Fact Checker Organization Is Heavily Funded By The Left
The organization that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether a certain story is “disputed” is financed by billionaire George Soros and a slew of other left-wings.
The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook yesterday announced it will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to the code of principles.
Facebook says that if the “fact checking organizations” determine that a certain story is fake, it will get flagged as disputed and, according to the Facebook announcement, “there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also appear lower in News Feed.”
IFCN is hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. A cursory search of the Poynter Institute website finds that Poynter’s IFCN is openly funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Poynter’s IFCN is also funded by the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The Omidyar Network has partnered with the Open Society on numerous projects and has given grants to third parties using the Soros-funded Tides Foundation. Tides is one of the largest donors to left-wing causes in the U.S.
Another significant Poynter Institute donor is the Craig Newmark Foundation, the charitable organization established by Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark. On Monday, just days before the announcement of the Facebook partnership, Poynter issued a press release revealing that Newmark donated $1 million to the group to fund a faculty chair in journalism ethics.
Newmark funds scores of liberal groups also financed by Soros, including the Sierra Club, the New America Foundation, and the Sunlight Foundation.
Newmark also finances the investigative journalism group called the Center for Public Integrity, where where he serves on the board.
When Fact Checkers May Be Motivated By More Than The Facts
PolitiFact, which is part of a new grouping that will help Facebook flag “disputed” stories, last year rated as “Mostly False” a claim that the U.S. funded an election effort in Israel via the nonprofit One Voice aimed at defeating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
PolitiFact left out of its declaration about One Voice that Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist who lists himself as an adviser and donor to PolitiFact, documents on his personal website that he has been “helping out” One Voice, where he writes he also serves as an adviser.
Also missing from PolitiFact’s rating is that One Voice is partnered with Google, which also happens to be a donor to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which owns the Tampa Bay Times. PolitiFact is a project of the Tampa Bay Times.
A senate investigation in July concluded that the State Department did not do anything illegal in funding One Voice to the tune of nearly $350,000 in 2013, but that the infrastructure created by One Voice at the time of the State Department financing could have been used last year in the anti-Netanyahu campaign.
While PolitiFact noted in its March 25, 2015 “Mostly False” designation that the ranking “may change as more evidence comes to light,” it did rely largely on One Voice’s word on the matter while failing to note the ties between PolitiFact and the partners of One Voice.
Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact’s executive director, responded to a request from this reporter about why the overlapping relationships were not mentioned in the article about One Voice by stating in an e-mail:
“Craig Newmark is one of many people who have supported PolitiFact’s independent journalism over the past nine years. Contibutors donate to PolitiFact knowing they have no say over what we fact-check, or how we rate a claim. The first time contributors see a fact-check is when it’s published.”
These kinds of overlapping partnerships and financial relationships, though, underscore possible ethical, financial, and political conflicts with an outfit like PolitiFact helping to determine which news articles should be designated as “disputed” by Facebook.
Who Interfered In Whose Election?
While Hillary Clinton’s team is currently pushing the argument that Russia interfered in the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, it was Clinton’s campaign team who were actually caught red-handed – with a paper trail to prove it – strategizing how to interfere in the GOP presidential primaries with the goal of ensuring that Trump was the Republican nominee.
Last month, Wikileaks published an email containing a document sent to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from Clinton’s campaign detailing a strategy to help ensure that Clinton’s opponent would be a “Pied Piper” candidate and not a so-called mainstream Republican, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio.
The “Pied Piper” candidates, according to the Clinton campaign document, were Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson.
The idea, which clearly failed miserably for Clinton, was to aid in the rise of one of these candidates, believing each of them to be “unpalatable to a majority of the electorate” and the weakest candidates against Hillary Clinton.
The underhanded scheme was outlined in a two-page document, dated April 7, 2015 and titled, “2016 GOP presidential candidates.”
The document, intended for the DNC, was contained in an e-mail from Marissa Astor, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook’s assistant, and sent to several Clinton staffers, including campaign chairman John Podesta. The correspondence was posted by Wikileaks, which published the contents of Podesta’s private Gmail account.
“This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field. Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper,” the document states.
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously,” the memo continued.
“Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate,” stated the memo.