The MRC's Dirty War Against George Soros Continues

In addition to the usual attacks, the Media Research Center is freaking out that a company tangentally linked to Soros is buying Spanish-language radio stations -- and it still bizarrely believes that Soros controls content on (user-written) Wikipedia.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 5/17/2023

George Soros

• Did Idea for Biden’s Ministry of Truth Originate with a Soros-Funded Think Tank?
• Biden Disinfo Board Advisor Michael Chertoff Tied to Soros-Funded Aspen Institute
• Soros-Funded Prosecutor in VA Says He WON'T Enforce Abortion Laws 'No Matter What'
• Progressive VA Prosecutor Bankrolled by Soros Has Disturbing History
• Editor’s Pick: Townhall Slams Soros-Backed DA on Rising Crime
• SOROS LOSES BIG: Woke San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin Gets Booted, Loses Election
• Former NYC Police Commissioner SLAMS Soros DAs: ‘Very Insidious Plot’
• Nets, Lefties Scramble Back to Drawing Board After Soros DA Gets Tossed in SF
• Virginia AG Calls Out Soros-Funded Prosecutor for ‘Criminal-First, Victim-Last Mindset’
• LIFE WINS! Soros-Funded Groups Lose Their Minds Over Abortion Defeat
• Parroting Chinese Propaganda? Soros Crony Claims COVID-19 Originated from U.S. Lab
• ‘Garbage’: Soros-Tied Young Turks Say Biden Climate Bill Is ‘Weak-Sauce,’ Doesn’t Go Far Enough
• Tucker Carlson EXPOSES Soros for Funding Radical Leftist DAs to ‘Destroy’ Justice System
• George Soros and His Woke Prosecutors (Cal Thomas column)
• DHS Axes Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board After MRC Exposed Soros Link
• Soros and Omidyar Backing Big Money Effort to Buy Latino Vote Ahead of Midterms
• Soros-Funded Group Behind Lawsuit Against DeSantis on Martha’s Vineyard Flights
• Nets Yawn at Bloody Violence in Soros-Backed DA's Philly

ConWebWatch has noted how the MRC was blaming Soros for pointing out that two straight quarters of negative GDP may not be a completely reliable indicator of a recession.

Meanwhile, the MRC was similarly appalled that Soros was being allowed to express opinions on a website he helped pay for. Jeffrey Clark ranted in a July 5 post:

Liberal billionaire George Soros claimed that the greatest threat to the U.S. is “far-right extremists” on the U.S. Supreme Court and not dictators like China’s Xi Jinping or Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

[...]

But there was one thing the chair of Open Society Foundations neglected to mention in his tweet. A radical leftist opinion site — one Soros pays for, called Project Syndicate (PS) – published Soros’s article. PS delivers thousands of extremist, far-left op-eds to a global audience and boasts a membership of “over 600 media outlets” in 156 countries. Soros and wealthy leftist philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates funded PS with $1,242,105 and $5,280,186, respectively, from 2012 to 2019, according to Foundation Directory Online.

Of course, any content that's even slightly to the left of the right-wing rants published by the MRC are "radical" and "extremist" in Clark's eyes. Indeed, so opposed is Clark to the mere idea of Soros being allowed to express an opinion that he bizarrely complained that "Soros then ridiculously suggested that because he is partisan, he can comment on nonpartisan issues." Clark has never applied that logic to any of his MRC co-workers.

An Aug. 1 post by Clark ranted that Soros "is pushing back big time against critics of woke prosecutors that he helped elect across the country. He claimed in a recent commentary that the 'agenda' of his 'reform-minded prosecutors' is both 'popular' and 'effective.'” But he hid the fact that the op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal -- hardly a "radical leftist opinion site." Clark apparently didn't want to admit that a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication bets known for its right-wing commentary deviated from that agenda to publish something written by Soros.

