Two Universities Tied to FCC Probe of Newsrooms
The FCC’s attempt to regulate news media, which has currently been suspended, is tied to left wing billionaire George Soros and two American Universities.
Mike Ciandella of CNS News reports.
Universities in FCC Newsroom Probe Have Close Ties to Soros, Got $1.8M in Funding
While disturbing, this should come as no surprise since Soros’ gave more than $52 million to media organizations from 2000-2010.
Two schools were working with FCC on the project, according to Byron York of The Washington Examiner. The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy, were tasked by the FCC with coming up with criteria for what information is “critical” for Americans to have. The FCC study would have covered newspapers, websites, radio and television, according to The Washington Post.
On top of the 1st Amendment problems with this proposal, the schools involved have strong ties to liberal billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and have gotten more than $1.8 million from since 2000.
The journalism programs at these schools have even more ties to Soros besides their funding, including faculty members writing for university-based publications allied with Soros-funded outlets.
The schools have collaborated on this project going back at least to 2012. Lewis A. Friedland, who was a “principle investigator” for the FCC on this project, also directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He gave a presentation at Annenberg in Feb. 2012, on “communication ecology.” This was just four months before the schools presented their findings to the FCC.
Tracking the $8.5 billion Soros-foundation world is challenging because he funds so much and many of those organizations then partner or even fund one another.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison got a whopping $1,672,397 from Soros between 2000 and 2012. The university also offers OSI-sponsored grants, scholarships and fellowships. Friedland also heads Madison Commons, a liberal journalism group “powered by” the university’s School of Journalism. Madison Commons, in turn, is a project of the university but supported in part by American University’s J-Lab. AU, including its Cairo campus, has received $588,395 from OSF since 2008.
Universities in FCC Newsroom Probe Have Close Ties to Soros, Got $1.8M in Funding (CNS News)