Foundation funding for the media: noble corruption
Foundation funding of the news media comes with a price. It quietly pushes journalism towards activism. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020).
Funding journalism by foundations is seen as a good thing because no one’s individual will (personal or corporate) can be imposed on newsroom through it. However, this growing financial aid comes with a price that few in the industry and nobody in the public is aware of yet. Foundation funding incentivizes the mutation of the formerly commercial agenda-setting into sponsored propaganda.
Grants and other forms of foundation and philanthropic funding affect journalism through the mechanism of “allocative control” (Graham Murdock). Allocative control incentivizes newsrooms to pursue topics and approaches that are most likely to be approved for funding while neglecting others. Therefore, when foundation funding is significant, the news agenda becomes quietly apprehended by foundations. Journalism starts serving foundations rather than the audience, the market, or society.
As foundations are deemed to be useful social institutions that maintain socially beneficial initiatives, no one scrutinizes their impact on the media’s autonomy. Foundations are not billionaires or corporations that need to be watched over. The creeping relocation of agenda-setting from the newsrooms to foundations remains unnoticed.
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For traditional journalism, particularly for journalism funded predominantly by advertising, the growth of the audience was an essential business goal. It increases both the sales of news to the audience and the sales of the audience to the advertisers. There are some secondary criteria, such as the affluence or loyalty of the audience, but its size is paramount.
As an industrial enterprise, the media—particularly within the advertising model—sought to gather, generalize, and standardize the audience. The audience might be segmented by consumer characteristics (income, demographics, etc.) but was preferably not divided politically, as political division would reduce the media’s audience reach. News media funded by advertising thus cohered, depoliticized, and united readers and viewers.
Under foundation funding, the defining factor is not the size of the audience but the impact of the message and its alignment with the ideas promoted by the foundation. One study quoted a director of a non-profit TV company who said, “impact goes beyond the classic journalistic mission of simply informing the public to asking: ‘Did I change minds? Did I move legislation?’” (Benson, 2018, p. 1071). The readers/viewers are seen within the paradigm of their potential engagement with values promoted by grants and subsidies from foundations.
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Under such conditions, the media are incentivized not to broaden the agenda in order to reach a wider and united audience, but rather to propagate the properly aligned message to a larger number of potential followers. The media do not marry the message to the audience; they marry the audience to the message. They engage in the selection of the audience, but not the message; the message has already been pre-selected. As Ben Smith from the New York Times put it, “nonprofit journalism can be boring, more attentive to its donors than its audience.”[1]
The switch in the principles of agenda-setting from audience-driven factors to message-driven factors leads to the atomization, not the generalization, of the audience. The switch from advertising to philanthropy in funding the media means the change from consumer profiling to civic profiling of the audience. Consumer profiling was depoliticizing and uniting, while civic profiling is politicizing and dividing. By making the media focus on certain topics and divide people, foundation funding reverses the cohering effect of the advertising model. Foundation funding invisibly contributes to polarization.
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The ways in which foundation funding reshapes mechanisms of agenda-setting in the media have started to attract the attention of media researchers. Rodney Benson of New York University wrote:
… Yet there has been too little critical analysis of the nonprofit alternative… We need better answers to questions like: Who exactly is in charge of these nonprofits, what are foundations asking in return for their support, and what are the material and ideological limits to reform embodied in this new organizational model of journalism? In other words, we must acknowledge the possibility that foundations are just as capable of non-democratic “media capture” on behalf of their own interests as they are of fostering civic benefits for society as a whole. (Benson, 2018, p. 1060.)
Based on the analysis of the “close intertwining of elite management and boards between foundations, nonprofits, and commercial media” and having conducted a series of interviews with them, Benson stated that,
Despite the language of civic duty that surrounds the foundation world like a golden haze, there are also often specific strings and metrics attached to grants. Foundations increasingly prefer funding specific projects to general operations, increasing the possibility of some degree of “media capture” by foundation donors <…>. Certainly, such arrangements create the possibility of a conflict of interest, or appearance of such. (Benson, 2018, p. 1073.)
He concluded that,
Foundation project-based funding has also sometimes skewed media attention towards fashionable issues favored by philanthropic donors while ignoring a range of equally or even more urgent social problems. Philanthropic support mostly reinforces and extends an upper middleclass, pro-corporate orientation in mainstream American journalism. (Benson, 2018, p. 1060.)
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As foundation-funded journalism is predestined to focus on pre-selected pressing social issues, it often reiterates the themes of the mainstream media but without the panoramic view the mainstream media are expected to offer due to their market-driven news coverage.