Fall 2022

The MRC finished out 2022 with even more anti-Soros attacks:

• Four Leftist, Soros-Backed DAs the Media Are Hiding From You
• Mother Jones Wields Soros-Funded Group to Wokescold Businesses Donating to GOP ‘Sedition Caucus’
• Soros-Tied Treasury Dept Official Supports Defunding Police and ‘Racial Equity’
• BREAKING: Soros Gave $30M to Groups Urging Censorship of So-Called Disinfo Before Midterms
• Big Three Evening Nets Ignore Soros Pouring $1M to Boost Election-Denier Abrams for 2 Days
• Soros Gave $17.6M to Lefty Group Pushing Facebook, TikTok to Censor So-Called Election Disinfo
• Soros Gave Another $32 Million to 28 Groups in Coalition Calling for Censorship Before Midterms
• ‘Holy Crap’: Soros-Funded ProPublica Admits Validity of COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory
• Soros-Funded ProPublica Harangues ‘Right-Wing Media,’ ‘Republicans’ for Sinking Orwellian DGB
• THE KING OF WOKE: New York Times Finally Crowns ‘George Soros’ ‘Largest Donor’ in 2022
• WATCH: '60 Minutes' Pushes Soros-Funded Org’s Social Media Political Rant Before Election
• ‘OUR DEMOCRACY’: Soros Gave Over $80 Million to Groups Pushing Censorship Before Midterms
• NYT Essayist with Soros Ties Pushes ‘Climate Reparations’ for ‘Third World Corruptocrats’
• Soros-Funded Group Pressuring Elon Musk to Keep President Trump Banned from Twitter
• Google and YouTube Give Biggest Fact-Check Grant Ever To Soros-Funded Group
• NYU Economist Warns of ‘Unavoidable’ Global ‘Crash’ in Soros-Funded Outlet
• Biden Nominates Soros-Tied Extremist to FCC AGAIN (a rehash of previous attacks on the nominee, Gigi Sohn)

Note that some of these items are lashing out at Soros-linked efforts to remove disinformation on social media, which are dishonestly framed as "censorship" or framed as "so-called disinfo," as if there was no objective definition of the word.

Vazquez used a Dec. 18 post to again push his bizarre claim that Soros directly controls the content of Wikipedia:

Leftists at the George Soros-funded Wikipedia attempted to paint the elitist journalists who shared the real-time flight location information of Twitter owner Elon Musk as victims of a “massacre.”

Yes, you read that right.

A Wikipedia article was published with a babbling headline that needed no explanation: “Thursday Night Massacre (Twitter).” The article’s logic was just pure nonsense: “The ‘Thursday Night Massacre’ is a term that refers to the December 15, 2022, account suspension of several high-profile journalists from the Twitter platform.” The article mourned: “At least nine journalists who covered the social media company and its owner, Elon Musk, were all suspended without warning. This included ‘reporters’ Keith Olbermann, Steven L. Herman, and Donie O'Sullivan, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept.” Soros committed at least $2 million to Wikipedia in 2018.

Vazquez is apparently too young to understand what metaphors are, or to know that the term is, in fact, an allusion to the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre," in which President Nixon order the attorney general to fire the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate scandal (he and his chief deputy resigned rather than do so, leaving the third in command, future failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, to do the dirty work).

Vazquez concluded by ranting:

The irony is that Soros said at the time of his endowment to Wikipedia that his gift “represents a commitment to the ideals of open knowledge—and to the long-term importance of free knowledge sources that benefit people around the world.” Apparently the “ideals” Soros’ Wikipedia funding supports are only those that cater to leftist propaganda.

Vazquez is obviously so consumed with irrational hatred of Soros that he doesn't understand that its Wikipedia articles are written by website users, not Soros himself.

The MRC cheered the anti-Soros propaganda of of the right-wing Convention of States. A Sept. 30 post by Jeffrey Clark detailed the softball inter view his boss, Brent Bozell, gave to the head of a group that wants a constitutional convention (but don't call it that):

Convention of States president Mark Meckler torched the George Soros-funded, anti-American organizations working to undermine his mission of “restor[ing] a culture of self-governance in America and to curtail federal overreach.”

“All the America-hating, baby-killing, communist, socialist organizations in America are against” a Convention of States, Meckler told MRC founder and President Brent Bozell in a Sept. 29 interview. “All the conservatives are for it.”

A “Convention of States” is a process found in Article V of the U.S. Constitution that “gives states the power to call a Convention of States to propose amendments. It takes 34 states to call the convention and 38 to ratify any amendments that are proposed.”

Meckler cited a 2017 statement signed by “over 230 leftist organizations.” That effort, Meckler said, was “led by Common Cause and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.” The catch? Both groups are “Soros-funded policy orgs,” Meckler explained. The press release whined how supposedly “[a]n Article V convention is a dangerous threat to the U.S. Constitution, our democracy, and our civil rights and liberties.”

