The MRC's Dirty War On George Soros: New Year, Same Hate
The Media Research Center went into 2024 performatively freaking out over George Soros investing in more radio stations and whining that organizations he funds call out right-wing misinformation online.
By Terry Krepel Posted 7/18/2024
The Media Research Center’s ongoing dirty war against George Soros has continued apace in recent months. Tom Olohan devoted a Nov. 29 post to ranting that a Soros-funded group did to right-wing groups what the MRC did to Soros — document their funding:
An organization funded by a leftist billionaire recently published a report smearing donors to political and media groups on the right.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) Research Director David Armiak published an article on Nov. 17 classifying the financial backers of the DonorTrust non-profit as people fueling so-called “culture wars and spreading climate misinformation, Trump’s big lie, and hate.” Armiak listed a large number of political, media and non-profit organizations including the Media Research Center, which he said received $160,600 from DonorTrust.
The CMD sought to target donors to DonorTrust, in an alleged effort to combat dark money in politics and limit the influence of billionaire Charles Koch. Despite this stance, the CMD has hypocritically taken money from leftist groups like billionaire George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society and from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation in order to complete its “opposition research” and left-wing “agitation” work, according to Influence Watch.
Olohan can’t even get the name of the group that his employer has taken money from — it’s DonorsTrust, not DonorTrust. Olohan also doesn’t explain what, exactly, the “smear” is of DonorsTrust since he doesn’t dispute the accuracy of anything in the article, and he’s not going to admit that, by this same definition, the MRC “smeared” Soros by obsessively looking into what he funded. Instead, Olohan tried to portray fairly mainstream liberal views advanced by CMD as “radical”:
The CMD has also embraced radical positions on energy. In 2022, the CMD published an article that referred to ESG disclosures and divesting from “waning” fossil fuels as “routine practices.” The CMD has even positioned itself to the left of leftist billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has bragged about shutting down coal plants and pushing states to adopt net-zero policies. A 2020 CMD article scolded Bloomberg for being unwilling to immediately get rid of natural gas and further cripple American energy.
Moreover, Armiak wrote about the alleged “manufactured crisis around so-called ‘woke’ capitalism, which demonizes companies that embrace environmental, social, and governance factors (ESG) in their business and investing practices.” Concerns about ESG investing are not a “manufactured crisis.”
Of course, as part of the right-wing noise machine loudly complaining about ESG, Olohan would deny it’s a “manufactured crisis,” even as he went on to continue to manufacture it, whining that “Aside from environmentalist pressure campaigns, organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) impose their own ESG scores to pressure companies.”
The MRC finished out 2023 and entered 2024 making its usual attacks on George Soros:
Catherine Salgado spent a Jan. 16 post whining that a college Soros has funded is targeting misinformation in artificial intelligence:
A college that has received substantial funds from leftist billionaire George Soros suggested tech companies, particularly artificial intelligence, aren’t censoring enough speech.
Bard College, which has received over a billion dollars in donations and endowment pledge from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), published a Jan. 13 post on combating artificial intelligence (AI)-generated “disinformation,” the favorite leftist catchphrase to justify censorship.
While seeming to approve of some aspects of X’s (formerly Twitter) Community Notes fact-checking program, the college also promoted Financial Times tech correspondent Hannah Murphy’s assertions that Big Tech isn’t doing enough to quash free speech.
“In a long essay on the dangers and challenges of AI generated disinformation, Hannah Murphy pretty much gives up,” Bard gloomily noted. “She ends her essay arguing that there may simply be no way to combat such advanced disinformation.” Bard noted that Murphy accused some social media, notably X, of not crushing speech enough.
X and Telegram have more “disinformation” now, argued Murphy and Bard, “because [perpetrators] know that the legacy platforms are putting resources into” censorship. X does have Community Notes, which add labels to and then demonetizes posts. Community Notes is censorship under another name, so it’s no surprise that anti-free speech Bard seemed undetermined on whether to critique or praise them.
ConWebWatch has documented how the MRC thinks Community Notes is “censorship” when it’s used to fact-check right-wingers (but has no problem with it when used to fact-check liberals).
Salgado returned for a Jan. 19 post engaging in the MRC’s usual dishonest framing of attempts to counter lies and misinformation as “censorship”:
The CEO of an organization funded by leftist billionaire George Soros went to Davos to whine that some U.S. government censorship actions have been restricted.
During the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos 2024 conference, Center for Democracy and Technology CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens pushed for increased censorship of free speech and fear-mongered about “AI-generated misinformation,” as reported by Reclaim the Net. Givens even specifically cited her Center’s work with election officials to boost only sources of which she approves and censor other voices, potentially an endorsement of election interference. Such actions seemed unsurprising given her Center’s funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF).
