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Podesta’s Center for American Progress Spinoff Becomes A Media Critic


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.

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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