Media Research Center: Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gave Taxpayer Money to Soros-Backed “Fact-Checker”

Newsbusters’ Joe Vazquez uncovered that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) gave taxpayer dollars to a censorship giant pretending to be a fact-checker funded by the George and Alex Soros empire. 

The CPB was created in 1967 to promote and support public broadcasting, and distributes most of its funding to over 1,400 locally owned public ratio and television stations - including NPR and PBS. The CPB is a “private, nonprofit organization,” but receives all of its annual funding from congress, making it private in name only. 

And as you’d expect, it’s a left-wing narrative that it’s been bankrolling. 

As Vazquez reported:

MRC Business discovered that the CPB gave $599,330 to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in 2023. Poynter, which runs the left-tilting International Fact-Checking Network, was heavily invested in helping Big Tech platforms like Facebook widely censor supposedly "troublesome" opinions on the COVID-19 virus, amongst other topics, like elections and abortion. 

What’s worse is that liberal billionaires like George Soros, eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar and others are also some of IFCN’s most infamous financiers, further compounding the First Amendment concerns that government funds could have potentially been used to silence Americans.

This is not the only connection between Poynter and "public" broadcasting: their website PolitiFact has a partnership with the PBS News Hour. You can tell these are fast friends: PolitiFact has zero fact checks on anything said or written by PBS and NPR staffers. 

As I revealed in my book “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” major funding from PolitiFact’s parent organization, the Poynter Institute, has come from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Soros-backed Tides Foundation and Tides Center, and the Carnegie Corp. of New York, among many others.

And it shows.

Their funding from Soros is Exhibit A in how money easily influences their coverage.

If you ever find yourself Googling George Soros’ name, you may find an ad from PolitiFact encouraging you to learn the “truth” about Soros. “George Soros does not pay protesters. Here’s the truth. The real purpose of the ‘paid protester’ myth.”

When you click through, you’re brought to a fact-check of a claim from Candace Owens that Soros is “funding the chaos” in Minneapolis via the Open Society Foundations (this was during the 2020 George Floyd riots).

Fact-checker Emily Venezky predictably rates Owens’ claim “False” while acknowledging that Soros donated $33 million to organizations “that have worked with Black Lives Matter or worked to raise awareness during the Ferguson-related protests.” She then tries to hedge that admission: “However, they had never given money to groups for the express purpose of organizing protests with the movement,” as if BLM wasn’t going to use the funds for whatever they want regardless.

The purpose of the article is simply to downplay the role of Soros in degrading law and order in the U.S. Whether or not Soros is funding protesters in the exact manner in the exact city that Candace is stating is almost irrelevant when we’re talking about a man who has spent $40 million funding far-left prosecutors nationwide, all of which implement soft-on-crime policies and favor defunding police departments.

In a similar vein, PolitiFact’s Yacob Reyes wrote an article downplaying Soros’ funding of Black Lives Matter–adjacent groups. When Candace Owens, citing the same data as Venezky, said that Soros “injected $33 million into Black Lives Matter,” Reyes rated the claim “False” because the groups weren’t official BLM groups. They were just groups that shared a virtually identical ideology and engaged in the same kind of disruptive activities.

Fortunately, the fact-checkers have lost nearly all the power they once had in being used to justify social media censorship. Twitter/X doesn’t rely on them anymore following the Elon Musk takeover, and Facebook and Instagram have also ditched them due to them being politically biased in one direction.