a far-left activist organization with strong ties to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden founded by David Brock.[1][2] It was created primarily to censor conservative media through blacklisting and intimidation of advertisers[3] and attack the Clinton organization’s opponents. Media Matters has the persistent and unenviable task of undoing and explaining away public perceptions generated by the Clintons’ words and actions. Since its inception, they’ve received over $50 million in contributions from several sources including wealthy liberal activists such as George Soros,[40] hedge funds,[41] and left-wing foundations.
Brock also works for American Bridge 21st Century, which he co-founded with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former Lt. Governor of Maryland and eldest child of former US Attorney General and US Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Sidney Blumenthal, the original creator of the birther movement narrative aimed at demonizing Barack Hussein Obama on behalf of the Clinton organization, has also been closely associated with Media Matters.[4]
Media Matters claims its goal is to highlight what it considers conservative “misinformation” in mass media organizations. Media Matters operates as a perpetual Clintonesque “war room” by targeting prominent conservative public officials, public television personalities, Fox News, and conservative talk radio.
Within the 90-page three-year strategic plan Media Matters distributed to its donor base and potential contributors, the document reveals that the non-profit entity has an “enemies list” which includes organizations like Fox News, Cato Institute, and Heritage Foundation. The list also targets numerous individuals and executives such as Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Peter Theil, and Richard Mellon Scaife.[5]
Further deviating from its tax-exempt status, a recently discovered internal strategy memo from Media Matters Senior Fellow Karl Frisch to David Brock and Eric Burns, suggests that Media Matters “hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” as well as “look into contracting with a major law firm to study any available legal actions that can be taken against Fox News, from a class action lawsuit to defamation claims for those wronged by the network. I imagine this would be difficult but the right law firm is bound to find some legal ground for us to take action against the network.”[6]
Some claim Media Matters was instrumental in lobbying for the firing of Don Imus,[7] whom they considered a moderate for endorsing John Kerry for president in 2004.[8] Imus was targeted by the liberal Left for criticizing Senator Chuck Schumer and most notably, the constant rebuke of former First Lady and at the time Senator Hillary Clinton.
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly took aim at Media Matters in March 2012 for their attack on Rush Limbaugh, calling their work “very fascist”.[9]
Read More at Conservapedia…
FOUNDING
Media Matters for America was founded on May 3, 2004 by David Brock. In the early 1990s, Brock was a conservative investigative journalist. By the end of the decade, he had become a liberal activist. He created MMfA to confront the conservative journalism of which he was previously a part.
In founding MMfA, Brock received help and guidance from the Center for American Progress, which at the time was also recently formed by former officials from the Clinton White House. The site was intended to become part of a larger liberal media apparatus, aimed at combating conservative opinion-makers like radio host Rush Limbaugh. Brock stated he hoped MMfA could provide content for struggling new liberal talk show hosts, including future U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) and Janeane Garofalo.[1]
According to MMfA’s application to the IRS for nonprofit status, it aimed to address the following problem:
It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote corporate interests, the rights of the wealthy, and a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology.
MMfA has been established to identify occurrences of excessive bias in the American media, educate the public as to their existence, and work with members of the media to reduce them in order to ensure that the public receives news coverage and information that is not only accurate but free from domination by a particular world view.[2]
MMfA was founded with about $2 million in donations from prominent liberal donors, such as Susie Tompkins Buell, Leo Hindery, and James Hormel.
CONSPIRATORS
A 2017 leaked briefing document from political operator David Brock’s ultra-liberal, self-proclaimed media watchdog, Media Matters, has exposed the hard-left activist group conspiring with Facebook and Google to create a strategy to marginalize and ban political thought outside of the progressive neoliberal paradigm – essentially censoring libertarian and conservative political speech.
The leaked briefing book, entitled “Media Matters: The Top Watchdog Against Fake News and Propaganda — Transforming the Media Landscape” (obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon) was privately published by Brock in January to solicit donors, and lays out the strategy for controlling the U.S. media narrative.
The briefing book advances the narrative of “Fake News,” which actually began with Media Matters, and reveals Brock is attempting to launch what the hard-left calls “a meme.” A “meme” is essentially a narrative designed to discredit news organizations that dare report from anything other than a neoliberal perspective. The goal is to discredit any organization that doesn’t toe the neoliberal line.
The main thrust of this narrative Brock is forwarding is to paint anyone who opposes the neoliberal agenda as “alt-right” – with a direct implication that they are racist, anti-Semitic, or misogynistic. It must be noted that this blanket term is used to intentionally marginalize anyone that disagrees with their ideological stance. Make no mistake that conflating neo-Nazis and racists, with constitutionalists, libertarians and conservatives is a strategic maneuver meant to marginalize the voice of large segments of the U.S. population.
