Piller and Smith’s Los Angeles Times exposé on Gates’s calamitous African adventure is an artifact of an expired era. Investigative journalism of this probative quality is a quaint relic of a time when editors and producers still permitted their reporters and correspondents to express skepticism toward Gates. Even before the open censorship of the COVID epoch, US media reports about Gates’s charities operated in the narrow range between obsequious fawning and adulation. This is no accident. By 2006, the tsunami of advertising revenues from pharmaceutical firms—about $4.8 billion annually—had
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