The Media Research Center has long been obsessed with George Soros as some kind of liberal string-puller through his funding of allegedly liberal groups (despite the fact that the MRC has a string-pulling moneybags benefactor in the form of the Mercers). We see this again in Aly Nielsen’s Dec. 13 post, in which she writes:
Soros-funded journalism is coming to seven states in 2018, thanks to ProPublica. The liberal journalism nonprofit announced on Dec. 9 it had chosen journalists in Louisiana, West Virginia, Oregon, New Mexico, Indiana, Illinois and Florida to receive year-long stipends to pursue ProPublica-approved investigations.
Nielsen’s article is accompanied by a chart of dubious origin — no source is given, but it’s apparently taken from the MRC’s apparently dormant “Buying Bias” website, which claims to track “the funding sources behind non-profit journalism” and where a version of Nielsen’s post first appeared in October — purporting to show donors to ProPublica over an unspecified period of time, but unfortunately for Nielsen’s “Soros-funded journalism” angle, it shows that Soros’ Open Society Foundation donated only $737,411, while five other foundations donated more than $1 million, and the biggest donor, the Sandler Foundation, utterly dwarfed OSF’s contributions with a whopping #44 million donation.
Yet, even though Soros’ foundation donated less than 1/33 of the money of ProPublica’s biggest donor, Nielsen’s headline claim is “Soros-funded journalism.”
The MRC has done this before. For example, a 2013 post about ProPublica calls it a “Soros-funded news operation,” and Nielsen herself did it again last January, using a similar chart that curiously omitted the Sandler Foundation’s donations — presumably to not undermine her Soros-bashing argument.
Nielsen also huffed that “ProPublica has a history of liberal alliances and reporting,” but she cited random, cherry-picked examples and offered no comprehensive research on ProPublica’s coverage.