Now I’m sure all of you have heard of government grants but are any of you familiar with “news grants.” I had never heard of them up until the editor of The Intercept brought them up. I’d bet the farm that it wasn’t’ a decision made willingly under pressure, when faced by the least shitty of shitty options.

I’m a believer in “beating someone to the objection”, seems like the editor is as well, given that he tried to get ahead of the bad news. Left of center news outlet, The Intercept was forced to confess an embarrassing admission this week, it had been accepting “grants” from one of FTX’s nefarious “philanthropic entities,” all in the guise of supporting The Intercept’s stellar work on “biosafety and pandemic prevention.”

In layman’s terms, lockdowns, mandates and passports, the tyrannical trifecta!

The Intercept reluctantly admitted that it was in line for a LOT of grants. Just how much, well having already received half million a couple months ago, they were still eagerly awaiting another $3.5 million yet to come over the next two years.

So much for the notion of a free press huh?

Just to prove that this wasn’t a random one-off occurrence, ProPublica, oddly enough another left of center “news outlet” got even more payola than the Intercept. Just how much, well in an email to staff, ProPublica’s editor broke the heartbreaking news that the unpaid portion of a $5M grant for reporting “on pandemic preparedness and biothreats,” was likely not be seen again, Monkeypox!

I’m sure FTX investors must be thrilled to learn that FTX was showering leftist news magazines with multi-million-dollar grants, can you blame them though, with inflation owning the free press doesn’t come cheap!

On the plus side, thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried, we’ve learned that “news grants” are a thing. Of course, I’m sure these fine pillars of journalistic integrity would tell you that grants are completely different, and nothing like those nasty, despicable bribes! Scouts honour!

Committed to doing what’s best for FTX and its shareholders, SBF didn’t write checks directly from FTX’s bank account to news companies. No siree, that would be so wrong, right?

Not to mention highly unethical and unprofessional!

Which totally explains why he would pay $150 to create a non-profit “foundation” to pay some bills on your behalf. And as a bonus, Uncle Sam gives you a tax deduction for “donating” the money to your non-profit, before it turns right around and then “grants” the money to a news site from whom you’d like some friendly coverage.

Seems to me like I recall Big Pharma doing something like this on all the “News Channels” but they called it advertising!

Makes you wonder about the motivation of all those news outlets who ran puff pieces on SBF prior to a couple of weeks ago, wonder how many of them got a taste of this grant money SBF was throwing around?

I know some of you watching are probably thinking, that SBF wasn’t engaged in philanthropy but buying himself some favorable coverage for his fraudulent crypto business and purchasing some “insurance” in case the shit hit the fan, like it has now. Man, you’re cynical, thinking that editors who take multi-million-dollar grants can’t still be completely objective and neutral. It’s almost as if you think they could be bought off!

Proving their commitment to transparency, to the best of my knowledge, so far none of the “completely objective” news companies who got FTX money ever disclosed that fact before now.

The real story behind the story isn’t the fact that not only is there a market for big companies to give large “grants” to news companies instead of buying advertising, but more importantly not only is the practice apparently so widespread and so well-accepted within the industry, that nobody’s blown the whistle on this lucrative gravy train so far.

In closing the collective media wants us to swallow that Sam Bankman-Fried was an altruistic genius, who because of his love of humanity became passionate about pandemic preparedness and biosafety. Which led him to discreetly lavish a bunch of enormous financial grants to news agencies, “grants” that were so large that in some cases they potentially led to doubling the firms’ annual budgets. Without knowing if there were any strings attached, or requirements, or restrictions, or anything else that would have favoured SBF and FTX

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say it’s all true, is it just me or does it trouble you that there’s a market for directing what topics news companies focus on? In this case, it would be SBF directing a bunch of newspapers to report on pandemics and biosafety. Even if we ascribe the best of intentions to his motives, it still looks a whole lot like SBF was buying news coverage.

The only question is whether his intentions were actually altruistic or at their core, self-serving and for a different purpose.