How Is The MRC Fearmongering About Soros Now?

Posted on October 9, 2022

The Media Research Center’s dirty war against George Soros has continued apace since the last time we checked in, cranking out posts with a heavy emphasis on his alleged support for countering disinformation (which you’d think the MRC would support) and freakouts over “Soros-funded prosecutors”:

We’ve already 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 and bizarrely accusing Soros of someone forcing Wikipedia to change the definition of a recession (showing that the MRC doesn’t understand how Wikipedia works). 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.'”

But because Bonilla had a narrative to advance, he ignored inconvenient facts and pushed his storyline: “In sum, the move appears to be primarily fueled by panic over Democrats’ continued loss of influence over the Hispanic vote ahead of the 2024 presidential election. This is a significant development inasmuch as it lays a marker down, but not one that is permanently transformative or even a game-changer, given the left’s current existing near-monopoly on Spanish-language media.”

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:

iberal 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.