Soros has ties to over 30 Major News Organizations

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When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.

Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations that take Soros cash. This despite the Society of Professional Journalists' ethical code stating: “avoid all conflicts real or perceived.”

This information is part of an upcoming report by the Media Research Centers Business & Media Institute which has been looking into George Soros and his influence on the media.

The investigative reporting start-up ProPublica is a prime example. ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure” – “progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/05/ ... test=faces

Oh and before someone starts whining about it being Fox News and an opinion article, I suggest you read it.

One more thing: a 14-person Journalism Advisory Board, stacked with CNN’s David Gergen and representatives from top newspapers, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster. Several are working journalists, including:

• Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times;

• Kerry Smith, the senior vice president for editorial quality of ABC News;

• Cynthia A. Tucker, the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

ProPublica is far from the only Soros-funded organization that is stacked with members of the supposedly neutral press.

The Center for Public Integrity is another great example. Its board of directors is filled with working journalists like Amanpour from ABC, right along side blatant liberal media types like Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post and now AOL.

Like ProPublica, the CPI board is a veritable Who’s Who of journalism and top media organizations, including:

• Christiane Amanpour – Anchor of ABC’s Sunday morning political affairs program, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” A reliable lefty, she has called tax cuts “giveaways,” the Tea Party “extreme,” and Obama “very Reaganesque.”

• Paula Madison – Executive vice president and chief diversity officer for NBC Universal, who leads NBC Universal’s corporate diversity initiatives, spanning all broadcast television, cable, digital, and film properties.

• Matt Thompson – Editorial product manager at National Public Radio and an adjunct faculty member at the prominent Poynter Institute.

The group's advisory board features:

• Ben Sherwood, ABC News president and former "Good Morning America" executive producer

Once again, like ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity’s investigations are mostly liberal – attacks on the coal industry, payday loans and conservatives like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. The Center for Public Integrity is also more open about its politics, including a detailed investigation into conservative funders David and Charles Koch and their “web of influence.”According to the center’s own 990 tax forms, the Open Society Institute gave it $651,650 in 2009 alone.

The well-known Center for Investigative Reporting follows the same template – important journalists on the board and a liberal editorial agenda. Both the board of directors and the advisory board contain journalists from major news outlets. The board features:

• Phil Bronstein (President), San Francisco Chronicle;

• David Boardman, The Seattle Times;

• Len Downie, former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, now VP;

• George Osterkamp, CBS News producer.

Readers of the site are greeted with numerous stories on climate change, illegal immigration and the evils of big companies. It counts among its media partners The Washington Post, Salon, CNN and ABC News. CIR received close to $1 million from Open Society from 2003 to 2008.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/05/ ... test=faces

Oh and here is one source link:

BILL BUZENBERG, executive director, has been a journalist and news executive at newspapers and in public radio for more than 35 years. He was vice president of news at both National Public Radio and American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio over a span of 16 years. Buzenberg is credited with launching such programs as NPR’s Talk of the Nation, APM’s documentary unit American RadioWorks, and Speaking of Faith. He also began Public Insight Journalism, an innovative use of technology to draw knowledge from the audience. Buzenberg joined NPR in 1978 as the first reporter to help start Morning Edition. For 11 years he was a foreign affairs correspondent based in Washington, D.C. He was named London bureau chief in 1986 and became NPR’s first managing editor in 1989. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Buzenberg has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award, public radio’s highest honor. A graduate of Kansas State University, Buzenberg has also been a fellow at the University of Michigan, the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR is the anchor of ABC’s Sunday morning political affairs program, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” Amanpour was formerly CNN’s chief international correspondent and anchor of Amanpour, a 30-minute, daily interview program that premiered on CNN International in September 2009. She is based in New York. In her 18 years as an international correspondent, Amanpour has reported on all the major crises from the world’s many hotspots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and the United States during Hurricane Katrina. Amanpour joined CNN in 1983 as an entry-level assistant on the network’s international assignment desk in Atlanta. She worked her way up to correspondent in CNN’s New York bureau before becoming an international correspondent in 1990. Her first major assignment was the Gulf War, and she has since covered wars, famine, genocide, and natural disasters around the globe. She has secured exclusive interviews with world leaders from the Middle East to Europe to Africa and beyond, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria and Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat among others. After 9/11 she was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Her body of work has earned an inaugural Television Academy Honor, nine News and Documentary Emmys, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards, the Courage in Journalism Award, an Edward R. Murrow award, and other major journalism awards as well as honorary degrees from The American University of Paris, Georgetown University, New York University, Smith College, Emory University, and the University of Michigan. In 2007, Amanpour was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for her “highly distinguished, innovative contribution” to the field of journalism. In 1998, the City of Sarajevo named her an honorary citizen for her “personal contribution to spreading the truth” during the Bosnia war from 1992 to 1995. Amanpour graduated summa cum laude from the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor of arts in journalism.
http://www.iwatchnews.org/about/our-peo ... -directors

That is from CPI's own website.

