Politico’s knee-jerk reaction to trust but not verify leftist magazine The Nation’s retort to Vice President J.D. Vance’s connection of the latter to billionaire George Soros is the epitome of what happens when journalists let Trump Derangement rot their brains so much they throw ethics to the wind.
During his guest-host appearance for the Charlie Kirk Show September 15, Vance argued that Soros “funds” The Nation, which drew the ire of the magazine’s president Bhaskar Sunkara, who falsely accused him of “lying” in an X post. “[W]e're not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation,” Sunkara railed.
Politico White House reporter Irie Sentner mindlessly regurgitated Sunkara’s deceptive dismissal in his September 15 write-up of Vance’s comments: “The magazine said in a statement that it has never received support from Soros or Open Society and is not currently funded by the Ford Foundation. It dismissed the broader criticism.”
But as MRC Business research showed, Sunkara was being blatantly deceptive. Up until 2019, The Nation was directly affiliated with the nonprofit media outfit The Nation Institute, which had in fact received at least $1,349,000 from Soros’s organizations between 2004 and 2019, according to Foundation Directory Online data. In January 2019, it was announced that The Nation Institute was officially rebranding to become the Type Media Center to expand beyond its connections to the magazine. Type Media Center Executive Director and CEO Taya Kitman, said in a statement then that “When the Nation Institute was founded more than 50 years ago, we were a modest organization affiliated with the Nation Magazine — but that name no longer reflects the breadth and impact of what we do today.”
Effectively, the evidence suggests that Sunkara was treating the one degree of separation between his magazine and Soros as definitive proof that his publication didn’t get “one dime” from Soros. But none of this apparently triggered the interest of Sentner, who also carried water for Soros himself by characterizing him as “a Democratic megadonor the right has long cast as a bogeyman.” Then again, this is the same outlet that once ludicrously cast Soros-Tied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who became infamous for his highly politicized legal vendetta against President Donald Trump — as “by-the-book,” in a March 20, 2023 headline before stealth-editing it out later.
I'm not sure where he's getting his information, but JD Vance is lying about The Nation magazine. We'd welcome donations from anyone who respects our editorial independence, but we're not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation. pic.twitter.com/LmcGgxVIWN
— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) September 15, 2025
What’s insane is that Sentner could have easily sifted through Type Media Center’s (or The Nation Institute's) 990 tax filings in order to determine the clear connection between the magazine and Soros. It’s hard to imagine that a lucrative media business like Politico that is easily worth hundreds millions of dollars didn’t have the resources to look any of this up to see if Sunkara was being deviously slippery on nuance. Instead, Sentner chose to spike due diligence and used his article as an echo chamber for The Nation to sneer at Vance:
‘In our 160 years of publication, we’ve long believed that dissent is the highest form of patriotism and we are proud of our journalistic legacy in pursuit of a more equal and just world,’ it said. ‘We’ve been criticized by both Democratic and Republican officeholders alike—and we are pleased to have the vice president commenting on what he’s read in The Nation because the White House should be reading The Nation.’
No worries: MRC Business was more than happy to do the work Sentner was apparently too lazy to do.