“Even if donors don’t make clear their desire for a particular thesis or ideological slant, there are the potentials for self-censorship. Money talks,” stated James Warren in Poynter, discussing the New York Times’ plan to seek philanthropic funding. He quoted Alan Mutter, a former newspaper reporter and current industry analyst, who wrote to him that,
Third-party funding necessarily raises questions of (1) whether a topic would have been covered if the money were not available, and (2), whether the reporting and conclusions of the resulting stories were influenced by the need to please donors, especially if the publisher has a hope of obtaining future funding.[2]
Since foundation funding incentivizes certain topics to be covered and certain approaches to be employed, newsrooms redirect their resources toward funded projects. Allocative control amplifies distortion in agendas in two ways:
1) it encourages certain topics and formats, and
2) it diverts limited newsroom resources away from other topics and formats.
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It used to be the job of editors to define what social issues are pressing. Now, the church of the media is in decline, and the parishioners are encouraged to save it by bringing their offerings to an intermediary institution that decides what themes the preacher must emphasize in order to sustain its parish. This fundraising intermediary supposedly knows better what the preacher should do and what the congregation wants.
Who are those people who are called upon for donations to support journalism? What is their social, cultural and political profile?
As they donate to the media, they most likely recognize its civic significance and would like to amplify its civic impact. They want to reinforce a message, not generalize the audience. Foundation funding is an invisible amplifier of the pre-selected fragments of agenda. This is where its polarization potential comes from.
Bensons stated that,
…Nonprofit media are not likely to do any better than mainstream media in connecting to the non-urban, non-cultural elite voters whose concerns about jobs, trade, and globalization tend to be ignored or dismissed in news coverage and public policy, and who arguably as a result helped elect the “populist” Republican Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. (Benson, 2018, p. 1067.)
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Martin Scott, Mel Bunce and Kate Wright in “Foundation Funding and the Boundaries of Journalism” (2019) explored the foundation impact specifically on non-profit international news and came to similar conclusions. They found that,
… Foundations did not try to directly influence the content of the journalism they funded. However, their involvement did make a difference. It created requirements and incentives for journalists to do new, non-editorial tasks, as well as longer-form, off-agenda, “impactful” news coverage in specific thematic areas. As a result, foundations are ultimately changing the role and contribution of journalism in society. (Scott, Bunce & Wright, 2019, p. 2034.)
The authors stated that, “Foundation funding ultimately encourages journalists to focus on producing longer-form, off-agenda news coverage about topics that broadly aligned with the priorities of the most active foundations” (Scott, Bunce & Wright, 2019, p. 2035).
The pre-selected focusing of foundation-funded journalism on narrow topics at the expense of a more balanced panoramic view was also noticed. They stated that,
In the case of non-profit international news, foundations direct journalism (both intentionally and unintentionally) towards outcome-oriented, explanatory journalism in a small number of niche subject areas. (Scott, Bunce & Wright, 2019, p. 2035.)
The for-profit media have many pitfalls. But it is at least noticed and criticized in the industry and beyond. No one will criticize non-profit media for pushing important topics and paid by grants from foundations.
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When foundation funding incentivizes certain themes and diverts resources from others, it leads to the pressing, in sponsors’ opinion, social issues to be pressed even more by the journalists. Receiving grants to cover certain issues, the media become more concerned with securing further funding than with solving the issue—because without the issue, there would be no funding.
For journalism, foundation funding almost inevitably creates a conflict of interest. Journalists will subliminally overemphasize the significance of those topics that are funded by philanthropists. Grants creates a demand for triggering media coverage. The agenda skews towards better-funded issues not because of newsrooms’ autonomous view of what is newsworthy, but because of newsrooms’ need for available funding. At some point, the pressing social issues reported on under such incentives become not just covered, but reproduced in the agenda and, through the agenda, in the media-induced reality.
The problem is more or less known in philanthropy. In foundations, special ethical committees are often commissioned to oversee the appropriateness of expenditures so that funding does not reproduce the issues it aims to fight against.
But when it comes to crowdsourced fundraising, exemplified in the media by the membership model, the problem only grows, as there is no such ethical supervision or even public understanding of the agenda risks related to philanthropy funding.
A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020).
[1] Smith, Ben. (2020, March 29). “Bail out journalists. let newspaper chains die.” The New York Times.
[2] Warren, James. (2017, September 3). “The New York Times is looking for nonprofit funding. Will it succeed where others have failed?” Poynter.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
