supports the National Trust for Local News, which has also received financial support from two of the largest sources of left-wing political funding — the Tides Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.
The Tides Foundation, a “donor-advised” fund, allows contributors to direct where the money goes. By acting as an intermediary, Tides obscures the original source of the funds, making it what transparency advocates call a “dark money” group. Tides is one of the largest dark money operations and spent $854 million in 2022 alone. It donates millions in grants to pro-Democrat get-out-the-vote operations, abolishing pretrial bail even for defendants charged with violent crimes, and pro-Hamas demonstrations following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel.
The Open Society Foundations network was created by leftist billionaire megadonor George Soros. According to NBC News, between 2020 and 2023, “Soros’ contributions to political campaigns and causes since January 2020 [amount] to roughly half a billion dollars — at the least — most of it steered through dark money nonprofit groups and going largely toward political causes aligned with the Democratic Party.” In addition to funding the National Trust for Local News, Soros also has the power to influence local news consumption after his family office recently purchased a large stake in 227 radio stations across the U.S.
Both the National Trust for Local News and States Newsroom have received funding from controversial Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who has spent nearly half a billion dollars on American left-wing causes. Between 1990 and 2006, Wyss gave almost $120,000 to candidates and political committees despite it being illegal for foreign nationals to spend money on U.S. elections. Wyss was never punished because the statute of limitations had passed by the time the Federal Elections Commission investigated his illegal donations.
In addition, some of the largest donations to The American Journalism Project are from the foundations of high-profile Democratic megadonors. The Emerson Collective, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of The Atlantic and one of the largest shareholders in Disney/ABC, has given in excess of $5 million. Also, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s The Democracy Fund and the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund of the eponymous Craigslist founder have given The American Journalism project donations somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.
In addition to numerous political causes, Omidyar has long funded journalism efforts — he provided the seed money for the left-wing news site The Intercept, and Democracy Fund has given sizable grants to the Defending Democracy Together Institute, which is closely associated with the online anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark.
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