Main Menu

Arianna Huffington (L) with Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans (R)

* * * * * 

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund is struggling, according to the Business Insider.

Arianna Huffington unveiled plans for her left-leaning gossip website’s foray into investigative journalism in March but so far the site is reportedly having trouble generating content.

The evidence of internal chaos is somewhat thin so far but respected writers claim they were treated poorly by the outfit. One unhappy writer suggests that the Huffington Post Investigative Fund doesn’t have much cash.

In March it was revealed that the program’s startup budget would be $1.75 million. The money would be provided by the Huffington Post and the Atlantic Philanthropies. The Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies is headed by Gara LaMarche, who used to be a vice president of liberal uber-philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute. LaMarche is a member of Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that is organizing to turn America into a European-style socialist state.

Meanwhile, we’ve had two articles out in as many months on the state of American journalism.

This month Tim Cavanaugh penned “Bailing Out the Press: Can Non-Profit Status Save American Newspapers?” Here’s a summary of the Foundation Watch article:

Could a bailout of the newspaper industry be on its way? A new Senate bill would offer financially struggling newspapers non-profit status in order to save investigative journalism. Critics say it probably won’t work, gives nonprofit media a tax advantage, could subject the free press to IRS oversight, and could open the door to more serious government interference in the media. But when has that ever stopped a crusading politician?

Last month Cheryl K. Chumley wrote “ProPublica: Investigative Journalism or Liberal Spin?” Here’s a summary of that Foundation Watch article:

The press is filled with sad stories about venerable for-profit newspapers that have been forced to declare bankruptcy and shut down. So it’s striking that the billionaire liberals Herb and Marion Sandler have decided now is the time to fund a new nonprofit group called ProPublica whose mission is to serve the public interest by funding independent investigative journalism. Too bad Pro Publica churns out little more than left-wing hit pieces about Sarah Palin and blames the U.S. government for giving out too little foreign aid.

We beat the Wall Street Journal to the punch.

More than a month after David Hogberg profiled self-described “banking terrorist” Bruce Marks and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America in the April edition of Capital Research Center’s Organization Trends, the Wall Street Journal profiled Marks and his nonprofit group that does many of the same things that ACORN does.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

Mr. Marks’s nonprofit organization, Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, has emerged as one of the loudest scourges of the banking industry in the post-bubble economy. It salts its Web site with photos of executives it accuses of standing in the way of helping homeowners — emblazoning “Predator” across their photos, picturing their homes and sometimes including home phone numbers. In February, NACA, as it’s called, protested at the home of a mortgage investor by scattering furniture on his lawn, to give him a taste of what it feels like to be evicted.

In the 1990s, Mr. Marks leaked details of a banker’s divorce to the press and organized a protest at the school of another banker’s child. He says he would use such tactics again. “We have to terrorize these bankers,” Mr. Marks says.

Though some bankers privately deplore his tactics, Mr. Marks is a growing influence in the lending industry and the effort to curb foreclosures. NACA has signed agreements with the four largest U.S. mortgage lenders — Bank of America, Wells Fargo & Co., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. — in which they agree to work with his counselors on a regular basis to try to arrange lower payments for struggling borrowers. NACA has made powerful political friends, such as House majority whip James Clyburn of South Carolina, and it receives federal money to counsel homeowners. [...]

People with good credit will soon be forced to pay more to subsidize people with bad credit.

That’s because the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation Tuesday that puts the screws to credit card companies by limiting their ability to price their products according to risk.

Passage in the Senate by 90 to 5 votes came after the House approved separate legislation on the same topic by a margin of 357 to 70 on April 30. The two chambers are expected to work out the differences on their competing bills in time for President Obama to sign a measure into law by the Memorial Day congressional recess.

Tom McMahon, acting executive director of liberal group Americans United for Change, has tried to shame Republican lawmakers into voting for the anti-market bill. “The Limbaugh-led Republican Party [which has] repeatedly said no to get the economy moving again … will have another opportunity to do the right thing.”

Of course McMahon makes no effort to explain how kneecapping credit companies will help to stimulate the economy.

According to Edward L. Yingling, CEO the American Bankers Association, provisions in the legisation “will undermine the availability of credit.” Credit cards are “a strong economic driver and are relied upon by consumers and small businesses to make payments and to bridge short-term financial gaps,” he said.

Yingling said the legislation “fundamentally changes the entire business model of credit cards by restricting the ability to price credit for risk.”

As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted when the House passed its version of the legislation three weeks ago, limiting consumers’ choices and interfering with sensible risk-based pricing practices “will result in less availability of credit and actually force card holders to pay higher rates in many instances.”

