Amongst the many revelations in the report “Clean”Air, Dirty Money, FIlthy Politics, were misleading claims made by the Guardian about it’s own funding.
In 2021, The Guardian ran a series of adverts claiming that the newspaper was ‘not funded by billionaires’, and that, ‘our readers’ backing gives us the independence to hold the powerful to account’. But The Guardian admitted elsewhere to be backed, in fact, by a number of powerful philanthropic foundations, including the The European Climate Foundation (ECF), as well as Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Family Fund and more. Since then, it has emerged that Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made grants of more than $12 million to The Guardian – equivalent to $116 per reader of the print version of the newspaper, according to the more recent published figures (The Guardian no longer shares its circulation data).
It seems there is no irony as to its own double standards, when the Guardian has run many articles denouncing the lack of transparency around the funding of rightof-centre CSOs and the influence of ‘dark money’, whilst neither The Guardian nor many of its backers, such as the ECF, publish detail on their own funding relationships.
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