When lifelines are labeled as conspiracy: The toll on small and non-profit newsrooms

By John Hurt Allauigan
PressOne.PH

A collaborative investigation by journalists from Southeast Asia has uncovered a coordinated campaign that weaponized transparency to dismantle the world’s primary foreign aid apparatus and vilify media outlets that received funding, labeling them as propaganda machines.

GRAPHIC BY NIKKO BALBEDINA

Why it matters: This smear campaign takes advantage of the fragility of public trust in the media, tainting public perception of foreign aid programs that many independent and non-profit newsrooms treat as their lifeline.

What we found: A coordinated narrative push on X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, and a network of partisan websites reframed the United States Agency for International Development’s official audit reports detailing legitimate humanitarian and media sustainability efforts as a “covert bankrolling of foreign interference.” 

• This bombardment of half-truths was amplified by figures like Elon Musk and Mike Benz and legitimized by WikiLeaks’ malicious “exposé” on an already public paper trail of USAID’s support of various media organizations around the world.
• Journalists found about 300 posts online linked to this campaign from February 2025 to July 2025.
• The campaign exploited a narrative loop: WikiLeaks launched a predisposed “exposé that validated Musk’s USAID conspiracy theories; this was then pushed by “censorship-industrial complex” pundits like Mike Benz before being amplified globally by smaller social media pages and accounts that used the original posts as “evidence.”

What they got wrong: This narrative bombardment relied heavily on strategic half-truths and the intentional omission of facts.

• While it characterized US foreign aid as a “wasteful use of US taxpayers’ money,” it failed to note the role of newsrooms in the global south that received these grants in building resilient communities through their reporting.
• Newsrooms that receive such funding typically disclose the source of funding for every grant-funded project.
• Funds from USAID and the European Union were facilitated by partners such as Internews and the International Fact-Checking Network, which award grants to initiatives such as media resilience and capacity-building for local journalists and independent newsrooms.
• In a market where independent journalism is under-resourced, these grants fund the digital tools, data analysts, and reporters needed to protect the Philippine information space from sophisticated threats, such as foreign influence operations.
• The grants not only fund media work; they are also a lifeline for the communities they serve—a guarantee that facts are reported and the truth survives in a landscape increasingly hostile to press freedom.

Not a new playbook: This attack against USAID and its grantees is not an isolated case; it mirrors a well-worn playbook used by state actors to delegitimize critical reporting. 

• A recent example is the Chinese Embassy in Manila’s campaign against the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) after it published a “how-to” guide on spotting pro-Beijing propaganda online in October 2025.
• The campaign peaked on Feb. 21, 2026, after PCIJ rereleased the story as a viral social video, which reached a significantly wider audience.
• Beijing’s retaliation was swift and followed the methodology seen in the anti-USAID campaign. 
• The Chinese Embassy in Manila issued statements labeling PCIJ journalist Regine Cabato and the organization “tools of U.S. propaganda,” which were amplified by pro-Duterte influencers and their proxies.
• The embassy specifically targeted the newsroom’s transparent funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to question its editorial independence. 

The newsroom’s reality: For veteran journalists like Ellen Tordesillas of VERA Files and independent journalist Cabato, reporters should stick to the values of journalism regardless of where the funds come from.

• According to Tordesillas, there remains no reliable source of funding for small and independent newsrooms working in this space, and receiving foreign funding is not a crime under Philippine law.
• She also urged the public to “also analyze if what we are doing is really harmful” before criticizing newsrooms for accepting foreign support.
• “Our objective here in VERA Files is to help promote excellence in journalism and to promote democracy in the country. It is our belief that the media is an important pillar in democracy,” she said.
• Cabato said that in her case, funders did not dictate how she should approach whatever story she was working on. 
• “What I can categorically say in my particular dealings with the PCIJ [is that] that I was never told what exactly I should write,” she said. “Never in the whole process did a foreign entity, or whoever the characters were in the imagination of these critics, influence the story.”

Pushing Back: To survive, newsrooms must move beyond passive reporting and actively contest the narratives designed to silence them. For Cabato, this begins with exposing the “ultimate act of gaslighting”—the demonization of transparency itself. 

• “The counter-narrative must clarify that foreign funding is a ‘fragile lifeline’ for accountability, not a directive for propaganda,” she said.
• And because “the online atmosphere is really rigged against us, a lot of inoculation is still needed” to prepare the public against disinformation.
• For her, silence is no longer an option when unmediated hate goes viral: “Essentially, we just need to set the record straight.”

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This is part of a cross-border investigation by Southeast Asian journalists from the Philippines and Malaysia.

Read more of other parts of this series: 

USAID collapse amplifies smear against Asia’s rights groups (Philstar.com) 

WHEN THE FUNDING STOPPED: How USAID’s collapse quietly dismantled years of environmental and media work in the Philippines (DailyGuardian)

Charging on: How independent media survives a funding freeze (Teka Teka/PumaPodcast)

From Soros to Usaid: How foreign funding narratives persist in M’sia (Malaysiakini)

This report was made possible by an Internews project to build the capacity of news organizations in understanding disinformation and influence operations in the Philippines.