After praising the Biden administration and whining that the majority of election officials don’t search for information from government websites, she endorsed “legislation and regulation” to address supposed misinformation. “So in the United States, for example, right now we have congressional investigations and lawsuits against people that study misinformation about elections on social media platforms,” Givens said.
The MRC, of course, has been a leader in harassing people who try to counter online lies and misinformation because right-wingers rely on them to advance narratives and don’t want people to know the truth.
Another radio freakout
The MRC’s meltdowns over Soros for doing things that right-wing billionaires also do have regularly continued. Olohan reprised his employer’s earlier “Soros radio” freakout — when a Soros-backed fund invested in a group of Hispanic radio stations — in a Feb. 16 post:
Leftist billionaire George Soros has reportedly acquired a massive stake in America’s second-largest radio company, igniting concerns about potential influence ahead of the 2024 election.
Soros Fund Management purchased $400 million of bankrupt radio company Audacy’s debt or about a 40% stake in the company, the New York Post reporters Josh Kosman and Ariel Zilber unveiled on Wednesday. According to the Post, citing bankruptcy filings, Audacy is “the No. 2 US radio broadcaster behind iHeartMedia with stations including New York’s WFAN and 1010 WINS, as well as Los Angeles-based KROQ.” Notably, Audacy features or streams at least 16 powerful 50,000-watt radio stations, which means that their coverage is especially widespread.
The Soros purchase may implicate the following 50,000-watt radio stations, as described by RadioStation.info: WVEE Atlanta, WZRH New Orleans, WFUN St. Louis, 1010 WINS New York, 1020 KDKA Pittsburgh, 830 WCCO Minneapolis, KCBS 740 San Francisco, WWL New Orleans, KYW Philadelphia, 1120 KMOX St. Louis, KNX News Los Angeles, WCBS New York, Talk Radio 1210 WPHT Philadelphia, 92-9 The Game Atlanta, 105.3 The Fan Dallas and 670 The Score Chicago. Additionally, Audacy has a deal with CBS News Radio that greatly expands Audacy’s reach.
A source described the Soros purchase as “scary” in statements to the Post. “One insider close to the situation, noting that he was a Republican, said he believed it was possible Soros was buying the stake to exert influence on public opinion in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election,” the Post reported.
Olohan didn’t explain why the word of an obviously partisan anonymous commentator should be trusted on anything, nor did he offer any evidence whatsoever that the formats of these stations would be changed. By contrast, the MRC defended the right-wing owner of one of the largest group of TV stations in the country — Sinclair Broadcast Group, known for right-wing bias in its local newscasts — when he expanded his partisan empire by buying the Baltimore Sun. And if these radio stations are apparently so unprofitable that they can be bought out of bankruptcy, why does the MRC care that Soros is sinking money into an apparent rathole?
Still, MRC chief Brent Bozell whined that Soros Fund Management wanted to fast-track federal approval of the purchase, as detailed in an anonymously written April 22 post:
The Media Research Center wants the Federal Communications Commission to know: “The Communications Act does not contain a special Soros shortcut.”
Today, the Media Research Center (MRC) and its president, Brent Bozell, filed a formal petition to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) requesting that the agency not fast-track George Soros’ scheme to take over radio behemoth Audacy, which owns the second largest number of broadcast radio stations in the country.
Leftist activist billionaire George Soros and his company Soros Fund Management have pushed for the FCC to approve their assignment applications to become the largest shareholder in Audacy. The Communications Act, however, requires the FCC first perform a “public interest” analysis before approving such an acquisition, particularly in a case like this one, where foreign ownership interests are involved. However, Soros has asked the FCC to disregard this congressionally-mandated procedure, saying the commission should use its byzantine “special warrant” process to sidestep proper review.
Soros Fund Management, made a move to spend $400 million to acquire 40 percent of Audacy’s shares, insisting that the “special warrant” process is necessary as Audacy has recently filed for bankruptcy. However, as Bozell stated succinctly on behalf of the MRC in the FCC petition, “The Soros filings fail to demonstrate that in this case any interest in the reasonably efficient emergence from bankruptcy cannot be accommodated while also assessing the foreign ownership interests at the same time.”
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MRC Vice President for Free Speech America Dan Schneider cautioned that FCC commissioners sympathetic to Soros’ agenda might try to disregard the law to fast-track the Audacy acquisition. Schneider warned: “Right now, the Democrats on the Commission are trying to grease the skids to allow George Soros and his son Alex to buy skads of radio stations all across America…right before the election. I don’t think that’s coincidental.”
