Politico describes itself as “the global authority on the intersection of politics, policy, and power” and “the most robust news operation and information service in the world specializing in politics and policy.” Since its founding in 2007, Politico has been hugely successful. It was sold in 2021 for $1 billion in what was “one of the most expensive media mergers in recent memory.” Politico says that it produces journalism and that its mission is “providing accurate, nonpartisan impactful information.” (Note that Politico does not describe itself as having an adversarial relationship with power and says that its job is instead to “inform the powerful, particularly those who have a political, professional or financial stake in politics and policy.”) 

But Politico is deeply ethically compromised by its corporate sponsors. It has hosted a range of “sponsored content”—from some of the world’s most insidious and harmful companies—which is deliberately disguised as journalism and is printed under the Politico brand. Politico has proven itself willing to broadcast damaging corporate propaganda on behalf of the fossil fuel, health insurance, finance, and weapons industries, with seemingly no checks on whether the material is misleading or not. It’s a corrupt, sleazy bargain.

My suspicions were raised here when, looking through a list of recommended Politico articles, I spotted one brought to you by a familiar corporate villain: 

Yes, this is an article about Medicare Advantage “sponsored by UnitedHealthcare,” the for-profit health insurance company whose CEO was recently assassinated, allegedly over the company’s infamous denials of care. 

Now, the first thing you should know is that Medicare Advantage is a controversial program. It’s essentially a privatized part of Medicare. Instead of being given a public health insurance plan (traditional Medicare), you’re given a private health insurance plan subsidized by the government. The private health insurance industry therefore wants to get as many people as possible to enroll in Medicare Advantage instead of traditional Medicare, because they get money from the government. This obviously creates a bad incentive, which is why Medicare Advantage has been scrutinized for funneling huge amounts of money improperly to health insurance companies including UnitedHealthcare. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that “Medicare Advantage insurers overall [added] diagnose[s] [to] patients,” which “triggered extra payments of $50 billion from 2019 to 2021, even though no doctor treated the diseases.”

UnitedHealthcare, which is the top Medicare Advantage insurer, has come under fire for overcharging Medicare. and is currently banking on Medicare Advantage in order to make up for weak earnings. Even Republican leaders have been quick to call out MA. Greg Murphy (R-NC) has said that UnitedHealthcare’s practices border on Medicare fraud and that it is the most egregious defrauder of the government. “The worst offender is United,” he said , “which is literally charging $1,000 more per enrollee than anyone else and they upcode them,” which means to add on diagnoses. Murphy explained further: “You take a stone-cold healthy person and they suddenly have 15 things wrong with them, then on the backside, they don't pay the people they should.” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has said that “[Medicare Advantage Organizations] continue to defraud the American taxpayer, costing them billions of dollars a year.” UnitedHealthcare has previously been sued for wrongly denying Medicare Advantage claims using an AI algorithm and has just been sued again by Danbury Hospital in Connecticut for failing to pay Medicare Advantage claims. 

Importantly, while the Trump administration has promised to rein in government waste, it has also promised to increase Medicare Advantage payments by more than double what the Biden administration had previously proposed. It has also appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz to oversee Medicaid and Medicare, even though Oz had personally profited from touting privatized Medicare plans and owned hundreds of thousands of dollars of UnitedHealth stock, which he promised to divest from within 90 days of starting his CMS position. This is not a good sign for reining in abuses, but since it remains to be seen whether Oz will keep good on his promise to divest and he has a history of promoting MA plans, it’s potentially a great sign for UnitedHealth’s profits. It was this kind of twisted corruption, which further enriches the rich by stealing from both taxpayers and sick people (who are themselves taxpayers of course), that allegedly so enraged Luigi Mangione that he shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and which caused a lot of people to cheer rather than mourn Thompson’s death. 