Brock implicates both Google and Facebook as co-conspirators in forwarding this “Fake News” narrative against independent media organizations.
Brock clearly articulates this strategy, as laid out on page two of his briefing book:
“Over the next four years, Media Matters will focus on achieving the following outcomes:
“Serial misinformers and right-wing propagandists inhabiting everything from social media to the highest levels of government will be exposed.
“Internet and social media platforms, like Google and Facebook, will no longer uncritically and without consequence host and enrich fake news sites and propagandists.
“Toxic alt-right social media-fueled harassment campaigns that silence dissent and poison our national discourse will be punished and halted.”
This clear attempt to consolidate control over the informational narrative Americans are exposed to is dangerous, and nothing less than a true threat to freedom. In essence, Brock is attempting to create a more effective “propaganda model,” as forward by academic Noam Chomsky, to prevent people having any perspective outside of the one the hard-left wants seen by the public — using social media as the weapon.
The narrative of “fake news” had a creeping, but clear, drive to delegitimize alternative media outlets, such as us here at The Free Thought Project, likely due to our reporting on U.S. hegemony/imperialism and topics like the contents of WikiLeaks’ releases of the DNC and Podesta emails during the election – while the mainstream media largely refused to do so.
Revealing the origins of this soft-censorship regime, Lachan Markay reported in the Washington Free Beacon that during the 2016 presidential campaign Media Matters launched a petition drive aimed at pressuring Facebook into prohibiting “fake News” websites and to “adjust its model to stem the flow of damaging fake news from its platform pages.”
There was a clear trickled down agenda enacted after a secret post-election meeting of progressive elites with the Democratic Alliance, co-founded by Soros in 2005, with Media Matters acting as the propaganda arm by issuing a press release about “fake news”– and, like clockwork, numerous publications, such as the Washington Post, began running articles about “fake news.”
In the leaked briefing book, Brock acknowledged that Google was a relatively easy sell on the “fake news” narrative, but Facebook was a much harder sale — with Mark Zuckerberg initially calling the notion that “fake news is a problem” is “crazy.”
So, how did Media Matters handle this?
According to the briefing documents:
“In November, we launched a campaign pressuring Facebook to: 1) acknowledge the problem of the proliferation of fake news on Facebook and its consequences for our democracy and 2) commit to taking action to fix the problem.”
Brock subsequently reported that “as a result of our push for accountability,” Facebook would now toe the neoliberal/globalist line and implement a soft-censorship regime under the guise of ridding Facebook of “fake news.”
In the wake of this full-court press by the neoliberal establishment, President Obama disingenuously proclaimed “fake news” a threat to our democracy during a speech in Berlin. In turn, Mark Zuckerberg caved to the pressure and announced a fact-checking regime, laughably announcing the use of Politifact, Snopes and ABC News to fact-check and flag disputed stories — which would then result in disputed stories being given a lower algorithm ranking, thus not as often appearing in people’s newsfeeds.
Make no mistake that this is simply an attempt by the corporate oligarchy to regain control of the informational gates of society, which they have lost due to the rapid rise of social media, in an effort to soft-censor any dissenting world views.
Brock believes that the only truth is that which supports a neoliberal-globalist agenda, and that all other points of view must be marginalized. It’s painfully obvious that Media Matters, Brock and his oligarchic ilk have no respect for free speech, as they attempt to create an echo chamber for neoliberal globalism, while attempting to silence all other voices. These actions, by the oligarchic left, are simply war by other means. (Source)
Through interviews with former staffers and a wealth of documentation, the Daily Caller revealed Media Matters to be an arm of White House propaganda, as well as seriously influencing national media to buy into its various narratives of the right.
Extensive interviews with a number of Brock’s current and former colleagues at Media Matters, as well as with leaders from across the spectrum of Democratic politics, reveal an organization roiled by its leader’s volatile and erratic behavior and struggles with mental illness, and an office where Brock’s executive assistant carried a handgun to public events in order to defend his boss from unseen threats.
Yet those same interviews, as well as a detailed organizational planning memo obtained by The Daily Caller, also suggest that Media Matters has to a great extent achieved its central goal of influencing the national media.
Founded by Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics. The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country. Brock, who collected over $250,000 in salary from Media Matters in 2010, has himself become a major fundraiser on the left. According to an internal memo obtained by TheDC, Media Matters intends to spend nearly $20 million in 2012 to influence news coverage.
Donors have every reason to expect success, as the group’s effect on many news organizations has already been profound. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
Targeting Christian Organizations:
CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s said in 2014 that Media Matters for America was being paid to attack her reporting which was perceived as critical of the Obama administration. She claimed that Media Matters helped produce news reports for CBS News—and given the matter of fact way Attkisson mentioned it—presumably other liberal news outlets as well.
