NY Post Editorial Rips The Associated Press For Prostituting the News

Last week The Associated Press announced plans to hire roughly 20 journalists across Africa, Brazil, India and the U.S. to expand its coverage of climate change.  On Saturday, the lead NY Post Editorial blasted the Associated Press for accepting money from special interests to fund the endeavor.

Here is the Post's editorial in its entirety:

"News To Order:   The Associated Press admits it’s taken $8 million from climate activists to write about their pet issues, so it’s “assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues.”

"If anyone had the least doubt what angle the resulting stories will take, the AP explained that it learned “that funders weren’t just being generous; they had their own goals to achieve.” Ya think?

"Since the AP feeds newspapers, websites and TV stations across the country and even the world, the “donors” have a great chance of getting all their money’s worth in propaganda, even though all the resulting content is to be clearly labelled as such.

"Sorry: This is news-as-prostitution. Pay the media to get the coverage you want.

"The venerable New York Times has tapped nonprofits to fund special reporting projects, including a story about the city after Superstorm Sandy. A Ford Foundation grant enabled the Old Gray Lady to hire a disability fellow to produce stories about disabilities. In both cases, the funders wanted government action — and knew Times stories would help them get it.

"Those causes may seem benign, but the principle remains the same: Renting out your institutional judgment on what news to cover (and, inevitably, how to cover it) betrays your promises to your readers.

"Let the 'donors' buy ads if they want to push their cause," concludes The Post.

According to Axios, the new climate desk is backed by roughly $8 million in funding from various philanthropies, including Quadrivium, the foundation run by James and Kathryn Murdoch, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In July 2020, Murdoch resigned from the board of directors of News Corp. His resignation letter stated that his resignation was "due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions".  The NY Post is owned by News Corp.

Axios reported last year that the Murdochs were nearing a deal to make a multimillion-dollar investment to support the formation of a new climate reporting hub at the AP.

The AP often receives backing from nonprofits to fund new coverage areas and says it retains complete editorial control of all content with each partnership. 

Details: A large focus of the new initiative will be to add reporters that are dedicated to the intersection of climate with the economy, as well as other issues, like the impact of climate change on food, migration, housing and urban planning, disaster response, and culture.

"The exciting thing for me is climate is everybody’s beat now," AP managing editor Sarah Nordgren told Axios. "And while we’ll have a lot of people fully-dedicated to climate, we'll also have the ability to infuse the entire organization with climate news."

The new climate desk also aims to produce more localized climate stories, including working with partner news agencies abroad to produce more localized climate coverage in multiple languages.
In the U.S., the AP will launch a "StoryShare," for climate change, which is a shared content network between local news outlets, later this year.

The big picture: Many outlets are ramping up their coverage of climate in response to the COVID-19 crisis, which exacerbated some climate-driven issues, like affordable housing.

The Washington Post said last week that it too planned to add more than 20 new positions dedicated to covering climate.