A host of corporate media outlets and their parent companies took in taxpayer cash from government customers over the last decade, federal records reveal.
Outlets such as Politico, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones & Co Inc., The Associated Press and others raked in taxpayer dollars from a myriad of federal agencies, according to public U.S. spending records. Trust in the corporate media has plummeted to its lowest levels since at least 1972, as numerous reporting blunders from major outlets continue to drive trust down.
Politico has taken a grand total of $35,018,269 in obligated taxpayer dollars in the form of contracts from 2015 to present day, with some longer-term contracts extending all the way to 2029, according to the spending data. Politico Pro subscriptions accounted for $8.2 million of spending, which includes a networking framework in addition to granting access to paid content, according to Politico’s website.
A subscription to Politico Pro can cost approximately $10,000, and is commonly used among Hill staff of both parties. Politico’s customers included the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Agriculture, and The Executive Office of the President (EOP) among many other agencies, according to spending data.
Politico CEO Goli Sheikholeslami said in a Wednesday memo to staff that the outlet has “never been the beneficiary of government programs or subsidies,” and that the “overwhelming majority” of its customers are in the private sector.
Dow Jones & Co Inc. raked in more than $4 million in government contracts, which included purchases of WSJ content from the DOD, the EOP and the Department of Treasury among many other government customers, according to spending data. Other purchases reflected in the total included Dow Jones Risk Compliance services, Factiva, a business intelligence database, and access to Barron’s, another outlet owned by the parent firm.
The AP, and its associated “child recipient” Press Association, Inc., have received one of the larger investments from the government, topping over $50 million in total awards for various services, according to spending data.
The AP received a $19,502,333 contract from the U.S. Agency for Global Media (AGM), stretching from 2017 to 2022, according to spending records. Additionally, the AGM is slated to dish out at least $5 million by 2027 to have “enterprise-wide access to the wire services including text, video, photo and images.”
The AP told CNN in a statement Wednesday that the government has “long been an AP customer — through both Democratic and Republican administrations.”
“It licenses AP’s nonpartisan journalism, just like thousands of news outlets and customers around the world,” the AP told CNN. “It’s quite common for governments to have contracts with news organizations for their content.”
The State Department also handed out over $400,000 to the AP from 2019 to 2024 to aid the outlet’s overseas expansion in the Pacific, with countries like Laos, Timor-Leste and other “Pacific island nations or territories” considered, according to spending records.
The NYT received a total of $3,107,520 worth of obligated contract awards from 2003 to 2025, with a significant part of the contracts being subscriptions to the newspaper in print and online, according to spending data. NYT customers included the DoD, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Transportation and others.
Other purchases included advertisements from various agencies, including the U.S. Air Force and VA, according to the data.
Trust for national news networks is 30% lower in 2024 than it was in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. Moreover, the data shows Republicans and young people are just as likely to trust social media for news as the traditional national news networks.
Incidents of false or misleading reporting only further drove distrust of the corporate media among the public.
Politico parroted the sentiment that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation” in 2020, with two former reporters claiming they were advised against covering the story by senior staff. Hunter Biden was convicted on three felony counts related to buying the gun in June 2024, with the Department of Justice acknowledging the laptop as genuine and using it as evidence in their case against Hunter.
However, Hunter received a pardon from his father, President Joe Biden, on Dec. 1.
The NYT ran a story in 2021 claiming the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents pushed back Haitian migrants with whips at the southern border in Del Rio, Texas. However, a CBP investigation a year later found no evidence of whipping taking place, but the NYT did not take down their story.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Wednesday press conference that the taxpayer funded Politico Pro subscriptions would be cancelled.
The New York Times and the AP did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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