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 First Lady 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment