Big Media Implodes: The Intercept And Other Media Engulfed By Scandal: FTX Was Giving Millions To Outlets Including The Intercept, ProPublica, VOX. Semafor, Vanity Fair, And More

November 28, 2022

Big Media Implodes: The Intercept And Other Media Engulfed By Scandal: FTX Was Giving Millions To Outlets Including The Intercept, ProPublica, VOX. Semafor, Vanity Fair, And More

By Celia Farber

To Control All Messaging Around COVID-19, “biosafety and pandemic prevention,” to ban certain virologists, and worse.

Because OF. FUCKING. COURSE. @TheIntercept was taking millions off Sam Bankman-Fried to run PR for his "biosafety and pandemic prevention" initiatives, and the collapse of FTX and his exposure as a criminal has left a "significant hole" in its budget. pic.twitter.com/wUHKya7oNc

— Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg) November 19, 2022

Daily Mail article here.

This guy Ben Armstrong is doing an old fashioned stakeout, waiting for Sam Bankman Fried to emerge from his luxury condo in the Bahamas. He says he is the one and only person there. No other press.

Must-read thread here from @Angie_Rasmussen on some of SBF's biosecurity investments, including $1.2 million given to a pair of lunatic to produce a hysterical whitepaper calling for the banning of virology/virologists. I'm not making this up…https://t.co/ouPIaAzmDi

— Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg) November 19, 2022

And they paid the UK/US intel agency-linked state-funded and convicted defamers @bellingcat for 'open source investigation' training and hosted their 'workshop'. Then there's the 'teams' eyewatering salaries from their billionaire benefactor who crowdfunded for COVID masks. pic.twitter.com/qJo1tXK6kn

— Michael Martin (@MichaelNo2War) November 19, 2022

They paid Vanity Fair $5M for a Covid origins piece

— james taylor (@ghosted_machine) November 19, 2022

Imagine someone asking people to leave a guy alone who stole minimum $8B in funds from customers

We just want answers.

We answers from Sam. We want answers from his parents. It’s time to tell the story. We aren’t leaving until we get it. https://t.co/QRrU3oeBKQ

— Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) November 26, 2022

It's very simple.

Every single thing SBF owns should be seized and sold. After a lengthy jail sentence, every penny he makes for the rest of his life should be garnished via court order and given to victims.

This is the purest form of fraud and deserves commensurate punishment. pic.twitter.com/PMpXDDMqsg

— FatMan (@FatManTerra) November 21, 2022

The $5 million FTX grant to ProPublica was announced online glowingly earlier this year, bold font and exclamation points mine:

“Building a Stronger Future — a family foundation run by Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and his brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried — announced a $5 million grant to ProPublica on Feb. 28, 2022. Over three years, the donation will support investigations into ongoing questions about the COVID-19 pandemic, biosecurity and public health preparedness.

“The grant will allow ProPublica to establish a world-class reporting team for wide-ranging, international coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and any future outbreaks. This reporting will center on a larger accountability question: Is the world taking the steps needed to contain this pandemic and prepare for the next global health threat? The investigative newsroom will look holistically at biothreats, including the security of labs around the world doing cutting-edge research, the factors that may lead to the next pandemic, and the state of monitoring systems meant to catch new infectious diseases as they emerge.

“To produce the greatest impact over the next three years, ProPublica will hire a team of experienced investigative journalists, including a gifted leader (!) who will help their colleagues focus on key areas, an editor who will shape the work, three reporters, a data reporter and a news app developer. Job postings will go up in the coming weeks.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to extend our investigative journalism on one of the most critical issues in world history,” said ProPublica President Robin Sparkman. “With this ambitious effort, our goal is to do what we’ve always done at ProPublica: offer readers reporting that spurs change, is not being done elsewhere and holds power accountable.”

( No real journalist uses any of these embarrassing cliches. Ever.)

“Sam and I are thrilled to support ProPublica’s vital work,” said Gabe Bankman-Fried. “Ambitious, high-quality reporting is necessary to inform the public, hold institutions accountable, protect lives, and reduce the risk of future catastrophes. ProPublica has provided essential reporting throughout the pandemic on government decision-making, testing failures, laboratory safety, and many other related subjects. We’re so excited that they will be expanding their coverage of one of the most important issues facing humanity.”

I feel queasy. Not shocked.

I was publicly crucified by these people, back in 2006-2008. I was gang stalked, and driven from the profession I loved, at the peak of my powers. I had, they said, caused the very downfall of the profession, had caused Harper’s reputation to “commit suicide.” And now here they are, these periodicals, taking many millions from Bankman Fried, and trying to get people to feel sorry for them that there is now a “significant hole” in the economy. It’s an abomination.

You’d have to be out of your mind to be an editor of a periodical said to be based on “fearless journalism” and take money from something called Building A Stronger Future Foundation.

But it gets worse:

Reported at Forbidden KnowledgeTV.net:

“Sam Bankman-Fried is the fall guy for Jeffrey Epstein. He took over. Everybody in the Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX – it all comes down to when Epstein exited the scenario…the assets ended up in Sam Bankman’s hands and his parents put him there to move it forward…and prior to Epstein [the assets] came from Robert Maxwell…And the regulators are in on this. They look the other way.”

This is the current masthead of The Intercept.

And here is the editor, Roger Hodge’s mea culpa statement. Read the last three lines!

Acting Editor in Chief Roger Hodge, was my editor on this piece at Harper’s.

Act Up hated it.

In fact it was the end of the world in all of American journalism for a while. I am always not in the right mood to tell this whole disgusting story. I will one day.

So I was noticing The Intercept said boo, nothing about the Covid-19 attack on humanity—lockdowns, masks, death shots. This did not surprise me about (the journalistically pulseless) The Intercept but I guess it faintly baffled me about Roger Hodge.

Because I know what Roger knows, about the apparatus/octopus/beast as we worked on a Fauci/DAIDS/AIDS Inc. expose for two years together. He made it more “intense” than even I wanted it to be, if you can believe that. It was in many respects his piece, as well as mine. I mean his imprint as editor was very strong, and it went though countless expansions, edits revisions and fact checks over two long frankly excruciating years but after it came out I was pitched into hell fire and they did that thing with him where they roughed him up but they didn’t mark him for death. I could tell they wanted to keep him.

Roger did not throw me to the wolves at the time and I was grateful for that. Gary Webb is dead because his editors threw him to the wolves— one of journalism’s most shameful chapters.

There’s more.

“Help Ukraine with Crypto, don’t leave us alone with the enemy.”