US state-funded broadcaster to suspend employees behind antisemitic Soros report

[Borealis]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-funded-broadcaster-to-suspend-employees-behind-multimillionaire-jew-soros-report

The federal government’s state-funded broadcasting arm is placing a number of employees on administrative leave and opening an investigation into how it ended up airing a story this
year attacking liberal financier George Soros as a malignant “multimillionaire Jew.”

The story aired in May on Radio Televisión Martí, a Spanish-language broadcaster housed in the Office of Cuba Broadcasting in Miami. OCB is a division of the United States Agency for
Global Media (USAGM), formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent federal agency that oversees government-funded news organizations around the
world.

The OCB segment accuses Soros, a “multimillionaire Jew of Hungarian origin,” of using “his lethal influence to destroy democracies.” Citing the conservative legal advocacy group
Judicial Watch, OCB’s story warned that Soros “has his eye on Latin America.”

The segment is of renewed relevance given a recent assassination attempt against Soros, who was one of a number of targets of a failed bombing campaign that also targeted former
President Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and other prominent Democrats.

Mother Jones reported on the segment’s existence on Friday. USAGM sources said the agency was caught completely off guard, and was not aware that their Cuba division had gone
after Soros in such controversial terms. The agency does not manage the daily operations of each of its subsidiary news organizations, and is in fact statutorily prohibited from
directing their news content.

USAGM is now trying to figure out how the Soros piece ended up on its airwaves, and whether OCB has broadcasted any similarly objectionable content. The agency’s senior staff
gathered on Monday morning to discuss the Soros segment, and decided to retain a third party organization to audit all of OCB’s coverage in an attempt to root out any similarly
objectionable content.

“I have directed an immediate, full content audit to identify any patterns of unethical reporting at the network,” said USAGM chief executive John Lansing in a statement on Monday
afternoon. “I have asked [OCB director Tomas] Regalado to also require ethics and standards refresher training for all OCB journalists.”

“Those deemed responsible for this production will be immediately placed on administrative leave pending an investigation into their apparent misconduct,” Lansing added.
“Disciplinary action appropriate under federal law may then be proposed, including the potential removal of those responsible, depending on the outcome of that investigation.”

This was before the bombings but not reported until now.