Neither Bozell nor Schneider offered any evidence to back up their anti-Soros conspiracy theory that Soros will change programming on all of these stations to his favored political content — and they will never apply the same standard to the owner of Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Consequences for misinformation
The Media Research Center loves to dish out guilt-by-association attacks on George Soros, and it’s mainly mad that the organizations he funds call out right-wing lies and misinformation. Joseph Vazquez complained in a Feb. 14 post that a Soros-funded group endorsed the proper legal consequences for a Twitter troll who spread election misinformation:
A leftist legal group heavily funded by leftist billionaire George Soros is trying to convince a federal appellate court that the First Amendment right to free speech doesn’t necessarily protect ... free speech.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL) actually argued that if the speech in question could be considered to constitute the murky concept of “harmful election disinformation,” First Amendment protections should be tossed to the curb. The group broke down its dystopian stance in a press release summarizing the sentiment of an amicus brief it filed with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals for the ongoing United States v. Douglass Mackey case. Soros injected LCCRUL with at least $10,729,441 between 2016 and 2021 alone.
The LCCRUL’s extensive monetary connections to Soros are especially concerning given the latter’s deep investment into undercutting free speech online writ large. MRC Free Speech America released a study in September 2023 uncovering how Soros had funneled over $14.8 million to at least 50 leftist anti-free speech groups attempting to quash so-called “disinformation” online and elsewhere between 2017-2021.
LCCRUL based its argument on the initial outcome of the Mackey case, which RealClearInvestigations Editor-at-Large Benjamin Weingarten referred to as a “straight-out-of-the-Soviet Union case.” The defendant — a Twitter troll — was sentenced to prison by a U.S. District Court judge for posting an anti-Hillary Clinton meme on Twitter in 2016. “Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” the spoof ad read. The Daily Wire noted that it was “unclear how many people, if anyone, fell for the meme and did not cast the vote they intended to cast; or were merely participating in the joke.” The Second Circuit Court later stayed the initial prison sentence in favor of Mackey until after his appeal was adjudicated. The Soros-funded LCCRUL was clearly triggered.
“[T]he First Amendment does not protect efforts to spread harmful election disinformation with the intention of disenfranchising” voters, the group whined in its press release. In essence, objectionable speech on elections must be verboten, even if it’s a meme!
As ConWebWatch pointed out when the MRC previously defended Mackey, he was not punished for a “joke” or a “meme” — Mackey sent out two tweets designed to look like they came from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign urging people to vote by text, which is not allowed in the U.S., and targeting black and Hispanic voters. Vazquez censored that information, as well as the fact that Mackey has a history of racist tweets — stating among other things that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that black people are easily deceived — which put his tweets in context, and around the same time he was sending tweets suggesting that it was important to limit “black turnout” at voting booths. Mackey’s intent to deceive was clear, which put the lie to Vazquez’s claim that this was merely a “joke” or “meme” and demonstrating that it really was deliberate disinformation. He then demanded that people should be deliberately misled about elections:
The LCCRUL proceeded to racialize the case in its rant by diminishing minority voters’ capabilities to determine facts for themselves. “There continue to be significant developments in the technologies that allow people to create misleading and harmful election disinformation and deter marginalized communities from exercising their voting rights. Our democracy cannot afford to let this trend continue unchecked,” propagandized LCCRUL senior counsel Marc Epstein in the press release. Free speech be damned!
Mackey is the one who “racialized” the case, not the LCCRUL. Vazquez seems not to know or care about it.
Catherine Salgado used an April 5 post to repeat her employer-mandated narrative that merely fact-checking someone is “censorship”:
A fact-checking network funded by leftist billionaire George Soros is trying to shift emphasis from free speech to pre-approved “facts.”
Leftist Poynter Institute and its International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) only mentioned free speech once in its 2023-2024 Impact Report — and such a mention was only to highlight an individual’s award. Rather, Poynter emphasized “Facts on the global stage,” setting itself up as an arbiter of truth online. Poynter openly boasted about its work to suppress speech on social media platforms. Significantly, this report comes after Poynter Institute received $492,000 in grants from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) between 2016 and 2019.
Poynter only mentioned “freedom of expression” when it highlighted the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Filipina journalist Maria Ressa for defending free speech. Tellingly, Ressa now trains fact-checkers, which is the work Poynter aimed to highlight. Ressa’s news organization Rappler was a beneficiary of Poynter funds, as was USA Today, among others. “In 2023, Poynter’s IFCN awarded $1.875 million in grants to 55 different news organizations through IFCN’s GlobalFact Check Fund,” the group announced. “Poynter will award up to $4 million in additional grants in 2024.”
