LAZY: Politico Plays Dumb on ‘The Nation’ Mag’s Connection to George Soros to Smear Vance

NewsBusters ^ | 9/16/2025 | Joseph Vazquez

[JV3MRC]

Politico’s knee-jerk reaction to trust but not verify leftist magazine The Nation’s retort to Vice President J.D. Vance’s connection of the latter to billionaire George Soros is the epitome of what happens when journalists let Trump Derangement rot their brains so much they throw ethics to the wind.

During his guest-host appearance for the Charlie Kirk Show September 15, Vance argued that Soros “funds” The Nation, which drew the ire of the magazine’s president Bhaskar Sunkara, who falsely accused him of “lying” in an X post. “[W]e're not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation,” Sunkara railed.

Politico White House reporter Irie Sentner mindlessly regurgitated Sunkara’s deceptive dismissal in his September 15 write-up of Vance’s comments: “The magazine said in a statement that it has never received support from Soros or Open Society and is not currently funded by the Ford Foundation. It dismissed the broader criticism.”

But as MRC Business research showed, Sunkara was being blatantly deceptive. Up until 2019, The Nation was directly affiliated with the nonprofit media outfit The Nation Institute, which had in fact received at least $1,349,000 from Soros’s organizations between 2004 and 2019, according to Foundation Directory Online data. In January 2019, it was announced that The Nation Institute was officially rebranding to become the Type Media Center to expand beyond its connections to the magazine. Type Media Center Executive Director and CEO Taya Kitman, said in a statement then that “When the Nation Institute was founded more than 50 years ago, we were a modest organization affiliated with the Nation Magazine — but that name no longer reflects the breadth and impact of what we do today.”