“He who controls the medium controls the message. He who controls the message controls the masses,” said Adolf Hitler’s vile propagandist Joseph Goebbels, whose masterful use of media, primarily radio, was instrumental in convincing Germans to accept the unacceptable in the 1930s.
Communications have changed vastly since the first half of the last century, especially with the advent of the internet. Radio remains a powerful force, however, with 42% of Americans (and more than half of the important aged 50-64 demographic) saying they get news from radio.
Any aspiring Goebbels, in other words, would be foolish to ignore the medium. You can’t Google the news or watch TV during your daily commute, for one thing — or at least you shouldn’t.
One important difference in radio listening is party affiliation. Forty-six percent of Republicans get at least some news from radio, versus 39% of Democrats. Conservative talk radio is a political force; leftwing talk radio is practically non-existent.
Leftwing billionaire George Soros wants to change that. He’s trying to purchase 200 radio stations spread across 40 markets — stations that run conservative superstars such as Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, Sean Hannity, and Dana Loesch.
To get the necessary funds, Soros has accumulated a lot of unvetted foreign investors, over the long-standing 25% limit on foreign ownership of radio stations that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has imposed. And it looks like the FCC has adopted a rule to waive the national security review requirement of the foreign entities in question.
At issue is the sale of Audacy, a media company that owns the stations nationwide. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Jan. 7 because of crippling debt levels. Six weeks after the filing, Soros Management Fund bought around $414 million of Audacy’s debt, 40% of the total senior debt.
When the bankruptcy resulted in a debt-for-equity swap in which Audacy’s debt holders would receive equity stakes, Soros emerged as its primary shareholder, “outsizing the stakes held by the likes of PGIM, Capital Commercial Finance, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Mockingbird Credit Opportunities Company, and Solus Alternative Asset Management,” according to Billboard.
Since then, Soros has been pressuring the FCC to approve the deal. Sure enough, this past Wednesday, the agency approved an order to expedite the arrangement. Rather than have FCC bureaucrats go through the investigation process, the rule allows the five-member commission, controlled by Democrats under President Joe Biden, to approve the process.
Speaking at a House of Representatives hearing on Sept. 19, one of the Republican-appointed members on the FCC Commission, Brendan Carr, called this unprecedented.
“There is a transaction where a Soros-backed group would take ownership of over 200 radio stations across 40 different markets after the FCC originally indicated that that transaction could be reviewed and approved at the bureau level without a commission vote,” Carr said. “It’s now become clear that that is a decision for the full commission, and it’s one that I would assume now or in the near future the commission would approve.”
Added Carr: “The FCC here is not following its normal process for reviewing a transaction. We have established over a number of years, one way in which you can get approval from the FCC when you have in excess of 25% foreign ownership, which this transaction does. And it seems to me that the FCC is poised to create for the first time, an entirely new shortcut.”
The transaction, Carr noted, was not extraordinary and should have been subjected to normal procedures. “It’s the type of thing that we see all the time, and the FCC has a process for this,” he told the committee.
The normal procedure would have been to “bring in national security agencies” to “review the foreign ownership,” Carr said. After that review — and only after that review — will the FCC make its decision.
Not this time.
“I am extremely alarmed,” Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-NY) told Carr. “It seems that the administration is giving a left-wing billionaire, who is a major donor, a close ally, one of the chief funders of all of the efforts in their dark money, a free pass to take control of hundreds of local radio stations, flooding the airwaves with leftist propaganda.”
As Carr later told Glenn Beck: “We have a very clear process at the FCC that we set up … to go through to [the national security] review the foreign ownership at issue here. But for reasons that are not sort of plain to me, the FCC … for the very first time ever, has skipped that process for the benefit of this Soros-backed group.”
Soros is a deep-pocketed donor. He donated $370 million to leftist candidates and causes during the 2022 elections, and spent $708 million in 2018 alone. According to Scott Walter of the Capitol Research Center, most of that money “went into politicized groups like Planned Parenthood, to fight for abortion; the Brennan Center, to tear down voter ID laws; and to all-purpose left-of-center powerhouses like the ACLU and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.”
Over time, Soros has transferred $32 billion to this Open Society Foundation, which funds equally nefarious causes.
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And Soros, like Goebbels, understands radio’s importance. In 2022, the FCC again greenlighted the sale of 18 Spanish-language radio stations to a progressive group financed by Soros. The FCC approval this time may come as Americans vote in the marathon presidential election already underway.
Nothing to see here, folks. Keep driving and listening to your new radio host.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.