“Media Matters, as my understanding, is a far left blog group that I think holds itself out to be sort of an independent watchdog group. And yes, they clearly targeted me at some point. They used to work with me on stories and tried to help me produce my stories, and at some point –“ (cut off by Stelter)1
JUSSIE SMOLLETT “HATE CRIME” HOAX
When Jussie Smollett, an actor on the drama series Empire, orchestrated a fictional hate crime against himself on January 30th, 2019, MMFA defended Smollett’s story. Despite early indications that Smollett’s reported hate crime had inconsistencies, MMFA labeled the skepticism as a “right-wing smear” just one day after the event. MMFA also accused Twitter and YouTube of artificially promoting content that doubted Smollett’s story. MMFA’s article was later updated on February 21st after Smollett was arrested for filing a false police report. [8]
SUPPORT FOR CLINTON’S 2016 CAMPAIGN
On August 13, 2020, conservative nonprofit Patriots Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) for not acting on complaints it had issued to the FEC in April against political operative David Brock and four of his organizations for illegally assisting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign. [9] [10] The organizations included Media Matters for America, American Bridge 21st Century PAC, American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, and Correct the Record. [11] The complaint issued on April 8 alleged that the organizations had coordinated with the Clinton Campaign while violating FEC regulations, with the lawsuit coming after 120 days of inaction. The Patriots Foundation further explained that during the 2016 election cycle, Media Matters had acted as an “arm of the Hillary Clinton campaign.” [12]
As the New Republic explained in a December 2016 report: “[Media Matters] had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned itself at the center of a group of public relations and advocacy outfits whose mission was to help put Clinton in the White House.” [13] In a different passage, the report quoted a former staffer of Media Matters saying, “The closer we got to the 2016 election the less it became about actually debunking conservative misinformation and more it became about just defending Hillary Clinton from every blogger in their mother’s basement.” [14]
There have been several other instances of the organization’s favorability towards Hilary Clinton as revealed by several employees’ noncompliance with their employer’s pro-Clinton agenda. In 2014, several employees were asked to critique Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” interview on National Public Radio (NPR) in which she questioned Hilary Clinton on her delay in supporting gay marriage. [15] The staffers refused, as they believed the questions asked by Gross were fair. Following much internal dispute, Media Matters’ research director Jeremy Holden ended up having to write the hit piece himself. According to the New Republic, there are 1,468 posts tagged with “Hillary Clinton” on Media Matters’ site as opposed to just 26 post tagged “Bernie Sanders.” [16]
Messages released by WikiLeaks showed that Clinton’s 2016 campaign also treated Media Matters as a campaign surrogate while coordinating with the group. The campaign allegedly wanted Media Matters to “muddy the waters” on certain issues Clinton might be vulnerable on by questioning the media’s coverage of how Republicans would handle the same issues and whether they would “do the bidding of their billionaire super-PAC donors and the special interests.” [17]
Journalists at the Atlantic, a left-of-center media outlet, have referred to MMfA as part of David Brock’s “three-pronged empire” consisting of American Bridge, Correct the Record, and MMfA, that was designed to boost Clinton’s campaign. According to the Atlantic “the ferocity with which Media Matters has defended Clinton can verge on the absurd.” [18]
Influence on the Mainstream and Left-wing Media
In addition to its website postings, Media Matters “works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and to take direct action against offending media institutions.” As the Capital Research Center reports, Media Matters “works in conjunction with liberal blogs, using sympathetic reporters and pundits to promote far-left messages to the mainstream media and to attempt to force right-leaning media figures out of the public debate.”
In February 2012 Media Matters was the subject of a damning exposé by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, which revealed the extent to which the organization had become successful in dictating the content of left-liberal media reports. As documented by the Caller, newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times all took their editorial cues from Media Matters’ talking points.
The Caller further reported that by 2008, “Media Matters staff had the direct line of [cable television station] MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and used it. Griffin took their calls.” According to one Media Matters source: “If we published something about Fox in the morning, they’d [MSNBC] have it on the air that night verbatim.” “We were pretty much writing their [MSNBC’s] prime time,” added a former Media Matters employee. “But then, virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
Left-wing bloggers were likewise eager to serve as mouthpieces for Media Matters. “The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” said a source for the organization, “from Daily Kos to Salon.” Media Matters considered Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent a particularly reliable dump for its content. As one source told the Daily Caller, “If you can’t get it [printed] anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game.” Along the same lines, a former Media Matters staffer recalls:
“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney]. The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s [a reference to Media Matters founder David Brock] long history with Arianna [Huffington]. Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff. So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful…. Ben Smith [formerly of Politico] will take stories and write what you want him to write.”
