A long time ago, Lee Smith wrote about what I think he termed "the Arabization of the American Press." The Arab press, he wrote, was not really a free press, and certainly not an independent one. The Arab press is understood to be one in which propaganda is the main stock in trade, and facts, or alleged facts, are just incorporated into propaganda pieces to give age-old narratives a topical feel.

Arab media outlets and Arab reporters are almost working for a power faction, and not just based on ideological grounds, but for actual cash-money payment. There are very few stories that run in the Arab press that do not advance a faction's preferred propaganda narrative, and many stories are commissioned by a patron who wants to push out a certain narrative.

When it was revealed that the political dirty tricks operatives at Fusion GPS were paying "real reporters" to "research" stories Fusion GPS' political patrons (which included foreign oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska), Lee Smith concluded that the American press was now becoming the Arab press.

By the way, the media itself has shown zero curiosity about which reporters have a For Sale sign on them and are similarly writing up "research" for billionaires and political groups. For an industry that demands maximum disclosure for everyone else, they sure seem to want to keep their secrets about who's paying them off for hit-piece "research." There was not a peep of media consternation about the exposure that some of their alleged fellow Incorruptible High Priests of the Truth were taking money from foreign oligarchs to do "research."

Which, by the way, almost certainly then became planted stories appearing in the media. A foreign oligarch is probably savvy enough to avoid saying "I am paying you to plant this story." He knows that a few members of the Incorruptible High Priesthood of the Truth would understand that as a gross violation that could get them blackballed.

But if he says "I'll pay you $50,000 to do 'research' on Trump's empire for me, and then you own that research to do whatever you want to with it," well, the "researcher" can then write it up as a "news" article and get it published. He can say "no one demanded i publish it" -- yes, but they did pay you $50,000 to do a month's worth of work, which is now all conveniently sitting in your hard-drive, and can be sold again, this time to a leftwing media publisher.

And why wouldn't you sell it that second time? You probably don't have much else to sell to newspapers and magazines because you just spent a month doing "research" for Oleg Deripaska; the "research" you did for him is almost all you have to sell to the media this month.

So by this method of paying someone to basically write a hit-piece against a political opponent but then saying "I'm not telling you you now have to plant this story, but I'm telling you I give you permission to plant it, if you like," billionaires, Democrat front-groups, and foreign gangsters can pay the media to run stories that they have in fact commissioned.

And now we find out that the AP has been running story after story commissioned by deep-pocketed leftwing foundations.

Associated Press Coverage of Courts, Climate Bankrolled by Dozens of Left-Wing Foundations

Billed as purveyor of 'unbiased news,' wire service strikes lucrative sponsorship agreements with progressive charities

"Lucrative sponsorship agreements," eh?

Chuck Ross:

The Associated Press, the country's top wire service, is now bankrolled in part by millions of dollars from left-wing foundations, including one founded by "1619 Project" author Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The news organization last year announced a series of "partnerships" to subsidize reporters covering climate change, race, and democracy. A review of the donor roster shows that the vast majority fund left-wing political causes, while none are supporters of conservative initiatives.

The Ida B. Wells Society, founded by "1619 Project" lightning rod Hannah-Jones, has teamed up with filmmaker Steven Spielberg's Hearthland Foundation, for example, to foster "more inclusive storytelling" at the Associated Press.

In some ways, it was a natural partnership: The AP's global investigations editor, Ron Nixon, serves on the Ida B. Wells Society's board of directors. In others, it may prove more problematic, given that Hannah-Jones's own reporting has been disputed by historians, who have argued--among other things--that her account of the motivations of the American revolutionaries is factually inaccurate.

The funding, much of it from these sorts of overly political actors, will make it more challenging for the Associated Press to swat away accusations of political bias. In one high-profile example, critics blasted the organization for revising its style guide to instruct reporters to avoid the use of terms like "the French," which the AP indicated was "dehumanizing."

...

The Associated Press is also taking nonprofit money to fund coverage of race and climate. The organization's "democracy journalism initiative," a division whose reporters cover "the intersection of race and voting," is bankrolled by nonprofits such as the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. That organization also funds Stacey Abrams's New Georgia Project and the left-wing activist group Take Back the Court, which advocates for expanding the Supreme Court.

A recent AP article on the topic asserts that the Supreme Court in a 2013 landmark decision "tossed out the heart" of the Voting Rights Act, when in reality the Court ruled that nine southern states would no longer have to "pre-clear" election law changes with the federal government. The AP lamented in another story that "far-right conservatives" in Tennessee were elected to city council seats. A February news report said that "GOP election tactics" intentionally disenfranchised black voters in Wisconsin.

Though the Associated Press is funded largely by subscriptions from the thousands of news organizations that pay to license its content, its donors shell out millions to subsidize coverage of some of the country's most divisive political issues. It is unclear when the AP began entering such partnerships, but they have proved lucrative in recent years.

The press isn't merely corrupt -- it's cash-money-in-an-envelope corrupt.

By the way, one Lee Smith story on the cash-money corruption of the press is here.

Weird that Jake Tapper has run zero stories on this scandal, huh?