EXCLUSIVE — Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, who some conservatives are seeking to brand as the “new George Soros” of the Left, cut a $1.1 million check last year to a Democratic dark money-linked umbrella group for state-focused news outlets.
The donation to States Newsroom is just one example of the almost $150 million in grants the Wyss Foundation, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., steering the Swiss billionaire’s fortune, disbursed in 2023, according to the organization’s latest tax filing shared with the Washington Examiner.
States Newsroom, which oversees websites covering state-level politics across the United States, has come under fire from transparency advocates and Republicans for being an apparent example of how “dark money” news networks conceal political agendas. Before 2019, States Newsroom was technically housed as a project of the Hopewell Fund, a charity managed by the shadowy Democratic-aligned consulting firm Arabella Advisors.
“In 2023, the Wyss Foundation was proud to donate nearly $150 million to various causes, including a $1.1 million grant to States Newsroom to help address the decline and consolidation in local media, particularly its coverage of state-level policy issues,” said Marnee Banks, a spokeswoman for the Wyss Foundation.
“Like all donors to States Newsroom, the foundation has no input into its news coverage or editorial control,” Banks added.
The donation, which comes after the Wyss Foundation directed a million dollars in 2020 to States Newsroom, illustrates how the Swiss billionaire has established himself as a prominent U.S.-based donor, fueling left-leaning causes in addition to his significant funding of conservation and environmental initiatives.
The Wyss Foundation and its affiliated advocacy arm, Berger Action Fund, have a track record of giving generously to groups tied to Arabella Advisors, which oversees a sprawling network of entities that obscure their finances through a legal arrangement called fiscal sponsorship.
Wyss, 89, has become a prime target and foe of Republicans due to GOP-led concerns about foreign influence in U.S. elections. Wyss lives in Wyoming and was found by the Federal Election Commission two years ago to have made $119,000 in illegal political donations from 1990 to 2006.
However, the regulator declined to take action against Wyss because the statute of limitations had passed.
States Newsroom insists on its website that its coverage of politics, healthcare, the environment, and criminal justice is “nonpartisan.” Conservatives disagree, holding that the websites it oversees have long leaned Left.
An old States Newsroom job posting unearthed by the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank, described the news outfit as “a progressive political journalism startup” in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Vardot, a web design company, says on a client page for States Newsroom that the group “provides high-quality, nonpartisan state reporting with a progressive editorial approach.”
“States Newsroom is the Left’s non-answer to unprecedented mistrust of the ‘mainstream’ media,” said Hayden Ludwig, the research director for Restoration of America, a conservative advocacy group. “Instead of reporting facts over spin, leftists have popped up entire networks of propaganda machines like this posing as trusted, independent, local news sites.”
The money-in-politics watchdog group OpenSecrets published a report in 2020 titled ‘Dark money’ networks hide political agendas behind fake news sites that included States Newsroom. In the report, OpenSecrets researcher Anna Massoglia described how the Hopewell Fund, the former parent of States Newsroom, also funded a group called News for Democracy behind “a network of seemingly independent Facebook pages disguised as news outlets.”
States Newsroom has sparred with NewsGuard, a group that purports to rate misinformation levels for news outlets that previously said States Newsroom is akin to other “politically-funded organizations with an undisclosed agenda and undisclosed funders posing as journalism.”
Tax forms show States Newsroom received donations in recent years from the Arabella Advisors-managed Hopewell Fund and North Fund, as well as donor-advised funds that obscure the identities of initial donors.
The Wyss Foundation routed $12.5 million in 2023 to the Arabella Advisors-managed New Venture Fund for a project “supporting the establishment of permanent protected areas in northern South America,” according to a fact sheet for the group’s giving shared with the Washington Examiner.
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Grants were also directed to Demos, a left-wing think tank in New York, the left-wing watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, and the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, among many others.
States Newsroom did not respond to a request for comment.