Liberal journalists try to make Soros’s millions a verboten topic
Timothy P. Carney
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Liberal billionaire George Soros spent at least $500,000 to help Alvin Bragg become the District Attorney of New York, from which perch Bragg has indicted former president Donald Trump. Yet NBC News Disinformation cop Ben Collins claims it is inaccurate to call Bragg a “Soros-backed prosecutor.”
There is not a single honest person in America who believes that this is a real standard for the usage of the word “backed.”
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If your candidacy gets six figures worth of support from someone, you are “backed” by that person. In no other context does one assume “backed” means “hangs out with.”
Collins considers himself not only a straight-news reporter but also something of a fact-checker. In the Trump era, the fact-checkers have styled themselves as “disinformation reporters.” Collins is notorious for basically adopting whatever the current Democratic spin is, presenting it as a fact check, and branding opinions or framing he dislikes as “misinformation.”
This schtick satisfies a massive segment of the liberal Twittersphere, as evidenced by Collins’ 2,000 likes and 500-plus retweets.
The political spending of Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, Peter Thiel, and other billionaires has been the focus of millions of words of the mainstream press, and for a good reason: Politicians are influenced by their donors in ways not immediately obvious to the public, but relevant to the public’s consideration of their politicians.
Why the hell would a reporter want to declare it off-limits to mention the massive donations from an ideologically extreme businessman? Isn’t it the job of the media to hold the powerful to account and so to connect the dots between big money and big power?
Well, it’s become a Democratic talking point in recent months that there is no valid reason to mention Soros’s donations.
Yet, very recently, the mainstream media was touting Soros’s efforts to reshape the world of criminal justice by electing people like Alvin Bragg, who would talk a left-wing view to prosecution.
Politico wrote in 2016: “While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.”
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So factually, objectively, Alvin Bragg is a Soros-backed prosecutor whose politics was directly relevant to his getting George Soros’s money. The reason Democrats want to make “Soros-backed” into a verboten phrase is that they don’t want scrutiny about their donors because they want to pretend — as all political parties do — that they answer to The People, not The Powerful.
That’s normal behavior by Democrats. The question is why the news media goes along.