Foundations plan to pay news media to cover radical UN agenda Fox News ^ | May 23 2015 |
George Russell
Posted on 5/25/2015 10:44:15 AM
by WhenifhowEXCLUSIVE: The United Nations Foundation created by billionaire Ted Turner, along with a branch of media giant Thomson Reuters, is starting to train a squadron of journalists and subsidize media content in 33 countries—including the U.S. and Britain--in a planned $6 million effort to popularize the bulky and sweeping U.N.-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals, prior to a global U.N. summit this September. where U.N. organizers hope they will be endorsed by world leaders.
The unprecedented media push is formally intended to start on May 25 but is already underway. It is intended to help breathe some new life into a sprawling U.N. effort--supported by, among others, the Obama administration--to create a global social and environmental agenda for the next 15 years.
It is taking place in parallel with an equally strong but unrelated media cheerleading push by supporters of strong climate change action to help set in stone a new global greenhouse gas emissions treaty at a Paris summit in December.
Training sessions for the journalists—whose parent organizations are as yet unnamed—are slated to run through August.
U.S. training sessions will take place in New York and Los Angeles, although who will be given instruction—and whose editorial platforms will be subsidized—has not yet announced. Overall subsidies are expected to range between $25,000 and $100,000, with 15 recipients named by the end of May and another 15 by the end of June.
The effort would also include “putting them in touch with people on the ground doing implementation work”--in other words, those who are actually going to put the goals into practice.
Not all of the funding for the effort has yet been
raised, he added. “We are in both implementing and fundraising mode.”
At the same time as the U.N.-supporting foundations are
boosting coverage of the “post-2015 development agenda,” an even bigger media
coalition has just announced it will start lumping content for collective use
in support of a new U.N.-sponsored treaty on greenhouse gases, which is
supposed to be agreed upon at a summit meeting in December in Paris.
The so-called Climate Publishers Network, a 25-member
group that includes The Guardian as well as such high-profile newspaper as Le
Monde in France and El Pais in Spain, as well as the China Daily, have agreed
to drop their mutual licensing fees to allow all network members to share their
coverage on the climate change issue prior to the December 11 summit.
The network arrangement is slated to disband immediately
afterward.
The U.N. Foundation's Sherinian said that the two
programs “were not formally affiliated in a specific way,” and said he could
not confirm “if or how the outlets involved in the Climate Publishers Network
coincide with those involved in our program to date.”
But like the Climate Publishers with their self-imposed
shut-off date, he said the U.N. Foundation would not commit to maintaining the
SDG subsidy effort beyond this year—it was, he said, “too early to say.”
The same could be said of the success of either
full-court effort to help build a media groundswell for the expansive and
expensive U.N.-supported objectives.
Source: Foxnews.com, George
Russell is Editor-at-Large of Fox News. He is reachable on Twitter at @GeorgeRussell and on Facebook at Facebook.com/George.Russell
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