The Media Research Center has had a weird obsession with Politico, which has most prominently manifested itself in desperately trying to portray the head of the publication’s German owner, Mathias Döpfner, as a flaming liberal when he’s actually very much a right-winger. Now it’s deliberately misconstruing the nature of government money the publication has received. P.J. Gladnick wrote in a Feb. 6 post:
Foreign aid is not the most popular category of government. So when Team DOGE shut down the USAID payment system how did Politico attempt to garner sympathy from its readers for that agency? By absurdly labeling foreign aid as an “industry.” In fact, the very title of the foreign aid sympathy story on Tuesday by reporters Maggie Miller and Carmen Paun invokes “industry” as in “Foreign aid freeze results in mass layoffs that could ‘crash’ the industry.”
The title is unintentionally ironic since one of those “mass layoffs” could be at Politico itself due to the cutoff of government funding for USAID. Former Fox News producer Kyle Becker offered the receipts:
Gladnick doesn’t make it clear that the money USAID paid to Politico was for newsletter subscriptions, not the government subsidy he suggests.
Gladnick got that part right in a Feb. 9 post, but still insisted this was some kind of scandal:
Politico issued an emergency “Note to Our Readers” on Thursday about evidence uncovered by Team Doge that Politico has been paid at least $8 million indirectly via high priced government agency subscriptions to its Politico Pro service.
Bizarrely in the entire note the agency at the center of the scandal dares not mention its name. Yes, you will not see the word “USAID” even once in the note issued by Politico’s CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and Global Editor-in-Chief John F. Harris.
The damage control starts with the subtitle of the emergency note: “POLITICO has been the subject of debate on X this week. Some of it has been misinformed, and some of it has been flat-out false. Let’s set the record straight.”
“Misinformed” as in Hunter Biden Laptop misinformed which was perpetrated as flat out election interference in Politico in October 2020?
Gladnick then tried to portray USAID paying for a service as a government handout: “Advertising money IS government funding. This is not an issue of ‘dimes,’ but of many millions.” No, dude, that’s not the way it works.
Joseph Vazquez continued to dishonestly blur the line between paying for a service and getting a government handout in a Feb. 10 post:
“Fact checkers” at the anti-Trump website The Dispatch tried to scold critics enraged over the millions in taxpayer dollars wasted on “Politico Pro” subscriptions, and ended up looking completely ridiculous in the process.
Facebook originally hired The Dispatch as part of its old fact-checker squad, perhaps to lend an appearance of balance, as they have claimed. This wasn’t balanced.
Following the uproar over the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other government agencies doling out $8.2 million on Politico’s wildly overpriced Pro subscriptions between 2024 and 2025 alone, The Dispatch fact-checker Alex Demas followed with a knee-jerk response on February 5: “Claims That Politico Received USAID Funds Are False.”
What?
Vasquez then pretended there’s no difference whatsoever between paying for a service and giving a government handout:
Oh, well as long as it’s just “subscriptions” and not “grants,” right? How is this any better? It’s still taxpayer money funding a leftist media outlet that falsely bills itself as being a bastion of “nonpartisan journalism!” It’s a wonder if The Dispatch or Politico for that matter ever bothered to read the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
Vazquez has yet to apologize for falsely portraying Politico’s right-leaning owner as a bastion of liberal bias. But then, this exercise is all about right-wingers lashing out at their purported media enemies. Curtis Houck huffed in another post the same day:
In another blow to the liberal media’s corrupt spigot of lucrative government subscriptions paid for with your tax dollars, President Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) — led by newly confirmed Secretary Doug Collins — said Monday it cancelled $178,000 in Swampy subscriptions for Politico Pro that can now be used to help the VA fulfill its mission of caring for servicemen and women.
Collins said in a statement to NewsBusters that this marked “a new day at VA” in which “[w]e’re putting Veterans at the center of everything the department does, focusing relentlessly on customer service and convenience.”
“We’re working every day to find new and better ways of helping VA beneficiaries. That means cutting wasteful spending and redirecting resources toward programs that benefit Veterans, families, survivors and caregivers,” he added.
The VA, along with its extensive medical care for the mental, physical, and spiritual needs of those who’ve served the red, white, and blue, also provides services for homeless veterans through its Grant and Per Diem (GPD) Program.
With the maximum per diem per veteran coming in at $71.53 a day, one could use the Politico Pro subscriptions to support one homeless veteran for over six years, which sounds like a far better use of tax dollars to us!
This marks the newest entry into perhaps the most stunning find in the early days of the second Trump term about the rot inside government agencies using tax dollars on subscriptions to liberal news outlets such as Politico Pro, a lucrative, paywalled version of Politico diving into the inner workings of government policymaking.
Neither Houck nor Vazquez gave space to anyone defending Politico Pro. It’s as if they’re pushing a narrative and don’t want any inconvenient facts to mess that up.