NWV News - Soros NPR Connection Grounds for Ending Gov't. Funding

SOROS NPR CONNECTION GROUNDS FOR ENDING GOV'T. FUNDING

By NWV News writer Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
April 12, 2011
© 2011 NewsWithViews.com

Billionaire and New World Order advocate George Soros is the latest person to be exposed by the always controversial Internet journalist James O'Keefe. Soros, through one of his multi-million dollar front-groups, the Open Society Institute, donated $1.8 million to National Public Radio on the condition that Open Society and NPR keep the transaction secret.

In a surreptitiously recorded telephone conversation released by the young O’Keefe, Betsy Liley, an executive with NPR is heard saying that the Open Society Institute opted against on-air credit for its $1.8-million donation to NPR last year to avoid negative publicity associated with the firing of Juan Williams, an NPR senior news analyst who also worked for Fox News Channel.

The tape marks the third time this month that Mr. O’Keefe has released a secret recording involving a top NPR fund raiser. In each case, the NPR official is heard talking to a staff member of Mr. O’Keefe’s Project Veritas who was posing as a donor from the fictitious Muslim Education Action Center.

The tape’s release came on the day when the House of Representatives was voting to end federal funds to NPR.

As a preface to the latest recording, Mr. O’Keefe narrates: “In another phone call to NPR on the morning of February 28, Betsy Liley … explains about George Soros deciding not to use on-air credits in exchange for his donation of $1.8-million.

“Betsy Liley went on to explain this was not the first time George Soros’s Open Society Institute had donated to NPR. In fact, the public will learn for the first time that George Soros’s Open Society Foundation has donated to NPR in the past, starting as many as 15 years ago.”

Ms. Liley was suspended after Mr. O’Keefe released the first tape of her and her boss, Ronald Schiller, at lunch with the donors who turned out be pulling a ruse. Two days later, Mr. O’Keefe released a tape in which Ms. Liley explained how the donors could keep any donation to NPR anonymous and off the radar of government auditors.

O'Keefe's revealed NPR fundraisers Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley at lunch with two men play-acting as Muslim contributors. The NPR duo are seen and heard telling the supposed contributors what they obviously wished to hear from the two "development" executives.

Ron Schiller is heard on the video saying, "[V]ery little of our funding comes from the government." He's also heard saying, "The current Republican Party, particularly the tea party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian — and I wouldn't even call it Christian."

"Basically, they believe in white, middle America, gun toting — it's pretty scary. They're seriously racist..." said Schiller.

Schiller has since left his job as NPR Foundation's senior vice president for development.

He went further in his pandering comments to the two men when he said he was proud when NPR let Juan Williams go last year after Williams said on Fox News he would be concerned if he boarded a plane with fellow passengers in Muslim garb. "He lost all credibility and that breaks your ethics as a journalist." Schiller says.

Of course, Schiller failed to mention that Williams is not a reporter but a political commentator.

NPR responded almost immediately after the O'Keefe video began to air on the Internet. NPR officials claimed, "The fraudulent organization represented in the video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept."

"We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for. Mr. Schiller announced last week he is leaving NPR for another job," stated the NPR media release.

O'Keefe's Project Veritas gained notoriety in 2009 in another covertly made video that showed individuals — O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, daughter of syndicated talk show host and Christian Pastor Doug Giles — posing as a pimp and prostitute seeming to get advice on gaming the tax system from a representative of ACORN, a leftist community activist organization that significantly helped President Obama capture the White House.

That undercover journalism operation all but destroyed ACORN which witnessed Obama distancing himself from their executives and programs.

This exposure of NPR confirms the suspicions of millions of Americans. Lawmakers are currently debating whether to cut federal grants and contributions to a decidedly slanted left-wing news organization.

"Anyone with half-a-brain can tell NPR is left in its news coverage and in fact in all of its programing," said political strategist Mike Baker.

'If they want to be a propaganda arm for the radical left, that's fine. But they should do it on their own 'dime' not the taxpayers'," he said.

Maria Archuleta, a spokeswoman for the Open Society Institute, said Soros' organization has had a longstanding policy of not taking on-air credit for its grants to NPR.

Soros had given $237,411 in 1997 and 1998 directly to NPR for four grants to support a criminal-justice series, coverage of crime and related issues, and reports in Central Asia, Ms. Archuleta said. The organization has also provided 34 grants from 1997 to 2010 to local NPR member stations and specific programs that have totaled nearly $3.4-million.

Recipients have included WNYC radio, Pacific News Service, and Minnesota Public Radio. The local grant information has been publicly available on Open Society’s annual informational tax return, Ms. Archuleta added.

“Some of our donors have chosen not to use the on-air credits. So George Soros and the Open Society Institute gave us $1.8-million and they have decided not to use on-air credits because of what is happening in Congress,” Ms. Liley said on the O'Keefe tape.

“In the fall, when Juan Williams was fired, a number of the conservative press linked the George Soros gift and the Juan Williams firing to each other and suggested that this was the liberals run amok. Which, they’re separate things. They have nothing to do with each other. No one here has even met Mr. Soros. I bring it up as just an example of choices that different people make.”

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Later in the tape, Ms. Liley said: “The Open Society Institute was getting, the conservatives were, on some of the Web sites, were having people call his foundation. The press was calling, and so it became, they got roped into the Juan Williams thing, which they didn’t feel like they needed to be.”

"It should be noted that Juan Williams is far from being a conservative," said Mike Baker. "Williams is a big-government leftist and internationalist. However, Soros was always vocal about his hatred for Fox News especially for libertarians such as Glenn Beck, Judge Andrew Napolitano and John Stossel and connecting the dots isn't hard in the world of the radical left."