The muck currently being raked up by Elon Musk’s investigations into the activities of USAID will have major repercussions across the Atlantic, specifically for BBC Media Action – “the BBC’s international charity”, according to its website.
[We work] with partners around the world to provide impartial, impactful, trustworthy media to people in need so that they can make informed choices to transform their lives. In a world of disinformation, distrust and division, we share the BBC’s values, skills and experience to bring people together, and foster greater understanding and trust.
Simply put, BBC Media Action appears to be the international arm of the BBC’s controversial Trusted News Initiative, an enterprise set up to “tackle challenges of harmful disinformation”.
BBC Media Action’s annual £32 million budget pays exclusively for projects overseas, focusing on social media and combating “the toxic combination of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation polluting our information environments”.
Interesting that they include ‘malinformation’. As Daily Sceptic readers will know, the term describes information which is factually accurate, but which is often an inconvenient truth for the custodians of approved doctrines. So, BBC Media Action is condemned as a self-described censorship outfit. And its funding partly reflects that.
You won’t be surprised to learn that one of the “top 10 donors” is the ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So, as night follows day, BBC Media Action is now heavily involved in two of Gates’ pet agendas: “climate change issues” and “vaccine hesitancy”. However, an even bigger donor is the British government. So, unwittingly, we are all funding this arm of the censorship-industrial complex.
But there’s trouble at mill. In 2023, BBC Media Action’s income began to shrink, with Gates almost completely pulling out, and the British government halving its grant. Panic stations? Not yet, for out of the blue from Washington came a mighty $3 million donation, courtesy of USAID.
Enter Elon Musk, stage right. His staff have been trawling through USAID’s accounts, and among the various things the US taxpayer is funding – $16,500 to foster a “united and equal queer-feminist discourse in Albanian society” – they will have spotted disbursements to what Musk might well characterise as some dodgy Limey outfit. He’s now cut off all funding – and it hurts. Last Tuesday, Media Action issued a press release: “We have been affected by the temporary pause in US Government funding, which amounts to about 8% of our income in 2023-24.”
Temporary? Some hope. A cursory examination of the outfit’s website and accounts will have told Musk’s sleuths everything their boss needs to know: that BBC Media Action is not only an enemy of free speech, but that also champions DEI employment policies – two prime bêtes noires of the Trump administration.
So is it game over for BBC Media Action? Possibly. Its latest accounts suggest it’s struggling: “Our total income in 23-24 was £32 million; our total expenditure was £33.8 million.” As Mr Micawber would say: “Result, misery.” Indeed, as it publicly acknowledged last October, “BBC Media Action continues to face serious challenges to its finances.” Now, four months later, with Musk almost certain to permanently cancel the USAID funding, BBC Media Action faces an uncertain future.
Is anyone likely to bail them out? Not the BBC, according to Media Action, which is at pains to insist that the charity is a wholly independent organisation. But that claim is a little suspect – the small print in BBC Media Action’s annual accounts boasts of its “unique position at the heart of the BBC”.
For example, its 85 London employees (roughly half of whom earn over £60,000 a year) appear to be able to flit from the charity to the broadcaster and vice versa. Indeed, such interchanges are encouraged “to give our London-based staff a chance to learn in other parts of the organisation”. And it’s all so effortless, because BBC Media Action’s offices are handily located within the BBC’s own White City broadcasting complex – for which, tellingly, the charity pays not a penny of rent. So the two organisations are wholly joined at the hip.
Furthermore, the BBC is legally required to use its income to underwrite the charity, whose Articles of Association state: “The BBC undertakes to contribute to the assets of Media Action in the event of it being wound up… and the cost, charges and expenses of winding up.”
So the people who would have to foot the bill in the dying days of the BBC’s Ministry of Truth would be the BBC’s own funders – the suckers who are required by law to pay the licence fee poll tax.
Tony Edwards is a former BBC TV science producer, now a medical research journalist. His latest book, The Very Good News About Wine, is an exposé of misinformation about wine and health.
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We can but hope and it gives us something to look forward in these dark days.
A lot of us might think that the word ‘earn’ is misinformation. Earn suggests merit while just being paid is more accurate for a bunch of Far Left censorship and propaganda nobodies.
roughly half of whom earn over £60,000 a year
Paid for jobs with no wealth creating output, paid for my money taken from those who do create wealth (a dwindling number in “democracies”) = parasites.
Games of Kings.
What they don’t know is that – down here – WE are the kings.
As someone mentioned, Soros will probably ride to the rescue of their Globalist project. I bet you will find their footprints in Ukraine too.
We might begin to find out that Soros is fronting USAID money along with others and not his own.
To borrow from the occasionally funny Jon Stewart, they’re getting rid of this censorship organisation leaving … nobody knows exactly how many more of these censorship organisations.
I do hope so.
Upwards of £60K a year to work for the Foreign Verify Desk of the British Broadcasting Commentariat – world-leading peddlers of mis-, dis- and malinformation, and barefaced climate claptrap lies.
Nice money of you can get it. Bad luck, the DOGE has rumbled you. Couldn’t happen to a more duplicitous bunch of Gates and States-funded charlatans.
“Will BBC Media Action, Auntie’s International, Pro-Censorship Charity, go Bust Now That Elon Musk Has Turned off the USAID Tap?”
I bloody well hope so. Most probably the license fee will go up or the charge will be made universal.
Some years ago I was working in Mali, where USAAID had funded, of all things, an experimental fish farm in the semidesert Sahel. Located on the border of the River Niger Inland Delta, the channel of the nearest minor tributary was over a kilometre away and, in that season, utterly dry. So, for a good part of each year, the farm was not exactly in the best position to rear fish. This is not an encouraging situation for investing in a fish farming demonstration project.
At the time of my visit, only two of the dozen or so small ponds held water, and even they were only partially full – like, with less than a foot or so deep. Inconveniently, a nearby damp wetland area had been designated as a Conservation Area for an impressive population of large protected birds, with a marked disposition to consume fish. I noticed a certain conflict of interest between the armed guards there and the fish farm operators.
But the gallant fish farmers did manage to produce a few kilograms of Tilapia each year, which they sold in the local market. I asked how much USAID had invested in this heroic attempt to bring the wonders of modern food production to this benighted arid region. From their replies I estimated that the American taxpayers had invested about US$3,000 in order for the demo project to produce each kilo of fish, rather less than they fetched in the local outlet. The Wall Street Journal had a field day with this information, proving that the Main Stream Media really do take interest in particularly interesting enterprises.
Until we eventually escaped, my colleague and I were held hostage by the irate Director of Fisheries, in an effort to force us to authorize another such seminal project. This confirms just how essential is USAID funding for the provision of Technical Assistance to deprived communities in the less developed areas of the world.
All very interesting but why no names of the “85 London employees (roughly half of whom earn over £60,000 a year) [who] appear to be able to flit from the charity to the broadcaster and vice versa”?
If a Private School cannot be a charity because it’s a business … how come a Media Propaganda Unit is registered as one? There’s nothing charitable about it.
The good news just continues to flow, I wonder if the BBC will put this under its ‘uplifting’ news section?