Soros Envy: Why Does Fox News Hate Rich People?

Ordinarily Fox News is the strongest advocate on behalf of the Greedy One Percent (GOP). They fiercely defend the the privileged class that they have endearingly tagged “job creators” (although that is far from true). They relentlessly oppose efforts to reform the tax code into something more equitable. And even though billionaires like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates agree that people like themselves are not paying a fair share, Fox News shouts nonsense about a class war that they invented.

But nothing comes as close to psychotic derangement as the right’s obsessive hatred of George Soros (except maybe Saul Alinsky and President Obama). In today’s FoxNews.com opinion section is an editorial titled: George Soros — the rich man who is hated around the world. What’s really interesting about this column is that the author, Dan Gainor of the uber-conservative Media Research Center, is actually correct.

Gainor has done his research and discovered that there are many nations in the world where Soros has cultivated a profound dislike. Gainor even provides a list of some of them. They include: Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union. The thing that most of these places have in common is that they all suffered under oppressive regimes prior to Soros coming to the aid of the people.

So what we have here is Fox News complaining bitterly that the dictators and communists who were deposed by the freedom-loving citizens of their countries, with help from Soros, do not now regard Soros affectionately. Fox is literally taking the side of the former tyrants who, not surprisingly, are somewhat upset with Soros. By extension we must assume that Gainor would prefer that Soros had minded his own business and let the tyrants continue their rule and their reign of terror.

This is the same sort of deranged thinking that resulted in Fox finding fault with the Seal Team assault on Osama Bin Laden. If Obama had anything to do with it, it must be bad – no matter how good it is. And the same goes for George Soros. So even though Soros helped to defeat the bad guys, the only thing Fox notices is that now all the bad guys hate him, and somehow that make Soros a bad guy.

This twisted criticism, however, is not the only point that Gainor sought to make with his article. He is also emphatically opposed to Soros’ philanthropic activities. Gainor complains that Soros has committed $8 billion to his Open Society Foundation that aids a diverse variety of international charitable organizations. But Gainor sees no irony in the fact that he is the Boone Pickens Fellow at the Media Research Center. That means that his position was endowed by another billionaire who bankrolls international charitable causes. What’s more, the Media Research Center is the beneficiary of millions of dollars from the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers, and the Scaife family foundations – all wealthy philanthropists with designs on influencing the direction of certain nations, particularly the United States. And we can add Rupert Murdoch to that group as his news enterprises are among the biggest customers of the Media Research Center.

Dan Gainor is a profoundly inept critic. He once condemned an imagined conspiracy by Soros and, in the process, implicated himself. He further embarrassed himself recently by declaring that Arianna Huffington is “the most powerful propagandist since a guy named Goebbels.” Then he penned a column upbraiding Rachel Maddow for a mistake made during her program, apparently unfamiliar with the cornucopia of on-air gaffes that Fox News seems to add to daily.

Fox News has made preaching the divinity of capitalism a staple of its programming. And they love nothing more than a wealthy individual who they can promote as proof of their Randian orthodoxy. But whatever you do, do not become a liberal billionaire. Fox has an entirely different standard for those practitioners Satanism. In fact, Fox hates them. What is it that Fox hates about rich people that actually care about people who are not rich?

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15 thoughts on “Soros Envy: Why Does Fox News Hate Rich People?

  1. You forgot to mention that Soros is a convicted criminal.

      • It was a French insider trading issue. Apparently the French laws regarding insider trading are (were?) vague and ambiguous and Soros broke one of those laws. He had to pay a fine. He failed in his bid to have the ruling overturned, but was semi-vindicated when the judge ruled that the laws were indeed ambiguous.

        But that really shouldn’t count to conservatives, because they hate France and what they believe is the country’s wishy-washy nature. Plus, wouldn’t insider trading laws fall under their category of “over-regulation”? Soros should be a hero to them.

        • Nice spin but it does not change the facts.

    • Nice attempt to change the subject.

      This article is not a defense of Soros. It is demonstrating the hypocrisy of Fox News who lauds people like Soros when they toe the conservative line. It shows that Soros has been a staunch foe of communist, totalitarian regimes, but Fox manages to find fault with him on that because they don’t like his politics.

      Soros’ tangles with the law in foreign countries is not the subject here, and I would bet that any billionaire you can name has similar troubles. The issue here is whether Fox is correct to criticize Soros for helping to free people from oppressive regimes. Or maybe you are just in favor of oppressive regimes.

  2. The man is a criminal money manipulator. Do you support people like that?

    Fox has every right to report about him.

    • The man broke one ambiguous law for which he was fined. I know a guy who had one too many beers and received a DUI. He was ashamed, paid the fine, and moved on. I don’t classify him as a criminal reckless driver. I’m guessing, Dave, that if Soros was a right wing billionaire with the same criminal record, you wouldn’t use the same language to describe him.

      • And I’ll bet you support illegal Mexicans crossing the border. After all, it’s only one little law.

        • Dave, are you a fan of Rush Limbaugh? He only broke one little victimless law too. There are tens of thousands of laws. Some are worse than others. Some are justified, some are not. Some things are illegal elsewhere but legal here. I never said whether I supported Soros in his legal troubles or not. I was just making the point that it was not on the level of Bernie Madoff. A comparison to illegal immigration is such a non sequitur I don’t even know how to respond.

          As a general rule, humans are more likely to forgive the misdeeds of those with whom they share an affinity.

        • Wow. I’ve heard many random comments in many a conversation, but I almost got whiplash trying to follow that one.

    • You are harping on a disputed incident that occurred twenty years ago and ignoring the issues I raised in this article.

      Either you are just to dumb to understand the issue and make a coherent response or you are deliberately trying to be disruptive. Either way you are proving that you are not a serious person who can engage in honest discourse. Doesn’t that embarrass you?

      • Your headline “Why does Fox News Hate Rich people” is ignorant enough. Why would I want to respond to such silliness?

        You don’t engage in honest discourse. Your smear people and call them names.

        • I see you “pulling a Palin” here.

          “I’m not going to engage in the discourse that should be engaged in…I’m going to just say whatever the hell I like, screw y’all.”

          The title IS provocative, the content however, raises a valid point: Is it right for FOX to go after and smear S.O.R.O.S for all the bad things they claim he has done? Especially when their claims don’t hold up under scrutiny?.

          Of course, if you’re already firmly entrenched in the “I hate S.O.R.O.S” camp to begin with (as your posts both here and elsewhere indicate) then I guess I can understand why you take S.O.R.O.S being evil as a given.

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