How the U.S. State Department spends millions of dollars to coordinate Western media and direct investigative journalism against its geopolitical rivals and enemies

Drew Sullivan, Director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, not-so-hidden agent of the U.S. State Department.

It is trivial to claim that the press are biased. Everybody says it.

In particular, one hears that the press are biased towards the left, but this is incomplete. In fact the press advance a very specific political line that is less undifferentiated leftism than it is establishment progressive liberalism. In Germany there are Marxist publications, like Junge Welt, which lie substantially to the left of the media liberal programme, and there are of course various traditional or conservative publications that outflank it on the right. Institutional media is not just “as left as possible,” but rather a carefully calibrated centre-left internationalism.

I think about this a lot, because reading the press is more than half of my job as a blogger. It is the only thing that I do each and every day. I don’t always watch broadcast media, because I much prefer the written form; and I don’t write every day, whether because circumstances intervene or because my writing muscles need a rest or because the ideas I’m developing are not yet ready for the wider world. But, I do read the press every day. I probably read thousands of articles every month, and it is impossible to do all of this reading without getting slightly creeped out. It is amazing how such a wide range of diverse publications, across different regions and countries, can maintain nearly identical messaging on such a wide range of issues. I also find it curious how they manage to change direction in tandem – within literally hours of each other – when as so often it comes time to sing a new tune.

The problem here is simple: How do you maintain this discipline in a decentralised system, across hundreds of different publications all claiming editorial independence? How do you keep literal state media like Deutsche Welle, public media like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and private media like the Süddeutsche Zeitung all on the same page? We should not minimise what an achievement this is. Communist regimes like the DDR had relatively few press outlets, all of them controlled directly by state or party operatives. Their coordination was anything but mysterious. Western liberal democracies, on the other hand, have vastly more complex media systems, but despite this they still manage high degrees of coordinated and even manipulated coverage.

Whenever I bring up this topic, people respond with the same two or three explanations, so allow me to go through them and explain why they are in themselves inadequate:

• “The press are all owned by the same two or three corporations”: Sure, the ownership of private media is highly consolidated, but we still have to explain the seamless integration of public and state media in this system. I find it particularly amazing that German state media (which has no aspirations to editorial independence) and German public media (which is separately funded via mandatory license fees precisely to ensure its independence) end up with more or less the same takes on a wide variety of issues.

• “Journalists are just highly-networked professionals who copy from and follow each other”: Sure, but the phenomenon we’re witnessing is bigger than mere herd behaviour. It is herd behaviour always in the same specific direction, always making the same specific arguments, always thematising and downplaying the same things.

• “Journalists are a bunch of urbanite professionals who express opinions typical of their class”: Sure, even I have said this, and while it explains a great deal, it cannot account for the complexity of the phenomenon before us. Consider how establishment papers of different ideological bent work together to block off opposite sides of the Overton Window and confine discourse. Centre-left papers, for example, sometimes voice nervousness about progressive liberal foreign policy, while demanding more progressive liberal domestic policy. Centre-right papers, for their part, often voice scepticism of progressive liberal domestic policy while doubling down on progressive liberal foreign policy. In this way disparate media work together as a system to support the same political programme while providing the illusion of diverse opinion.

This is not the phenomenon you’d expect from market forces alone. The system we have is constantly flooding the airwaves with the same narrow range of bland and hackneyed opinions. The demand for journalism and analysis from a different perspective is enormous, which is one of the reasons it’s even possible for a nobody like me to have any readership at all. It’s also why anti-establishment views quickly dominate any platform that is not heavily moderated. The standard liberal progressive fare is on offer everywhere; nobody need wade into the dark and dubious recesses of the internet to find more of it.

Of course, by saying that the coordinated messaging of the liberal press is a problem to be understood, I don’t mean to say that it is entirely mysterious. Media throughout the West is awash in outside money and influence. In addition to the farce of public media (that is, direct government intervention in the media marketplace), a wealth of non-profits, non-governmental organisations, academic institutions and other monstrosities are always sticking their fingers in the pie, and always towards the same ends.

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This brings us to the real point of this post, which is this amazing investigative report about an NGO called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The OCCRP was founded in 2008 by a rotund and eccentric man named Drew Sullivan, with the original purpose of coordinating investigative reporting on corruption in the Balkans in the wake of the Bosnian War. Since then, the OCCRP has grown into what Sullivan calls “the largest investigative reporting organization on Earth,” responsible for sensational stories frequently based on mysterious data leaks; the Panama Papers and Suisse Secrets are just two of their many achievements. The OCCRP has an annual budget of 20 million Euros and a dedicated staff of 200 people. Major papers from Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, to the New York Times and the Washington Post in the United States, are members or partners of the OCCRP.

