Ground News is a news aggregator that sponsors several of the YouTubers I follow: Perun, William Spaniel, Kraut, and others. All of these are moderate, rational, pro-western, anti-Russia voices.
The folks at Ground News tout themselves as helping you avoid media bias by providing information on who owns each news source, a rating for the site's reliability, and an estimate of the site's ideological bias. (They give savagely low reliability ratings to Russian government sources.) You can also get a "blindspot feed" that will show you stuff that your usual new diet misses.
One day while listening to a YouTuber tout Ground News for the hundredth time I suddenly wondered: who is paying for all of this? How can these people possibly be making enough money for all these sponsorships?
So I looked it up and found this:
Ground News is a Canadian news comparison platform that aims to reduce media bias by showing readers multiple perspectives on current events. Founded in 2018 by Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, the company is based in Kitchener, Canada. . . . Ground News is independently funded through subscriptions and a small group of investors, avoiding backing from major media, tech firms, or governments.Google's AI adds that Ground News has never been profitable.
So I am thinking, is this "small group of investors" really a front for the CIA? During the Cold War the CIA did this all the time, often secretly; I remember reading about several anti-Soviet groups or publications who were rather startled to discover that the funding they thought came from NGOs or obscure arms of the French or German governments really came from the CIA. Some of them were not particularly pro-American, seeking some sort of middle political ground, but the CIA didn't care as long as they opposed the Soviet and called out communist crimes.
And note that while much of the Trump administration has gone waffly on Russia, the CIA is still doing all they can to combat them, most recently providing Ukraine with information on the exact locations of Russian air defenses so they can route their missiles and drones safely to targets deep in Russia.
And, hey, if the CIA is not involved, maybe they should be; my view is that Russian policy is so wicked, and so unjustifible, that any attempt to present a truthful point of view is bad for them.
1 comment:
You'd be amazed how little money an organization like Ground News can get by on. Do you think Wikipedia is a CIA operation? Because I'm quite sure it's a much larger, more expensive project.
Also, I think you're getting far too hung up on the "small group of investors" part and paying much too little attention to the "subscriptions" part.
The internet has shown time and again that crowd funding is a very powerful tool when properly utilized. Because - surprise! - ordinary people care about things, and want to support good projects where they can afford to.
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