They’re an odd couple–Father and Son, that is.
Morris Beschloss, a longtime resident of Southern California’s Coachella Valley, is a conservative economic and political expert who at 82 writes a regular column for the Desert Sun newspaper, blogs on the paper’s website, and hosts his own television show, The World Report, on the Time Warner network.
In 1939, at the age of 9, Beschloss, a German Jew, escaped Nazi Germany with his mother and older brother. His grandmother refused to leave, and several years later she became one of the six million Jews murdered at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Morrie, as friends call him, spoke to me about his only son, Michael Beschloss. He is the Harvard educated, NBC News Presidential Historian. As the Presidential Historian, the younger Beschloss holds himself out as an unbiased, apolitical analyst of all things Presidential. Long ago, a political wedge was driven between the two, with Michael Beschloss strongly objecting to his father’s conservative politics.
The older Beschloss talked about his son’s accomplishments, which he admires. When it comes to his son’s work with NBC, however, Beschloss didn’t mince words:
“Once you’re in bed with the devil, you begin to spout the devil’s bullshit,” he explained, when referring to what he calls NBC’s overtly liberal bias. He cited Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin as another example of media driven political taint. “She is nothing but a lackey for the left,” said Beschloss.
Beschloss, who calls the cable division of his son’s employer, MSNBC, “nothing more than the propaganda wing of the Obama White House,” spoke with disdain about the network and many of its on-air personalities. Al Sharpton, who incited the 1991 Crown Heights riots, “is a known anti-Semite,” said Beschloss. He also decried the fact that the network employed, as an anchor, the daughter of alleged “arch-anti-Semite Zbigniew Brzezinski” (Mika Brzezinski).
We then began to talk about the self-designated, progressive “media watchdog group” Media Matters for America. Michael Beschloss (the son) is married to Iranian born Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss. She has well-documented, strong ties to Democrats and George Soros-backed groups, including Media Matters. Mrs. Beschloss is currently President and CEO of Rock Creek Group, a hedge fund based in Washington, D.C. One of Rock Creek Group’s senior advisors is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former Lt. Governor of Maryland, who is also leading American Bridge–a Democrat fundraising project co-founded with Media Matters for America’s David Brock.
George Soros announced in 2010 that he was donating $1 million to MMFA specifically to go after Fox News Channel, whose hosts, he claimed, were “inciting violence.”
“George Soros is the most dangerous man in America,” said Morrie. Beschloss believes that major conservative media such as Fox News and BigGovernment.com are targets of MMFA and Soros not only because they present opposing points of view, but because they have “huge audiences” that far outnumber those of liberal media outlets.
Beschloss adds that despite Soros’ Jewish heritage, Soros “sides with the enemies of Israel on a regular basis.” In 2010, Soros gave $750,000 to J Street–an organization that poses as pro-Israel but in reality is a radical left-wing group actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.
Beschloss went on to say that in his view, the only media that matters is News Corp., the parent company of Fox News Channel; and the Wall Street Journal, which he says are the “only objective major media left in America.”
Notwithstanding his son’s affiliation with NBC and his daughter-in-law’s ties to MMFA, Beschloss says MMFA’s simple mission is “to destroy any organization with views that contradict theirs.”