NBCbgets fresh leftist invasion. Network teams up with ‘journalism’org founded by Obama campaigners.

Aaron Klein Online ^ | 12 6 2011 | Aaron Klein

[tutstar]

NBC-owned television stations in cities across the nation just teamed up with a nonprofit “journalism” group funded by a billionaire husband and wife team who not only spent millions campaigning for President Obama but also topped donor lists to groups like ACORN and MoveOn.org.

The nonprofit, ProPublica, will contribute to the news operations of all NBC owned-and-operated stations, including those in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, the network announced Monday.

The NBC affiliates will get early access to investigative reports from ProPublica, which describes itself as an “independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

Also included in the arrangement are local radio stations owned by Comcast, which purchased NBCUniversal earlier this year

The LA Times reported the arrangement comes as Comcast moves to fulfill its commitment to federal regulators to strengthen local, public-interest programming.

[tutstar]

“We can get to the kind of investigative and enterprise stories we wouldn’t be able to singularly,” Davis told the LA Times.

snip>

Controversial Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a friend of Obama who was embroiled in a national race scandal in 2009, sits on the board of ProPublica.

ProPublica was founded with a $10 million yearly grant from Herbert and Marion Sandler, the former chief executives of the Golden West Financial Corporation, which was one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and savings and loans.

[frankenMonkey]

I’ve always wondered who writes the drivel for national stories that the local stations used in their newscasts.

[tutstar]

ping

[SECURE AMERICA]

So NBC the Obama propaganda machine hooks up with another Obama propaganda machine. What a shock......

[tutstar]

Well if you read the whole article it is very telling, this quote for example:

On its website, Pro Publica describes itself as championing the values of the “weak” against the “strong.”

More class warfare is coming and we must be able to combat the leftists. Any doubt now that we are in a Soviet style or iron curtain staging ground?

[tutstar]

This article is long but mentions the Sandler connection (that Savage has talked about on his radio show). Wonder if he will mention Aaron’s report today or in the near future?

[tutstar]

gnip

[dynachrome]

Thanks. We will see whether Doc S. has this on his radar.

[EQAndyBuzz]

File a huge class action lawsuit against NBC Corp News Division.

Frivolous? Sure. But hey, why not?

[combat_boots]

“Herbert and Marion Sandler”

CRIME, INC. rides again!

[tutstar]

not sure if this may interest you due to the Soros connection, also Herbert and Marion Sandler who are connected to J Street

[tutstar]

Not a shock to many of us. What I still don’t understand is why so many Jewish people support ZERO when he is so against Israel. Is it power, and money? Surely they can see how he is spelling the ruin of Israel.

[kcvl]

How is it legal for a 501(c)(3) to team up with NBC?!

April 18, 2011: ProPublica staff

ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is ProPublica’s managing editor. Richard Tofel, the former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is general manager.

The Sandler Foundation made a major, multi-year commitment to fund ProPublica at launch.

ProPublica is a non-profit corporation, and is exempt from taxes under Section 501(c)(3). It has its own Governing Board, chaired by Herbert Sandler.

******

It seems the Sandlers are ONE PERCENTERS!

Golden West was sold in 2006 for $24 billion to Wachovia Bank

Herbert Sandler is the former CO-CEO (with his wife, Marion Sandler) of Golden West Financial Corporation and World Savings Bank.

******

The third wave in American journalism—that of the foundation press—may be taking form now thanks to Bay Area billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler. Waving $10 million that they promise to replenish annually, the Sandlers have founded the nonprofit ProPublica to produce investigative journalism. (Usual suspect the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is also chipping in some money to the ProPublica kitty, as are the Atlantic Philanthropies and the JEHT Foundation.)

What do the Sandlers want for their millions? Perhaps to return us to the days of the partisan press. The couple made their fortune, which Forbes estimates at $1.2 billion, at Golden West Financial Corp. In recent years, they've spent millions on politics. The Federal Election Commission database shows the two of them giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic Party campaigns.

In 2004, Herbert Sandler gave the MoveOn.org Voter Fund $2.5 million, again according to the FEC database. The Center for Responsive Politics Web site reports donations of $8.5 million from Herbert and Marion to the 527 group Citizens for a Strong Senate, in the 2004 cycle.

CSS was formed by " a group of strategists with close ties to former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards," writes the washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza.

American Banker reported in 2005 that Herbert also gave $1 million to the California stem cell initiative and that the pair have also funded the progressive Center for American Progress.

Here

[jersey117]

I wonder if there is some legal action that can be taken to prevent them from being labeled a news organization. In addition to the billion dollars he has to spend, he gets free campain air time.

[facedown]

Just before the financial crisis, the Sandlers in 2008 sold their business to the Wachovia Corporation for about $26 billion, a deal which valued their personal shares at about $2.4 billion.

How convenient.

