O'Keefe's Latest NPR Bombshell Instantly Falls Apart
Written by Simon Maloy
Published 03/17/11 9:53 AM EDT
Discredited conservative activist James O'Keefe is out with yet another NPR video, and its auteur took to Twitter to tease its SHOCKING REVELATION:
Yep, that's the big story, and in his narration to the tape O'Keefe delivers this breaking news: "Betsy Liley went on to explain that [an October 2010 grant] was not the first time George Soros' Open Society Institute had donated to NPR. In fact, the public will learn for the first time that George Soros' Open Society Foundation has donated to NPR in the past, starting as many as 15 years ago."
Actually, Soros and Open Society funding of NPR programming is not a secret. In fact, NPR has openly publicized the fact that they've received Soros and Open Society money.
Here's a 2000 NPR press release announcing that the Soros Foundation provided funding for an All Things Considered documentary on people who witness executions in Texas.
Witness to an Execution was funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Soros Foundation.
Here's a 2001 NPR press release announcing Open Society funding for their American RadioWorks documentary unit:
This American RadioWorks documentary aired on All Things Considered® from NPR News and was made possible through major funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, with additional project support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, the U. S. Institute for Peace, and the Glaser Family Foundation.
This information was obtained via a Google search. It took less than 10 minutes to find and was quite literally the bare-minimum of fact-checking one could do.
Heckuva scoop, O'Keefe.
UPDATE: TPM Media's Benjy Sarlin further dismantles O'Keefe's allegation:
But donations from the Open Society Institute have long been public. They reported in their IRS 990 forms for 1997 and 1998 donations of $50,000 to finance a series on criminal justice and a series of grants totaling about $80,000 to support coverage of Central Asia. In addition to these direction donations, OSI has provided dozens of grants to individual public radio stations like WNYC and Minnesota Public Radio, some of whom have produced programming used by NPR.
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