Biden Admin Taps Liberal Journalism Academy To Teach Journos How To Be “Balanced and Bias-Free”

The Biden Administration has contracted the Poynter Institute, a liberal journalism academy, to teach journalists how to create balanced and bias-free journalism. The U.S. Agency for Global Media paid Poynter $23,500 for the course through March 31, as they oversee government news outlets, Voice of America, among others. However, Republicans have accused the agency of whitewashing stories about Iran and engaging in partisan advocacy in favor of President Joe Biden, raising doubts about the effectiveness of the training course.

While Poynter presents itself as nonpartisan, the organization is funded largely by wealthy Democratic donors, such as George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Bill Gates, and Tim Gill, who is an LGBT activist and whose husband is Biden’s ambassador to Switzerland. Poynter has attracted criticism for releasing a “blacklist” of conservative news organizations, including the Washington Free Beacon, considering them “unreliable” in 2019. Poynter has also been accused of displaying pro-liberal, anti-conservative bias on their fact-checking site, PolitiFact. Additionally, Poynter has participated in a tabletop exercise to plan how to handle hypothetical threats to Hunter Biden’s emails, advising participants to be skeptical about any release of the documents.

The government’s contract with Poynter comes in the midst of growing scrutiny of think tanks and watchdog groups that track disinformation. Many organizations involved in the network receive federal funding and demonstrate a tendency to label conservative viewpoints as misinformation. For instance, the State Department funded the Global Disinformation Index, which has advised companies to pull advertising from conservative websites, and Poynter has pressured social media companies to eliminate what they consider disinformation.

This is not the first time the US Agency for Global Media has employed Poynter to train journalists. The State Department has compensated Poynter $360,000 over the years to train journalists in several countries, including Japan, Thailand, Turkey, and India.