Modus Operandi: Characterize Conservatives as Liars and Racists
Media Matters has cultivated a well-earned reputation for portraying honest differences of opinion by conservatives as lies, smears, and even evidence of “racism.” According to Republican pollster Frank Luntz, “They are vicious. They only understand one thing: attack, attack, attack.” David Folkenflik, media reporter for National Public Radio, said: “They’re looking at every dangling participle, every dependent clause, every semicolon, every quotation to see if there’s some way it unfairly frames a cause, a party, a candidate that they may have some feelings for.” And a Capital Research Center analysis states that Media Matters, in its effort to “stigmatize and marginalize conservative ideas,” “will typically isolate a small facet of a media story that can be twisted in such a way that suggests that the reporter or commentator is a liar or hypocrite. That tidbit is then used to suggest that everything the original source says must be false and deserving of censure.”
Intimidating Journalists Whose Reporting Is Unacceptable to Media Matters
One Media Matters source explains that when that organization focuses critical attention to certain journalists, they are intimidated into silence: “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper, all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails [in response to the criticism from Media Matters]. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”
Founder David Brock and Other Early Notables
In launching its aggressive attacks against conservatives, Media Matters takes its cues from its founder and CEO, the self-described former “right-wing hit man” turned leftist, David Brock. A reporter for the conservative magazine The American Spectator in the 1990s, Brock subsequently underwent a political epiphany, renouncing his past writings, which were critical of liberal figures such as Anita Hill and President Bill Clinton, as a confection of lies and slanders.
In Brock’s present judgment, the mainstream media have fallen under the sway of conservative ideology, thus explaining, in Brock’s view, the many discussions about “liberal bias” in prominent media outlets. “The right wing in this country has dominated the debate over liberal bias,” Brock says. “By dominating that debate, my belief is they’ve moved the media itself to the right and therefore they’ve moved American politics to the right.” Hence the supposed need for Media Matters: “I wanted to create an institution to combat what they’re doing.” The sense of urgency with which Brock approaches this task is amplified by the low regard he has for conservatives, whom he describes as people who “are simply willing to lie.”
In his 2004 book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, Brock claimed that the “most important sectors of the political media—most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites”—provided a “structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism.” During a February 2005 talk at the Center for American Progress, Brock articulated a similar theme: “We have seen the mainstream media increasingly accommodating conservatism and this is not an accident. This is the result of coordinated and financed effort by the right wing to pressure, push and bully the media to do that. The media today is a political issue. I believe it is conservatives that have politicized it.”
When Brock applied for tax-exempt status for Media Matters, he told the IRS, in writing, precisely whom the targets of his organization would be:
“Media Matters for America (MMA) believes that news reporting and analysis by the American media, with its eye on profit margin and preservation of the status quo, has become biased. It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote corporate interests, the rights of the wealthy, and a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology.”
Prior to founding Media Matters, Brock consulted with a number of leading Democratic Party figures, including Senator Hillary Clinton, former Senator Tom Daschle and former Vice President Al Gore. He also pitched his idea to potential liberal-left funders, a number of whom promptly lined up to bankroll his cause. The fledgling Media Matters received more than $2 million in seed donations from a roster of affluent donors including Susie Tompkins Buell, co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and a close ally of Senator Hillary Clinton; New York psychologist and philanthropist Gail Furman; Leo Hindery Jr., a former cable magnate; James Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist who nearly served as ambassador to Luxembourg during the Clinton administration; Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corporation and a longtime consort of billionaire financier George Soros; and Bren Simon, a Democratic activist and the wife of shopping-mall developer Mel Simon. “It [Brock’s presentation] just made so much sense to me,” Buell would later recall. “All this garbage that’s coming out of the Right is like the worst contamination of this country…. He brought so much understanding of what goes on over there. He’s very articulate, and very, very bright.”
Also standing behind Brock was John Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration and the head of the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress. In 2004 Podesta provided Brock with office space for his new enterprise. Hillary Clinton played a key supporting role as well; she would later (in 2007) tell a YearlyKos convention of left-wing bloggers that she had “helped to start and support” Media Matters.
More than a few of the fledgling organization’s staffers were Democratic operatives. Among these were Katie Barge, Media Matters’ director of research, who had formerly presided over opposition research for Senator John Edwards‘ unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign; Brock’s personal assistant, Mandy Vlasz, a Democratic pollster and a veteran consultant to Democratic campaigns, including the 2000 Gore/Lieberman presidential ticket; and Media Matters’ chief communications strategist Dennis Yedwab, who was also director of strategic resources at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Another notable figure at Media Matters was senior fellow Eric Boehlert, who remains with the organization to this day. Boehlert was among the most passionate defenders of University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian when the latter was accused of having been a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist operative. In a January 2002 article titled “The Prime-time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian,” Boehlert charged that: “In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, all four media giants, eagerly tapping into the country’s mood of vengeance and fear, latched onto the Al-Arian story, fudging the facts and ignoring the most rudimentary tenets of journalism in their haste to better tell a sinister story about lurking Middle Eastern dangers here at home.”
