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BILLIONAIRE BILL GATES USES MONEY TO SHAPE THE MEDIA

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11.27.2021
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BILLIONAIRE BILL GATES USES MONEY TO SHAPE THE MEDIA

An interview with Tim Schwab

The role of philanthropy in Bill Gates’s global empire is well known. But the
Gates Foundation’s contributions to media organizations are huge, underexamined,
and a significant part of how one of the world’s wealthiest men has built and
protected his image.



Bill Gates attends the World Leaders' Summit "Accelerating Clean Technology
Innovation and Deployment" session at COP26 on November 2, 2021, in Glasgow,
Scotland. (Jeff J. Mitchell — Pool / Getty Images)

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Editors
Interview by Luke Savage

The past year and a half have been a roller-coaster ride for the public image of
the world’s most famous philanthropist. At the outset of the pandemic, Bill
Gates seemed to be everywhere: appearing on news outlets throughout the world
and positioning himself, with stunning success, as a leader of the global
response to COVID-19. Amid his divorce, allegations of personal misconduct, and
renewed scrutiny of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Gates’s image was suddenly
facing its most serious crisis in at least two decades.

Investigative journalist Tim Schwab has spent much of the past year and half
writing on Gates, his foundation, and the way both have leveraged charitable
giving to advance an agenda. Last year, he published a lengthy investigation
into Gates’s media contributions — a hitherto underexplored part of the Gates
empire and the key to understanding Gates’s cozy relationship with the world’s
imagemakers.

In this conversation, Jacobin’s Luke Savage sits down with Schwab to discuss
Gates’s media strategy, what lies ahead for the Gates Foundation, and how
billionaire-led big philanthropy has inserted itself into public interest
journalism.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Luke Savage

The period of time spanning 2020–2021 has been quite a roller coaster for Bill
Gates’s public image. He got some great press at the beginning of the pandemic
(we’ll come back to that in a moment) but has recently taken quite a brand hit
amid his divorce and some of the revelations that have come out of it.

Can you tell us, broadly speaking, a bit more about this arc and what Gates
himself has been up to over the past year or so? And how has the mainstream
media narrative around him diverged from an honest reckoning with the facts and
his own motivations?

Tim Schwab

It’s been really an extraordinary couple years for the Gates Foundation. Early
in the pandemic, the Gates Foundation inserted itself, in a very central way,
into the pandemic response. You saw Bill Gates constantly on CNN, on the media
playing expert. He’s weighing in in the New England Journal of Medicine, he’s
publishing long op-eds: “I’m going to prescribe what governments should be
doing.” This is a private billionaire in Seattle at the highest levels of the
scientific discourse, the New England Journal of Medicine, telling governments
what they should be doing. And it really showed you how institutionalized his
power has become in these areas like global health and vaccines. But he’s also
playing an important role behind the scenes. There is a global effort, nominally
under the auspices of the World Health Organization — though the World Health
Organization doesn’t actually have a lot of power in how this plays out — but
this is an effort to get vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics to the global
poor. And the Gates Foundation has arguably been the most important voice and
actor in that project, though a lot of that power is behind the scenes.

This is a private billionaire in Seattle at the highest levels of the scientific
discourse, the New England Journal of Medicine, telling governments what they
should be doing.

So you have the Gates Foundation playing this huge role in the pandemic response
in a number of different ways. And what’s really striking to me, speaking about
this arc over the last year, is that it was only in January or February that
Bill Gates came out with a best-selling book about climate change. In other
words, he’s now at the center of the two most pressing existential issues of the
age: a global pandemic and climate change. Then, once again, the media lines up
to support Bill Gates. He’s doing op-eds in Time magazine and is getting
profiles everywhere. 60 Minutes did a long profile about Bill Gates as this kind
of de facto climate change czar.

