Video: Welcome to 1984: Bill Clinton calls for a Ministry of Truth
This is amazingly scary!!! One step closer to 1984 and Big Brother… Haven’t read it… Time to check it out: Nineteen Eighty-Four
They had (have) one of these in the Soviet Union, under Hitler, under Stalin, under all dictatorships and Communist regimes!
Video: Clinton Is Asked About Concentration Camps in the USA
Why Is Soros Spending Over $48 Million Funding Media Organizations?
AP
Editor's note: This is the second part of a two part series by on billionaire investor George Soros and his ties to the U.S. media. To read Part 1 of the series, click here.
It’s a scene journalists dream about – a group of coworkers toasting a Pulitzer Prize. For the team at investigative start-up ProPublica, it was the second time their fellow professionals recognized their work for journalism’s top honor.
For George Soros and ProPublica’s other liberal backers, it was again proof that a strategy of funding journalism was a powerful way to influence the American public.
It’s a strategy that Soros has been deploying extensively in media both in the United States and abroad. Since 2003, Soros has spent more than $48 million funding media properties, including the infrastructure of news – journalism schools, investigative journalism and even industry organizations.
And that number is an understatement. It is gleaned from tax forms, news stories and reporting. But Soros funds foundations that fund other foundations in turn, like the Tides Foundation, which then make their own donations. A complete accounting is almost impossible because a media component is part of so many Soros-funded operations.
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.
It turns out that Soros’ influence doesn’t just include connections to top mainstream news organizations such as NBC, ABC, The New York Times and Washington Post. It’s bought him connections to the underpinnings of the news business. The Columbia Journalism Review, which bills itself as “a watchdog and a friend of the press in all its forms,” lists several investigative reporting projects funded by one of Soros foundations.
The “News Frontier Database” includes seven different investigative reporting projects funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute. Along with ProPublica, there are the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting and New Orleans’ The Lens. The Columbia School of Journalism, which operates CJR, has received at least $600,000 from Soros, as well.
Imagine if conservative media punching bags David and Charles Koch had this many connections to journalists. Even if the Kochs could find journalists willing to support conservative media (doubtful), they would be skewered by the left.
For Soros, it’s news, but it nothing new. According to “Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire,” he has been fascinated by media from when he was a boy where early career interests included “history or journalism or some form of writing.” He served as “editor-in-chief, publisher, and news vendor of” his own paper, “The Lupa News” and wrote a wall newspaper in his native Hungary before leaving, wrote author Michael T. Kaufman, a 40-year New York Times veteran. The Communist Party “encouraged” such papers.
Now as one of the world’s richest men (No. 46 on Forbes’ list), he gets to indulge his dreams. Since those dreams seem to involve controlling media from the ground up, Soros naturally started with Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Columbia is headed by President Lee Bollinger, who also sits on the Pulitzer Prize board and the board of directors of The Washington Post.
Bollinger, like some of Soros’ other funding recipients, is pushing for journalism to find a new sugar daddy or at least an uncle – Uncle Sam. Bollinger wrote in his book “Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century” that government should fund media. A 2009 study by Columbia’s journalism program came to the same conclusion, calling for “a national fund for local news.”
Conveniently, Len Downie, the lead author of that piece, is on both the Post’s board and the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting, also funded by Soros.
Soros funds more than just the most famous journalism school in the nation. There are journalism industry associations like:
• The National Federation of Community Broadcasters;
• The National Association of Hispanic Journalists;
• And the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Readers unhappy with Soros’ media influence might be tempted to voice concerns to the Organization of News Ombudsmen – a professional group devoted to “monitoring accuracy, fairness and balance.” Perhaps they might consider a direct complaint to one such as NPR’s Alicia Shepard or PBS’s Michael Getler, both directors of the organization. Unfortunately, that group is also funded by Soros. At the bottom of the Organization of News Ombudsmen’s website front page is the line: “Supported by the Open Society Institute,” a Soros foundation. It is the only organization so listed.
The group’s membership page lists 57 members from around globe and features:
• Deirdre Edgar, readers’ representative of The Los Angeles Times;
• Brent Jones, standards editor, USA Today;
• Kelly McBride, ombudsman, ESPN;
• Patrick Pexton, ombudsman, The Washington Post.