This is all important context for Politico’s March 2025 article sponsored by UnitedHealthcare, which is a propaganda piece designed to obscure these basic facts. It’s meant to convince older people to enroll in Medicare Advantage rather than traditional Medicare, so that UnitedHealthcare can profit from them. The piece, which is presented as a “Politico Focus Bulletin,” appears to not just be sponsored by UnitedHealthcare, but directly written by them. (Some publications accept sponsors for articles that are nevertheless written in-house, such as the Guardian’s Gates Foundation sponsored content.) Other UnitedHealthcare-sponsored Politico articles have bylines from Dr. Philip Painter (“Chief Medical Officer, UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement”) and Wyatt Decker, MD (“Chief Physician, UnitedHealth Group”). 

The articles, full of pure corporate spin, are entirely misleading works of propaganda. Take the recent Focus Bulletin, “Transforming Health Care for Americans on Medicare.” Its only point is that Medicare Advantage (i.e., privatization) is better than traditional Medicare (public insurance). It says: 

To truly support [older Americans], people must have access to affordable, high-quality health care. That’s why, now more than ever, programs like Medicare Advantage or MA, are so important because of the value they offer through extra benefits, improved health outcomes and lower costs to the nearly 33 million people who rely on MA plans. However, misinformation about MA can create a misguided and incomplete narrative about the program. […] Read on to discover the real value of MA.

The bulletin goes on to misrepresent the state of research regarding the differences between privatized Medicare plans and the public plan. It touts industry-funded polling (sponsored in part by UnitedHealth itself) showing a “95 percent satisfaction rate” among Medicare Advantage enrollees, without mentioning satisfaction rates among enrollees in traditional Medicare. Independent polling by the Commonwealth Fund has found that “whether enrolled in Medicare Advantage or traditional Medicare, about two in three beneficiaries overall said their coverage has fully met their expectations,” but “larger shares of beneficiaries in MA plans than in traditional Medicare reported they experienced delays in getting care because of the need to obtain prior approval.” The Politico Focus Bulletin does not report this, of course, nor the fact that “taxpayers pay 22% more per Medicare Advantage enrollee than the cost of traditional Medicare,” or that “MA has limited provider networks that can change, sometimes leaving beneficiaries unable to keep their doctors.” Nor does it mention the crucial fact, as reported by KFF, that “Virtually all enrollees in Medicare Advantage (99%) are required to obtain prior authorization for some services. […] This contrasts with traditional Medicare, where only a limited set of services […] require prior authorization.” 

The widespread use of prior authorization (requiring the provider to obtain the insurer’s permission before giving care) is one of the most frustrating and problematic parts of Medicare Advantage , with the American Medical Association’s news service describing it as a “time-wasting, care delaying tactic.” In a 2024 AMA survey of a thousand doctors, 24 percent said that prior authorizations have led to “serious adverse event[s]” for their patients, including things like hospitalization, an event that was life-threatening or “requiring intervention to prevent permanent impairment or damage,” or even “disability, permanent bodily damage, congenital anomaly, birth defect or death.” Last year, New York Magazine’s Chris Stanton wrote about the case of Dan Hurley, a 48-year-old who was diagnosed with an “aggressive cancer in his pelvic bone.” A medical doctor himself, Hurley was worried from the outset about prior authorizations leading to delays in his care, and indeed, “At every stage of Hurley’s fight against cancer, prior authorization has created roadblocks.” He concluded that “It really feels like they’re trying to kill you… I know they’re not, but that’s what it feels like.”

Prior authorizations also delay the routine care of chronic conditions that are common, especially among people as they age. While the authorizations are pending, “[P]atients aren’t getting treated, and we know that a significant portion of those patients give up. So their diabetes, their depression, their [high blood pressure], or whatever it is just gets worse,” said the president of the AMA, Jack Resneck. A 2022 audit by the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services found that Medicare Advantage organizations wrongly denied 13 percent of prior authorization requests that met Medicare’s coverage rules. 

