In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, billionaire philanthropist Craig Newmark spent close to $200 million on news media projects to help fight “disinformation,” secure “voting integrity,” and defeat Donald Trump. More importantly, after a raft of multimillion-dollar gifts to New York’s leading journalism schools, he is poised to shape the future of journalism. However, after the recent dramatic collapse of one of his flagship investments at the Harvard Shorenstein Centre, Newmark’s low-profile news media meddling has been thrust into the spotlight.
Craig Newmark, in case you were wondering, is the Craig in Craigslist who, since leaving the company in 2000, has been spending his wealth on what he calls philanthropy.
In 2015, he established Craig Newmark Philanthropies, built, he claims, on Sunday School principles and the belief that “a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy.” It’s a charming sentiment but hardly believable. In a 2022 TWiT Tech podcast, Newmark repeated this line but with a telling addition: “A trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy. It failed us in 2016.”
Newmark is a Bay Area leftist. Since 2019 he has made numerous large political donations to the DNC and to well-known individual Democrat candidates, including $105,000 to Joe Biden in 2020 and a $1 million donation to ProPublica to fund its Electionland project. He gave $500,000 to the leftist Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law organization. This group acts as a vehicle for pushing DNC policies, including suing for expanded mail-in voting and opposing