Rupert Murdock to only 29, which is bellow the evil threshold.

Rupert Murdoch is rather open about the fact he has financial ties to the News Agencies he owns.

The Koch brothers bought the right to interfere in academic freedom and faculty hiring decisions at Florida State University.

So you are pro disclosure in this thread, and anti-disclosure in the other. Ok.

Difference is we're talking about news agencies in this thread, not individuals making political donations. If a news agency or owner of one decides to donate to politicians I expect them to be honest about it because it is a public trust issue. Otherwise, it's really none of your business to have that information because it leads to discrimination based on political affiliation.



Okay, and have they done anything unethical with it? There is a substancial laundry list of interfering with academic freedom and discrimination based on political affiliation on University campuses (and the perpetrators are usually liberals).

Last edited by Inuyasha on 13 May 2011, 11:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You know, my internet is capable of reaching the Drudge Report. You don't have to spam his entire page of content here.

So, you don't expect your own government and businesses making deals with it to be honest with you. But news media has to live under tougher standards.


I find it really , really hard to buy this.

I'm posting it up because quite a few people would not bother to even look at it otherwise, and I actually didn't get this from drudge, I saw only after I posted that it made it up on Drudge Report.

The University can choose whether it wants to accept donor money or not. That 1.5 million would help FSU compete with other schools who are its size but hold a far larger endowment. (FSU is around $400,000,000 annually).

Would you prefer that they used tax-payer dollars? That hasn't decreased bias in the professors they hire (conservatives for the business departments, leftists for the rest of the school). And what is wrong with what is essentially a left-wing seminary hiring a libertarian professor.

I'd click a lot of donate buttons myself, if I had that kind of money.

Yes. The money they gave FSU is explicitly to fund a program promoting their political ideology.


For all the conservative bitching about how they are "discriminated" against in academia, the fact of the matter really is just that educated people happen to be more liberal. There is nothing to prevent a conservative from gaining a faculty appointment, especially in the sciences or mathematics where political ideologies of candidates would never even be known, but this seldom happens.

Of course FSU can choose whether or not to accept the money. The moral failing here is not just on the Koch brothers for buying out the University's academic integrity, but also on the part of FSU for being so willing to whore itself out to the highest bidder. The idea of donor's money being contingent on being able to interfere in faculty hiring decisions is completely unheard of.


Yes. They are a public university. Of course, under fraudster Rick Scott they are likely to see large funding cuts.


The difference is that this is a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate students into a particular ideology by outright refusing to hire qualified candidates who believe differently than the Koch brothers. They are not hiring the best scholars available for the job, but rather any right-wing shill they can find. The left-leaning nature of most academic departments is not a result of political discrimination.

But you have no problem with the fact that faculty has always had an influence on the hiring of other faculty, even if it limits the diversity of opinion on campus? Unless of course, integrity = adherence to leftist thought, or at least not going against it, I don't think there is much there.

Context is key. Take the amount of professors who prescribe to Libertarian ideology, and divide it by the amount of professors on campus who prescribe to the opposing view point and we'll see how under-represented that form of thought is. The president and board who oversee hirings should then begin hiring to average out and diversity opinion on campus, even if it pisses off every "intellectual" in the world and causes FSU to be branded a fascist-producing institution.

you already have the entire university... One should be consistent in that It is fine for academia to vet from a limited pool of talent who subscribe to leftist dogma, and it is also fine for outside millionaires to influence the hiring of one libertarian economics teacher.




So your problem is the deliberate part... you fully acknowledged the political bias in the hiring and vetting of professors in the humanities, the social sciences, english department, etc. And you think it's fine that they always choose a leftist who publishes work that doesn't conflict with leftist ideology or values?

You then note what the University would be missing out on: The best Scholar available for the Job. And then, the dark consequence of this all in the type of candidate they are now limited to: any right-wing shill they can find. I think it's fair to assume that right-wing scholarship is an oxymoron to you?

It should be noted that this money will alleviate financial pressures on the economics department... it will allow the entire university, which employs mostly left-wing academics, some breathing room, and help secure some jobs that otherwise would be lost to the recession...




Fine, but explain.

That's how academic freedom works. Faculty are chosen by their prospective peers. Not a perfect system, but certainly far preferable to monied interests controlling who can get a job in academia.


Straw man. I never said that and you know it. The whole point is that professors should be free to explore ideas that are interesting to them. I have no problem whatsoever with any university hiring a professor who happens to be right-wing. I do have a problem with an outside meddler refusing to allow them to hire the candidate they want because they are insufficiently right-wing.


