Like many election-weary Americans, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is fed up with fake news.
So the Morristown High School graduate has done something about it. His charitable foundation has donated $1 million to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the journalism advocacy nonprofit announced this week.
“I want to stand up for trustworthy journalism, and I want to stand against deceptive and fake news,” Newmark, a member of the Poynter board, said in a statement.
“And I want to help news organizations stand and work together to protect themselves and the public against deception by the fake media.”
Poynter will use the gift–the largest in the institute’s 41-year-history– to endow a Newmark Chair.
Next month a faculty member will be hired to expand journalism ethics teaching- and certification programs and organize annual ethics conferences, in a five-year campaign focusing on verification, fact-checking and accountability.
“This gift allows Poynter to begin a much-needed expansion of its vital work with journalists in exploring the intersection of media, technology and ethics,” Poynter President Tim Franklin said in a statement.
“Our goal is to grow this into a centerpiece of Poynter’s work in the future,” Franklin said.
Newmark’s donation comes at a critical juncture for journalism. Poynter’s coverage of the donation summarized the situation:
The spread of propaganda masquerading as news, turbocharged by social media, has led many to confuse fact with fiction. The flourishing of hyperpartisan news has further fragmented audiences, sowing mistrust of journalists reporting accurate information. Meanwhile, trust in the media is at an all-time low after an election result that was largely unforeseen by pundits and pollsters.
“The silver lining in the election is that lots of people understand that fake news is a really big problem for this country. It threatens our democracy,” Newmark told the San Francisco Chronicle. “People who have a vision of trustworthy reporting need to be louder about it.”
Poynter plans to work closely with The Trust Project, the American Press Institute, Google and Facebook in the Newmark-backed endeavor. Based in St. Petersburg, Fla., Poynter owns the Tampa Bay Times.
The Craig Newmark Foundation also gave $1 million this year to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia. Newmark serves on that foundation’s advisory board, too.
Charity begins at home, of course. Newmark donated $10,000 last year for a composting toilet at the Early Street Community Garden, across the street from his boyhood home in Morristown. Newmark graduated from Morristown High in 1971 and now lives in the San Francisco area.
Newmark’s invention, craigslist, a free electronic bulletin board, is perceived by many as contributing to the decline of established media by eroding the once-lucrative paid classified advertising market.
He expressed concerns about the state of journalism in a 2015 interview with MorristownGreen.com.
“I’m only a news consumer, and just want news I can trust. News professionals tell me that the only real hope is for ‘quality’ or ‘premium’ journalism, which above all, is trustworthy,” Newmark said.
Despite a profusion of “news” platforms, Americans probably are less informed now than when he was younger, “since there are fewer trustworthy news sources,” Newmark told MG.
He expressed high hopes for news sources such as ProPublica and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Time to set the record straight:
This is a joke, and nothing more than a push for propaganda and an end to free speech. The Poynter Group; the Soros-aligned leftists who will be in charge of this program, have a clear agenda to censor any REAL NEWS that comes from the right, or any other source for truth. These sources have become extremely inconvenient to the left, and the globalists. To these globalists/leftists/elitists/technocrats, truth is not something they wish to be circulated. This is the genesis of the “fake news” narrative. It was also used to immediately distract, discredit, shame, dismiss the extremely damaging #pizzagate revelations.
Everyone knows the “Fake News” false narrative perpetrated by the mainstream media is another obvious use of projection. Nobody spreads actual fake news like the mainstream media.
Newmark is just another globalist tech mogul who wishes to silence free speach, truth tellers, and true dissent under the guise of combating “fake news”. I’m embarrassed that this man went to my high school, and is from my home town.