The site doesn’t address whether the OSI money creates a conflict of interest. But then, who could readers complain to anyway?
There’s more. The Open Society Institute is one of several foundations funding the Investigative News Network (INN), a collaboration of 32 non-profit news organizations producing what they claim is “non-partisan investigative news.” The James L. Knight Foundation also backs the network and is possibly the most-well-known journalism foundation. Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen is on the board of directors for ProPublica.
INN includes the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the liberal web start-up MinnPost, National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, National Public Radio, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. The network had included the liberal Huffington Post investigative operation among its grants, but HuffPo investigations merged with the possibly even more left-wing Center for Public Integrity, on whose board Arianna Huffington sits.
Liberal academic programs, left-wing investigative journalism and even supposedly neutral news organizations all paid for by a man who spends tens of millions of dollars openly attacking the right. George Soros is teaching journalists that their industry has a future as long as he opens his wallet.
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on Facebook
and Twitter as dangainor.
Source: Fox News
White House shuts out Herald scribe
The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.”
“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit.
“My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits,” Lehrich wrote.
But Lehrich said the Herald wasn’t purposefully barred from the press pool, saying local pool duty by the Boston Globe was arranged earlier with the White House Correspondents Association. And Lehrich insisted the Herald may yet be allowed into Obama events.
“As we have in the past — including the multiple occasions on which the Herald has supplied local pool reporters — we will continue to consider the Herald for local pool duty for future visits,” Lehrich wrote.
Obama is in town today to raise money for his 2012 re-election campaign. His afternoon speech in the South End’s Cyclorama is open to all media, but only a selected pool can attend other aspects of his fund-raiser. Pool reporters must share all their material with other press. The Herald has been bypassed for pool duty during Obama’s last two visits despite asking the White House to be the local pool reporter.
“Newspapers don’t have to be unbiased to get access. You can’t just let only the newspapers you want in,” said Boston University journalism professor Fred Bayles.
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom defended Romney’s March 8 opinion piece:
“That op-ed was about jobs, which apparently is a sensitive subject for the thin-skinned people around the president. The White House may be able to manipulate pool coverage, but they can’t manipulate the fact that millions of Americans are out of work because of President Obama’s failure to create jobs and get our economy moving,” Fehrnstrom said in a statement yesterday.
The administration has a history of controversial clashes with the press.
The White House was seen to be at war with Fox News early in the administration, with its communications director calling Fox an “arm” of the Republican Party, while the president avoided Fox interviews until his health reform proposal ran into trouble. Since losing control of Congress, Obama has sat down with conservative Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly.
In April 2010, Bloomberg’s Ed Chen, president of the White House Correspondent’s Association, met with then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to hash out complaints about limitations on the press, saying, “In my 10-plus years at the White House, rarely have I sensed such a level of anger ... over White House practices and attitudes toward the press.”
Last month, a San Francisco Chronicle editor reported the White House threatened to bar Hearst reporters from pool duty after a Chronicle reporter shot video of protestors mocking Obama at a fund-raiser.
Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed White House-press relations at right-leaning Instapundit.com, said a pattern appears to be developing.
“It’s all about control,” Reynolds said. “At some point this will blow back on them. Most presidents behave in a more refined fashion. Experience has shown that acting presidential is good politics and to their advantage.”
President Obama:
Video: 13-Year Old Kids Questioned by Secret Service Because of Comments on Osama Bin Ladin on facebook without his parents permission or supervision - Get Your Kids and Grandkids off Facebook and use a search engine other than Google or Yahoo!! WiliLeaks Founder Julian Assange Rails Against Facebook, Google and Yahoo
Brotherhood of Darkness - Shocking, connect-the-dots exposé of the globalist plot
Do world events seem like they're spinning out of control?
Do the explanations you hear from government officials sound like they're meant to mislead?
Does the establishment news media leave you feeling like you've only heard part of the story – maybe even the wrong part?
Why are groups like the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers – groups whose members are obviously powerful with connections to wealth and political influence – never the subject of the evening news?
And for those Snopes disciples: SNOPES EXPOSED – Heavily financed by George Soros
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