Targets of Media Matters
From its earliest days, Media Matters aggressively targeted individuals and groups that did not share its left-wing political orientation. For instance, in 2004 the organization tried to persuade chain book retailers to ban sales of Unfit for Command—a book critical of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Toward that end, Media Matters launched a month-long assault against Unfit for Command and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group responsible for the book. The Media Matters website featured a host of denunciatory articles that attempted to discredit the Swift Boaters as Republican shills and liars.
Driving Media Matters’ fusillades against the Swift Boat Veterans was its partisan support for Senator Kerry. Even as it stressed that “honest scrutiny of [Kerry’s] record might be ‘fair game,’” Media Matters spent the months leading up to the 2004 presidential campaign dismissing conservative criticisms of Kerry as nothing more than “distortions.” To take one example, Kerry’s critics disproved his claims that he had spent Christmas of 1968 “sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia.” Rather than making a concession to this reality—which was generally conceded—Media Matters portrayed all attacks on Kerry’s record as “unfounded, contradictory, and discredited.” The Tides Foundation, meanwhile, gave Media Matters $100,000 in 2004 for what it described as the latter’s “voter education” efforts.
Media Matters also waged a negative-publicity campaign against the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a Republican-leaning media outlet that broadcast the documentary film Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal on its 62 stations during the 2004 election cycle. Stolen Honor featured the testimony of former POWs in Vietnam who asserted that the cruelties to which their captors had subjected them during the war were exacerbated by the anti-war posturing in which John Kerry engaged after completing his tour of duty. When some of Sinclair’s largest advertisers subsequently pulled their ads from the company’s programming, Media Matters took “partial” credit for that outcome.
Media Matters has long nursed a special contempt for the conservative, nationally syndicated talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh. In the aftermath of the initial revelations of prisoner-abuse that had occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Limbaugh likened the antics of the guilty U.S. soldiers to fraternity initiations where the perpetrators were merely “blowing off steam.” Media Matters responded quickly, launching an anti-Limbaugh campaign that included expenditures of $100,000 to broadcast ads denouncing the broadcaster on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and ESPN. David Brock personally wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asking that Limbaugh’s program be removed from the American Forces Radio and Television Service. Brock claimed that Limbaugh had “condoned torture,” and that his program “divides rather than unites Americans.”
In June 2005 Media Matters again excoriated Limbaugh, this time for his opinion on the so-called Downing Street memo, which accused the Bush administration of manipulating evidence and otherwise fudging facts in order to promulgate its policies. “Limbaugh baselessly suggested Downing Street memo ‘may be a fake,’” read a Media Matters headline. Yet, as Media Matters was forced to acknowledge in the compass of its attack, Limbaugh’s remarks, far from being “baseless,” were actually derived from a report that had appeared in the Associated Press.
In 2007 Media Matters falsely claimed that Limbaugh had characterized anti-war Iraq veterans as “phony soldiers.” In fact, Limbaugh was referring only to left-wing activists who fabricated military credentials in order to lend an air of perceived authority to their anti-war arguments. Media Matters, however, edited out the full context of Limbaugh’s remarks and emailed a doctored transcript to liberal-left journalists nationwide. Once the actual transcript became available, the controversy ended.
In 2007 as well, veteran broadcaster Don Imus also felt the wrath of Media Matters. Though not a conservative by any means, Imus had long been in Media Matters’ crosshairs because of his repeated, harsh criticisms of Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton was a particular favorite of David Brock and his watchdog group, which not only had been building a dossier on Imus for some time, but had assigned a young, Washington, DC-based researcher named Ryan Chiachiere to monitor Imus’s program on a daily basis. On April 4, 2007, Chiachiere heard the shock-jock refer to black players on the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” and promptly posted a 775-word blog, along with a video clip of the offending comments, on the Media Matters website; in addition, Media Matters swiftly dispatched a news release about the incident to hundreds of reporters nationwide. It also notified organizations like the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists, and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, all of which joined the anti-Imus campaign. The Daily Caller reports what happened next: “Over the course of a week, Media Matters mobilized more than 50 people to work full-time adding fuel to the Imus story. Researchers searched the massive Media Matters database for controversial statements Imus had made over the years. The group issued press release after press release. Brock personally called the heads of various liberal activist groups to coordinate a message. By the end of the week, Imus was fired.”
When Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News distinguished herself as one of the few mainstream media reporters willing to investigate the Obama administration’s false claims regarding the genesis of the infamous September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks against a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Media Matters condemned Attkisson for her “shoddy reporting.”