And then it’s exactly like you said. Suddenly this news out of nowhere comes out
that Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced. I didn’t know what to think of
that. The official line at the time was, “Well, this doesn’t change anything.
This is a personal matter.” And then, all of a sudden, news started coming out
about Bill Gates’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, along with allegations
that Bill Gates had acted inappropriately toward female subordinates at
Microsoft and the Gates Foundation over decades (there are numerous allegations,
which he denies). That created this opening where journalists started to take a
new interest in the Gates Foundation because of personal scandals: around the
divorce, around Epstein, around these allegations of womanizing. Then, at the
same time, the pandemic response that Gates was helping to lead for the global
poor was going terribly wrong. It wasn’t working, and it’s still not working. I
just looked today, and I think it’s only 5 percent of people in low income
countries have received their first vaccine dose. This plays into the idea of
vaccine inequity and vaccine apartheid.

So whatever plan Gates helped to organize to deliver vaccines to the global poor
wasn’t working, and news started coming out about why it wasn’t working. You had
a spate of articles this spring looking at this issue of intellectual property
and patents, and the Gates Foundation standing in the way of a more equitable
manufacturing model, in which you could waive the patents and compel Big Pharma
to share the recipes and the know-how. That seemed to fade somewhat and then,
more recently, you’re starting to see some new autopsies and investigations into
what’s going wrong with this global effort that Gates helped to lead called
COVAX. Now, the official narrative is more or less that COVAX failed. There’s
some really good reporting about why it’s failed and what’s going wrong. But in
that reporting, you don’t see much of a critical lens placed on the Gates
Foundation’s role itself, even though they’ve played a big role.

To really put all this into context, for most of the last twenty years, the
narrative around the Gates Foundation has been about the billions of dollars
it’s given away in the millions of lives it’s saving. So, like you said, this
past year has really been a roller coaster.


CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Luke Savage

Before the divorce, and other news surrounding Gates that’s drawn criticism,
there was also one small chink in the armor around the foundation giving an
award to Narendra Modi. What exactly is the Gates Foundation’s relationship to
Modi? And what exactly went on there?

Tim Schwab

Yeah, I mean, this became a big scandal. Somebody from the Gates Foundation even
publicly resigned and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the inhumanity
and injustice in the Gates Foundation claiming to be a humanitarian organization
and giving a humanitarian award to Indian prime minister Modi at a time when
news outlets around the world were reporting on the controversies and criticisms
around human rights violations with the Modi administration. So there was a real
contradiction in the foundation’s effort to do that. And it made for a rare bad
news cycle for the Gates Foundation. Even NPR, which receives funding from the
Gates Foundation, reported on it.

For most of the last twenty years, the narrative around the Gates Foundation has
been about the billions of dollars it’s given away in the millions of lives it’s
saving.

As for the bigger picture, the Gates Foundation has a very large presence in
India, an office in India, and they spend hundreds of millions of dollars there.
And they really exercise a great deal of influence, especially over public
health. They also have a big global program around sanitation, which is what
they were ostensibly giving Modi an award for: his work to improve sanitation in
India.


Luke Savage

Something that I think is generally well understood on the Left is that the kind
of charitable giving practiced by someone like Gates is neither an actual
solution to global problems nor even an act of individual generosity — but
rather a kind of brand-building you undertake if you ascend to his level of
wealth and influence.

I could be wrong here, but it strikes me that there’s been less attention
specifically paid to how Gates has involved himself in journalism and media
specifically. This is something you tackled in what I thought was a very
insightful piece last year and, before we get into specifics, can you give us a
bit of a rundown of the Gates Foundation’s media contributions?

Tim Schwab

Yes. They have a very significant relationship with the news media. Every day,
there are new articles about the Gates Foundation. Historically, they’ve almost
always been favorable or uncritical, and I think there are a few reasons for
that. But one important reason is that the Gates Foundation funds the news
media. Last summer in Columbia Journalism Review, I looked at every grant the
Gates Foundation had given away, and I found that more than a quarter billion
dollars is going to journalism: to NPR, to Al Jazeera, to ProPublica, to the
BBC, to the Guardian . . .

Luke Savage

So to a lot of public interest and progressively inclined media.