[kcvl]

25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis

The good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown

Marion and Herb Sandler

In the early 1980s, the Sandlers’ World Savings Bank became the first to sell a tricky home loan called the option ARM. And they pushed the mortgage, which offered several ways to back-load your loan and thereby reduce your early payments, with increasing zeal and misleading advertisements over the next two decades. The couple pocketed $2.3 billion when they sold their bank to Wachovia in 2006. But losses on World Savings’ loan portfolio led to the implosion of Wachovia, which was sold under duress late last year to Wells Fargo.

The Sandlers respond here: “Don’t Pin the Blame on Us”

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877343,00.html #ixzz1ftMHKhVr

[tutstar]

HA! Funny tagline....

What would you sue them for?

[kcvl]

September 29, 2008

How allies of George Soros helped bring down Wachovia Bank
By Ed Lasky

Wachovia Bank, a major institution, has seen its stock plummet and its continued viability called into question, as the nation’s financial crisis muddles forward. [Update: shortly after publication of this article, Citigroup agreed to purchase Wachovia’s banking operations in a deal facilitated by the FDIC.]

Largely ignored in this crisis is the key role played by Herbert and Marion Sandler, founders of Golden West Financial (GDW), one of the largest savings and loans in the nation. Wachovia purchased GDW for $24 billion dollars in 2006. This was one of the worst merger and acquisition deals of all time for the buyer, and remarkably excellent timing on the part of the seller. In essence, Wachovia bought a financial time bomb ticking away, one that exploded this year, bringing down yet another former financial titan and further wrecking Wall Street. [Update: see this commentary from Bllomberg on the role of GDW in the fall of Wachovia.]

How did this transpire and who are the Sandlers?

Herbert and Marion Sandler, a New York lawyer and Wall Street analyst respectively, bought a small California thrift in 1963 and built it into GDW — one of the largest thrifts in the nation. The company’s business was built on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs. These were mortgages offered at low “teaser” rates that ratcheted upward as interest rates increased. They were often sold aggressively to unsophisticated home buyers who did not comprehend the vast financial risks they were taking, or who assumed that housing prices would rise high enough to provide a profit to them when they sold their houses. They were targets for lenders peddling mortgages that should have been stamped with a skull and crossbones, for these were among the most seductive and dangerous types of mortgage.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/how_allies_of_george_soros_hel.html

[kcvl]

The Sandlers have started to invest their billions of dollars politically, in the manner of George Soros, sugar daddy of many far-left wing groups and an early and prominent supporter of Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Soros has developed an empire of so-called 527 groups, putatively independent political activists groups that have influence within the Democratic Party. These 527 groups include the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.Org, Human Rights Watch, Media Matters and a slew of other like-minded groups .

This set of political organizations also includes the International Crisis Group, whose foreign policy staff is likely to contain the embryonic future of the State Department in an Obama Administration . Eli Pariser, who heads MoveOn.Org, boasts about his group’s role in the Democratic Party:

“Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we are going to take it back.”

They have already done so, in large measure.

The top four donors to these 527 groups in the last Presidential election cycle (2004) were Soros, Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, Steven Bing, and Herbert and Marion Sandler . Collectively they gave 78 million dollars to left-leaning 527 groups. That was just in 2004. They have become much more ambitious over the last few years.

Soros, Lewis, and the Sandlers form a core group of billionaire activists and Democrat partisans who have formed a group called The Democracy Alliance. They realized that they could magnify their power by working in unison and tapping other wealthy donors to further their agenda (the superb Boston Globe article “Follow the money” is a good primer on how money and 527 groups have come together to have a huge impact on politics in America).

The Democracy Alliance is a major avenue to help them achieve their goals. The roster of its growing membership consists of a list of billionaires and mere multi-millionaires who collectively hope to give upwards of 500 million dollars each year to further promote a left-wing agenda. A partial roster of the Democracy Alliance membership can be found here.

Half a billion dollars a year can purchase a great deal of influence.

The Sandlers certainly know quite a bit about leverage from their savings and loan days.

Among the beneficiaries of their largesse: Air America, ACORN (a group that has very close and long lasting ties to Barack Obama and has a long history of engaging in voter fraud. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (basically a private detective group focused on the private faults and foibles of Republicans), Media Matters, a media watchdog group that engages in harsh partisan attacks against media figures and articles it considers supportive of Republicans). The list goes on and on.

They are not merely out to elect Democrats, but to also permanently realign U.S. politics and shift our society and culture in a far-left wing direction.

One of the steps the Sandlers have taken on their own is to start ProPublica with a 10 million dollar donation, a sum which they promise to replenish annually. This is an outfit that will engage in investigative journalism and will provide its “findings” to larger media outlets for greater impact at no cost. American Thinker was among the first outlets to express wariness over ProPublica and the approach it would take given the ideology of its founding couple. Even Jane Mayer of the New Yorker described the Sandlers as hard-core partisans. Other publications shared our concern about ProPublica. Investor’s Business Daily commented in an editorial:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/how_allies_of_george_soros_hel.html

[tutstar]

You got that right. I don’t see how people continue to get away such stuff.