Training Program for Left-wing Media Pundits_
In August 2009, Media Matters launched its Progressive Talent Initiative (PTI), a boot camp designed to train progressive pundits to maximize their effectiveness at articulating their positions during media appearances. David Brock conceived of PTI as a means of further countering what he perceives as the “chronic imbalance” favoring conservatives in the media, and as a way to “professionalize the training and booking” of media spokespeople for the left. During its first 19 months, PTI trained nearly 100 pundits who appeared some 800 times on television and radio.
Media Matters’ Ties to George Soros, and the “War on Fox”
From its inception, Media Matters was careful to obscure the financial ties it had to the controversial billionaire financier/philanthropist George Soros. But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) detailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros “affiliates”—among them the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, and Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, a spokesman for Media Matters explained that his organization “has never received funding directly from George Soros” (emphasis added), a transparent evasion. Nor were the groups cited by CNS the only connection between Media Matters and Soros. As investigative journalist Byron York noted, another Soros affiliate that bankrolled Media Matters was the New Democratic Network. In addition, Soros was a central figure in the Democracy Alliance, which news reports identified as yet another major benefactor of Media Matters. To summarize, Soros and his Open Society Institute poured millions of dollars into the coffers of groups like the Center for American Progress, the Democracy Alliance, MoveOn, and the New Democratic Network. In turn, these organizations funneled some of that money to Media Matters.
In October 2010 Soros decided to stop concealing his ties to Media Matters, when he openly announced that he was donating $1 million to the organization—money that would be used to hold “Fox [News] host Glenn Beck and others on the cable news channel accountable for their reporting.” Said Soros:
“Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by various Fox News commentators, I have not to date been a funder of Media Matters. However, in view of recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence,[1] I have now decided to support the organization. Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”
David Brock, for his part, confirmed that Beck would now be Media Matters’ chief target:
“From the moment in early 2009 that Roger Ailes enlisted Glenn Beck to the Fox News Channel’s new agenda—a battle to overturn the 2008 election results that Ailes likened to the ‘The Alamo’—Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 GOP attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends. Worse still, in recent months, Fox has allowed Glenn Beck’s show to become an out-of-control vehicle for the potential incitement of domestic terrorism. No American should be quiet about these developments—the degradation of our media and the reckless endangerment of innocent lives.”
In March 2011, Politico.com reported that Media Matters had “all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks,” preparing instead to wage “what its founder, David Brock, described … as an all-out campaign of ‘guerrilla warfare and sabotage’ aimed at the Fox News Channel [FNC] … and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the ‘nerve center’ of the conservative movement.” Brock explained that whereas previously “[t]he strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment”—i.e., challenging FNC’s factual claims and trying to keep them out of the mainstream media—the new strategy would be an unrestrained “war on Fox.”
In that “war” effort, said Politico, Media Matters: (a) was “assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials”; (b) had “hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show”; (c) was “assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes”; (d) had “hired two experienced reporters … to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network”; (e) was planning, in collaboration with an executive from MoveOn.org, “to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp.”; and (f) planned to “disrupt [the] commercial interests” of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.
According to the Daily Caller, Brock’s animus against Fox was so extreme that Media Matters considered harassing individual Fox News employees at their homes, hiring private investigators to look into their private lives, and hiring a law firm to pursue lawsuits against the network. In February 2012, Brock and co-author Ari Rabin-Havt released a book titled _The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine.
_In 2014 Media Matters came to the defense of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of Obamacare, when newly uncovered videos showed Gruber boasting that he and congressional Democrats had knowingly and repeatedly lied about key aspects of the health-care legislation so as to deceive American voters who were “too stupid” to realize what was happening. When Fox News explored the scandal in depth, headlines and stories on the Media Matters website derided Fox for “dishonestly” conducting a “fraudulent media campaign” to promote a “manufactured … scandal.”
When IRS officials in 2014 claimed to have no knowledge of the whereabouts of key emails containing evidence that the agency had unjustifiably delayed or denied the processing of applications for tax-exempt status by hundreds of conservative organizations during 2010-12, a Media Matters report charged that “Fox News personalities baselessly accused the Obama administration of engaging in a cover-up following reports that the IRS lost emails connected to the alleged targeting of organizations seeking tax-exempt status, ignoring the fact that government agencies regularly lose emails due to antiquated computer systems and policies.”
Expenditures Designed to Influence 2012 Elections
Also in early 2012, as the presidential election season was gearing up, Media Matters was planning to spend $20 million—double the organization’s reported $10 million annual budget—on efforts to influence media coverage prior to the election.
