Online Journal
Front Page 
 
 Donate
 
 Submissions
 
 Announcements
 
 NewsLinks
 
 Special Reports
 
 News Media
 
 Elections & Voting
 
 Health
 
 Religion
 
 Social Security
 
 Analysis
 
 Commentary
 
 Editors' Blog
 
 Reclaiming America
 
 The Splendid Failure of Occupation
 
 The Lighter Side
 
 Reviews
 
 The Mailbag
 
 Online Journal Stores
 Official Merchandise
 Amazon.com
 
 Links
 
 Join Mailing List
Search

News Media Last Updated: Jan 4th, 2007 - 01:08:31


Guerrilla News Network's Ford Foundation connection: The progressive media and the CIA
By Bob Feldman
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jan 4, 2007, 00:40

Email this article
 Printer friendly page

Although the Guerrilla News Network [GNN] may claim to be an anti-corporate media group, it was given a grant of $62,500 in 2006 by the multi-billion dollar (and CIA-connected) Ford Foundation, (also see "Alternative Media Censorship") whose board of trustees chairperson, Kathryn Fuller, has also been sitting on ALCOA's corporate board since 2002.

Anti-corporate environmentalists in Iceland have been fighting against ALCOA's plan to have the Bechtel Group build a $1.1 billion aluminum smelting plant in Reydarfjordur that will likely produce a great deal of environmental destruction in northeastern Iceland. As Corporate Watch’s site observed: "ALCOA is the company which, in the face of unprecedented local opposition, is building an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland powered by a hydro-electric dam which will flood vast swathes of Western Europe's last pristine wilderness."

GNN was not the only alternative media or social change group to be given a grant by the ALCOA-linked Ford Foundation in 2006. Other 2006 recipients of Ford Foundation grants included the following:

  • Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) -- $100,000.

  • Independent Television Service -- $300,000.

  • Unity: Journalists of Color, Inc. -- $200,000.

  • Youth Speaks, Inc. -- $175,000.

  • United for a Fair Economy -- $600,000.

  • Progressive magazine -- $150,000.

A grant of $500,000 was also given to Columbia University in 2006 by the Ford Foundation to subsidize Nation magazine co-owner Victor Navasky's Columbia Journalism Review.

The Ford Foundation apparently also gave a $50,000 grant in 2006 to the dance company of the domestic partner of the Radio Nation/Air America show producer/talk-show host "to launch an emerging commissioning program and to create a new, full-evening dance/theatre work."

In addition, the Ford Foundation also gave a grant of $550,000 in 2006 to Columbia University to subsidize the "Columbia Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity."

The ALCOA-linked Ford Foundation board of trustees also gave a lot of money to the Ms. Foundation for Women in 2006. A grant of $1.5 million, for instance, was given to the Ms. Foundation for Women "to launch the New Women's Movement initiative to increase the size, impact, power and diversity of the women's movement and implement its grant-making and leadership development program." So don't expect many of the Ms. Foundation for Women-subsidized feminist activists to be very eager to criticize ALCOA for destroying the earth in Iceland or the Ford Foundation for its apparent profiteering from investments in weapons manufacturing corporations.

The ALCOA-linked Ford Foundation also gave a grant of $300,000 in 2006 to the Jewish Fund for Justice "to enable the Social Justice Leadership Collaborative to strengthen the development of and networking among social justice organizers" and a $400,000 grant to one of the U.S. groups that still lobbies in support of continued U.S. military aid to the militaristic Israeli government: the American Jewish Committee.

Bob Feldman is an investigative reporter.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
Email Online Journal Editor

Top of Page

News Media
Latest Headlines
Living in a lying nation
No news is bad news: TV news and the political conventions
Downsizing the news and pretending to increase quality
All the propaganda that's fit to print: The New York Times, again, tells it like it ain’t
TSA targeting investigative journalists
Journalistic imperatives: Saying what others might not
All the news that fits -- in 500 words or a graphic
Beyond media revolutions: Are Arab media truly free?
The Tibet card
For the benefit of Israel, US media stoops to trashing Carter
Economic suicide
Basra battles: Barely half the story
Toronto 18 suspects undergo trial by media
How big is the Animal Farm?
Strangulation in the dark: Palestine, Somalia, and the American corporate media
Media language and war: Manufacturing convenient realities
Are British media complicit in imposing a blackout on the siege of Gaza?
The Internet must die
Despite ‘good news,’ Iraq is not okay
Game theory and the U.S. presidential election of ’08