February 8, 2025 – USAID and Internews Networks orchestrate global media control

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

USAID-Funded Internews CEO Jeanne Bourgault pushes for global advertising “exclusion list” to censor “disinformation” at the World Economic Forum.

Like what they did to 𝕏?

“Disinformation makes money. We need to follow that money. We need to work with the global advertising industry because a lot of those dollars go to pretty bad content, and so you can work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists and really try to challenge the global advertising industry to focus their ad dollars towards the good news.”

Notably, Bourgault’s call for global ad boycotts coincided with a widespread advertising boycott targeting Elon Musk’s 𝕏, which has been at the forefront of defending free speech online.

USAID has funneled $472 million to Internews and $68 million to the WEF, where both groups collaborate on censoring the internet.

Is this a good use of American taxpayer funds?

USAID-funded Internews went from funding media organizations with George Soros to overthrow governments in Eastern Europe to calling for advertising boycotts to censor free speech online.

This is a textbook example of U.S. regime change tactics being redirected against domestic populism and American citizens.

In the 1990s, Internews partnered with the Soros Foundation to fund media organizations in post-Soviet nations, playing a pivotal role in the color revolutions of the 2000s in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

During Georgia’s Rose Revolution, Internews funded and trained journalists at Rustavi-2 TV, the leading channel driving the uprising.

“Media was very good at informing the public about what was going on, and it had a huge role in calling people onto the streets.” – Marc Behrendt, former Internews director for Georgia

By 2003, in Ukraine, Internews had conducted 220 media training programs, trained over 2,800 journalists, and produced more than 220 television and 1,000 radio programs. It also funded Telekritika, an online outlet that played a central role in the 2004 Orange Revolution.

After Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Internews—now working with the USAID-funded World Economic Forum (WEF)—shifted its focus to pushing advertising boycotts to suppress online dissent.

What was once a U.S.-funded operation to overthrow foreign regimes is now being used to silence American citizens and dismantle Trump’s populist MAGA movement.

The Price Tag?

USAID has funneled over $470 million in taxpayer dollars into Internews.

The dissemination of information has long been a battleground for ideological and political power. Control the narrative, and you control the minds that shape the future. Internews, a nonprofit organization that positions itself as a champion of independent media, is in reality one of the most insidious forces in global information warfare. With its extensive reach—boasting the training of 100,000 journalists in over 100 countries—Internews operates as an international media cartel, shaping narratives that align exclusively with far-left ideologies while undermining conservative movements worldwide. It functions as an enforcement mechanism for progressive orthodoxy, cloaking itself in the rhetoric of free press and journalistic integrity while methodically silencing dissent.

One might initially dismiss such claims as hyperbolic, but the evidence is staggering. In Ukraine alone, Internews has trained 5,000 journalists. Globally, it has indoctrinated 38,000 media educators, reporters, and fact-checkers on the purported mission of combating “misinformation”—a term increasingly deployed to delegitimize viewpoints that deviate from left-wing narratives. Behind the benign facade of media training lies a targeted effort to shape public discourse by ensuring that only select ideological perspectives receive legitimacy. Internews does not seek merely to report the news but to curate what is permissible as news.

Internews’s funding sources betray its true objectives. It is no accident that USAID, the CIA’s tool for ideological influence operations, provides up to 90% of Internews’s budget. USAID’s historical entanglement with regime-change operations and the promotion of progressive social policies should alone raise suspicions about the kind of “independent media” that Internews claims to support. But even more telling is the financial backing from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, a network infamous for bankrolling leftist movements under the pretense of fostering democracy. The confluence of Soros’s globalist agenda and USAID’s interventionist ethos ensures that Internews operates not as a neutral media entity, but as a propaganda wing for international leftism.

Internews has played a direct role in creating political upheavals across the world, particularly in Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. In each of these nations, CIA and USAID foreign policy interests have leveraged Internews to foster dissent, support opposition movements, and ultimately engineer instability. By flooding these regions with Internews-trained journalists and media networks, the organization has been instrumental in shaping narratives that align with U.S. geopolitical objectives, undermining sovereign governments in favor of pro-Western factions.

Former high-ranking U.S. officials, including Victoria Nuland and Samantha Power, have been key figures in overseeing agencies that fund Internews, reinforcing its ties to globalist foreign policy objectives. Nuland, in particular, played a pivotal role in utilizing Internews to control Ukrainian media. Under her direction, Internews and USAID effectively took control of 9 out of 10 major media companies in Ukraine, ensuring that local reporting adhered to a strict pro-Western and anti-Russian agenda. These media outlets became entirely dependent on Internews and USAID funding, with their reporters trained and guided by Internews operatives. It is no coincidence that Internews-backed journalists were instrumental in organizing the Maidan protests and the broader color revolution that ultimately led to regime change in Ukraine.

A closer examination of Internews’s role in narrative control further unravels its claims of neutrality. The organization is heavily involved in determining which news outlets are deemed purveyors of “misinformation”—a label that has become a convenient pretext for censorship. It does not merely flag content for scrutiny; it pressures advertisers to withhold funding from outlets that fail to conform to its ideological litmus test. By leveraging financial strangulation, Internews ensures that conservative, nationalist, and libertarian perspectives are systemically deplatformed. This economic coercion is an insidious means of silencing dissent, executed under the guise of maintaining journalistic integrity.

Perhaps most chilling is Internews’s alignment with the climate alarmist movement and its role in controlling COVID-19 reporting. It is not content to allow open debate on climate science and policy; rather, it rigidly enforces a doctrine of climate panic. Skepticism of radical environmental policies is summarily dismissed as misinformation, and journalists trained under Internews’s programs are conditioned to treat dissenters as heretics. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Internews played a pivotal role in suppressing alternative viewpoints. Under pressure from USAID and the CIA—despite the latter’s own knowledge that the virus originated from the Wuhan lab—Internews pressured media outlets to reject the lab leak theory outright. It also worked to delegitimize alternative treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, ensuring that only government-approved pharmaceutical solutions received coverage. Furthermore, it actively pressured media to deny any vaccine-related side effects, insisting that the vaccines were safe and effective even as evidence emerged to the contrary. Mask mandates were similarly promoted without question, despite internal knowledge that they were ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus. In doing so, Internews abandoned the core tenets of journalism—objectivity, balance, and inquiry—and embraced advocacy masquerading as reporting.

The broader implications of Internews’s work are deeply concerning. It does not simply train journalists; it manufactures ideological foot soldiers. By embedding itself in media infrastructures across the world, Internews serves as a de facto Ministry of Truth, determining what can be said, who can say it, and what the public is permitted to believe. This is not media freedom—it is media subjugation.

The conservative resistance to Internews must be steadfast. Exposing its financial underpinnings, its ideological biases, and its coercive tactics is essential to reclaiming journalistic integrity. The first step is to challenge the notion that Internews is an impartial organization. It is not. It is a politically motivated entity with a clear mission: to eliminate opposition to the progressive agenda and to ensure that future generations inherit a world where the left’s narratives are the only ones that remain.

Those who care about genuine press freedom must recognize the true nature of Internews. It is not a beacon of independent journalism, but a hegemonic force in media manipulation. Its pervasive influence must be countered with unwavering resolve, lest the very concept of free thought become a relic of the past.