US Government-Run Network Pulls Segment Calling Soros ‘Multimillionaire Jew’

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Radio Televisión Martí, a network overseen by the U.S. government that broadcasts to Cuba, pulled a video segment it produced months ago that relied on material from the conservative group Judicial Watch and referred to Democratic donor George Soros as a “multimillionaire Jew,” Mother Jones reported last week.

“George Soros has his eye on Latin America. But Judicial Watch, an American investigative legal group, also has its eye on Soros and what it sees as his lethal influence to destroy democracies,” the narrator of the segment says in the video, according to an English translation published by Mother Jones. “It describes him as a millionaire investor and stock market speculator who exploits capitalism and Wall Street to finance anti-system movements that fill his pockets.”

The video also refers to Soros as “the multimillionaire Jew of Hungarian origin whose fortune is estimated at $8 billion” and “a non-believing Jew of flexible morals,” according to Mother Jones.

Radio Televisión Martí is overseen by the Office of Cuban Broadcasting, a U.S. federal government office meant to “promote freedom and democracy by providing the people of Cuba with objective news and information programming.”

The segment painting Soros as a menace to Latin America was initially flagged by the Cuban Triangle blog, and the director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), Tomás P. Regalado then told Mother Jones that the videos were removed from the broadcaster’s website when the news organization approached him about the content.

In his statement, Regalado merely said that the story did not have “balance” and should have had additional sources.

“Judicial Watch is a good source, but having said that, it should not have been the only source. The two part series was not precise and did not have on the record sources to balance the story,” Regaldo told Mother Jones. “To be fair and to show that we in the new administration are committed to journalistic integrity, the stories have been pulled out of the digital page, not because we want to hide anything, but because we want to be transparent if we say that the story did not have the required balance, then it should not be on the air.”

Archived videos of the segment were still available on YouTube as of early afternoon on Monday but were later unavailable.

On Monday afternoon, the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the OCB, announced that it would investigate and possibly discipline those responsible for the segment.

Latest News
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: