The leftist extremism of ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC (and its cable affiliate MSNBC) is well-documented. However, what rarely gets mentioned is that the woke reporting emanating from these networks aligns with that of the leftist ESG asset manager giants that own the biggest portion of their stock.
ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC (and its cable affiliate MSNBC) have persistently inundated viewers with non-stop left-wing TV broadcasting with impunity. Whether it’s the media pushing a woke environmental, social and governance agenda; propping up President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign; smearing former President Donald Trump and his supporters; pushing climate agitprop or ignoring news that’s politically damaging to the left, the media’s overt bias correlates with the interests of the leftist corporate entities that bankroll their enterprises.
Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street — three of the most notorious asset managers that pushed woke environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards onto the U.S. economy and Middle America — are the top three shareholders in each of ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN’s parent companies: Walt Disney Corp., Paramount Global, Comcast Corp. and Warner Bros. Discovery. Collectively, Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street own a whopping 1.9 billion shares of these media empires valued at a combined 71,879,816,285 as of Sept. 4. Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street have consistently been among the top shareholders of the leftist media companies since 2023.
WATCH: Environmental, Social, Governance Standards and the Radical Left’s Anti-American Agenda
MRC Business also looked at the top shareholders of Fox News’s parent company News Corp., which tends to appeal to a more right-leaning audience. Of the five major media giants, News Corp. is the only one that does not have Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street amongst its top three shareholders. Instead, State Street, Vanguard and BlackRock rank fourth, fifth and sixth respectively among News Corp. shareholders.
So if Americans are wondering why ABC, CBS and NBC have prolonged the Harris political honeymoon by pushing non-stop propaganda, as a recent MRC study showed, perhaps they should look to their activist owners. The ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts boasted 11,330,000 viewers combined during the week of July 22, 2024 alone, putting an exclamation point on the enormous influence that these media entities wield over Americans’ daily news diet.
All three asset managers have come under enormous fire for their fixation on ESG, wokeism and coercion of other businesses to follow suit, reportedly causing them to pull back on their more aggressive public leftist activism. But that doesn’t seem to have deterred their underlying goals. Financial News reported in February that Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street and Fidelity had spent $7.6 million just on government lobbying in the year 2023 alone. One of the firms cited “ESG regulation” as one of the top issues that they actively lobbied for.
But the three asset managers' connections to ESG don’t end there.
BlackRock boasts on its website how in 2020 it integrated ESG at BlackRock, putting “sustainability at the center of our investment process, based on the conviction that integrating sustainability-related information into the investment process can help our portfolio managers manage risk and make better informed investment decisions.”
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was present in June 2024 when President Joe Biden and other G7 leaders reiterated their commitment to accelerating eco-activist “sustainable infrastructure investment through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI).”
At the meeting, BlackRock “highlighted its commitment to facilitate billions in investments, including the close of the Climate Finance Partnership (CFP), a blended finance investment vehicle developed in partnership with the governments of France, Germany, and Japan that seeks to accelerate the flow of capital into climate-related investments in emerging markets.”
Vanguard also makes no bones about its commitment to ESG, pontificating on its website about its “set of corporate sustainability goals and initiatives to make progress toward reducing carbon emissions and reaching carbon neutrality in our global operations by 2025.”
And not to be outdone, State Street pats its ESG focus on the back: “As one of the world’s largest service providers and managers of institutional assets, our success depends on the success of our stakeholders — our clients, employees, investors and the communities we serve. We believe that considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues supports our purpose.”
Despite the reported pullback by the big three asset managers due to political backlash, the woke, anti-American manipulation of the information flow on broadcast and cable TV outlets has already left its mark. MRC recently reported how 84 percent of legacy media coverage about Vice President Kamala Harris is favorable, while 89 percent of legacy media coverage about Trump is negative, but that is only the beginning of the story. Consider the following instances of overt leftist bias:
- ABC World News Tonight Sunday anchor Linsey Davis linked the Ku Klux Klan to Trump. (Aug.19)
- MSNBC host Alex Wagner propagandized that Trump and his supporters fear a Harris presidency would end the “white patriarchy.” (Aug. 20).