Tim Schwab

Yeah, absolutely. Something like NPR is probably a good example, since it has a
generally liberal point of view, which already chimes with the Gates
Foundation’s worldview anyway. But now they’ve taken, I think, $22 million from
the Gates Foundation, which is really a lot of money for a newsroom. The
foundation is funding journalism conferences and journalism fellowships as well
as news organizations. And the analysis I did was very conservative, and
probably a very serious underestimation, because you can’t actually track all of
the money the Gates Foundation has been giving away — there’s this whole black
hole of funding that it gives through contracts. It doesn’t disclose where that
money’s going. So it’s definitely more than a quarter billion dollars. And since
I did my analysis, of course, Gates has given even more. They recently gave $3.6
million to CNN. Which, to me, kind of explains why CNN has been so cozy with
Gates during the pandemic.

Luke Savage

When you were writing that piece, the Gates Foundation strongly disputed the
idea that its contributions in any way impacted or influenced the work of
recipient organizations. The organizations themselves tend to reject this, too.

But, you write, “When Gates gives money to newsrooms, it restricts how the money
is used — often for topics, like global health and education, on which the
foundation works — which can help elevate its agenda in the news media.” How
would you characterize the influence Gates is able to exert through these kinds
of donations?

Tim Schwab

I mean, that’s kind of the standard counterpoint or rejoinder: “We take the
money, but it doesn’t influence what we cover.” But, when you start to look at
the actual coverage, you see it reliably does introduce a bias or a blind spot.
What we’re talking about here is a conflict of interest, and this is the same
reliable bias and blind spot you see whenever there are conflicts of interest.
It’s like when our politicians take money from big gas and big oil, and then
they come out with legislation or with rules and regulations that are favorable
or soft on big oil or big gas. We can draw that through line and clearly see its
influence. It’s the same with a doctor or a scientist: when they take money from
Big Pharma and produce research that is uncritical or favorable to Big Pharma,
that’s a reliable bias.

You can’t actually track all of the money the Gates Foundation has been giving
away — there’s this whole black hole of funding that it gives through contracts.

The meta point here is that, for journalists, conflicts of interest are a
bread-and-butter issue. They’re something that journalists should be reporting
on assiduously. But when you start to take on your own conflict of interest,
when the funding for your newsroom is coming from a powerful institution you
should be watchdogging, there’s an obvious problem. Most of the foundation’s
journalism money is for education and global health, which are also two big
fields where Gates works and where the Gates Foundation is a very important
actor. So, if you’re a journalist covering global health, the Gates Foundation
should be one of your most important targets. But it can’t be if it’s funding
your newsroom. The target or the topic of your journalism can’t also be a
funder. It’s just a fundamental conflict of interest. Unfortunately, a lot of
the reporting in those fields is now funded by Gates — especially global health.


SOLUTIONISM

Luke Savage

Something that particularly struck me in the piece was something you mentioned
called “solutions journalism.” Can you tell us exactly what that is and the role
it played in your piece?

Tim Schwab

I don’t fully understand it. But the idea is that, instead of focusing on the
problems in the world, we’re going to look at what’s working right. It doesn’t
fully make sense to me, because anytime I’m reporting on a problem — say, for
example, a conflict of interest — the solution is right there: there’s
guidelines in place that they could be following, there needs to be more
accountability, et cetera. I don’t think there’s a specific need for this new
brand of “solutions journalism.” But it’s everywhere in and around the Gates
Foundation. And I think part of that has to do with the organization’s big
picture worldview. The Gates Foundation has as its brand and its message this
notion of “impatient optimism.” They have their own news publication called the
Optimist, and the worldview Bill Gates is trying to promote has to do with the
idea that everything is getting better all the time (and, of course, that the
Gates Foundation is contributing to that betterment through its charitable
giving).

If you’re a journalist covering global health, the Gates Foundation should be
one of your most important targets. But it can’t be if it’s funding your
newsroom.

I profiled one organization called the Solutions Journalism Network, which has
received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation (at the time, the
foundation was the largest funder). The real problem with those grants is that
the founders and directors of this Gates-funded organization are also frequent
contributors to the New York Times, where they frequently write about the Gates
Foundation — always in ways that are uncritical or favorable. So, after I did
the story and did a follow up story, the New York Times finally issued
corrections to disclose their financial conflicts of interest.

When you think about it, articles have been published at the highest level of
journalism, the New York Times, about the Gates Foundation from journalists who
have ties to it. So that, to me, became a really interesting story that allows
you to see how far this influence travels.