No. The president and board have an obligation to find the most qualified candidate. There is no need to deliberately seek fringe viewpoints. We do not need to "balance" our academic departments by hiring creationists for the biology faculty, flat-earthers for the geology faculty, or Marxists or Austrians for the economics department. If a new faculty hire happens to have an interest in Marxian or Austrian economics, fine, but mandating one or the other is ridiculous.


That's not the result of discrimination... people who enter academia just happen to be more liberal.


No, I didn't. Learn to read.


No. Quit with your ridiculous straw men.


Consider that the overwhelming majority of professors in science and math departments are also liberals. Do you really believe there is actual discrimination against conservative mathematicians? The political views of a prospective hire for a math or science department wouldn't even be apparent to the university or the other faculty before a hiring decision was made (or afterwards, for that matter). Clearly the correct explanation for the liberal tendencies of academics is not dependent on actual bias in hiring decisions if the disparity exists even where no such discrimination would be possible.

I'd be fine to take the position that Universities should have an acting political ombudsman to ensure that both left and right wing thought is thoroughly and equally expressed on campus, and, that no private influence is allowed, or, that private institutions supporting each side are allowed with transparency and an acting ombudsman to ensure fairness on both sides.

I am at least consistent in either they do it for both sides, or they do it for no sides. I don't think that the status quo is fine, or if they did what their doing now by restricting left-wing thought on campus by only vetting and hiring right-wingers who either adhere to right wing thought and values or did not go against it.



I didn't say you said that. I assumed that from what you wrote. That is fine that you also take the position that you do above (the one I've emboldened), but it in a sense is a straw-man... you are throwing out there something that you know does not exist just for the sake of coming off as being fair, but it is a double standard to excuse the current - ideologically pure and insular - reality as nothing more then just leftists wanting to enter academia more then conservatives.

The method isn't even impure, a right-wing institution gives FSU money to hire a conservative faculty member. That's the professors salary+benefits over 10 years. They want a libertarian added to the Economics department. You think poorly of the "ends" because of the "means" but also stand by the status quo since the 60's. The means aren't dirty if you know from the onset that your getting money to hire a libertarian economist. If FSU wants to hire any professor, they shouldn't take the money.



You didn't really have to reply to that. That was an emotional rant. But it still illustrated the fact that libertarian view points aren't presented on campus. You also said "Fringe" and brought up a lot of silly examples - I was merely suggesting people whose views are right-of-center. Your constant boiling things down to either being just the Intellectuals, or the Intellectuals + Right-wing crackpots justify my statement:

I think it's fair to assume that right-wing scholarship is an oxymoron to you. I don't set things up to defeat you. You need to be more careful with your words, and explain yourself if I misread you, and not take every chance you get to look lowly on the Right. It detracts credibility from you.



Ideological purity in virtually every department?



I read it well and came to the conclusion that all of the things that you worry about already happens with regards to leftists vetting leftists. It's not like their hiring the very best possible... they limit themselves to only hiring those who adhere to leftist dogma or don't go against it. All of the terrible consequences are already lived out in every public university, its just that leftists are doing so with billions of dollars of tax-payer money(and why you don't consider this a scandal is beyond me). There is no way that leftist insularity in every field outside of business has been secured for this long without constantly vetting or hiring on a ideologically consistent basis. You are talking as if there are no qualified candidates on the right, or as if there aren't already leftist economists on the campus.




Hey, be fair. I'm only reacting to what your saying. You said: "They are not hiring the best scholars available for the job, but rather any right-wing shill they can find." It's either the best possible candidate or any right-wing shill they can find? The only thing the university is limiting themselves of is the best left-wing or centrist they can find. There are great professors on all sides, and perhaps FSU can get land an amazing right-wing professor, who is not a "Right-wing shill" - your words, not mine. I'm sorry, but no straw-man here. You should be more careful with your words. I'm not always, but at least I correct myself and re-clarify and admit if I'm wrong.





Are conservatives not interested in teaching history? Why is that department disproportionally employing leftists? A field that you'd think would be more diverse or equal in who teaches it is disproportionally left-leaning. Unless you are saying that teaching _______ (any subject outside of business) is only of interest to Liberals... Are only Liberals interested in 17th Century German Philosophy? Are liberals only interested in teaching Geography? Ideological purity and insularity in academics is not self-supporting or did not come about on its own. It was constructed and strictly maintained. I would like to see universities hire a closet conservative in a math department who then vocalizes anti-left sentiments, and see him keep his job. If not from within, pressures from outside the department will put things in order. And of course, it will be followed with the excuse that he had other problems, and that he wasn't a very good teacher who also did not get along with other faculty members. I will go into depth, correct, or reply tomorrow after work.