- The ABC, CBS and NBC evening networks ignored coverage of Biden outrageously issuing his first veto killing a bipartisan bill to prevent pension fund managers from unilaterally making investment decisions based on ESG. (March 20, 2023).
- The ABC, CBS and NBC evening news networks ignored major news that two of their top parent company shareholders, BlackRock and State Street, withdrew from Climate Action 100+ over apparent fears that such a meeting to discuss pressuring companies to lower their fossil fuel usage would violate federal antitrust law, according to The New York Times. (Feb. 15, 2023 - Feb. 16, 2023).
- CNN Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour teed up one her guests to lambast Trump for rolling back climate regulations. “Now, the other concern about Donald Trump is his effect on the climate after rolling back many environmental provisions in his first term, not to mention pulling out of the Paris climate accord,” Amanpour railed. (April 22).
- Ahead of the April solar eclipse, NBC News’s streaming platform held a highly politicized segment with Star Trek icon William Shatner to tie the eclipse to the need to fight climate change. (April 8).
- CNN contributor Van Jones called GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) an “ideological nationalist” and suggested that “[t]hat’s a much more dangerous virus because he can … polish this stuff and make it seem palatable to people” better than Trump. (July 15).
- CNN climate alarmist expert Michael Mann doom-mongered on the 2024 summer heat wave: “There is no economy on a dead planet.” (June 19).
- The ABC, CBS and NBC evening networks ignored coverage of a damning Congressional hearing that explored the imminent dangers ESG policies posed to the U.S. economy. (May 10, 2023).
- CNN climate warrior Bill Weir celebrated the utility of whale poop to fight the climate crisis: “Let's figure out the value of a whale. What Earth services it provides over its 60-year life, $2 million-- $ 2 million in Earth services, all thanks to their poo.” (Feb. 2).
- CBS Saturday Morning Host Dana Jacobson twisted the Biden-Harris human smuggling crisis at the U.S. southern border as “more complex” because of climate change (May 4).
- MSNBC Host Alicia Menendez complained that Trump discussed illegal immigration during his RNC speech and claimed that it had shades of the 2019 El Paso, Texas mass shooter’s “manifesto.” (July 18).
One glaring potential conflict of interest between the media and their corporate shareholders involved the East Palestine, Ohio train disaster that occurred in February, 2023, which resulted in toxic fumes being spewed into the atmosphere.
An MRC study revealed that the Big Three broadcast network’s morning and evening news shows all but dropped coverage of the Ohio disaster once residents were permitted to return home Feb. 8. Between the incident’s genesis on Feb. 3 and the evacuation order for East Palestine being lifted on Feb. 8, all six shows fell just shy of spending a combined 30 minutes on the topic, largely regurgitating the public relations gaslighting of the company that owned the railway implicated in the incident, Norfolk Southern Corp.
MRC Business revealed at the time that two of the three asset managers with the biggest holdings in the Big Three’s parent companies, BlackRock and Vanguard, were also the two largest shareholders of Norfolk Southern. This indicated that ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s premature abandonment of coverage of the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio may have been a gambit to protect the leftist pro-environmental, social, governance (ESG) standard giants tied to the incident.
Deliberate or not, you can’t help but wonder whether these woke companies and their large ownership stake in the parent companies of ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC (and its cable affiliate MSNBC) is part of the reason why the talking heads on these networks adopt the same left-wing talking points and regurgitate them near-verbatim.
When DNC talking points were leaked the week of July 26, 2024, they appeared to be almost identical to what TV journalists had been saying that whole week about Harris’s role as border czar for the Biden-Harris administration. MRC’s News Analysis Division assembled the following compilation video to illustrate this. Watch:
In another montage, MRC’s News Analysis Division showcased how the leftist media simultaneously took Biden-Harris administration Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre’s novel term “cheap fake” and regurgitated it ad nauseam in an apparent effort to protect Biden’s electoral aspirations before dropping out.
Clearly, a greater spotlight should be placed on the massive woke corporations that own America’s news.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192, MSNBC at (800) 952-5210 and CNN at 404-827-1500 and demand they report the news fairly and stop genuflecting to leftist ESG standards.