There have long been rumours that all is not right with this Reporting Project …

… but until recently, even many of its widely scattered collaborators had no idea of its extensive ties to the United States government. In 2023 alone, the US contributed 12 million dollars to fund OCCRP operations. The funding comes from the US State Department, via the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Allegedly because the latter “has no competence in media activities,”¹ it is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that puts its name to this particular operation and manages it. Via this circuitous path, the United States maintains veto power over appointees to key positions within the OCCRP, and also provides the OCCRP with dedicated funds to be used only on investigations targeting specific countries, like Russia and Venezuela.

From the investigative report linked above:

The OCCRP has confirmed most of the information presented … in this investigation, but … refutes the importance of it, arguing that the US government has no influence on the choice or contents of the articles … “From the beginning, we made sure that government grants had impenetrable guardrails that would protect the journalism produced by OCCRP,” wrote the members of the NGO’s board of directors in a reply to our questions …

Washington’s strategy is more subtle. The head of a South American media outlet which has collaborated with the OCCRP, said that “critics of OCCRP who parrot Putin’s charge that the news organisation takes orders from the US are wrong” and “misunderstand the nature of soft power”. The OCCRP “is an army of ‘clean hands’ investigating outside the US,” he added. “There is value in investigating alleged allies and enemies. It makes the US seem virtuous and allows them to set the agenda of what is defined as corruption.”

Unlike the the OCCRP board of directors, I do not believe that editorial independence from one’s single largest grantor is ever possible, whatever disentangling solutions you devise. As I said above, public media in Germany – despite not only editorial but also formal financial independence from the government – has become functionally indistinguishable from state media. What is important is the myth of independence itself, which allows public media to pose as an objective critic of government policy while supporting this policy at every turn.

The OCCRP have never denied that they receive funding from the United States, but they obfuscated the extent and the nature of their dependence on a US law enforcement bureau for many years. Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), a German public media broadcaster that used to be a member of the OCCRP, first realised something was wrong back in February 2023. The OCCRP was being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize at the time, and NDR reporters interviewed USAID staffers about their role in funding the NGO:

Proud to have financed a journalistic NGO which had become a potential Nobel prize winner, the [USAID] interviewees spoke very frankly, apparently without realising how revealing their comments were. Among these was that the US government had the right to veto appointments to the OCCRP’s “key personnel”, and that the financing that allowed for the NGO’s creation was secretly paid out by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) of the US Department of State.

NDR, despite their longstanding cooperation with this NGO, were so floored by these revelations that they ultimately severed ties with the OCCRP. In their ignorance they were not alone: Our investigative reporters asked 22 different members or partners of the OCCRP if they were aware of its extensive ties to the U.S. government; none of them were.

Journalists at NDR initiated the investigative report I’m writing about now, eventually bringing on additional reporters from Mediapart (France), Drop Site News (United States), Il Fatto Quotidiano (Italy) and Reporters United (Greece). As soon as OCCRP director Drew Sullivan got wind of their project, he began to retaliate:

On October 4th and 5th 2023, Sullivan sent three emails to OCCRP journalists, in which he advised them to “not talk” to NDR’s [investigative journalists] [John] Goetz and [Armin] Ghassim. “It’s like talking to RT – your words may be twisted,” warned Sullivan, comparing the German broadcaster with the Kremlin’s propaganda TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today) …

In the same emails to OCCRP’s reporters, Sullivan also claimed inaccurately, without the least proof, that Goetz had been described as a “Russian asset” by the German secret services. “This reporter has a sketchy history on these issues and you can never be sure who is a Russian asset,” wrote Sullivan about Goetz.

By October, Sullivan had succeeded via some mixture of accusations, legal threats and God knows what else to get the NDR to censor their own reporting on this subject and to back out of the investigative project entirely. They finally published their own summary of the findings yesterday, well after Mediapart released the report linked above.

To review: For years, the US State Department has secretly funded and coordinated the OCCRP, a massive journalism consortium directing the energies of press across the world towards America’s geopolitical rivals and enemies. The dominant figure in the OCCRP is a mysterious man named Drew Sullivan, whose extensive influence on Western media is sufficient to get a leading German public broadcaster to drop a story that he doesn’t like. The man can literally email hundreds of leading journalists around the world with specific instructions about how they should answer questions. And this is only one NGO, amid a vast sea of them – one node in a massive, hopelessly complex system working to coordinate Western media.

1. … but probably because it is a bad look for an American law enforcement bureau to be funding an international investigative reporting operation …