After the Anti-Defamation League called out Fox News on Wednesday, the cable giant deleted its social-media posts portraying Jewish philanthropist George Soros as a “puppet master”—a common antisemitic trope.
Posted to both the network’s Instagram and Facebook pages this week, the cartoon by conservative illustrator A.F. Branco features the liberal billionaire Soros—who has long been a right-wing catch-all bogeyman—controlling local prosecutors and attorneys general.
The Soros figure, pulling puppet strings emblazoned with the words “$ORO$,” forces the other characters—both portrayed as Democratic donkeys—to hold up signs reading “Defund Police” and “No Bail,” obviously referencing right-wing complaints about progressive local and state criminal-justice policies and Soros’ supposed influence on them.
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Fox News captioned the cartoons with the phrase “The puppet master” on both its Instagram and Facebook pages. Before being deleted on Wednesday afternoon, the IG post racked up roughly 16,000 likes.
“As we have told Fox News numerous times, casting a Jewish individual as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes conjures up longstanding antisemitic tropes about Jewish power + contributes to the normalization of antisemitism,” the ADL tweeted on Wednesday. “This needs to be removed.”
Shortly thereafter, Fox News deleted the Facebook and Instagram posts. The network did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the posts, the deletions, and whether Fox would continue to share Branco’s work.
“We’re glad Fox News did the right thing and removed the offensive cartoon from its Instagram account,” ADL spokesperson Jake Hyman told The Daily Beast. “We hope they will heed more caution in the future when considering using such imagery.”
This was just the latest time Fox News has run drawn outcry from Jewish organizations like the ADL over the network peddling antisemitic “puppet master” tropes or normalizing white supremacy.
Just last month, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt denounced Fox Nation host Lara Logan after she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to notorious Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, calling it an “outlandish and offensive” analogy. The group has also repeatedly called for the network to fire star Tucker Carlson for relentlessly promoting the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory on air.
The network, meanwhile, eventually stopped booking pro-Trump lawyer Joe diGenova—once a frequent guest—after he peddled an antisemitic conspiracy theory about Soros on the Fox Business Network in late 2019. (Greenblatt called it “disturbing” after diGenova made a brief return a month later, saying it showed a lack of “remorse” on Fox’s part. The attorney hasn’t been back and has since said Fox is beholden to Soros.)
—With additional reporting by Adam Rawnsley.
