How the United States has penetrated South African media

The fund connects the US government agencies, including the NED, and the private sector—namely the Luminate foundation of Pierre Omidyar, tech billionaire and financier of US media outlet The Intercept—with the stated goal being to eventually provide US$1 billion in global media funding per year, targeting primarily economically vulnerable countries.

In this new Cold War, South Africa is once again in the crosshairs. In recent years, the NED has developed close ties with the Johannesburg-based newspaper Mail & Guardian, which describes itself as “the continent’s leading independent newspaper.” 

In 2020 and 2021, the NED issued US$355 200 over four grants to the Adamela Trust, Mail & Guardian’s non-profit foundation through which it receives and administers funding. The NED detailed that the grants were intended to support the launch of Mail & Guardian’s weekly pan-African, WhatsApp-based digital publication The Continent and the building of a regional network of journalists and media outlets. 

The grants even specified content that The Continent will publish—including a “monthly disinformation column” and “quarterly in-depth investigations on the role of public, private, and non-governmental actors’ roles in disinformation trends in Africa”—raising concerns about whether Washington is wielding influence over editorial decisions at the outlet to target political adversaries in the region.

The concerns about Mail & Guardian’s proximity to Washington are not new. In the past decade, two of the paper’s editors-in-chief have gone on to work for NED-sponsored organizations. 

In 2015, Chris Roper (editor from 2009-15) left the paper to become deputy CEO of the data journalism initiative Code For Africa—part of the umbrella network Code For All, which is principally funded by the NED—and began a fellowship with the NED-sponsored International Center for Journalists. 

Similarly, Khadija Patel (editor from 2016-20) resigned from the outlet to chair the NED-sponsored International Press Institute and, in 2021, was named head of programmes of the aforementioned International Fund for Public Interest Media.

Further complicating the picture is Mail & Guardian’s relationship with long time US government partner Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropic foundation of George Soros. In 2017, OSF acquired a majority stake in the paper through its Media Development Investment Fund. 

The OSF, considered to be the largest private funder of media in the world, is an official partner of the NED’s Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), whose mandate is to support “US-sponsored development of independent and sustainable media”. The US government has long worked with OSF founder George Soros to sponsor media organisations in furtherance of Washington’s foreign policy agenda—a relationship that CIMA credits with playing an important role in facilitating the dissolution of the Soviet Union:

The breakthrough [in financing media], though, came with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The idea of promoting democracy rapidly grew into a major focus of diplomatic and developmental efforts, and a free press was seen as integral to the process. Backed by major infusions of funding from the U.S. Congress, USAID began pouring resources into supporting independent media in the newly free nations of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. USAID was joined by the State Department and by allied governments, as well as by private funders, most notably by philanthropist George Soros.

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