Under the headline “Two Groups Trying to Prevent Breitbart Video Release Also Soros-Funded,” Iris Somberg writes in a March 8 NewsBusters post that Boston public TV station WGBH “prevented” access by Breitbart.com to a video of Barack Obama in 1990 making a speech at Harvard Law School in favor of professor Derrick Bell getting tenure. This echoes a previous claim by Breitbart.com Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch that “WGBH refused to give Breitbart.com the video.”
Somberg seems to have ignored that the Breitbart sites apparently didn’t feel like paying for the video. As WGBH pointed out, the website Buzzfeed, which posted the entirety of what was available of Obama’s speech, paid WGBH for the footage it used. Breitbart apparently demanded the footage be given out for free.
It appears Breitbart was too cheap to pay for the footage it wanted. (WGBH has since posted the Obama-Bell footage in its entirety.)
Somberg also claimed this Obama-Bell footage “was hidden from the American public,” which is utterly false. As WGBH noted, excerpts of the footage were used in a 2008 campaign special for the PBS show “Frontline.”
Somberg goes on to irrelevantly scaremonger about George Soros, complaining that “more than $3.5 million was granted to WGBH and Harvard by Soros’s Open Society Foundations since 2000.” Which, of course, has nothing to do with any of this.