Media Leave Liberal Soros’s Politics Aside in News of Manchester United Buy

George Soros’s $25 billion Fund Management Group bought 7.9 percent of Manchester United’s Class A shares. The English soccer club went public in August, according to many news reports Aug. 21.

But from Reuters, to Associated Press (AP), to BusinessWeek, many news reports excluded any indication of Soros’s politics or his controversial history. The man who broke the Bank of England, who has spent billions to underwrite political operations and liberal higher education, wasn’t even called “liberal” by most news outlets.

BusinessWeek.com (also published on Bloomberg.com) gave no description of Soros, while The New York Times Dealbook called him “the hedge fund billionaire.” The Wall Street Journal and Reuters preferred the moniker “octogenarian financier,” and AP used the similar “billionaire financier” label. Nowhere in those stories was “liberal,” “left-wing,” “progressive,” or “anti-capitalist” used to identify Soros. Nor was his decision to buy a 2 percent stake (reported by the UK Guardian) in the soccer club controversial in the slightest. Forbes was an exception when they noted that Soros "is known for having broken the bank of England." Contrast that with the uproar and allegations of racism among the media when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh was part of a group making a bid to buy the St. Louis Rams pro football team.

The Media Research Center reported in 2009 that cable outlets, MSNBC and CNN, repeated fake quotes about slavery attributed to the talk show host that eventually forced Limbaugh his attempts to buy the Rams.

Former Pulitzer Prize winner Karen Hunter reacted on MSNBC Oct. 13, 2009, outrageously claiming, “I can just see the visions of plantation grandeur dancing in his head as we speak. Yeah, it doesn’t make you a racist to want to own a team. But, it does kind of with all his history question his power position over these players who make millions of dollars and his ability to be able to move them around, deny them contracts and do whatever he wants willy-nilly. It’s the ultimate power position to be an owner of an NFL team.”

CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed Rev. Al Sharpton about Limbaugh’s bid, giving Sharpton room to criticize the possibility saying: “[T]he question is whether or not the NFL is going to have standards. I think, when the Players Association came out this weekend and said that they objected because he was divisive ... You have to have some standard to say, but, wait a minute, this guy has offended the people that generate the money.”

So unlike Limbaugh, who was lambasted and labeled as racist for words he had not uttered, Soros’s own comments and actions have been severely underreported by the U.S. news media. The Business and Media Institute previously reported in a Special Report: George Soros: Godfather of the Left, the media’s unwillingness to cover Soros’s politics. He has amassed monumental wealth ($20 billion according to Forbes), but has used much of that money to underwrite political operations, liberal higher education and an international organization that makes him one of the most powerful and influential men in the world. It has also made Soros among the most hated, not that the U.S. news media report on that.

BMI noted that the American media seldom tell anything about Soros’s problems abroad or his hard-left agenda here at home. Some of the low points all-but ignored by the media include his $3 million fine for insider trading in France and how he operates his “own foreign policy” that often goes against U.S. interests.