Ties to Al Jazeera
In contrast to its “war on Fox News,” Media Matters has had some notable friendly ties to Al Jazeera, the anti-American, Qatar-based Arabic television station and satellite network. For example, in March 2012 it was reported that M.J. Rosenberg, a senior foreign-policy fellow at the Media Matters Action Network (a sister site to Media Matters), had a profile on Al Jazeera’s website, where his articles attacking Israel and the United States regularly appeared. As told by the Daily Caller, Rosenberg represented Media Matters at the first Al Jazeera “Unplugged” forum on social media in Qatar in May 2010. At that event, he praised Al Jazeera as a “mainstream network” and a “factual” source, while attacking Fox News as a “very, very dangerous force in the United States.” Rosenberg also charged that Al Jazeera had been “bombed by orders of the United States government.” That same year, Al Jazeera’s then-director general, Wadah Khanfar, visited Media Matters’ offices in Washington, where he met with David Brock and the organization’s president, Eric Burns.
Media Matters and Israel
In December 2011, the aforementioned M.J. Rosenberg ignited controversy when he referred to supporters of Israel as “Israel firsters.” The use of that term, which implied loyalties to Israel first and America second, was widely panned by the Jewish community and by newspapers like the Washington Post. But neither Rosenberg nor Media Matters disavowed the slur.
According to Breitbart.com journalist Ben Shapiro, Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert “once downplayed genocidal anti-Semitism, routinely suggests that media coverage is too pro-Israel thanks to intimidation by nefarious forces …, and defended terrorist professor Sami Al-Arian.”
Another Media Matters figure, research fellow Oliver Willis, has accused Israel of “playing games with American lives” by building settlements on lands occupied by the Jewish state during the 1967 Six-Day War. Further, Willis writes that he “can’t wait for the day when we can tell both sides [of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict] to go to hell”; that “the Democratic Party will be at its best” only after pro-Israel, AIPAC-affiliated liberals are “marginalized”; and that conservatives consistently attack “everyone who doesn’t march in lockstep with Israel.”
Media Matters’ Influence on the Obama Administration
A February 2012 Daily Caller exposé revealed that Media Matters had “regular contact with political operatives” inside the Obama White House, in part through its weekly strategy calls with members of the administration. In June 2010, for instance, David Brock and Media Matters president Eric Burns met at the White House with Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett and the President’s former communications director, Anita Dunn, who had recently (in November 2009) stepped down from that post amid controversy. Dunn, for her part, parroted Media Matters’ claim that Fox News is “more a wing of the Republican Party” than a media outlet. When Fox News host Glenn Beck had accurately revealed, in 2009, Dunn’s self-professed admiration for Mao Zedong, Media Matters condemned the broadcaster for what it called his “ridiculous smear of Anita Dunn.”
In November 2014 the Obama White House nominated Matthew S. Butler, the former CEO and president of Media Matters, to serve as a commissioner on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). As Heritage Foundation scholar Hans von Spakovsky writes: “The EAC serves as a national clearinghouse and resource for information about the best practices in election administration. It is also responsible for the accreditation of testing laboratories and the certification, decertification, and recertification of voting systems, like the electronic voting machines many people use when they vote in their precincts.”
Collaborating with NOW, Against Rush Limbaugh
In early May 2012, Media Matters and the National Organization for Women held a secret, narrowly focused strategy session to brainstorm ways of getting the conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh off the air. According to Media Matters online outreach director Jay Carmona, the key would be to target Limbaugh’s advertisers in local radio markets. “[M]ost local station affiliates make the bulk of their profit off of these local advertising dollars,” said Carmona, “so targeting your local advertisers really is how you get those local stations to drop Rush.”
Collaborating with the Justice Department
On September 18, 2012, The Daily Caller reported that dozens of pages of internal Department of Justice (DOJ) emails (obtained via the Freedom of Information Act) showed that Media Matters had secretly collaborated with the communications staff of Attorney General Eric Holder in an effort to discredit and suppress further news stories about scandals that were plaguing Holder and his agency. Among those scandals were DOJ’s infamous dismissal of voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party, and the role Holder and other DOJ officials may have played in Operation Fast and Furious.
For further details about these collaborations between Media Matters and DOJ, click here.
Media Matters’ collaboration with DOJ is significant because the former enjoys tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. This not only exempts Media Matters from paying federal tax on its income, but also permits its donors to claim income-tax deductions for their contributions to the organization. However, 501(c)(3) status is typically reserved for groups that do not engage in partisan politicking, a criterion that Media Matters clearly does not meet.
Involvement in Gun-Related Felonies
In January 2013 the Daily Caller reported that former Media Matters staffer Haydn Price-Morris, who lacked a permit to carry a concealed firearm, had “committed numerous felonies in the District of Columbia and around the country” by carrying a fully loaded Glock handgun to protect David Brock during the latter’s travels. According to the Daily Caller, “multiple firearms used to protect the Media Matters founder were purchased with Brock’s blessing—and apparently with the group’s money.” Records show that the Glock was purchased with cash in Maryland, so as to prevent the transaction from appearing in the tax-exempt group’s financial books.
