Sometimes you just have to bite the hand that feeds you. Open Society Foundations, the group backed by liberal billionaire George Soros, was ranked the least transparent think tank in the United States by a group it funds.
Transparify, a 3-year-old organization that ranks think tanks from “Highly Opaque” to “Highly Transparent,” released its 2016 transparency report on June 29. For the third year in a row, Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) occupied the lowest spot in the United States, having ranked below the other 42 American think tanks evaluated.
“We are aware of the irony," Transparify spokesman Dustin Gilbreath told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Transparify applies the same criteria to all organizations, including our own donor."
The organization ranks the transparency of an organization by how well it publicly disclose its funding sources on its website. When Transparify released its first report in 2014, it noted “The OSF website highlights George Soros as their founder, but does not specify the funding source on its expenditure page.”
Yet instead of pursuing greater transparency, OSF simply complained it has “incorrectly been labeled a think tank and should not have been included in the ranking,” Reuters reports. OSF has made the same excuse the last two years as well.
Soros has used his foundation to influence the FCC, fund the Black Lives Matter protest movement, determine the Progressive political message, and even pushing for President Obama’s most recent Supreme Court nominee.
Soros has also given more than $52 million to media groups that advance his liberal policies, and his influence is woven throughout Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, one of the most prominent journalism schools in America.
