Ever wonder why you rarely read a critique of Bill Gates, who is ostensibly a global health expert – but has no medical background whatsoever? Wonder no more. Just follow the money. A recent Columbia School of Journalism exposé reveals that in order to incentivize favorable media stories about him and his foundation – inoculating him against bad press – Bill Gates has steered as much as $250 million to media entities including The New York Times, NPR, NBC, the BBC, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Univision, and The Guardian, to name but a few.
For perspective, it’s helpful to remember that $250 million is the amount Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Post.
Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds
That such generous gifts to media outlets come with an explicit caveat which states they must never report anything untoward about their benefactor misses the point. It’s not that the Gates Foundation writes a one-sheet of bullet point dos and don’ts for the Fourth Estate it enriches – it’s that it doesn’t have to. His explicit messaging on COVID-19, the WHO, and the desperate need for a miracle vaccine he insists everyone on earth should get comes with an implicit message: media outlets that rely on Gates’ financial largesse shouldn’t do anything to upset the computer guy.
Anyone who has made the workplace calculus that it is professionally disadvantageous to tell the boss she has bad breath and a low IQ knows how that game is played.
The Cost of Going From Villain to Hero
It wasn’t always the case that Gates was kid-gloved by the media. In 1998, the Department of Justice brought antitrust charges against Microsoft, which was found guilty of unfair competitive practices in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Gates was seen as a ruthless businessman willing to risk flouting federal law to gain complete hegemony over the software market – and the media, by and large, reflected this perception of him.
Gates dodged the comeuppance for his vaulting ambition, however, as the fateful decision to order the breakup of the Microsoft monopoly was overturned on appeal. To rehabilitate his image with the public in the wake of the bruising anti-trust battle, he established The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization with a current endowment of over 45 billion dollars, which changed perceptions of him virtually overnight. With his wife Melinda by his side, Gates became the billionaire philanthropist willing to fund charitable initiatives domestic and international – the tech oligarch with a heart of gold.
Gates prioritized world health among his many initiatives, which included making technology universally accessible and improving educational opportunities for the impoverished. As a result, funding vaccine research, promoting them for the entire adult population of America as per the Healthy People 2020 initiative, and testing and disseminating them throughout the third world all became matters of urgency for the be-sweatered college drop-out.
A Well-Funded Smear Campaign
Absent from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation mission directive was the idea of population control – although Gates has voiced concern about this throughout the years. He did so most alarmingly in a 2010 Ted Talk in which he asserted that “if we do a really good job on vaccines… we could lower that (world population) by perhaps 10 or 15 %.” Gates and his army of fixers have since endeavored to walk back this shocker of a claim, assuring the rest of us that what he meant was that third world families have a lot of children because of increased mortality and that vaccines would reduce this need.
Were the loud objections to his statement examples of a good man being besmirched and misunderstood by those who would attribute to him nefarious intentions – or a window into his soul? It hardly matters, because when you endow the media with the kind of hush money Gates does, detractors can be helpfully lumped into such categories as “anti-vaxxers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “tin-foil hat wearers.” As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Children’s Health Defense states:
“Gates also funds an army of independent fact checkers including the Poynter Institute and Gannett —which use their fact-checking platforms to “silence detractors” and to “debunk” as “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” charges that Gates has championed and invested in biometric chips, vaccine identification systems, satellite surveillance, and COVID vaccines.”
Like the old Hollywood trick of smearing the camera lens with Vaseline to give actresses that soft glow, Gates’ financial infusions to media have been able to successfully produce a flattering, filtered image of him and his foundation for the public at large. Effectively press bribes, this transactional cash-for-news arrangement has inoculated Gates against criticism at a time when he has ironically become an alleged health expert and is promoting a vaccine for the global population that is as yet unformulated, and without which, he insists: “things won’t get back to normal.”
He may still have some check-writing to do. A recent poll showed nearly 40% of respondents would not get a vaccine for COVID-19. For a man with designs on control of global health, it may be time for Bill Gates to cast aside the V-neck sweaters and spectacles in favor of a bald head and a fluffy white cat. This would at least represent a rare case of truth in advertising for the billionaire globalist.
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Read more from Pennel Bird.
