Thomson-Reuters, the parent company of the news agency Reuters, has received millions of dollars from the US federal budget, according to documents on the US government’s platform USAspending.gov. The agency received several million dollars between 2018 and 2022 for a large-scale campaign to influence public opinion, with the stated purposes of “active social engineering defense” and “large scale social deception.” The majority of the funds came from the US Department of Defense’s budget, although the specific use of the funds is not disclosed in the records.
This is not the first time that Reuters has faced serious allegations of being influenced by governments and willing to be used as a tool. In the 1960s and 1970s, the news agency received funds from the British government to spread anti-Soviet propaganda. At the time, the state funding flowed through the BBC to Reuters, in an effort to obscure the direct state support.
The question of the independence of Western press has been raised for some time. In Germany, the major media outlets are closely tied to the government. Points of contact include transatlantic think tanks, revolving doors between politics and media and the financing of German journalism by Western oligarchs, which corrupts the German journalistic landscape. The reporting on Corona, particularly on the Ukraine conflict, also shows that the attempt to establish a state-independent media apparatus through a publicly funded institution has failed in Germany.