90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Soros's Attempt To Control News Coverage Using The FCC Has Been Put On Pause...For Now...

(from breitbart)The real mystery behind the FCC's now abandoned "study" to police American newsrooms is why the mainstream media refused to raise holy hell over it. While Obama's lapdogs refused to bark, it was conservative media who fought for newsroom independence and got the FCC to finally back down. Other than the media's natural obedience to Obama, the fact that the fingerprints of radical left-wing billionaire George Soros have been found on the FCC study might also help to explain the media's silence.

CNS News reports that for the first ten years of the last decade, Soros donated more than $52 million to numerous media outlets. In a world where the media is dying a slow, painful suicide (brought about by their own incompetence and corruption), that is no small amount of money. And you can bet that those media organizations that have not benefited from Soros' largesse would someday like to. So why antagonize him?
The media's hands-off policy with Soros is nothing new. While outlets such as Politico and NBC News obsess over every move made by the libertarian Koch brothers, Soros and his spider-web of influential left-wing political operations (Media Matters, Center for American Progress) almost never receive any kind of media scrutiny. A recent media study found that the ratio of references between Kochs' organizations and Soros' organizations, in news outlets that pose as objective, are literally hundreds to one. Politico actually has Ken Vogel, a former Soros employee, constantly harassing covering the Koch brothers.

The mainstream media not only shares Soros' hard-left vision, but also benefits or hopes to benefit from Soros' bottomless billionaire well of funding. And in return, even though Soros' Tides Foundation is many times larger than the Kochs, the media look the other way for Soros and turn the Kochs into America's bogeyman. Which brings me back to the FCC proposal to police America's newsrooms.

As enamored and protective as the media are of Obama, when the Administration was caught spying on journalists last year, his Media Palace Guards still squawked. But still, this attempted move by the FCC, which is probably the scariest move against the media by the federal government since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, resulted in almost uniform silence by the mainstream media. If alternative and conservative media hadn't been vocal, nothing would have stopped FCC from interrogating and intimidating the press.
What might explain the media's silence is the looming specter of George Soros. History already proves the media has been reluctant to cross him. Apparently, even the idea of Soviet-style monitors looking over their shoulder couldn’t change that. CNS News helps to explain why:
Two schools were working with FCC on the project, according to Byron York of The Washington Examiner. The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy, were tasked by the FCC with coming up with criteria for what information is "critical" for Americans to have. The FCC study would have covered newspapers, websites, radio and television, according to The Washington Post.
On top of the 1st Amendment problems with this proposal, the schools involved have strong ties to liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations and have gotten more than $1.8 million from since 2000.

The journalism programs at these schools have even more ties to Soros besides their funding, including faculty members writing for university-based publications allied with Soros-funded outlets.
The schools have collaborated on this project going back at least to 2012. Lewis A. Friedland, who was a "principle investigator" for the FCC on this project, also directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He gave a presentation at Annenberg in Feb. 2012, on "communication ecology." This was just four months before the schools presented their findings to the FCC.
There is just no rational explanation for the media's lack of outrage over a federal government "study" that should put a chill down the spine of anyone who understand how important a free press is to protecting democracy.

It is bad enough when the media pushes to have the freedoms of everyone else crushed by the federal government. But when the media stops fighting for their own freedom, the canary in that coalmine doesn't have a chance.

His name is Robert Malley. His father was a confidante of Yasser Arafat and a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. Over the years, Malley has penned numerous op-eds condemning Israel and exonerating the Palestinians. Now he will be a senior director at the National Security Council.

Middle East and North Africa Program Director for the International Crisis Group
Formerly served as President Bill Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs
Son of Simon Malley, a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party
Blamed Israel for the failed Camp David peace negotiations with Yasser Arafat in 2000
Has co-written a number of op-ed pieces with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat
Consistently condemns Israel, exonerates Palestinians, urges U.S. disengagement from Israel, and recommends that America reach out to negotiate with its traditional Arab enemies
Became foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2007

A Harvard-trained lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, Robert Malley is the Middle East and North Africa Program Director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), which receives funding from the Open Society Institute (whose founder, George Soros, serves on the ICG Board and Executive Committee).

In his capacity with ICG, Malley directs a number of analysts based in Amman, Cairo, Beirut, Tel Aviv, and Baghdad. These analysts report periodically on the political, social and economic factors which they believe have the potential to spark conflict in those regions, and they make policy recommendations in an effort to defuse such threats. Covering events from from Iran to Morocco, Malley’s team focuses most heavily on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the political and military developments in Iraq, and Islamist movements across the Middle East.

Prior to joining ICG, Malley served as President Bill Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs (1998-2001); National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s Executive Assistant (1996-1998); and the National Security Council’s Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Affairs (1994-1996).

In 2007, Malley -- one of the most frequently quoted commentators on U.S. Middle East policy and Arab-Israeli strife -- became a foreign policy advisor to Democrat presidential candidateBarack Obama.

Malley was raised in France by his mother -- a native New Yorker named Barbara Silverstein -- and his father, Simon Malley, a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. Rabidly anti-Israel, Simon Malley was a confidante of the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat; an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary of Soviet funding; and a supporter of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In a July 2001 op-ed (titled “Fictions About the Failure at Camp David”) which was published in the New York Times, Robert Malley (whose family, as noted above, had close ties to Yasser Arafat) alleged that Israeli -- not Palestinian -- inflexibility had caused the previous year's Camp David peace talks (brokered by Bill Clinton) to fail. This was one of several controversial articlesMalley has written -- some he co-wrote with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat -- blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for that failure.

In their August 9, 2001 piece, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” Malley and Agha again dismissed claims that the Camp David talks had failed when “Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offer” was met with “Yasser Arafat’s uncompromising no.” They wrote that Barak had taken an unnecessarily hard-line approach in negotiating with Arafat. According to Malley and Agha, Arafat believed that Barak was intent on “either forcing him to swallow