12.15.09
Bill Gates Tightens Information/Agriculture Grip on Africa by Funding African Journalists, Expanding to India
Summary: The Gates Foundation specifically trains African journalists to play along with agricultural monopolisation of the continent
THE collaboration between the Gates Foundation and Monsanto is a scarcely-explored subject that we’ve covered in:
- With Microsoft Monopoly in Check, Bill Gates Proceeds to Creating More Monopolies
- Gates-Backed Company Accused of Monopoly Abuse and Investigated
- How the Gates Foundation Privatises Africa
- Reader’s Article: The Gates Foundation and Genetically-Modified Foods
- Monsanto: The Microsoft of Food
- Seeds of Doubt in Bill Gates Investments
- Gates Foundation Accused of Faking/Fabricating Data to Advance Political Goals
- More Dubious Practices from the Gates Foundation
- Video Transcript of Vandana Shiva on Insane Patents
- Explanation of What Bill Gates’ Patent Investments Do to Developing World
- Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems
- Gates Foundation Looking to Destroy Kenya with Intellectual Monopolies
- Young Napoleon Comes to Africa and Told Off
- Gates Foundation Denies Global Warming and Strives for Global Domination
- Gates/Microsoft Tax Dodge and Agriculture Monopoly Revisited
The mainstream press rarely tells the truth about the Gates Foundation and Monsanto and it is easy to see why. A few days ago we showed that the Gates Foundation was paying people to write books about agriculture the "Monsanto way" and now we discover that the Gates Foundation does the same thing with journalists, whom it probably trains to recite the required spin. As GatesKeepers puts it:
Training on journalism advancing the interests of the Gates Foundation or the interests of Africans
Why is ‘training’ for journalists always issue-based? AIDS, agriculture, etc. The Gates Foundation wants to advance its own agenda. Why not fund an panAfrican school of journalism? Or five or six regional African schools of journalism? Africans can run their own schools of journalism.
This is a very important move for Gates and Monsanto. People in Africa will inevitably say, “I read it in the paper that Gates is doing all these wonderful things…”
Well, who funded this paper?
Who paid the journalists?
“This would not be the first time that the Gates Foundation buys newspapers, sometimes literally.”Who provided the training?
Why was the particular subject chosen?
This would not be the first time that the Gates Foundation buys newspapers, sometimes literally. To seed the press with praise of its own work, it is usually sufficient to put some money in the bucket (this latest example is of NPR). We have provided other extensive evidence to show that the Gates Foundation has PR operations and also invests heavily in the press, which in turn glorifies it. That’s a fact of life.
Here is what Gates is doing in Africa now.
But there are efforts underway to increase reporting about Africa from Africans. The International Center for Journalists received a $2 million grant, three-year grant in 2008 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve coverage of agriculture and health. They’re placing journalists from the U.S. in four key African countries–Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, and Senegal– where they will lead projects with African journalists, helping them improve not only coverage, but the quality of the articles they’re writing. The project will also help train “citizen journalist” stringers who can relay information from the village level via cellphones.
And earlier this year, the Gates Foundation also awarded a two-year grant to the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to develop an intensive training program for African journalists to promote high-quality coverage of agricultural issues.
Return on investment is trivial here.
Meanwhile, as we showed before, Bill Gates is bringing Monsanto to India. Well, in India in particular, Microsoft is always ushered by worshipers like NASSCOM and thus allowed to introduce another foreign monopolist, as long as those few rich people who welcome the monopolist can benefit (personally) in the process. It’s like British imperialism many decades later.
It is probably worth pointing out that former Microsoft employee, Mr. Reifman, has been warning about Microsoft’s tax dodging and offshoring to India (or bringing in employees from abroad) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Microsoft was found guilty of tax evasion in India too and Reifman has this new update.
More importantly, Microsoft’s already mandating local teams use managed development teams in India for at least some of their project work and its long term plan is to replace more local talent with outsourced talent (see also this commenter, which reflects our own source’s comments and the H1B visa fiasco).
This vision that Microsoft and Gates present for the only planet we have appeases nobody except the monopolists and those whom they successfully deceive using pseudo-journalists (which they fund or influence). For what it’s worth, China is doing similar things in Africa. It’s really sad and it is self destructive. █
Needs Sunlight said,
December 15, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Note that due to connectivity, CDs are a major way for software and systems to be distributed in the African nations, even Shuttleworth’s home of South Africa. As such, the attempts Gates is making on Ubuntu via helpers on the inside make the situation bad.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
December 15th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Here is one great thing that Mark Shuttleworth has done in SA.