The need to tie any critics of Mecker's group to Soros was not explained -- aside, of course, from the kneejerk demonizing of Soros endemic in right-wing circles -- nor did Meckler offer proof that all 230 organizations who signed the statement were "leftist."

Unsurprisingly, the MRC tried to work its hatred for Soros into its pro-Elon Musk narratives regarding Twitter. A Nov. 17 item by Clark complained that "Two groups linked to failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and liberal billionaire George Soros are behind a massive pressure campaign aimed at sinking Twitter and destroying its advertising revenue after Elon Musk took control of the platform," complaining further that "Soros gave $450,000 to UltraViolet Action, the lobbying arm of UltraViolet, in 2020 alone." Vazquez ranted in a Nov. 30 post:

A group funded by liberal billionaire George Soros is pressuring the federal government to investigate the world’s richest man simply because he now owns Twitter.

A press release by The Open Markets Institute (OMI) promoted a Nov. 16 letter it sent clamoring for the U.S. government to investigate Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “purchase and management of Twitter and his ongoing management of Starlink.”

The letter itself was saturated with absurd fear-mongering language that a Musk-owned Twitter meant doom for the world: “[P]eople across the United States and around the world are watching Mr. Musk potentially destroy – out of greed, recklessness, or incompetence – a service that has proven critical to their safety, and around which they have institutionalized entire systems of emergency response.”

As if the war on Soros by Vazquez and the rest of the MRC wasn't heavily based in absurd fear-mongering language.

A Dec. 21 post by Vazquez parroted claims from hand-picked "independent journalist" Michael Schellenberger (who was taking his orders from Musk, so there's lots of questions about just how "independent" he is) about how "A radical group heavily funded by leftist billionaire George Soros has now been linked to Twitter’s FBI-influenced effort to squash the Hunter Biden laptop scandal" -- specifically, the Aspen Institute. Vazquez never explained what, exactly, made this group so "radical"; more of that absurd fear-mongering language, apparently.

MRC ties Twitter whistleblower to Soros

At the MRC, you're a good whistleblower only if you advance right-wing narratives, like Peiter “Mudge” Zatko did in bolstering Elon Musk's pre-purchase attacks on Twitter and like Frances Haugen did in criticizing Facebook (at least until Facebook started working behind the scenes with right-wing media outlets to attack her, at which point the MRC flipped as well).

When a whistleblower emerged who countered right-wing anti-Twitter narratives, the MRC was quick to attack by playing the Soros card in an attempt to discredit him. Vazquez threw a massive tantrum in a Sept. 23 post, whining that this whistleblower was distracting from Zatko's pro-Musk narrative:

The Washington Post found a so-called “whistleblower” connected to liberal billionaire George Soros to stoke hysteria about how former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account threatened the planet.

In a so-called “exclusive,” The Post found a Twitter truther to steal former Twitter executive Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s thunder and make the issue about Trump rather than the Big Tech platform. “ Jan. 6 Twitter witness: Failure to curb Trump spurred ‘terrifying’ choice,” was The Post headline.

The leftist whistleblower — now identified by The Post as Anika Collier Navaroli — was reportedly a “former policy official on the team designing Twitter’s content-moderation rules,” meaning the “rules” that made Twitter a bloated censorship operation to silence conservative speech. But nowhere in the article did The Post mention Navaroli's ties to Soros.

Navaroli reportedly overcame the “terror she felt” about coming forward due to her so-called “worry” that Trumpian “extremism and political disinformation on social media pose an ‘imminent threat not just to American democracy, but to the societal fabric of our planet.’” [Emphasis added.]

The story fawned how a previously “unidentified former Twitter employee” testified before the Soviet-style House Jan. 6 committee to slam the company for ignoring “false and rule-breaking tweets from Donald Trump for years because executives knew their service was his ‘favorite and most-used ... and enjoyed having that sort of power.’” Twitter banned Trump two days after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

Navaroli “worked on media and internet privacy campaigns for” the nutty, Soros-funded defund-the-police group Color of Change — founded by CNN commentator and former Obama appointee, Van Jones. Soros has donated millions to the group. The leftist organization proclaims itself as the “nation’s largest online racial justice organization.”

[...]

