Soros Media Connections from 2004

The Hidden Soros Agenda: Drugs, Money, the Media, and Political Power

Special Report | By Cliff Kincaid | October 27, 2004

The Soros media connections include:

• An investor in the Times Mirror Company, Soros funded the Project on Media Ownership, headed by Professor Mark Crispin Miller at New York University. Whose purpose was expose "media concentration." A total of $300,000 over several years came from George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI). In 1999, a survey commissioned by the Project on Media Ownership and the Benton Foundation and paid for by OSI found that seventy-nine percent of adults would favor a law requiring commercial broadcasters to pay 5 percent of their revenues into a fund for public broadcasting.
  
• Eric Alterman of The Nation has hailed Soros for spending millions on "education campaigns with America Coming Together, voter mobilization drives with MoveOn.org and research activities with the Center for American Progress (CAP)--where I am a senior fellow…" Alterman says his own magazine, The Nation, is viewed as out of the mainstream in part because of "the continued appearance in its pages of a long-time Stalinist communist, Alexander Cockburn, whose unabashed hatred for both America and Israel ... tarnish the reputation of its otherwise serious contributors." Alterman's mentor, I.F. Stone, was a paid agent of the KGB and a Stalinist.
  
• In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Orville Schell said that Soros had written a "succinct and well-reasoned book," The Bubble of American Supremacy, which ought "to provide a welcome template for how the candidates might begin to think their way through to a more coherent view of America's place in the world." Soros had spoken on March 3 at the Goldman Forum on the Press and Foreign Affairs, sponsored by UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. The event was a conversation between Soros and Journalism Dean Orville Schell.
  
• OSI gave $60,000 to the Independent Media Institute , whose executive director, Don Hazen, is a former publisher of Mother Jones. Hazen has called Soros a "progressive philanthropist." A story carried by the Independent Media Institute on its AlterNet project says Soros "believes in democracy, positive international relations and effective strategies to reduce poverty, among other things."
  
• OSI gave a $75,000 grant to the Center for Investigative Reporting. The group's board of advisers includes prominent journalists.
  
• OSI gave $246,528 to the Center for Public Integrity, headed by former CBS News producer Charles Lewis, "to support the continuing expansion of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists." A total of $1 million went for "the Global Access Project." In total, it is estimated that the group has received $1.7 from Soros.
  
• OSI gave $200,000 to the Fund for Investigative Journalism. This group, too, features prominent journalists on its board.
  
• OSI's "Network Media Program" gave $22,157 to Investigative Reporters & Editors.
  
• Soros Foundations have provided $160,000 to MediaChannel.org, a so-called "media issues supersite, featuring criticism, breaking news, and investigative reporting from hundreds of organizations worldwide." The executive editor is Danny Schecter, a former news program producer and investigative reporter at CNN and ABC. It was created by Globalvision News Network, whose board includes "Senior executives from the world's leading media firms."
  
• OSI has contributed $70,000 toward the far-left Independent Media Center, or Indymedia, known as an "independent newsgathering collective," whose servers were seized by a federal law enforcement agency on October 7. The action was apparently related to an investigation into international terrorism, kidnapping or money laundering.
  
• OSI provided $600,000 to the Media Access Project, a so-called telecommunications public interest law firm critical of conservative influence in the major media.
  
• OSI provide $30,000 to the Media Awareness Project, a "worldwide network dedicated to drug policy reform" and promoting "balanced media coverage" of the drug issue.
  
• OSI provided $200,000 to the Association for Progressive Communications, "an international network…working for peace, human rights, development and protection of the environment…"