By Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in MediaFriday, June 1, 2007
Another Hillary Clinton connection to the phony media "watchdog" group Media Matters has surfaced. Susie Tompkins Buell, a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, put $300,000 into the group through her Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation. Interestingly, while Tompkins Buell was swelling the bank account of Media Matters, which largely functions as a Hillary Clinton front group, her foundation was also putting $100,000 into The White House Project, an organization dedicated to promoting the election of a woman to the U.S. presidency. And we all know who that is.
Marie Wilson, president of The White House Project, hailed the Hillary Clinton candidacy, declaring that she enters the race "at a time when the country is more prepared for female leadership than at any point in its history." Wilson is the former president of the Ms. Foundation for Women.
Potential media backing for Hillary can be found in the fact that the "corporate council" of The White House Project includes Disney/ABC, General Electric (parent of NBC News and MSNBC), Time Warner (parent of CNN), and the HBO and Lifetime cable channels.
The George Soros connection appears in the person of Gara LaMarche, vice president and director of U.S. Programs for the Soros-funded Open Society Institute. He is a member of the board of directors of The White House Project. However, LaMarche left the Open Society Institute in April of this year to become President and CEO of The Atlantic Philanthropies, which has assets of $3.1 billion. One of its major grantees just happens to be the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR), which has received a total of $7 million.
The CCIR describes itself as "a joint legislative advocacy and grassroots mobilization initiative begun in 2003 with the mission to enact rights-centered comprehensive immigration reform legislation in the US." It is "guided by a core set of rights-based immigration principles and priorities, including: a path to permanency for the undocumented, family re-unification and labor protection for future flows."
Translated into English, this means that the organization is dedicated to amnesty for illegal aliens, enabling them to become U.S. citizens and vote Democratic, and a process to let even more immigrants from Mexico and other countries enter the U.S. in the future. The CCIR created a sister coalition, The New American Opportunity Campaign.
It's fascinating how amnesty has now become giving "opportunity" to "new Americans."
The group supports two bills―the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, and the Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy Act of 2007. These are the Senate and House amnesty bills. Both have provisions facilitating creation of the North American Union.
Interestingly, the CCIR website lists a number of major papers supportive of its position on "comprehensive immigration reform." They include the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Arizona Republic, Miami Herald, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, and the Orlando Sentinel, among others.
What this means is that Americans opposed to amnesty are up against not only politicians from both parties and the White House but many of the major newspapers in the U.S.
For her part, Senator Clinton is counting on her support for "comprehensive immigration reform" to propel her directly into the White House. A memo from her campaign strategist, Mark Penn, and pollster, Sergio Bendixen, declares that immigrants will be critical to her winning the Democratic presidential nomination.
Meanwhile, Media Matters, which is desperately trying to keep the media from reporting anything critical of the New York senator, is continuing its personal attacks on Jeff Gerth, the co-author of a new book somewhat critical of Mrs. Clinton. One hit piece on the group's website tries to compare him to Judith Miller, who wrote stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that turned out to have flaws.
Curiously, however, the organization quotes Gerth in trying to defend itself from a charge by Dick Morris, a former Clinton adviser. It says Morris made a false claim when he appeared on the Fox News Channel and cited the Gerth book as evidence that Media Matters was "set up by Hillary's staff" and that Mrs. Clinton "had a large amount to do with setting it up."
But rather than being false, it appears that Morris understated the degree of Hillary's personal involvement in creating the organization.
In trying to rebut Morris, Media Matters quotes a statement from the Gerth book that it "wasted no time becoming an aggressive protector of Hillary's reputation" after its founding. The book also alleges, according to Media Matters, that Mrs. Clinton "advised" David Brock, the founder of Media Matters, and "quietly nurtured" his "nonprofit empire." None of this is disputed by the group, which emphasizes a Gerth statement that it is "independent." It is "independent" only in the sense that while it spends much of its time defending Hillary, it also goes to the defense of other Democrats on occasion.
The Gerth book also reportedly identifies one of Hillary's earliest supporters and advisers, Kelly Craighead, as instrumental in the start-up of Media Matters.
Then there is the Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation connection, also reportedly mentioned in the book. Tompkins Buell, co-founder of the Espirit clothing company, funded Media Matters and The White House Project through her foundation and now raises big money for Hillary's presidential campaign. It also turns out that her foundation provided $150,000 to the Ms. Foundation, out of which came Marie Wilson and her pro-Hillary White House Project.
The Ms. Foundation, in turn, is funded by the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and a number of media companies, including MTV Networks, Turner Broadcasting System, Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc., the Sundance Channel, Oxygen Media LLC (co-founded by Oprah Winfrey), and HarperCollins Publishers (a division of News Corporation, parent of the Fox News Channel).
The heavy involvement of the major media in this Hillary campaign apparatus is a virtual guarantee that there will be no significant coverage of the media's role in any of this.
It looks like Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. have only scratched the surface in their book, Her Way. But this makes the book worth reading.
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