SIIA President Chris Mohr says administration claim that government is funding brands like Politico and Axios is misleading.
SIIA President Chris Mohr offered a spirited defense of the B2B media industry on Friday after Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” announced that funding is being cut for those and other brands.
In fact, Mohr pointed out in an interview—some of which was used in a story on NPR that evening—the government buys subscriptions to those and many other media brands, and those subscriptions are essential to the work of government agencies.
Musk’s claim that Politico was receiving millions from USAID, the federal foreign aid agency, led to President Trump directing the U.S. General Services Administration to cancel all media subscriptions and contracts.
“To characterize this as a government funding of these publications is at best pretty misleading,” Mohr said. “The government is subscribing to these sources of information, which it’s free to do. It can choose to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, Aviation Week, etc. And if you’re at the FAA, that’s probably a good idea.
“That’s not funding,” Mohr continued. “The government is a customer of these organizations, and the more relevant question is, ‘What information do the people in the government need to do their jobs successfully?’ That’s the exact same question that’s asked in the private sector.”
Mohr went on to explain the unique value of B2B media, which “provides unbiased, apolitical information about virtually every sector of the global economy. If you are in an agency and your job is to know what’s going on in Congress, and to manage relationships with your areas of jurisdiction, you need information about the lay of the land every day. That’s the kind of thing that these publications provide,” Mohr said.
He added that “the entire industry is designed to help people make policy and business decisions. Whether you’re trying to partner with the industry or regulate it, it’s critically important to have this information. The government can, of course, choose what sources it wants to subscribe to, but the idea that it would be cutting off intelligence completely would be extremely concerning and ill-advised,” Mohr said.
“In order for people to make decisions in the different sectors, they need transparency into the workings of the market. That’s what B2B media provides.”