So: Politico is letting UnitedHealthcare publish misleading corporate propaganda on its website. Politico apparently doesn’t fact-check anything its corporate sponsors post. It says that “POLITICO's editorial department has no involvement in the creation of this content.” But that raises the question: If there is no editorial involvement in the content, is a sponsor allowed to spread whatever self-interested lies it likes? Is there any limit? Would Politico run an article by the Saudi government called “We didn’t kill Jamal Khashoggi”? (That’s not even an especially absurd hypothetical. CNN, the self-described “most trusted name in news,” has run branded content from the Saudi government meant to improve its image, including by “showcas[ing] the diverse and vibrant Saudi culture, from fashion designers to business pioneers, inspiring and connecting people across the world.”)

Now, of course, the defense that media outlets have for “sponsored content” is that it is marked as sponsored content. Look, there’s a faint little gray box around it! It’s distinct! And it says it’s sponsored by UnitedHealthcare! It’s a bogus excuse. For one thing, it’s not actually clear to readers what “sponsored content” means, because it can mean multiple things. It can mean, as it does when the Guardian runs Gates-sponsored content, that the publication is purporting to write what it would write anyway, but that someone has underwritten the coverage. Here at Current Affairs, an animal welfare focused nonprofit (the Craigslist Foundation) has given us a grant so that we can produce animal welfare coverage, but beyond telling us “produce animal welfare coverage with this funding” they have no editorial input into the material we produce. 

But allowing sponsored content on Politico means letting corporations write press releases and publishing those on Politico’s website, with only the most minimal distinctions making it clear that we are reading a corporate press release. Are casual readers really supposed to know that a “Politico Focus Bulletin, which is branded at the top as if it is a joint production of Politico and UnitedHealthcare, is something Politico takes absolutely no responsibility for? That it’s apparently not under the control of their editorial team at all and has therefore not been fact-checked? 

The argument that the content is “labeled” fails as a defense because the whole reason corporations prefer these pieces to advertisements is that they look like they’re Politico articles. The whole point is to make the distinctions between them and “real” content as subtle as possible, in order to make corporate press releases look more credible than they would if they didn’t say “Politico Focus” at the top. Politico itself calls this content “brand journalism,” a term that doesn’t make clear to the reader whether we are expected to treat the content as true or not. 

Politico might also defend the practice by saying that while it does publish corporate press releases, these in no way affect the rest of its journalistic work, which is kept independent from the influence of sponsors. Yes, perhaps senior citizens might confuse health insurance industry propaganda for journalism (and of course targeting seniors with this stuff is especially insidious, because they are more vulnerable to scams and less likely to be skeptical of fake news online), but savvy readers can read the rest of Politico knowing that their information is uncompromised. But this, too, is false.

Let’s say you do a Google search for Politico coverage of UnitedHealth. Here’s what you’ll find in the top two pages of results: 

Notice that four of the results on the first page are UnitedHealth’s own propaganda, including this piece about its HouseCalls program. UnitedHealth has been accused of using HouseCalls as another way of bilking Medicare, essentially sending staff to people’s houses to fill out a questionnaire, offering no treatment, and then billing the government, and doing this over and over with a ton of unnecessary visits to profit as much as possible. (My own mother recently had an experience with a program like this recently—not from UnitedHealth—where nurses kept showing up at the house over and over for seemingly no good reason except to fill out a form, and then of course they billed the government.) Politico/UnitedHealthcare’s article doesn’t refute any of the allegations, but does claim a “99 percent satisfaction rate among participants.” (The statistic has no citation, and we should be skeptical, since almost nothing has only 1% dissatisfaction. Even the Black Plague gets 9% approval in polling. UnitedHealthcare is citing “Saddam Hussein election” level numbers.)

Notice what you do not see in these first pages of Google results: Politico coverage about UnitedHealth’s scandals and lawsuit (although they did cover some things like Elizabeth Warren’s comments on the killing of Thompson, and elsewhere have occasionally discussed things like the controversy over the use of AI by insurers). UnitedHealth has succeeded in controlling the message about it that’s conveyed by one of the country’s leading political information sources, a source that is intended to speak directly to policymakers. (In fact, it emerged in the first round of DOGE’s government spending cuts that many government agencies subscribe to Politico’s hugely expensive news subscription program, Politico Pro.) UnitedHealth is successfully corrupting a journalistic outlet, then, making sure the messages it broadcasts most prominently about this harmful company are positive. 

