As reported by newsbusters.org: A leftist journalism group financed by billionaire George Soros is releasing a new guide for reporters to help them fight "digital threats" like “disinformation,” despite its own sordid history of propping up ridiculous left-wing propaganda.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) released the first in a “series of chapters” from its upcoming “Reporter’s Guide to Investigating Digital Threats.” The April 3 article, headlined “Investigating Digital Threats: Disinformation,” bemoaned the threat of “[o]nline manipulation” and how Orwellian Big Tech “platforms fell behind on investing” in censoring disagreeable views.
The article’s author, freelance reporter Jane Lytvynenko, doom mongered how “[w]ithout the checks and balances that reporting provides, problems of disinformation that can seem insurmountable will genuinely become so.” Lytvynenko is also listed as a contributing researcher for the Harvard University Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project.
As MRC Business analyzed in its extensive three-part series on Soros’ enormous media influence, GIJN is just one entity in the laundry list of well-funded media operations in Soros’ global “Propaganda Powerhouse.”
Soros's media "Powerhouse" works to push his radical leftist ideas on issues like abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism. Soros’ Open Society Foundations funneled $1,850,000 to GIJN between 2017 and 2021 alone.
Soros also heavily funded the Shorenstein Center, where Lytvnenko worked. Soros gave $1,975,000 to Harvard’s Shorenstein Center between 2017 and 2021. One 2021 grant was earmarked specifically for the Center’s “research on media manipulation tactics and to educate the public about disinformation.” Go figure.
The GIJN itself is no stranger to pushing leftist propaganda. An Oct. 1, 2020 “GIJN Election Panel” tried to sound the alarm bells on how it will be the end of democracy if former President Donald Trump were to have won the 2020 election.
GIJN’s report on the panel was headlined, “Democracy Really Is on the Ballot, Says GIJN Election Panel.” GIJN cited panelist and far-left anti-Trump journalist David Cay Johnston, who likened the Trumps to a “crime family”:
What happens if the US — the world’s oldest democracy – even with all of its deep faults and we have plenty of them — ceases to be a free country, and is taken over by a crime family, which is what the Trumps are. They’re a white collar crime family. They don’t shoot people or break their legs. They lie, cheat and steal with legal documents and contracts and they've done this since the late 1800s. This is really an election that will decide whether the US will be a free society governed by the rule or law — that is the principle that the law determines what we do —or we'll become a dictatorship and Trump envisions himself as Louis XIV in France.
Watch: Leftist Journalist David Cay Johnston Likens Trumps to a 'Crime Family' in Global Investigative Journalism Network Panel (Oct. 1, 2020).
When the U.S. Supreme Court was considering overturning the infamous pro-abortion Roe v. Wade (1973) ruling, GIJN whipped out the sad violin on Twitter: “A woman's right to abortion is currently under threat in the United States.” It’s unclear where in the Constitution GIJN is insinuating that it codifies the so-called “right” to kill an unborn child.
In a 2021 article, GIJN called the United States one of the most economically and racially “unequal societies” in the world. GIJN cited the founder of the U.S.-based MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Wendi Thomas, in order to insinuate that America is plagued with institutional racism and advised journalists to frame stories on inequality in this manner.
“‘The framing is essential — the first sentence, ‘Black people don’t get loans,’ absolutely obscures the actor,’ [Thomas] said. ‘The question investigative journalists need to answer is the ‘“why”’? For instance, framing it on what banks are doing allows you to get at the institutional racism that created these systems where Black people are not getting loans.’” Talk about propaganda. [Emphasis added.]
It’s clear that GIJN is in no position to be pontificating to anyone about “disinformation.” The fact that it is tied to an America-hating billionaire like Soros is just par for the course. GJIN propagandized the supposed importance of its so-called "reporter's guide:"
"A growing crowd of researchers, reporters, and academics is uncovering ever more damning facets of online manipulation. In reading this guide, you are becoming one of them. Never be afraid to seek and give help in this field."
What a joke.
It is no news that George Soros fondly referred to as ‘The man who broke the Bank of England’ when he famously made the whopping sum of 1 billion pounds in a day as a currency trader cum speculator, has been a well-known global backer of various liberal causes from abortion to gay rights, euthanasia, legalization of prostitution etc.
His current bid to tackle media disinformation is highly suspicious as he clearly wants to control the narrative of what constitutes the infamous fake news ostensibly from a liberal perspective.
Conservatives must not allow him to succeed as journalists are tragically at his mercy since the general poverty in the media has left them scrambling like rabid dogs for his funding.
He is a very dangerous man giving the causes that he backs and massively funds; allowing him so much media liberty will mock what millions of our forebears died for – freedom of expression.
Enough of this surreptitious move to information gagging and totalitarianism!