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In the same report, IFCN Director Angie Drobnic Holan raised the alarm that “[m]isinformation is on the march” and that “fact-checkers and other journalists face attack and harassment simply for doing their jobs.” Ignoring the fact that anti-free speech actions are a major factor in reducing trust in media, Holan then claimed, “We are on the side of truth. We are on the side of information integrity.”
Salgado didn’t explain why fact-checking isn’t also “free speech” under her employer’s definition — after all, people should have the freedom to call out lies and misinformation by others without it being falsely dismissed as “censorship.” Nor did she explain her apparent belief that lies and misinformation deserve more constitutional protection than the truth. Instead, she spread her own misinformation:
An example undermining Holan’s claims of objectivity is a 2020 article and Facebook fact-check still available on the Poynter-owned PolitiFact website. The article pushed the claim that “Russian operatives used a series of ‘active measures’ to hack campaigns, spread disinformation and sow discord in an effort to sway the election in favor of President Donald Trump.” PolitiFact cited and linked to the since-discredited Mueller Report, which actually found no evidence of “Russia collusion” with Trump.
Salgado offered no evidence the Mueller report is “discredited.” That false label allowed her to ignore the fact that the report did, in fact, find that Russia attempted to interfere in the the election and that the Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian operatives. The only thing we see being undermined here is Salgado’s partisan talking points.
Of course, any Soros funding these groups receive is irrelevant to what the MRC is attacking them over. The MRC has a longstanding agenda to build a hostile narrative around Soros as an evil boogeyman because it helps sell right-wing narratives.
More Israel-related smears
The Media Research Center has labored hard to blame George Soros for Hamas instigating a war against Israel, despite that narrative being dishonest and counterfactual. The MRC then tried to blame Soros personally for protests against the war, despite such things being guilt-by-association at best. Tom Olohan served up one such drive-by attack in an April 18 post:
First on MRC Business: A vicious anti-Israel group that occupied Google until their arrests was created by two organizations that Soros poured massive amounts of money into.
No Tech for Apartheid, a tech worker campaign that frequently accuses Israel of “genocide,” occupied the Sunnyvale, California-based office of Google Cloud’s CEO for the crime of doing business with Israelis. No Tech for Apartheid refers to itself as a project of the anti-Israel groups Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and MPower Change. Strikingly, Soros’ Open Society Foundations’ gave at least $525,000 to JVP between 2017 and 2022, while also giving $350,000 to JVP Action, an affiliated 501(c)(4) “sister organization” of JVP. Soros gave at least $2,205,555 to MPower Change from its founding in 2016 to 2022.
[...]
Radical anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour is the executive director and co-founder of MPower Change. Sarsour is famous for her radical hatred of Israel. According to the Committee For Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, Sarsour strongly opposes the existence of Israel. Sarsour is a supporter of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to impoverish, isolate and destroy Israel, the homeland of the Jewish People. Both Sarsour and MPower Change promote a radical anti-law enforcement agenda and viciously smear both American law enforcement and Israel as collaborating oppressive forces.
Olohan offered no evidence that any Soros money is currently funding any of the group’s protests -- and he can't, given that he apparently has no data newer than 2022. Still, Olohan rehashed his employer’s previous bogus attack:
Soros has a long track record of funding radical anti-Israel groups like MPower Change and JVP. After last year’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel, MRC President Brent Bozell and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider called Soros out for giving $550,000 to Pro-Hamas groups between 2017 and 2022 alone.
As we pointed out, much of Soros’ previous support of Hamas came at a time when it was seen as a reform group that could supplant the do-nothing Fatah party that previously ran Gaza — something the MRC refused to tell its readers.
The New York Post has unearthed some important information about some of the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas campus protests across the nation.
In an April 26 article, New York Post reporter Isabel Vincent broke down not only the funding behind anti-Israel groups involved in campus protests but also revealed that some of the activists were trained to lead such protests by a Soros-funded group. “At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are ‘fellows’ of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR),” Vincent wrote.
She added, “USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based ‘fellows’ in return for spending eight hours a week organizing ‘campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.’ They are trained to ‘rise up, to revolution.’” Vincent went on to say that the USPCR received $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Just one problem: A couple days earlier, the Washington Post blew up the New York Post article’s premise that Soros is paying student activists:
By itself, this is a reflection of the idea that student activism is necessarily insincere or a function of young people being hoodwinked. Claims about Soros being the engine behind political or social movements have also been identified as being intertwined with antisemitism or explicitly antisemitic, given historical tropes about wealthy Jewish people controlling the world.