But this is only the beginning of Politico’s corruption. Apparently, they will take sponsorship from anyone. Politico’s corporate sponsors are a “who’s who” of shady corporations. For instance, Wells Fargo sponsored a 2023 piece titled “Sustainable Finance is Good for Business,” portraying the bank as a champion of clean energy and social justice. But Wells Fargo has been a major financier of fossil fuels, providing nearly $300 billion in lending and underwriting to the fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2023, making it among the top 5 global banks to finance fossil fuels. ​​It was the last of the big banks to set 2030 emissions targets and the first to abandon its net zero commitments. And the idea of Wells Fargo as a champion of equity is a joke. The company has an infamous history of consumer abuses and has been repeatedly fined by the government for violations of law. 

Last year, Politico ran an article sponsored by an entity called the “Electronic Payments Coalition” arguing against a piece of legislation called the Durbin-Marshall Credit Card Bill, under which “banks that issue credit cards would have to ensure that for every consumer swipe there was a network available to merchants for routing the payment that wasn’t Visa or Mastercard.” The article concluded that “this bill will hurt consumers, small businesses, financial institutions of all sizes and local economies across the nation.” But the Electronic Payments Coalition is funded by Visa (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, and the processor TSYS, part of Global Payments), a fact undisclosed in Politico’s story, and its stated purpose is to “defend the way America’s credit card system works” and to avoid any “major transformational change to it.” 

When we turn to the fossil fuel companies, the situation is just as egregious. In June 2022, the American Petroleum Institute (API) sponsored a Politico article called “10 Policies to Unleash American Energy and Fuel Recovery.” It reads as API’s policy wish-list to expand oil and gas production. The piece calls for the government to “lift development restrictions” on federal lands, expedite permits, and roll back environmental rules that “unnecessarily restrict energy growth.” It argues U.S. oil and gas are the “foundation of our economy” and “make our way of life possible,” even claiming that domestic fossil fuels have “made America safer in a turbulent world.” There is no mention that burning those fuels contributes to climate change, or that many of the “burdensome” regulations exist to protect public health and the environment. In 2022, a gas industry front group, Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future, sponsored an op-ed by former Senators Mary Landrieu and Heidi Heitkamp titled “Politics Aside: The fact is natural gas is accelerating our clean-energy future.” (This article looks even more like a typical Politico article than many of the other pieces.) The authors argue that natural gas is not a “bridge fuel” to eventually be phased out, but a permanent partner to renewables: “we need a demand signal from leaders and policymakers that natural gas will be a part of our future—not just a bridge.” In other words, don’t phase out fossil fuels, despite the clear warnings from scientists that nothing could be more urgent. It is any surprise to learn that when Landrieu was in office, “The oil and gas industry [was] the second-largest contributor to Landrieu's campaign committee and leadership PAC combined” and she was “an oil- and gas-industry champion who tiptoes around the global-warming debate and voted to block the Obama administration's climate rules for power plants”? After leaving office in 2015, Landrieu was paid over $200,000 in one year to lobby on behalf of the natural gas industry, including by writing op-eds like the one in Politico. 

