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Mike Benz has exposed how the federal government subsidizes Reuters as it pushes government propaganda against “disinformation.”

Public records confirm that the US government has showered the Thomas Reuters Foundation with all kinds of contracts totaling $300 million.

It is rather strange to think that the federal government would give that kind of big money to an organization that does “news,” and in any case, one can be sure that any organization that receives such money from the government will only exist to parrot the regime’s talking points. As Benz’s tweet notes, Reuters is no exception. The news wire has been on the warpath against Elon Musk in particular, whose purchase of X has been an existential threat to the regime’s media monopoly. Reuters has even won prestigious media awards for its critical coverage of Elon Musk’s business practices.

It would be one thing for Democrat advocacy groups to attack Musk for acquiring X, restoring free speech, declaring war on the “woke mind virus,” and playing a decisive role in Trump’s historic popular vote victory that additionally delivered both houses of Congress to the Republicans. It would be another thing for a fake news mainstream journalism outfit to similarly attack Elon Musk simply because he is an ideological enemy. However, for an organization like Reuters that receives considerable direct payments from the government bureaucracy to attack Elon Musk, this crosses the line into scandalous territory immediately reminiscent of the revelations contained within the Twitter Files.

The Twitter files have confirmed and built upon much of our reporting to the effect that internet censorship wasn’t simply a private sector phenomenon but was taking place illegally at the behest and insistence of the Biden government itself. It was this exposure of unconstitutional censorship pressure from the government, under the guise of fighting “disinformation,” that unraveled the entire censorship industry. The Reuters revelations reveal that the Biden administration’s pressure on tech companies to censor in the name of “disinformation” is only one of several domains of illegal weaponization and encroachment of government authority, and that this same type of practice extended into the news media sphere.

Elon himself reacted to this revelation with characteristic bluntness.

Benz elaborated on the story with a video, asking the obvious question:

Does Reuters’ Relationship with government agencies taint its news coverage of government actions, because I’ve seen this up close and personal in government, where you have a company that wants a government contract, but it’s got capacities beyond that core business that could also help the government so they know, even though they’re getting the contract for one thing, if they use their other lines of business to help the government, in other ways, they put a favor in the favor bank, and the government repays that favor with a big fat federal contract.

This politically motivated attack on Musk by Reuters is just the tip of the iceberg and simply the latest and highest-profile example of a long pattern of corrupt and politically nefarious behavior on the part of Reuters, where their “journalists” seamlessly move from attacking so-called “disinformation” in their coverage to censoring it at Big Tech companies. Consider Reuters employed Hazel Baker as the lead censorious “disinformation beat” reporter. In 2023, she left Reuters to become Snap’s Trust and Safety” (i.e., censorship) manager.

When Baker left to Snap, a man called Raphael Satter took her place as chief anti-disinformation reporter for Reuters. His great contributions to disinterested journalism include such gems as—you guessed it—blaming Russia for influencing voters on behalf of Trump.

Satter regularly amplifies reports from Deep State-tied groups like Bellingcat and the Dossier Center.

Reuters is, of course, not just your run-of-the-mill corporate media outlet. It has, for a long time, served as one of the chief vehicles through which the CIA and British Intelligence have laundered their talking points and agenda under the guise of disinterested media coverage. The British intelligence community, for instance, has been revealed to have funded Reuters as far back as the 50s and 60s to advance the Anglo-American deep state’s Cold War agenda.

Yahoo News:

LONDON (Reuters) – The British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970s at the behest of an anti-Soviet propaganda unit linked to British intelligence and concealed the funding by using the BBC to make the payments, declassified government documents show.

The money was used to expand Reuters coverage of the Middle East and Latin America and hidden by increased news subscription payments to Reuters from the BBC.

Much of the deep state censorship and propaganda infrastructure that has been so poisonously weaponized against the American people was set up during the Cold War—including censorship institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy and other associated organizations.

And once an intelligence cutout, always an intelligence cutout. Reuters had a close relationship with Twitter when the social media company was under its old, deep-state-controlled, censorious management. The extent of the relationship was considerable and little understood.

That the UK government would fund Reuters, and Reuters would partner with Twitter specifically to fight “disinformation,” puts Reuters square in the center of the hornet’s nest of UK-originated intel censorship operations against American citizens. This makes Reuters’ decision to single out and target Elon Musk, who single-handedly transformed Twitter from a hornet’s nest of intel operations to a thriving public square of free speech, all the more ominous.

Reuters’ connection to censorious Twitter management and UK intelligence is especially ominous in light of what we have reported on in terms of UK intel operations specifically targeted at Twitter, most notoriously the Integrity Initiative, which involved some of the top disinformation commissars in the world, including the disgraced Nina Janjowicz, whom Biden sought to lead Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board.

The UK intelligence world is not only specifically hostile to free speech issues but hostile in particular to Elon Musk, as the sorry case of the unfathomably unpopular Keir Starmer shows.

In addition to government funding, Reuters receives funding from Google. Every year, the Reuters Institute receives over $2 million for its “Digital News Report,” which focuses largely on the so-called problem of “misinformation” and relies heavily on groups like Newsguard.

Reuters also launched a separate woke news app called “Context,” which focuses exclusively on “modern slavery, LGBTQ+ rights, labour rights and the human impact of climate change.” Reuters and Context have used this platform to demand more censorship around “climate disinformation,” running puff pieces for the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” and “Climate Action Against Disinformation”, complaining that green energy skeptics are engaging in disinformation (of course):

Common disinformation tactics include saying green energy is expensive and exacerbates the recent cost-of-living crisis, casting doubt on the reliability of green technology and trying to make climate skepticism part of wider culture wars, for example over “wokeness”, research has found.

In short, based on their funding and output, Reuters cannot be seen as “independent journalism” but as an appendage of the US government, Big Tech, and the far left.

Revolver News and a handful of other experts, such as Mike Benz, completely reshaped the national conversation on social media censorship. For the longest time, the conversation surrounding censorship had revolved around the notion that it was being driven by ideological zealots within the private companies themselves. This was of course true, but not the full story. The far more troubling reality is that the social media companies received extreme pressure to censor from the government itself.

The case of Reuters indicates that a similar recalibration is in order as it pertains to our understanding of the incentives guiding the fake media. To be sure, the fake media is utterly replete with true believers and ideological zealots. And yet, the example of Reuters indicates that at least for a certain select group of deeply compromised media outlets, the problem goes deeper than simple ideological motivation and becomes a matter of government influence by means of considerable grant money and intelligence community involvement.

If Elon stepped in and saved the social media world from these vermin, perhaps Elon or another enterprising billionaire could do the same for the traditional media—assuming that it shouldn’t simply be put out to pasture.

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