The attack on the credit card industry was funded in part by left-wing philanthropist George Soros through his foundation, the Open Society Institute, as shown in “Consumers and Credit Cards: Leftist Watchdogs Attack An American Success Story,” by Sara Wille, Foundation Watch, September 2006. (A related article is “Demonizing Subprime Lenders: Liberal Groups Oppose Consumer Choice,” by Melanie Sans and Matthew Vadum, Organization Trends, October 2007.)

Venezuela’s socialist strongman Hugo Chavez ordered the expropriation of some 60 oil service companies and assisted government-owned oil company PDVSA (parent of CITGO) in looting those firms unfortunate enough to have invested in the workers’ paradise. 

“To God what is God’s, and to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” said the Venezuelan president as he stole at least a dozen oil rigs, more than 30 oil terminals, and more than 300 boats. “Today we also say: to the people what is the people’s,” said Chavez, who is a hero to his American friends and admirers including actors Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Kevin Spacey, Ed Asner, singer Harry Belafonte, and supermodel Naomi Campbell.

Ana Maria Ortiz and I profiled Chavez and his American buddies in Organization Trends last year.

The William J. Clinton Foundation, which we profiled, is looking for a silver-tongued spokesperson to help it cover up misdeeds promote its programs.

The want ad, found at PR News Online, looks like this:

The late hotel magnate Leona Helmsley wanted the bulk of her estate to be spent on the care and welfare of dogs, but her trustees had other ideas.

Instead, they have decided to give only $1 million of the $5 billion estate for canine care.

“This is a trifling and embarrassingly small amount,” according to Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States. “Mrs. Helmsley’s wishes are clearly being subverted.”

With just one 5,000th of the total estate of the animal lover being devoted to dogs, I am inclined to agree with Pacelle for a change.

Perhaps Helmsley sabotaged herself by not being specific enough. As the New York Times reports

After Mrs. Helmsley’s death in 2007, it was revealed that she had drafted a mission statement four years earlier listing two specific priorities for the distribution of her estate. The first was helping the poor, which she struck from the document a year later. The second was to provide for the care of dogs, although she added “and such other charitable activities as the trustees shall determine.”

Our senior fellow, Martin Morse Wooster, has explored at length what happens when philanthropists are not specific in their bequests or when their fortunes are hijacked by trustees who have different views. Wooster’s book is called The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of “Donor Intent.”  The third edition of the book is available at Amazon.com.

Liberal whiner Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for to Destroy America’s Future, cries himself a river at the Huffington Post gossip website:

Fox News is flogging Astroturf “tea parties” underwritten by corporate lobbyists, while its pundits warn that raising the top income tax rate to the level it was under Bill Clinton constitutes “socialism.”

Whatever, Bob.

Eleswhere in Crybabyland, haughty CNN reporter Susan Roesgen was too busy being condescending to Tax Day protesters to bother doing actual reporting. Here are two clips from her disgraceful, unprofessional coverage today:

Perhaps this Roesgen idiot should concentrate on reporting the news, not trying to fabricate it.

An affiliate of the George Soros-funded think tank and pressure group, Center for American Progress (CAP), has emulated the sleazy Media Matters for America by becoming a media critic.

Claiming to be outraged at the aggressive news-gathering techniques of Bill O’Reilly’s team, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization that grew out of CAP, rejoiced Friday after getting UPS to stop advertising on “The O’Reilly Factor.” The Fund released this statement on its Think Progress website: 

In response to our Stop Supporting The O’Reilly Harassment Machine campaign, UPS told us yesterday that it was investigating whether to continue supporting O’Reilly’s show. “We are sensitive to the type of television programming where our messages and presence are associated and continually review choices to affect future decisions,” spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg told us.

Today UPS announced it will stop advertising on O’Reilly’s show. Here is the statement UPS emailed out just moments ago:

Thank you for sending an e-mail expressing concern about UPS advertising during the Bill O’Reilly show on FOX News. We do consider such comments as we review ad placement decisions which involve a variety of news, entertainment and sports programming. At this time, we have no plans to continue advertising during this show. [emphasis in thinkprogress.org post]

I regret I missed this anti-Bill O’Reilly campaign until it struck gold. The campaign also claims to have elicited responses from Capital One, AT&T, and Ford.

I’ve never been a fan of ambush-style interviews but sometimes in the news-gathering process the approach is justified as a last resort. Surely nothing the O’Reilly team has done is any worse than anything done by myriad leftist commentators such as Michael Moore and journalists such as Geraldo Rivera and the team at “60 Minutes.”