Here, then, this antisemitic framework is being deployed to undermine protests on college campuses … that have been repeatedly cast as being antisemitic.
More importantly, it’s simply not true. Or, more accurately, the connection between the protests and funding from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) is so tenuous as to be obviously contrived.
One might begin by asking what Soros is theoretically paying for. After all, this is just kids setting up tents on a college campus. Is the allegation that Soros is planting students at Columbia University (for example) and fronting the $68,000 tuition?
[...]
At no point does the Post article demonstrate how this purported cash has been critical, instead simply listing organizations that have been involved in the protests to some extent and tracing their funding back to OSF.
Olohan censored any mention of the collapse of the premise behind his article, and his post remains uncorrected. Instead, he whined that Soros himself discredited the article: “Soros did not react well to the exposé. In a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter), the Open Society Foundations accused the New York Post of continuing ‘its practice of mixing distortion and unsubstantiated insinuations in attacking George and Alex Soros and the Open Society Foundations.’” Olohan didn’t prove anything Soros said to be wrong.
Rather than correct the falsehoods in his post, Olohan peddled another Soros funding conspiracy theory in a May 7 post:
First on MRC Business: George Soros’ Open Society Foundations sunk massive amounts of cash into several universities—most of which have been a breeding ground for radical anti-Israel students and whose administrations responded poorly to protestors, agitators and rioters trespassing, breaking into and occupying buildings and harassing Jewish students.
Both the New York Post and Politico have reported on Soros’ connections to the groups leading the anti-Israel protests. And now, an MRC Business investigation exposed how Soros has also given at least $34,638,060 to the nine universities that have made headlines for their slow response to anti-Semitic protests and riots, as well as their ineffectual or possibly even sympathetic administrators.
Among the recipients of Soros funding connections were Columbia University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of North Carolina (UNC), University of Southern California (USC), City University of New York (CUNY), the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and, of course, the University of California Berkeley from 2016 to 2022.
Olohan offered absolutely no evidence to back up his framing that Soros is explicitly paying off universities to stay silent about anti-Semitism — it’s just more lazy guilt-by-association, and it ignores that Olohan’s employer has engaged in anti-Semitic attacks on Soros. When others pointed out those right-wing attacks on Soros, Alex Christy was the designated whiner in a May 8 post:
After former President Donald Trump gave some remarks to reporters assembled outside of his New York trial on Tuesday, CNN’s host of The Lead, Jake Tapper, brought on the network’s resident fact-checker, Daniel Dale, to assess the accuracy of Trump’s claims. In one instance, Dale shamed Trump for calling D.A. Alvin Bragg a Soros-backed prosecutor, even going so far as to claim Soros is a frequent victim of anti-Semitism.
Tapper began, “Let’s bring in CNN’s Daniel Dale, who fact-checks what we just heard from Donald Trump. He started off criticizing the case, what happened on the case. Daniel, then he turned to protests on college campuses, then he turned to inflation, then back to the case. What’s — what caught your notice?”
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He elaborated, “So, Mr. Soros, who’s a liberal billionaire philanthropist, also a frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, did not make any direct contributions to Mr. Bragg’s election campaign. He also says he’s never spoken once to Mr. Bragg. What did happen was he donated to a liberal PAC that then in turn donated to Mr. Bragg’s campaign, as well as other reform-minded prosecutors. So, this is at best a one-step removed relationship.”
As Dale would say, “there was a lot there.” First, with anti-Semitism surging on college campuses, labeling criticisms of Soros’s political donations to far-left causes, including those anti-Israel encampments, as anti-Semitic is as nonsensical as it is appalling. Second, Dale wants to pretend as if Soros giving money to an organization, which in turn donates it to a candidate, is somehow evidence that Soros doesn’t financially support Bragg. Soros doesn’t need to have spoken to Bragg to support him. Plenty of people donate to organizations, who in turn donate to candidates because they support those groups’ missions and trust them to donate to candidates who support that mission. Soros just does so in great quantity. Third, “reform-minded” is a convenient way of hiding their soft-on-crime progressivism.
Unsurprisingly, Christly censored any mention of the MRC’s anti-Semitic attacks on Soros or its portrayal of Soros as a Jew that right-wingers are allowed to hate. As ConWebWatch has also pointed out, tying Soros to Bragg in an attempt to distract from the charges he was filing against Donald Trump — something the MRC enthusiastically did — was very much an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
