Poynter Institute

Poynter Institute
Motto	Democracy needs journalism. Journalism needs Poynter.
Founder	Nelson Poynter
Headquarters	St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
Type	School of Journalism
Subgroups	PolitiFact
Interests	“Fake News”, journalism, “democracy”
Sponsor of	Kaiser Family Foundation
Sponsored by	Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, Google News Initiative, Koch family foundations, Lumina Foundation, Luminate, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, Tides Foundation
Subpage	•Poynter Institute/List

The The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit "school for journalism and democracy" located in St. Petersburg, Florida. It owns the Tampa Bay Times.

Fake News

Full article: “Fake News”

In September 2016, the Poynter institute published a list of signatories of the code of conduct applicable to its International Fact-Checking Network. It declared itself to be "committed to promoting excellence in fact-checking" and stated that "We believe nonpartisan and transparent fact-checking can be a powerful instrument of accountability journalism; conversely, unsourced or biased fact-checking can increase distrust in the media and experts while polluting public understanding." By 23 November 2016, 40 groups around the world had declared their affiliation to its code of ethics which were supported by the Integrity Initiative.

List

Full article: Poynter Institute/List

In November 2018, the Poynter Institute published UnNews: An index of unreliable news websites, which aggregated 5 lists of unreliable websites to produce a list of 515 sources which it deemed "unreliable". They promised that the "next release will include more sites and the criteria we used for inclusion."

Funding

The combined salaries of the chairman, treasurer, and president of Poynter in 2012 were reported to exceed $1 million, a year in which the institute lost $1.75 million. In December 2016, the Craig Newmark Foundation (an organization established by the founder of Craigslist) donated $1 million to the Poynter institute to fund a chair in journalism ethics.

People

Baybars Örsek is Director of Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network. Prior to joining IFCN, Örsek was as the founding executive director of the Turkish fact-checking organization Doğruluk Payı between 2014 and 2019. He is a frequent source for major media outlets around the world. Örsek is a member of the board of trustees at the NED-funded [TESEV]], Turkey’s oldest think tank.

The institute seems to have received a major financial boost since the war on fake news. Other establishment foundations giving more than $50,000 for 2019 or 2020, are: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation,Charles Koch Foundation,Democracy Fund (Pierre Omidyar),Facebook,Google News Initiative, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,Lumina Foundation,MacArthur Foundation,McClatchy Foundation,Miami Foundation,National Endowment for Democracy,Newmark Philanthropies,Newton & Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, Omidyar Network / Luminate (Pierre Omidyar),Open Society Foundations,Peter & Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Robert R. McCormick Foundation,Silicon Valley Community Foundation,Tides Foundation (Google.org)

 

A Document by Poynter Institute

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:White House Must Establish Disinformation Defense and Free Expression Task Force	open letter	29 April 2021	Censorship Freedom of speech NGO "Disinformation" COVID-19/Censorship "Conspiracy theory" 2021 Washington D.C. Riots US/2020 Presidential election	A number of alleged "free-speech organizations" begging to join the US government in implementing censorship in an Orwellian-named "Free Expression Task Force".

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Norbert Häring	“A fact-checking scene coordinated from the United States, paid for by the EU and supported by the federal government ensures that all media are supplied with narrative-faithful agency reports on important topics, which they disseminate, and remain true to the narrative prescribed from above in their own reports and comments. From this point of view, it also explains why the fact checks are often so openly tendentious and the arguments are borderline retarded. It's not primarily about convincing someone with these fact checks. Its main function is to announce to the media landscape what are the topics on which a narrative must be respected and what this narrative is.”	Norbert Häring	June 2024

 

Sponsors

Event	Description
Craig Newmark Philanthropies	Grantmaking organization by billionaire sugar daddy Craig Newmark to influence journalism, fight "disinformation" and create "cybersecurity" by among other things rebooting social media.
Facebook	The world's most popular social network, with over 1,000,000,000 users in 2014.
Google News Initiative	Google and the deep state buying domination over corporate media and creating tools to censor independent voices.
Koch family foundations	Controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers, who finance the 'right' in US politics when they say the right things.
Lumina Foundation
Luminate	Pierre Omidyar's foundation for financing global media and civil society groups. It is unknown how close it coordinates with certain deep state US government agencies.
MacArthur Foundation	Finances non-profit organizations and select people in approximately 50 countries around the world, buying immense cultural and political influence. It often coordinates its priorities with other deep state foundations, creating a mesh of grants, cross-grants and sub-grants that is very hard to analyze.
National Endowment for Democracy	The "traditional intermediary of the CIA", promoting the US "national interest" abroad by financing groups and individuals.
Omidyar Network	Foundation owned by the the deep state-connected billionaire Pierre Omidyar, financing preferred NGOs
Open Society Foundations	A NGO operating in more countries than McDonald's. It has the tendency to support politicians (at times through astroturfing) and activists that get branded as "extreme left" as its founder is billionaire and bane of the pound George Soros. This polarizing perspective causes the abnormal influence of the OSF to go somewhat unanswered.
Tides Foundation	Funneling large amounts of anonymous deep state dark money to "activists" mostly on the "left"

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