Forum Post: NBC News Content To Be Provided By Billionaire Obama, MoveOn Donors

Steve Watson December 7, 2011

NBC has reached an agreement to broadcast news content provided by a media organisation run by a team that has ploughed millions of dollars into campaigning for Barack Obama and donated large cash amounts to organisations such as the George Soros affiliated MoveOn.org and the now defunct ACORN.

The LA Times reports that NBC has opened up the newsrooms of all its affiliates across the country to ProPublica, which describes itself as an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.”

NBC affiliated and Comcast owned radio stations will also broadcast ProPublica content under the agreement.

“The arrangement comes as Comcast moves to fulfill its commitment to federal regulators to strengthen local, public-interest programming in the wake of its purchase of NBCUniversal earlier this year.” the Times report states.

NBC stations will also produce their own stories based upon ProPublica’s output.

“We put the reporting at their fingertips and they can do terrific local stories with it,” said Richard Tofel, general manager for ProPublica.

The development represents yet another infiltration of corporate news media by special interests with their own political agenda.

ProPublica already delivers content to more than 50 different news organizations, including 60 Minutes, CNN, ABC World News, USA Today, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Politico, Salon.com, Slate, MSN Money, MSNBC.com, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Business Week, This American Life, and NPR among many others.

The organisation operates with a bounty of $10 million per year from married billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler, who are the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, formerly one of the largest mortgage lenders in the US.

The couple sold the company to the Wachovia Corporation for $26 billion in 2008. The ramifications for each party in the deal could not have been more contrasting when the financial collapse hit just months after the acquisition.

Though it claims to be nonpartisan, the intention behind Propublica’s output becomes clear with examination of other donations regularly made by The Sandlers.

Federal Election Commission database records show that they have donated hundreds of thousands to the Democratic Party and funded MoveOn.org to the tune of $2.5 million. They are or have also been involved with a host of other partisan organisations including ACORN, Media Matters and The Democracy Alliance.

The Sandlers also regularly contribute to the Center for American Progress, a Washington lobbyist group that has direct and weighty influence on Obama Administration policy.

As ever, globalist stalwart George Soros also has his tentacles in ProPublica, given that in 2010 it received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In a revealing piece for The American Thinker, Ed Lasky comments that the Sandlers “are not merely out to elect Democrats, but to also permanently realign U.S. politics and shift our society and culture in a far-left wing direction.”

The level of news content ownership and distribution by corporations and special interests groups has reached such an extreme that Americans can no longer turn on the television or tune into the radio without being bombarded by carefully crafted and paid for propaganda from both ends of the political spectrum.

It is no surprise or coincidence that we have witnessed a seismic shift in audiences away from the dinosaur media and towards the alternative online media. However, with groups such as ProPublica and MoveOn, we are now witnessing an attempt on behalf of powerful special interests to masquerade as alternative grassroots media sources, when in reality they merely represent an attempt at reinvention on behalf of the exposed establishment.