The Free Press
Last week, I dipped back into X just to see what I’d been missing on paternity leave. A post from Benny Johnson, a conservative activist with 3.4 million followers, caught my eye. Apparently, he had discovered “the biggest scandal in news media history.”
According to Johnson there was a “crisis” at Politico, the Washington-based news site: It was unable to meet payroll because it had been “massively funded” by USAID, but DOGE had just “deleted” the cash. “Now Politico will go out of business,” Johnson wrote. “The corruption is endless. Good riddance.”
The post went viral, boosted by influential X accounts, including Elon Musk’s. Radio personality and financial maven Peter Schiff posted: “The Biden Administration paid Politico millions of dollars under the table to spread propaganda, which Politico then fraudulently represented to the public as being legitimate news. And they call Trump a fascist!” President Trump himself weighed in, repeating the “biggest scandal” line. For days, this dominated my newsfeed.
The only problem: Johnson’s story was something between a nothingburger and a hoax.
The totally innocuous truth is that a few hundred out of two million government employees were buying subscriptions to a premium trade publication called Politico Pro. Given that Politico Pro offers tools and analysis to better understand niche industries (like agriculture, cannabis, energy, or cybersecurity), and given that we want our civil servants to understand these topics as well as possible, this feels to me like money well spent.
(As for the idea that Politico is “going out of business” or struggling to make payroll: Politico was making a reported $200 million in annual revenue as of a few years ago and Axel Springer bought it in 2021 for $1 billion; Politico Pro is part of their valuable suite of offerings.)
Johnson’s main evidence for his more lurid version of reality was a screenshot from the website USAspending.gov, which seemed to show a company called Politico, LLC being “awarded” $8.2 million, ostensibly illustrated by a sharply ascending line graph.
It took me only a few minutes on USAspending.gov to understand how misleading this was. (By the way, USAspending.gov is not a new website brought to you by DOGE, as many online seem to believe. Congress created it in 2006 via the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.)
What I found—and what you could find if you look—is that Politico did not get $8.2 million from USAID over the last year; it got $8.2 million from various agencies across the entire government. No grants were “awarded”—“under the table” or otherwise. Employees purchased a service called Politico Pro and expensed it to the government.
They did so for legitimate reasons. Politico Pro is not an online media outlet publishing op-eds bashing the Trump administration or, say, the now-infamous Politico article regurgitating intelligence officials’ claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
Politico Pro is to Politico what a Bloomberg Terminal is to Bloomberg news—a specialized product for sophisticated users. As such, it’s expensive. Individual subscriptions can run north of $10,000, and team subscriptions can run into the six figures. Politico can charge this much for the same reason Bloomberg can charge $25,000 for its famous Terminal—customers find it incredibly useful. And, by the way, single federal agencies have spent millions on those terminals, too.
We can debate whether this kind of thing is wasteful or smart spending. Personally, I am fine seeing my tax dollars being used for government agencies to make informed decisions, even in USAID’s climate division, which spent $44,000 on Politico Pro’s energy and environment publication. But it’s not a scandal.
The real scandal is that it got so much traction from powerful accounts on X and so much amplification from our politicians. To see this company admonished by some of the most enthusiastic capitalists in America simply because some of its customers work in the government is disorienting. For the criticism to emanate from Musk, who receives billions of dollars in actual government grants and contracts, is bizarre.
(Though this whole controversy also led to some delicious insight into how silly the outrage really was. When Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) posted that Musk was “exposing [Politico’s] grift,” the post was amended with a Community Note: Boebert’s own office had several Politico Pro subscriptions.)
I spent much of last week screaming into the internet void, trying—with limited results—to correct this obvious misinformation. I got so impassioned that one follower asked me earnestly why this issue mattered so much to me.
My answer: It epitomizes everything that’s wrong with our current media environment. Unreliable or phony information, and the internet mobs they feed, spreads fast. But it feels impossible to keep up or correct the record—even when the black-letter facts are on your side.
If you correct the record that the millions spent came from all federal agencies, not one, the goalposts immediately move to the government “funneling” money to a news organization for favorable coverage. If you can explain that the money was used to pay for valuable subscriptions to a valuable tool, not to influence coverage at a news organization, you might be able to have a reasonable debate about whether this is the way the government should spend their money. And then, just as you’re getting somewhere, a new absurd lie like USAID sending money to the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein will pop up. And the whole process begins anew.
In this particular case—and there will be many more by the end of this week—even prominent conservatives like Christopher Rufo wound up falsely accused of taking money from USAID.
This is our new information reality. For news consumers, the lesson is clear: Proceed with extreme caution. The best thing you can do is bring skepticism to viral claims that you see on platforms like X, and spend a couple minutes reading through the reactions to the claims (where people are often correcting them in real time). You can wait for more thorough reporting on such allegations, consult nonpartisan fact-checkers you trust, or consult platform tools like X’s Community Notes. Most importantly, think critically about these allegations even—and perhaps especially—when they come from people who share your political views. Most of all: Beware of the sycophantic mob.
The best reason for Musk and those who support what he’s trying to accomplish to course-correct is their own self-interest. Truth, and a reputation for telling it, are the strongest weapons in their fight against waste. Amplifying phony claims like Benny Johnson’s destroys that credibility.
Isaac Saul is a reporter and founder of Tangle, a politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from the right, left, and center on the big debates of the day. You can try it for free.
