Either NPR is so high on its own ego that it believes it can get support from George Soros-backed groups for its lefty spin-jobs without anybody noticing or it’s so obtuse that it thinks nobody with a skeptical mind will even take the time to look.
NPR immigration correspondent Sergio Martínez-Beltrán came out with a dense, 1498-word pro-illegal immigration sob story May 5 attacking the Trump administration for daring to enforce immigration law in Minnesota. “Minneapolis grapples with the impact of Trump's largest immigration crackdown yet,” read Martinez-Beltran’s narrative-twisting headline. He didn’t even bother to wait past the first paragraph to have a pseudo-conniption over President Donald Trump supposedly declaring war on “immigrants” writ large as opposed to finally dealing with a decades-long illegal immigration problem:
Three months ago, masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles descended on the Twin Cities as part of Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration's largest and most aggressive crackdown yet of immigrants.
This, of course, is false, and emblematic of the common leftist logical fallacy of treating “undocumented immigrant” and “immigrant” as if they aren’t mutually exclusive.
It’s not until the last line of the article that you get this banger of a disclosure (sarcasm), “This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.” Of course, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Here’s what you wouldn’t know reading Martinez-Beltrán’s screed: EHRP lists Soros’s Open Society Foundations as one of its key “funders,” which makes sense in retrospect given that pushing for open borders and unchecked illegal immigration is synonymous with the Soros brand.
Soros specifically poured at least $600,000 into EHRP’s coffers between 2016 and 2021, according to OSF grant records. But the Soros connection isn’t the only monetary tie here. Liberal billionaire and “reimagining capitalism” enthusiast Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network is also listed as a funder, along with another usual suspect of major, radical left-wing financing in the Ford Foundation. The EHRP is no push-over organization either. The Soros-backed group boasts prominent liberal outlets like CNN, CNBC, The Daily Beast, Columbia Journalism Review, Alternet, The Atlantic, Bloomberg News and The Boston Globe as its “media partners.”
Did Martinez-Beltrán bother to disclose any of the objectivity-busting factoids about the EHRP? Of course not. And why would he, given that NPR also received funding historically from Soros to the tune of over approximately $2 million at least? He would have had to disclose the funding ties to the activist Soros regime on both ends, which would in theory upend his whole spiel.
Martinez-Beltrán proceeded to cite anonymous illegal immigrant sources, making them seem like Iranian dissenters daring to speak out against the oppressive Islamist regime. “"We were left traumatized," said Y, a woman who asked NPR to identify her by her middle initial because she worries speaking out will affect her ongoing immigration case … V, an Ecuadorian man who asked NPR to identify him by the initial of his first name because he's undocumented, said ‘everything changed’ for day laborers.” What is this, an alphabet soup?
But this is par for the course for Martinez-Beltrán. During the August 1, 2022, edition of All Things Considered, Martinez-Beltran compared "hardline Republicans" pushing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to be stricter on immigration to the mass shooter at the El Paso Walmart in 2019. It’s no mystery that he’s willing to blow past every checkpoint of journalistic ethics just for the sake of pushing his propaganda with impunity.
It’s an insult to consumers’ intelligence that this outlet had received tax dollar funding for as long as it did through Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants.