While disingenuously painting Navaroli as having a “strong bias for protecting speech,” The Post championed how she “grew fascinated with how” online censorship rules “were helping shape real-world social movements, from the inequality campaigns of Occupy Wall Street to the protests over racial justice and police brutality.”

At no point did Vazquez disprove anything Navaroli said, and he didn't even bother to prove Navaroli is a "leftist" -- he was just mad that his preferred narratives were getting ignored by someone with at least as much credibility as Zatko offering a different story that was just as credible.

'Soros radio' meltdown

But it also reserved ire for media-related claims. A June 4 post by Jorge Bonilla (also in Spanish) freaked out that a non-conservative owners with a tangental tie to Soros are buying several Spanish-language radio stations in Florida and elsewhere:

After years of whining about "Spanish-language disinformation" and watching the Democrats continue to lose Hispanic electoral share to the GOP, the left has had enough.

In what is clearly a panic move, a Soros-led investment group has backed the acquisition of 18 Univision radio stations by a media organization led by former Obama and Clinton operatives.

[...]

The deal fundamentally recreates the footprint of the failed Univision America talk radio network, with affiliates in: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, McAllen, Miami, San Antonio, and Fresno. As a deal sweetener, Univision threw in WADO-NY, the Spanish-language home of the New York Yankees, and most importantly WAQI 710 in Miami- the iconic anti-communist Radio Mambí.

The latter is important because Mambí has long been a thorn on the side of an entitled left that demands absolute control over what media Hispanics consume.

Doesn't Bonilla's freakout over this business deal suggest that he's the one who doing the "panic move" here? Meanwhile, one observer pointed out that Radio Mambí is not just the "anti-communist" Bonilla describes it as; it's "anti-Democrat, anti-Biden, pro-Trump and spreads beliefs that Democrats stole the 2020 election and are conspiring to steal the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election," and some hosts "have gone so far as to praise the militant far-right Proud Boys and speak favorably about violence as a way to combat 'a looming Democratic Party dictatorship.'"

As the deal moved closer to completion, the freakout continued -- coupled with whining about how right-wing misinformation about it was being called out. Jorge Bonilla huffed in a Nov. 6 post:

You can tell we’re at the tail end of another election cycle where the GOP is doing well with Hispanics, because as a recent report from CBS Mornings shows, the media have gone back to their favorite trope: “Spanish-language disinformation”.

OK, maybe “interesting” isn’t exactly the right word. “Weird”, perhaps, is a more accurate descriptor for correspondent Enrique Acevedo’s report that aired on CBS Mornings and throughout the rest of CBS’ footprint.

Watch the hosts’ exchange at the end of this strange report on the sale of Radio Mambí and 17 other stations owned by Univision to the Soros-backed Latino Media Network, and feel their sheer panic at the idea that Hispanics would dare obtain information beyond designated approved sources[.]

[...]

As we noted when the “Radio Soros” transaction was first announced, the deal was a panic move aimed at shoring up lost narrative control over Hispanics. We’ve reported on the decreasing trust in Spanish-language media, and on data that shows that corporate Spanish-language media are the biggest disseminators of Spanish-language disinformation.

Actually, Bonilla's freakout over the sale shows he's the one who's panicking, and that "data that shows that corporate Spanish-language media are the biggest disseminators of Spanish-language disinformation" he referenced -- which he hyped in an Oct. 30 post -- is actually nothing more than a poll conducted by the right-wing Latino group Bienvenido, so bias is to be assumed. He went on to whine:

In its one-sidedness, the report makes no note of the reasons why Hispanics are abandoning their designated media gatekeepers- only that they must be doing so due to "disinformation".

Acevedo positions Radio Mambí as a boogeyman, but fails to mention that the station's top talent left the station rather than work for a Soros-backed outlet, and landed at conservative Americano Media. So Radio Mambí as we knew it is essentially dead.

Given that Radio Mambi was filled with disinformation, that's not the bad thing Bonilla wants you to think it is, and perhaps those hosts quit to avoid being held accountable for their lies. Despite all that, Bonilla thought his post to be so important that it was translated into Spanish.

