When the Associated Press puts out a “fact check,” it’s easy for millions to take it as gospel. The AP has been around for over a century, known for being neutral, thorough and reliable. So, when the director of climate news at the wire service says that President Trump made “false claims” about climate change at the United Nations, readers expect to hear the real story from someone who’s not biased. They're not. And the AP practically admits it — buried at the bottom of every climate story, in small print, is a disclosure that deserves to be in the headline.
The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. Let that sink in. The organization fact-checking climate skeptics is itself funded by climate activists. That's not journalism. That's sponsored content with a press badge.
Source (AP News disclosure).
- Builders Initiative — funds clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and climate-related systems change through Builders Vision.
- Climate and Land Use Alliance — explicitly focused on forests, land use, and mitigating climate change.
- KR Foundation — well known for funding climate transition and fossil-fuel phaseout initiatives.
- Nathan Cummings Foundation — funds climate justice and environmental initiatives.
- Outrider Foundation — supports journalism and public education around existential risks including climate change.
- Quadrivium — supports climate and ocean research, energy transition, and environmental reporting.
- The Rockefeller Foundation — heavily involved in climate resilience, energy transition, and sustainability initiatives.
- Skoll Foundation — supports climate innovation and environmental sustainability programs.
- Walton Family Foundation — funds conservation and environmental initiatives including water and sustainability work.
- William + Flora Hewlett Foundation — a major funder of climate and clean-energy policy research.
- The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation — has supported climate-tech and environmental initiatives.
- Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation — involved in climate and sustainability funding.
Follow the Money
In February 2022, the AP made headlines — not for a scoop, but for an announcement. The wire service declared it would assign more than two dozen journalists across the globe to cover climate issues, calling it the organization's "largest single expansion." (Washington Examiner, May 2023)
The price tag? Over $8 million. And the funders weren't neutral philanthropists — they were a collection of ideologically aligned foundations with a shared agenda. The five organizations bankrolling this initiative were the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation. (Legal Insurrection, December 2022; Inside Philanthropy, March 2022)
These are not passive donors. The Hewlett Foundation has openly stated its grants "focus on cleaning up power production, using less oil, using energy more efficiently, preserving forests, addressing non-CO2 greenhouse gases, and financing climate-friendly investments." (Washington Examiner, May 2023) The Rockefeller Foundation is described by the nonprofit tracking organization InfluenceWatch as a "pillar of the liberal philanthropic establishment." (Climate Depot, February 2022) The Walton Family Foundation has awarded at least $64 million in grants to the Environmental Defense Fund alone. (Climate Depot, February 2022)
AP executive editor Julie Pace celebrated the initiative, saying it would "transform how we cover the climate story." That framing itself is telling. Journalism isn't supposed to be “transformed” by the people paying for it. (Legal Insurrection, December 2022) Reporters don't typically celebrate how donors will reshape their coverage. Yet here was a top AP editor doing exactly that.
The Conflict Is the Story
The AP says its editorial choices are free from donor influence. AP News Vice President Brian Carovillano mentioned that the organization only accepts money “without strings attached.” (Legal Insurrection, December 2022) However, this claim needs careful examination—not because someone might be trying to stop a story, but because how money is distributed can really affect the culture, what’s important and how things are presented in a newsroom.
If you hire a bunch of journalists to focus on climate change through a grant from climate activist groups, you’re not just building a team; you’re creating a team with a specific goal. The stories they write, the people they interview and the words they use—all of it is influenced by who funded them. This isn’t a secret plot; it’s just how organizations work.
Think about the AP’s own climate reporting in this way. The wire service often publishes stories that praise UN negotiators for trying to “phase out fossil fuels” to save “a planet in peril.” Articles ask big questions like, “How did humans get to the brink of crashing climate?” (Washington Free Beacon, January 2024) This isn’t the kind of language you’d expect from a neutral report. It’s more like a call to action.
An MRC Business analysis of 64 AP climate stories found the outlet had effectively become a "de facto mouthpiece for its major left-wing donors who have an obsession with pushing apocalyptic climate narratives." (Washington Examiner, May 2023)
Now, look at the AP’s fact check of President Trump in this context. When Trump told the United Nations that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and suggested leaders “get away from the green scam,” the AP sent its director of climate news to say his claims were wrong. The outlet presented this as journalism, but it’s really more like a funded response.
The Credibility Standard
Fact-checking is only valuable if the checker has no stake in the outcome. A referee paid by one team is not a referee — they're a participant. When the AP fact-checks Trump's climate skepticism using a department built with money from organizations that exist to accelerate the very policy agenda Trump opposes, the result is not an objective assessment. It's a well-dressed opinion piece.
This matters enormously because the AP's fact checks don't stay on AP's website. They cascade through hundreds of news outlets, radio stations, and social media platforms. They influence what gets labeled "misinformation" on tech platforms. They shape public perception at a massive scale. AP says its content reaches billions of people every day. When that content is shaped — even subtly — by the ideological priorities of its funders, the downstream effects on public discourse are significant.
None of this means every factual claim the AP makes about climate science is wrong. The science itself is a separate debate. The point is simpler: an organization cannot simultaneously take millions of dollars from climate advocacy groups and serve as a credible, neutral arbiter of climate-related claims. The conflict of interest is too direct, too large, and too undisclosed to most readers.
Demand Better
Readers deserve to know who is funding the news they consume and how that funding shapes what they read. The next time the AP publishes a climate fact check, scroll to the very bottom. Read that small-print disclosure. Then ask yourself: if an oil company funded "fact checks" of stories critical of their industry, would we accept the results as neutral truth?
Of course not. The same standard must apply here. As the New York Post editorial board put it bluntly after the original grant was revealed: "Sorry: This is news-as-prostitution. Pay the media to get the coverage you want." (New York Post, cited in The New American, January 2024)
Disclosing a conflict does not resolve it. Until the AP separates its climate journalism from activist funding, its fact checks on the topic should be read for what they are: a point of view — paid for by people with a very clear agenda.
