The uber-conservative Media Research Center has been fixated lately on a pathetic “study” of the media reach of George Soros. The author, Dan Gainor, may be one of the most ineffectual researchers to ever publish on the InterTubes. The product of his research seems more like a symptom of the debilitating syndrome that hobbles many of his ilk, OCD: Obsessive Conservative Disorder. The latest chapter is the third of a four-part series. Let’s re-cap:
In Part One, Gainor introduced his premise that George Soros “has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets.” He never documented any ties other than some donations to charitable organizations, none of which were major news outlets. There were some non-profit institutions that focus on journalism, but even in those examples Gainor didn’t explain how Soros’ donations would have given him any control over them. Neither did he cite any evidence that the organizations were influenced by Soros’ donations.
In Part Two, Gainor claimed to expose millions of dollars of influence peddling by Soros to media enterprises. For the most part it was a rehashing of Part One. The new information turned out to reveal that the organizations Gainor disparaged for their connection to Soros were also connected to right-wing billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and T. Boone Pickens. Gainor himself is the Boone Pickens Fellow at the Media Research Center.
Now, in Part Three, Gainor asserts that Soros-funded media “reach more than 330 million people around the globe.” Again, he never reveals how he arrived at that calculation. He merely cites a few examples that figure into the total without actually adding it up. And his examples are hysterically misconstrued. For instance, Gainor cites a $1.8 million contribution to NPR. That would represent a fraction of 1% of NPR’s funding, not exactly enough to wield much influence. And then Gainor frantically reports that…
“Soros funds nearly every major left-wing media source in the United States. Forty-five of those are financed through his support of the Media Consortium. That organization ‘is a network of the country’s leading, progressive, independent media outlets.'”
Did you get that? Nearly every major left-wing media source in the United States! Really? The forty-five that Gainor mentions as receiving funding via their membership in the Media Consortium actually receive nothing for their membership. In fact, they pay the Consortium to belong.
However, I think I discovered the real reason Gainor has been hammering on this. The Media Research Center is now featuring an ad that asks “Help us expose George Soros.”
“Left-wing billionaire George Soros has undertaken a war on conservative media to make it easier to spread his anti-American views, and the liberal media are his willing accomplices.”
The MRC says that if you make a donation today your donation will be matched dollar-for-dollar. Will those matching funds come from a right-wing billionaire who has undertaken a war on liberal media? I don’t know. They don’t say where the money will come from. But we do know that the MRC is funded by Pickens and another media billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife. We also know that they have partnered with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News whose former managing editor, Brit Hume, considered them indispensable.
So perhaps this is just a symptom of another sort of OCD: Obtain Conservative Donations.
James O’Keefe And Hannah Giles are being tried for violations of California’s privacy laws. The plaintiff, ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera, contends that O’Keefe and Giles unlawfully recorded conversations with him that were later edited to misrepresent his remarks.