The whole campaign by the CAP Action Fund seems like a cheap publicity stunt that has the added benefit of hurting the revenues of a prominent right-leaning TV commentator perhaps with the ultimate goal of removing him from the airwaves.  

Incidentally, both CAP and Media Matters are funded by Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a billionaire’s club that is funding a drive to turn America into a European-style socialist country.

CAP is a well-funded machine that has aspirations of becoming a “Heritage Foundation” of the left. It has an approximately $25 million annual budget and took in $64,681,960 in donations from 2003 through 2006, according to its tax returns.

The CAP Action Fund, 501(c)(4), may be legally separate from CAP, a 501(c)(3), but both have roughly the same goals: pushing liberal, Big Government policies.

CAP funds the CAP Action Fund directly. It gave $1,796,235 in “grants” to the CAP Action Fund in 2007 alone, according to the CAP 2007 tax return.

The liberal media isn’t going to spell out exactly how it goes about smearing conservatives, so Bill O’Reilly helpfully explained it last night on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Boiled down it goes like this: George Soros (and others) fund one of the left’s most prominent noise machines, Media Matters for America, which distorts statements made by conservatives and then urges reporters to provide saturation coverage of such statements as proof conservatives are hypocritical and sinister.

In his “talking points” segment, O’Reilly references the Obama administration’s strategy of attempting to marginalize its most vocal opponent, radio talk show giant Rush Limbaugh:

BILL O’REILLY: The Limbaugh-Obama controversy is thankfully just about over, but the far-left smear machine that propelled it to our attention is just getting started.

At the top of the smear chart is the MoveOn organization. George Soros [is] heavily invested in that. The propaganda arm of MoveOn and other far-left pressure groups is Media Matters, run by a guttersnipe named David Brock. Brock and his character assassins distribute out-of-context statements to a carefully selected group of corrupt media, headed by MSNBC, and to the Internet. Sometimes the entities even cooperate. The aforementioned Newsweek, for example, provides far-left commentators to MSNBC on a daily basis. The goal, of course, is to smear conservatives in the media, to convince ill-informed Americans that those on the right are racist, homophobic, extremist, whatever.

Unfortunately, the smear machine works on some levels. The Obama administration apparently picked up on a poll done by Democrats that showed Mr. Limbaugh’s popularity to be low among Americans under 40. Then the president’s men tried to portray Limbaugh as actually running the Republican Party. Short term, it worked. A controversy exploded and the head of the RNC, Michael Steele, came off looking bad.

But as I wrote in my newspaper column this week, a backlash is in the air. Americans want the economy fixed, not silly games.

As for Limbaugh saying he wants Obama to fail, here’s something you’ll never hear on NBC News or read in The New York Times. According to a FOX News poll taken in August 2006, 51% of Democrats said they wanted President Bush to fail. Fifty-one percent. I believe NBC and the Times were in that group.

The Obama administration should understand that Americans are wising up to the smear factory. [...]

O’Reilly has performed a valuable public service.

But in his brief op-ed, he left out a few details some may find helpful.

George Soros, the hedge fund tycoon and currency speculator, is the preeminent funder of America’s left. Soros is rarely depicted by the media as a political puppet master. Usually, he is portrayed as a wise elder statesman-like figure or a visionary. Last month Bloomberg News gave him an opportunity to dishonestly denounce America’s financial system as an example of free markets run amok.

Soros bloviated about “market fundamentalism,” while ignoring the role that the U.S. government played in the crisis, e.g. the Community Reinvestment Act, artificially low interest rates, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and so on. (BB&T chairman John Allison has demolished the argument that the free market caused the subprime mortgage collapse. In a recent talk available here he shows that the financial services sector is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in our economy.) 

Soros and Brock work closely together. Last year they collaborated on a project called Progressive Media USA that vowed to spend $40 million trashing GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

Media Matters for America is a well-funded slander shop run by discredited journalist David Brock. It exists solely to combat what it calls “conservative misinformation.”

Even the New York Times describes Media Matters as “highly partisan.” 

Apart from the occasional profile of Media Matters, don’t expect to hear more from the media about how the left manipulates the news.

(crossposted at NewsBusters)

Venezuela moved another step closer to dictatorship as voters there reportedly approved a referendum removing term limits for President Hugo Chavez, a longtime friend of America’s enemies and a harborer of terrorists.

Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s State Department rushed to congratulate the budding Marxist tyrant even though it’s unclear if it was a fair vote.

Chavez now vows to speed up “the construction of true socialism” in Venezuela.

We profiled Chavez and his useful idiot friends in America in the March 2008 Organization Trends. Around the same time I wrote an op-ed about the same topic that ran in the Boston Herald.