Hoovering Up Henry Ford’s Money: Shaping the News

Hoovering Up Henry Money: A Guide to Ford Foundation Grants (full series)
Free Money Versus Free Enterprise | Revolutions and Bullhorns
Crime and Democracy | Shaping the News

Shaping the News

Finally, Ford grants are also showered upon those who help inject left-wing messages into media and culture. Since the beginning of 2023, those in charge of Henry’s money have shipped out at least $40 million of it to these sorts of recipients.

Setting the tone is a $750,000 grant in March 2024 for Hammer & Hope, a digital magazine produced by a project of the New Venture Fund. Hammer & Hope is so far left-wing that its very name is partly derived from the imagery that eventually landed on the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle flag. (According to Capital Research Center’s Robert Stilson, “the publication’s pages openly debate whether the “masculinist” hammer remains a suitable symbol for the modern proletariat.”)

Influencing local news coverage is another major focus. Rebuild Local News has received $490,000 in grants from Ford since March 2024 to “advance public policies to help save local news and strengthen democracy.”

Scalawag, one of the local news sources, received a $200,000 grant in January 2024. A July 2024 Scalawag headline declared: “Louisiana is the blueprint for further fascist repression.”

Examples of other local news grants since the start of 2023 included Deep South Today ($1,150,000), Outlier Media ($390,000), Texas Tribune ($300,000), Charlottesville Tomorrow ($250,000), Mountain State Spotlight ($225,000), and City Bureau ($100,000).

The Center for Independent Documentary is one of many of Ford’s filmmaker recipients. It has received at least $725,000 from Ford since the start of 2023. Some of it was for Raised by Wolves, described as “a documentary film about how young, white, rural men are being radicalized by forces on the internet.” (For a comprehensive analysis of recent Ford grants to filmmakers, see “How the Ford Foundation Changed Entertainment.”)

Those seeking to become the policeman of internet content have friends at Ford. Disinformation Index Inc. received $400,000 in June 2024 for the Global Disinformation Index, which became infamous for encouraging advertiser blacklisting of news sites such as RealClearPolitics, the New York Post, and Reason, the libertarian magazine.

Finally, the Ford philanthropoids are particularly impressed with grantees who can inject identity politics into the media.

The 19th News is named for the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote. Representative headlines on the main page (as they appeared on a day in mid-August 2024) included “America’s Black elite is buzzing about Kamala Harris on Martha’s Vineyard,” and “Abortion providers are bracing for ‘havoc’ under a possible Trump-Vance administration.” Since March 2023, the 19^th News has received more than $1 million in Ford grants.

Producing news produced by or designed to appeal to Americans who are anything besides white, heterosexual men is a proven path to finding some Ford money in your mailbox. Other examples of those funded since the start of 2023 include the Center for Asian American Media ($3.5 million), the Futuro Media Group ($2,750,000), Documented ($650,000), the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association ($400,000), the National Association of Black Journalists ($300,000), the National Association of Hispanic Journalists ($250,000), Capital B ($250,000), and the Asian American Journalists Association ($250,000).

And then there is the New York Times, which as of this writing had a market capitalization of nearly $9 billion. It is probably not the sort of recipient Henry Ford had in mind when he forked over his fortune to charity.

But this epitome of regime-friendly journalism speaks a language Ford philanthropoids love to hear.

In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine released the 1619 Project, an issue dedicated to rewriting the American founding and capitalism as a triumph of slavery. The inflammatory premise was so off base that several of the nation’s most prominent historians (Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, and others) sent a rebuttal letter disputing several of its main assertions:

On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding—yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.

The Ford grants database shows no funding at all for the New York Times from 2006 through 2019, and thus no known funding for the 1619 Project. But in 2020, right after the newspaper was embroiled in its 1619 controversy, Ford shipped $1.5 million to the newspaper. And since the beginning of 2023, Ford has given the people working under the “All the News That’s Fit to Print” masthead at least $1.6 million more.

The 1619 premise was so far left of reality that even the World Socialist Web Site ran interviews of several historians who were critical of its mangling of American history. The website is run by unapologetic communists, followers of dissident Soviet Marxist Leon Trotsky. And yet, in a September 2019 editorial the WSWS branded the 1619 Project a “politically motivated falsification of history” that was created to help the “Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal “identities”—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race.”

While that description was obviously intended by the socialists as a pejorative, it’s not difficult to imagine every word of it appearing in a successful Ford Foundation grant request.