Stephen Halbrook, a D.C.-area attorney who had practiced gun law for more than 35 years, said that Price-Morris “could be looking at some substantial prison time because if we use the low-end felony sentence of five years, you could get five years for the non-registration, five for the carrying, and then [more for] the second offenses of the magazine being over 10 rounds and then the cartridges.” Halbrook also said that Brock himself could possibly be charged as “a conspirator, or maybe an aider or abettor of a crime.”
“Misinformer of the Year” Award
Media Matters annually presents a “Misinformer of the Year” award to the journalist, commentator, and/or network that was, by Media Matters’ reckoning, responsible for the most numerous and/or grievous inaccuracies. Past recipients include Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly (2004); MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (2005); ABC (2006); Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity (2008); Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck (2009); Fox News Channel’s Sarah Palin (2010); and Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation (2011).
Media Matters’ “Progressive Talent Initiative”
In 2009 Media Matters launched its Progressive Talent Initiative (PTI), a sort of boot camp/training ground for young progressives who wish to help push the media ever-more leftward. By December 2014, its graduates had appeared at least 800 times as commenters or interviewees on TV and radio. According to a Washington Post report: “Media Matters uses that metric to pitch donors for more contributions.”
Budget, Staffing, and Funding
MMfA began with the help of $2 million in donations. According to Byron York of the National Review, additional funding came from MoveOn.org and the New Democrat Network. In 2004, MMfA received the endorsement of the Democracy Alliance, a partnership of wealthy and politically active progressive donors. The Alliance itself does not fund endorsees, but many wealthy Alliance members acted on the endorsement and donated directly to MMfA.
Media Matters has a policy of not comprehensively listing donors. In 2010, six years after the Democracy Alliance initially endorsed MMfA, financier George Soros — a founding and continuing member of the Alliance — announced that he was donating $1 million to MMfA. Soros said his concern over “recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence” had moved him to donate to MMfA. During a 2014 CNN interview, David Brock stated that Soros’ contributions were “less than 10 percent” of Media Matters’ budget.
The Gateway Pundit reported that in January 2017, after Hillary Clinton was shellacked in the November 2016 election, top Democrat operatives at Media Matters, Share Blue, American Bridge, and CREW came together and released their two-year plan to take back power in Washington DC.
A leaked memo obtained by The Free Beacon documents how George Soros funded groups plotted with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to eliminate conservative “right wing propaganda.” The confidential, 49-page memo for defeating Trump was presented in January 2017 by Media Matters founder David Brock at a retreat in Florida with about 100 donors, the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time. The recent wave of censorship of conservative voices on the internet by tech giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Apple mirrors a plan concocted by a coalition of George Soros-funded, progressive groups to take back power in Washington from President Trump’s administration.
The document obtained by The Free Beacon states that Media Matters and other Soros funded groups have “access to raw data from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites” so they can “systemically monitor and analyze this unfiltered data.”
WND reports that the memo spells out a four-year agenda that deployed Media Matters along with American Bridge, Shareblue and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to attack Trump and Republicans. The strategies are impeachment, expanding Media Matters’ mission to combat “government misinformation,” ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy, using a “digital attacker” to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat “fake news.”
The Gateway Pundit pointed out that in 2016, Google carried out that plan on the Gateway Pundit blog and other conservative sites, including Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Infowars, Zero Hedge and Conservative Treehouse. President Donald Trump himself was affected, with his engagement on Facebook dropping by 45 percent. A study in June by Gateway Pundit found Facebook had eliminated 93 percent of the traffic of top conservative news outlets.2
Additional Information
For additional information on Media Matters, click here.
NOTE:
Soros was referring to Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert’s assertion that Glenn Beck’s rhetoric had motivated a deranged gunman named Byron Williams, a multiple-felon who had twice been convicted for bank robbery, to aspire to kill employees at the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation and “start a revolution.” Williams, who engaged in a 12-minute shootout with police on a California freeway, never reached his destination (Tides), but he cited Beck, who had recently criticized the work of that Foundation, as his inspiration. Boehlert wrote that Beck “has routinely smeared the low-profile entity [Tides] for being staffed by ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’ and [being] involved in ‘the nasty of the nastiest,’ like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a ‘mass organization to seize power.’” Boehlert added that “nobody knew” about Tides “until Glenn Beck started targeting it.” During the weeks that followed the Williams incident, Media Matters posted dozens of stories about the gunman, all of them mentioning the alleged influence of Glenn Beck.
Source: https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/media-matters-for-america-mmfa/
Chronology of Events Related to Media Matters
“Thought Police” at YouTube REMOVE *Congressional Debate* Video From Platform for Discussing Election Integrity
Former Secret Service Agent Slaps Lawsuit on Clintons, Podesta, Soros and more
