A day after admitting that he was not telling the truth when he denied labeling Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) “a nut,” FOX News host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed that Media Matters for America, which documented O'Reilly's false denial, receives funding from financier and philanthropist George Soros and that “pretty much every newspaper” prints Media Matters “propaganda that's paid for by Soros.”

On the January 27 edition of the nationally syndicated Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, O'Reilly compared Soros's funding of liberal think tanks and advocacy organizations with Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, two conservative pundits who accepted money to promote Bush policies without without disclosing their contracts with the administration. O'Reilly opined that Williams and Gallagher were “wrong,” but the “crazy left” is involved in “another kind of dubious funding of opinion”:

O'REILLY: All right, anyway, Gallagher was wrong, and Williams, obviously, was wrong. And the government can't be -- shouldn't be buyin' journalists. So, Bush is right when he says, “It's not gonna happen again.” All right now. We don't justify bad behavior by -- Lis Wiehl?

LIS WIEHL [co-host and FOX News legal analyst]: Other bad behavior.

O'REILLY: By pointing to other bad behavior. We don't do that. Ideologues do that; we do not. But we have to, in the interest of being responsible here, tell you that there's another kind of -- I'm not gonna use the word “bribery,” that's too strong -- another kind of dubious funding of opinion!

WIEHL: There you go!

O'REILLY: And it's being done by the crazy left. All right, let's get specific. George Soros has donated $27 million, at least, to political organizations like MoveOn.org, Americans Coming Together, and the Center for American Progress -- ooooh. Those are Internet things primarily, and they basically do Soros's bidding. So, Soros is a far-left guy, wants legalized drugs, internationalism, headed the Open Society Foundation -- no borders, we're all one, we are the world, all that kinda stuff. So, he buys up these organizations. They cannot function without him. He buys them. And they parrot what he wants them to parrot on the Internet. They also attack people like me who disagree with Soros. OK, they are big attack dogs. And they are basically in business to do Soros's bidding. What they have done is they have gotten a roster of newspaper writers who they feed stuff to.

There's another organization, Media Matters -- is this a Soros deal, too? I think they get it. But they get funding from other sources -- but they do the same thing.

So, they have -- they feed stuff into the newspaper columnists who use it. Now, the newspaper columnists don't get paid as far as I know -- I mean, if I find that out, we'll go after them. But they're basically taking propaganda that's paid for by Soros and printing it in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Atlanta [Journal-]Constitution, the New York Daily News -- all -- pretty much every newspaper prints it.

So, Soros has figured out, “I can buy my way into the elite, legitimate media by using these Internet people who, on the phone, will call up columnists sympathetic, left wing” -- we had a guy [on the January 25 edition of FOX News' The O'Reilly Factor] -- what's his name? From the St. Louis [Post-]Dispatch -- Sylvester Brown [Jr.]. You know he uses Media Matters stuff all the time. You know they just feed it to him, and he prints it. That's why I called him a fraud.

Neither Brown nor anyone else at the Post-Dispatch had ever cited Media Matters items before O'Reilly made these remarks. Brown's January 28 column cited Media Matters for posting O'Reilly's remarks about Boxer, proving that his subsequent denial was false.

Finally, as Media Matters has previously noted, to date we have received no money from Soros or from any of his organizations.