Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so they need to have as much information as possible. And so we pay premium subscriptions for foreign-facing activity to U.S. media companies who are the best in business or sometimes the only or some of the only people who provide that needed proprietary service. So a great example of this is with the Reuters case. Because when I talked about the Reuters case, a lot of people
there's still a scandal there and a moral hazard in the system that needs to be reformed, but a lot of people ran away with it and sort of presupposed, when they read this, that that meant that it was like a direct pay to play. We don't know if there was or wasn't, if there was back-channel conversations, if there was an informal phone call. I'm not suggesting there was.
Or if it's simply the incentives aligned. You know these are the people giving you the money. You know they're targeting Trump. Because this was the other thing, is all 11 agencies targeting Trump, targeting Elon Musk, were paying to the... non-news agency side of Reuters who was digging up the dirt that the regulatory agencies could use to go after Elon Musk. The same thing for OCCRP.
USAID funds the hit piece journalists. The hit piece journalists dig up dirt. The prosecutors then use that dirt as the basis to arrest them. And then you have a USAID big fat bow on top of it with an accomplishment section saying, ta-da, 456 arrests that we sponsored. But in this case, for example, the Justice Department under the Biden administration paid tens of millions of dollars.
It was something like $60 million to Reuters for Westlaw because Thomson Reuters has properties. They have their news agency side. They have a tool for legal folks, for legal research. LexisNexis and Westlaw dominate that space. So the Justice Department is paying for Westlaw and they're tens of millions of dollars padding the profits of a portfolio company of Thomson Reuters.
But every one of those million is less that they need to make in their news line because their profits are still being pumped up for the network, and they are still... picking heavy winners and losers in domestic politics. You know, like, for example, what if they were paying Raytheon?
You know, what if the Defense Department was paying Raytheon, you know, continually, you know, as it does, billions of dollars in defense contracts, and Raytheon opens up a new line of business called Raytheon Media LLC. And Raytheon Media LLC has a basically explicit media purpose. to target Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Republicans like Bill Kristol.
I mean, just straight up, just like the Washington Post, just like Reuters, just like no objectivity. In fact, they even just like the Washington Post and all the different journalistic things said, we're going to end whataboutism. Objectivity is no longer an underpinning credo of our reporting because we believe both sides makes misinformation spread.
So we do need to pick winners and losers in this. And Trump, And Trump doubled Raytheon's Pentagon contracts to Raytheon. So the contracts aren't going directly to Raytheon Media. They're going to Raytheon Military LLC. But now, Raytheon Media doesn't have to make a dime because their margins, their revenues, are padded up the wazoo by a huge cash infusion to a sister line of business.
You see this everywhere. NewsGuard, for example, one of the most notorious private sector for-profit censorship mercenary firms with the former head of NATO on its board, the former head of DHS on its board, the former... head of the State Department's Global Engagement Center on his board. You name it. Mark Milley, the former head of the CIA NSA. I'm sorry, not Mark Milley.
General Michael V. Hayden, the former head of the CIA NSA, four-star general on his board. they got a $750,000 Pentagon contract, nominally for the purpose of helping the Pentagon scan the internet to help scan and ban Chinese and Russian propaganda online. Now, as this new MAGA foreign policy coalition and base has to navigate the tension between foreign ops and domestic interests,
We have to navigate what the role is of countering foreign influence and countering foreign propaganda, squaring that with the fact that that was the exact predicate used to take out hundreds of thousands and arguably millions of Trump supporters at home when Trump was called a Russian asset and Trump was just like Putin, Trump equals Putin. The FBI is saying it. The CIA is saying it.
And you had tens of thousands of American citizens who were rolled up in these very groups who were supposed to be focused on Russia, making the argument that, well, these Americans are being an unwitting or unwitting vassal of talking points from Russia, so now we get to put them in these blacklist databases. So that's a tension that has to be navigated. But the point is, however you navigate it,
That 750,000 Pentagon grant to NewsGuard was not explicitly for NewsGuard to create advertiser blacklists to target Stephen Crowder and Ben Shapiro and Prager University and Fox News hosts and virtually every populist right-wing media conduit for news. the man who is now the sitting democratically elected president of the United States. But it's the same Raytheon military, Raytheon media thing.
So we need to create firewalls so there's no domestic bleed. If you volunteer to accept... a U.S. government contract for foreign-facing work from any foreign-facing agency, whether that's state, whether that's aid, whether that's DOD, whether that's a confidential CIA service. It's another thing, right? Reuters does CIA services. They have a whole intelligence assistance wing.
So they're getting paid By the CIA and the DOD, again, this is the, you know, it's not the Reuters media line, but it's the, you know, it's the sort of strategic intelligence and whatnot. But this problem pops up everywhere with all these news. But then you do have another problem. So you have that USAID Truman show that comes up from that.
But then you also have the other one, which is that we actually do fund these, a lot of these U.S. media outlets online. to operate in foreign countries. And then they also operate at home, so they sort of are being a direct arm of the State Department for what the grant is doing, and then they're coming back and using that. So, for example, a great example is like our fact-checkers.
Independent fact-checkers. My asthma. There's no such thing as an independent fact-checker. This entire field was created by the U.S. State Department. I would say with a set spike relationship, a sort of Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal relationship with the UK Foreign Office because this was a transatlantic thing.
The UK Foreign Office funds a ton of these as well, but it's one foreign policy blob there. Why do places like the Poynter Institute – Almost every one of the credentialed fact-checkers for Facebook and Reddit and Twitter 1.0 and TikTok and Twitch and YouTube, almost every single one of these groups are either directly or partnered with a U.S. state department.
It's because we use this international fact-checking network, which is housed under the Poynter Institute. as the way to get foreign countries to censor their internet, to stop the rise of politicians, whether they be right-wing populist or left-wing socialist sometimes, to stop them, to censor their internets.
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