Pushing “Solyndra Scandal,” Fox Distorts George Kaiser Speech

After falsely insinuating that Obama campaign donor and oil tycoon George Kaiser personally stood to profit from investments in Solyndra, the now-bankrupt California solar company that received a federal loan guarantee, Fox is trying to gin up more controversy. Fox Nation is promoting a video clip from 2009, which it claims shows the “Solyndra Investor,” Kaiser, “bragging about how he was trying to get as much of Obama's giant stimulus payout as possible.”

Kaiser

While Fox suggests that the video shows Kaiser bragging about getting money for Solyndra, the video clearly shows Kaiser was discussing his foundation's efforts to help Oklahoma entities attract federal funding. Kaiser didn't say, as Fox's headline claimed, “We're trying to get as much stimulus money as we possibly can.” He said we're trying to get “as much of it for Tulsa and Oklahoma as we possibly can.”

Kaiser described how his foundation was helping local entities “make effective grant requests” to fund anti-poverty efforts, such as early childhood education and health care. The Tulsa World has the full video of the speech, in which Kaiser told the Tulsa Rotary Club about the initiatives of his charitable foundation.

Kaiser is a major philanthropist whose primary cause is poverty in Oklahoma. BusinessWeek found that Kaiser gave or pledged over $2 billion between 2004 and 2008 -- second only to Warren Buffett and Bill & Melinda Gates among American philanthropists.

Even VerumSerum, the conservative blog that created the video, acknowledged that “obviously in this presentation [Kaiser] was talking about his Family Foundation's efforts to obtain stimulus funding primarily for community-based initiatives." Tellingly, Fox Nation did not link to the blog.