Luke Savage

The whole idea of “solutions journalism” sounds like something inspired by a
very neoliberal view of the world. It seems to me there’s a tendency in big
philanthropy to conceptualize social problems as technical puzzles to be solved.
Problems are never about imbalances of power. They’re never about the
maldistribution of resources, at least not in any kind of structural way.

When you think about everything like that, you can have this narrow focus on a
kind of solutionism that, by design, excludes actually looking at structures,
hierarchies, and all the rest of it: i.e., the very essence of the things you
should be looking at if you’re actually interested in, well, solving problems.

Tim Schwab

Right, these solutions that they’re looking at in fields like global health are
the Gates Foundation’s solutions. There’s never going to be, within solutions
journalism, a reporter who steps back and asks whether the Gates Foundation is
part of the conversation about solutions, or whether it’s actually the problem.
Once you get so involved in this kind of solutionism, and in the Gates
Foundation’s worldview, it becomes impossible to step back and really take a big
picture look — or to conclude that the Gates Foundation is not always, and maybe
even not often, part of the solution. You have to have the independence to be
able to step back and see that the Gates Foundation is not a dispassionate,
unimpeachable charitable organization. It’s a political organization that has a
great deal of influence over public policy. And when it’s funding journalism,
it’s not just indiscriminately writing checks and telling journalists to go for
it. It’s very carefully advancing its agenda.

Luke Savage

As somebody who has been following all this so closely, what do you think lies
ahead for Bill Gates? How serious is the crisis currently facing his personal
image? In the title of your piece, “The Fall of the House of Gates?”, you
included a question mark. So I’m assuming that said fall isn’t something you
think is inevitable.

Tim Schwab

I don’t think you should underestimate Bill Gates. I mean, he almost literally
has all the money in the world. And you can’t overstate what can be done with
that money. He seems to have weathered the storm with all the allegations
surrounding the divorce and the allegations of womanizing. He has had a big
presence in all the recent news around climate change. He’s inserted himself
there and has just announced he’s building a nuclear facility in Wyoming. Longer
term, the Gates Foundation has announced that, within two years, if Bill and
Melinda Gates can’t figure out a new balance of power at the Gates Foundation,
that Melinda Gates will have to step down, and that Bill Gates will unilaterally
be in charge. I mean, that’s just such an obvious illustration of the way that
they’re clearly not equals, and that the Gates Foundation is clearly Bill
Gates’s project. So that’s something that could be coming up.

The Gates Foundation is not a dispassionate, unimpeachable charitable
organization. It’s a political organization that has a great deal of influence
over public policy.

The foundation has also said that it’s going to reorganize its board. And this
is a pretty astonishing feature of the Gates Foundation: you have a private
billionaire, who donated money to his own private foundation that he and Melinda
have controlled for all these years. And right now, the only trustees of the
Gates Foundation are Bill and Melinda Gates. You think of any organization today
— whether it’s a company, a school, or a nonprofit — they’re going to have a
diverse and robust board. That’s so important for governance, to have checks and
balances. But when you look at something like the Gates Foundation, which has a
$50 billion endowment and wields this much influence, it’s so critical that
there be checks and balances in place. So they’ve said that they’re going to
introduce a new board of directors. Whether it’s actually going to have any
power or whether it’s just going to be window dressing, we’ll see.

But fundamentally, Gates is still in crisis mode, trying to figure out how to
pivot with everything that’s going on. I do think there are some real,
potentially existential crises the foundation is facing, especially around these
personal scandals. The foundation has a very public brand around women’s
empowerment and gender equity, at the same time that its founder and its leader
stands widely accused of misconduct toward women. The CEO of Barclays recently
had to step down because of investigations related to Epstein. You’ve also had
Prince Andrew, and a number of other corporate figures, whose professional
careers have been impacted by revelations about their relationships with Jeffrey
Epstein. But for Bill Gates, you know, the world’s leading humanitarian, there
have been no real professional consequences for him within the Gates Foundation.
It will be interesting to see how the pandemic response plays out vis-à-vis
what’s coming next. I think the Gates Foundation is definitely changing. The
question is, how significantly is it changing?

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC.

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin.

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BILL GATES’S PHILANTHROPIC GIVING IS A RACKET

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