In a Nov. 13 post (also translated into Spanish), Bonilla complained that it was "obnoxious and bigoted" for former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to point out the "massive disinformation problem in Spanish language media" that fed a narrative of Hispanics shifting rightward that was dispelled by the results of the midterm elections, going on to huff:

This talking point was echoed half an hour later by Latino Media Network (“Radio Soros”) board member, former Univision anchor and current ABC contributor María Elena Salinas, who tried to reassure liberals by saying that the GOP’s Hispanic vote blowout in Florida is “not indicative of the national Latino vote. Florida is a very small fraction of the Latino vote on a national level, so, we have to be careful not to read too much into this. This is just Florida.”

The right-wing narrative is totally real, Bonilla insisted, actual election results notwithstanding:

No one said that the ongoing Hispanic shift to the right would happen in one or two cycles. The shift is rooted in things that have been happening over the course of several decades, separate from the current issue arrays. The effort to conflate the shift to the stillborn red wave is intended to be disinformation and suppressive.

Going forward, expect further attempted tamping down of the Hispanic shift, and expect a renewed interest in “Spanish-language disinformation” as a means to prevent conservatives from entering communications spaces in some of these hotly contested states throughout the Southwest- which is all the proof you need that the very thing the left says isn’t happening is, in fact, very real.

When the radio deal was cleared by federal officials, Bonilla went into another freakout in a Nov. 22 post (again, translated into Spanish):

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has cleared the way for the Soros-backed Latino Media Network’s (LMN) purchase of 18 Televisa Univision radio stations, among them Miami’s Radio Mambí.

[...]

There was nominal opposition to the deal, which the FCC promptly shot down. That is, in part, because the best time to kill this deal was in 2017- when the incoming Republican Congress had the power to do so under the Congressional Review Act. Recall that it was under cover of the Obama-Trump transition that the FCC approved a sweeping rule change that enabled Univision to increase its foreign ownership stake from 25 to 49 percent.

The Republican Congress -- caught sleeping -- failed to review and repeal the rule when it had a chance. This, in turn, created the precedent that eventually allowed Univision to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Televisa. The result of Congress' inaction is that a foreign-owned corporation is now in the position, by virtue of this sale of significant assets to a domestic partisan group, of exerting undue influence upon our elections.

You mean all those partisan right-wing disinformers in right-wing Hispanic radio weren't exerting undue influence upon our elections? Only liberals are capable of "exerting undue influence," apparently. Bonilla's whinefest continued:

With the last significant roadblock removed, the Soros-backed Latino Media Network can finalize its purchase of the Univision stations, neuter or kill anti-communist bastion Radio Mambí, and attempt to exert influence upon the 2024 election across the nation’s top Hispanic markets, which include such places as the Rio Grande Valley (McAllen, TX) and Las Vegas.

The establishment of “Radio Soros” as a trusted purveyor of information is critical to the next stage of The Great Spanish-Language Disinformation War we’ve seen unfold over the past few years. As conservative alternatives finally emerge, it remains to be seen whether *this* venture will be successful.

Bonilla ignored the fact that those right-wing disinfo-pumping stations were found not to be trusted purveyors of information -- portraying Radio Mambi as "anti-communist" doesn't give it exemption from facts.

Bonilla continued whining in a Nov. 26 post (yes, it's also in Spanish) complaining that PolitiFact is hiring a Spanish-language fact-checker:

The hunt for “Spanish-language disinformation” is proving to be America’s fastest-growing grift: so much so that Politifact is now itching to get into the game.

We have a pretty good notion of what a Spanish-language Politifact is going to look like, thanks to a recent MRC study showing that Politifact is 6 times more likely to defend Joe Biden than it is to fact-check him.

[...]

A core element of Politifact’s foray into Spanish-language fact-checking is the belief that Hispanics are unable to discern between fact and fiction without proper assistance from institutions designated by the enlightened elite as approved purveyors of information to the heretofore underserved community.

In reality, these moves are about power and control- and are no different from the reincarnation of the failed Univision America talk radio network as “Radio Soros”. Hispanics continue to move away from the left and its institutions, including Spanish-language news media. The left scrambles to hold a restive cohort in line via the buttressing of failed institutions and the creation of new ones. Thus “Politifact En Español” seeks to join Univision, Telemundo, and every other Tom, Dick, and José in an already-crowded “Spanish-language disinformation” market.

If calling out Spanish-language disinformation is a "grift," then defending that disinformation as Bonilla does has to be one too. But grifters won't tell you about the grift -- they simply accuse others of what they're doing.