Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series about the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships. The first part, published on the author’s personal blog in July and cross-posted with updates to CJR yesterday, described a two-year-old partnership with PBS NewsHour. This installment examines more recent agreements with the Guardian and ABC News.
The independence of the Guardian’s global health journalism has a new guarantor: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Manchester, U.K.-based paper recently announced a global development section co-sponsored by the foundation. Such non-profit funding deals are not unusual in the media today and, like many others, the partnership agreement states that the Guardian has editorial independence.
The Gates Foundation is not just any foundation, however. It is the largest charitable foundation in the world, and its influence in the media is growing so vast there is reason to worry about the media’s ability to do its job. With Gates’s support, the Guardian aims “to hold governments, institutions and NGOs accountable for the implementation of the United Nations millennium development goals,” according to its press release. The site unveiling came in the run up to a September U.N. meeting to assess progress on the goals, which are supposed to be met by 2015.
The project, which is described as an action-oriented, “global development website,” is reminiscent of the Guardian’s 10:10 climate campaign to get people to reduce their carbon emissions. However, neither 10:10 nor the environment section sits within the Guardian’s news section (nor do they or any Guardian section have a site sponsor). But that is exactly where the global development page can be found on the Guardian’s home page. That alone stands to confuse readers and blurs the line between journalism campaign and advocacy campaign.
In the press release, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger described the sponsorship arrangement as compensating for declining coverage. “All too often the mainstream press ignores long-term development stories,” he said. “However, it is essential to have a place where some of the biggest questions facing humanity are analysed and debated, and through which we can monitor the effectiveness of the billions of pounds of aid that flows annually into the developing world. The creation of this website is a natural step for the Guardian, which has always been internationalist in its outlook and passionate about social justice.”
Yet the Guardian has ignored an important, long-term story: the ascendancy of the Gates Foundation in setting global health policy and orchestrating media coverage. In 2006, the paper ran “Super-rich donations are just a drop in the ocean,” which observed of the Gates Foundation’s $3 billion a year in spending:
[J]uxtaposed with UK government spending, these sums of money are a drop in the ocean… [T]he Gates Foundation endowment is about the same as a year’s worth of official UK development aid.
With perhaps a few million dollars in media investments, however, the Gates Foundation has made itself synonymous with global health. As part one of this series detailed, PBS NewsHour struck a similar deal with the foundation in 2008. On Wednesday, ABC News announced that it has partnered with the foundation for a yearlong project investigating global health problems. ABC News is investing $4.5 million in the project and Gates will contribute $1.5 million for overseas travel and production. The New York Times called it “an unusual financial agreement.”
One concern that follows from this is that the Gates Foundation has given $50 miillion to promote male circumcision in Africa in an attempt to stem the AIDS epidemic. While this would be admirable in principle, the claim that it will have any effect is entirely based on three non-placebo-controlled, non-double blinded (of course) Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) of some 10,900 paid volunteers for circumcision. After less than two years, 64 of the circumcised men had HIV, 73 less than the non-circumcised control group (137). From this has spun the factoid that circumcision offers "60% protection against HIV". There are several issues with the accuracy of those trials. Circumcision comes with heavy cutlural bias, and more than usual effort is needed to avoid eperimenter and experimentee effects.
Observational and demographic studies go both ways (in at least six African coutnries, more of the circumcised men have HIV than the non-circumcised, and in Malaysia, 60% of men are Muslims - almost the only people in Malaysia who are circumcised - but 72% of HIV cases are).
With the Gates Foundation's heavy investment in circumcision, what chance of being published do any studies now have that fail to show it is beneficial?
#1 Posted by Hugh7, CJR on Mon 11 Oct 2010 at 11:38 PM
Gates is using his billions to buy policies that benefit his financial interests and ideology. His educational grants are going towards the privatization of the public schools and the replacement of teachers with long-distance technology.
His agricultural funding is being made in conjunction with Monsanto, effectively privatizing the the agricultural gene pool.
This is malanthropy, or vulture philanthropy: take your pick.
#2 Posted by Michael Fiorillo, CJR on Sat 16 Oct 2010 at 11:55 AM