Unsurprisingly, in Politico you’ll find the “American Chemistry Council” (a chemical industry lobbying group formally known as the Chemical Manufacturers Association, not an educational council pushing for, say, chemistry classes in school) insisting that “investing in American chemistry can advance Trump’s economic agenda.” “America’s economy runs on chemistry,” they tell us, before recommending that regulatory requirements under the Toxic Substances Control Act be loosened so that the Environmental Protection Agency will give toxic chemicals less scrutiny. There’s more. In an article titled “Supporting the U.S.’s energy transition,” the Chemours Company argued that “domestically manufactured fluoropolymers, a class of PFAS, are key to unlocking U.S. dominance” in clean energy tech​. In other words, Chemours attempted to recast PFAS “forever chemicals”—which have been under scrutiny for contaminating water and human bloodstreams—as essential and beneficial for green innovation. The piece spins a positive narrative around PFAS with zero mention of their well-documented downsides. At the time, regulators were moving to restrict PFAS due to health risks. The Chemours-sponsored content didn’t address any of that; it was an attempt at image rehabilitation by focusing only on the potential “good” PFAS can do. Unsurprisingly, last year, U.N. experts found that Chemours had discharged toxic PFAS chemicals into the local environment along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, “completely disregarding the rights and wellbeing of residents.” Inside Climate News says the company is “a poster child for irresponsible behavior.” But in Politico, the head of the company is profiled in a (seemingly non-sponsored) story as “The chemicals exec looking to decarbonize — and rebuild trust.” Unsurprisingly, the U.N. experts’ reporting on Chemours went unreported in Politico. 

Toxic chemical manufacturers, Medicare defrauders, fossil fuel lobbyists: who else gets to write for Politico? Well, it wouldn’t be good old-fashioned American corruption if the weapons industry wasn’t involved somehow. And sure enough, Raytheon Technologies produced a piece for the site in 2022 on how the U.S. can win the global arms race for hypersonic weapons (by generously subsidizing Raytheon Technologies). The piece is based around an interview with Wes Kremer, president of Raytheon Missiles and Defense, and says that “POLITICO Focus connected with Kremer to learn more about how the U.S. is developing hypersonic technology and how companies like Raytheon are committed to advancement in this space.” Note there that even though this is Raytheon content, Politico is lending its name to the piece (“POLITICO Focus connected.”) POLITICO Focus is clearly trying to present itself as a legitimate part of Politico. The division claims to be “guided by the utilitarian mission of POLITICO journalism and the unmatched policy acumen of our newsroom” even though its actual mission is to “imagine and deliver intelligence-led brand content solutions that earn clients a seat at the table in Washington and in power centers across the globe.” A reader of Raytheon’s “article” would come away with the message that Raytheon’s high-tech weapons are crucial for U.S. security in the face of threats from China and/or Russia—a viewpoint Raytheon obviously wants policymakers to share. There is no discussion of the staggering costs of hypersonic programs and no mention of the risk of escalating arms races. 

More recently, in November 2024, L3Harris Technologies (a defense electronics firm) sponsored an article called “‘Arsenal of Democracy 2.0’ Will Require New Ways of Doing Business,” penned by its CEO Christopher Kubasik​. Kubasik invoked America’s WWII-era industrial surge and argued that today’s defense challenges require similarly tight partnerships between government and industry, thereby pushing a policy agenda that benefits his company. He wrote that “the time has come to fully embrace commerciality in our defense acquisition system and make it the rule rather than the exception.” 

The close proximity of defense industry advertising to POLITICO’s foreign policy writing has drawn criticism. For years, Lockheed Martin sponsored POLITICO’s National Security Daily newsletter, a blatant conflict of interest. In response to criticism. POLITICO abruptly scrubbed references to Lockheed’s sponsorship from the newsletter archives. During that period, POLITICO’s newsroom also ran a favorable profile of Lockheed’s secretive Skunk Works facility. The article gushed that visiting Skunk Works was “the equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory” for “defense tech journalists and aviation nerds.” 

So: Politico sells corporations the right to use Politico’s website to tell damaging lies in order to increase corporate profits. No wonder Politico, with such low ethical standards, has been among the few media success stories in an age where quality journalism struggles to get funded. They’re simply selling themselves to the highest bidder and are happy to let the most unethical corporations in the world whitewash their crimes under the Politico banner. Worse, Politico helps these companies target policymakers, which means they’ve essentially turned themselves into part of the lobbying arm of the finance, health insurance, fossil fuel, and weapons industries. It is hard to imagine an arrangement more corrupt and unethical for a journalistic organization. Politico has no commitment whatsoever to the idea that journalism should hold the powerful to account. Instead it helps the powerful manipulate the public.