🚨EXCLUSIVE - BOUGHT AND PAID FOR: HOW $472 MILLION BUILT A GLOBAL LEFT-WING MEDIA MACHINE In February 2025, WikiLeaks pulled back the curtain on a government-funded media empire that’s been quietly shaping what billions of people read, watch, and believe. At the center of it all? A group you’ve probably never heard of: Internews Network. Funded mostly by USAID, Internews presents itself as a friendly nonprofit supporting “independent journalism.” But behind that noble-sounding mission lies a global operation that critics say is more about managing narratives than reporting facts. The numbers are jaw-dropping. Nearly $473 million—yes, that’s nearly half a billion—has flowed to Internews from USAID and the U.S. State Department over the past 2 decades. Add in millions more from billionaire-backed organizations like George Soros’s Open Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and you’ve got a media Frankenstein stitched together with government cash and private influence. In 2023 alone, Internews claims to have worked with 4,291 media outlets, produced 4,799 hours of programming, and trained over 9,000 journalists. It also says it reached an audience of 778 million people worldwide. That’s more than double the population of the United States. But here’s where things get murky. Internews isn’t just giving media groups equipment and microphones. It’s tying grants to ideological conditions. In Hungary, for example, officials accused Internews of funding anti-government media under the guise of “media development.” If you didn’t toe the line, you didn’t get the money. In Ukraine, it funded 9 out of 10 major media outlets—almost all promoting pro-NATO, pro-conflict content during wartime. And it’s not just about news. In Kosovo, just months before major protests broke out in Serbia, Internews offered grants to reporters to write in Serbian. The pitch? Promote “positive” stories about Albanian-Serb relations. Sounds harmless—until you realize this was a foreign-funded push to shape how people talk about sensitive ethnic conflicts. Then there’s Internews’ Earth Journalism Network, which recently launched a $100,000 media grant focused on climate reporting in Asia. Sounds great—except that the fine print gives Internews and its donors the rights to edit and publish all the content. So yes, they’re funding journalism—but they’re also controlling the output. Even advertising isn’t off limits. Through its “Ads for News” program, Internews partners with GroupM, the world’s biggest media buyer, to funnel ad dollars to “trusted” outlets. If you’re not on the list, you get nothing. It’s a digital loyalty program—except instead of points, you get credibility and cash. Internews is led by Jeanne Bourgault, a former U.S. government official who made $451,000 last year. She previously worked on post-Soviet “transition programs” and oversaw a $250 million budget at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. In 2023, she launched a $10 million media fund at the Clinton Global Initiative—a project backed by Hillary Clinton. The Internews board includes big Democratic donors and political insiders, and WikiLeaks says at least one of its six subsidiaries is based in the Cayman Islands, a notorious offshore haven. Meanwhile, its headquarters in California? Reportedly an abandoned building still listed in official filings. Let that sink in: a half-billion-dollar media empire, pushing narratives in dozens of countries, funded by your tax dollars—and run from a ghost office. Internews says it’s here to “support press freedom.” But as one media analyst put it, “It’s not about giving journalists a voice—it’s about choosing which voices get heard.” So the next time you read a “fact-check” or see a story calling something “disinformation,” remember: it might just be brought to you by the same people who paid $473 million to decide what the world thinks is true. Sources: Anadolu Agency, Hungary Gov, Ukrayinska Pravda, KoSSev, Earth Journalism Network, TRT World, Concordia, Shore News Network