White House Attack Dog Targets Limbaugh Sponsors

Censorship: The pressure on Rush Limbaugh's advertisers is from a group that meets regularly with the White House and runs an Obama Super-PAC funded by unions.

The group Media Matters acts like a lobbyist but is not registered as one. It operates in the shadows, outside congressional oversight and unaccountable to voters.

This makes its collusion with the White House in the heat of a presidential race a serious matter worthy of investigation.

Targeting Limbaugh, a staunch Republican, is no coincidence. If the Obama campaign can silence him, it can knock out the party's most powerful voice for firing up its base and getting out the vote. Limbaugh has a huge Tea Party following.

The White House's attack dog, Media Matters, has been intimidating private businesses into dropping their ads on Limbaugh's popular radio show. It boasts of scaring off 45 of his advertisers since launching its drive last week, when Limbaugh apologized for using sexist terms to criticize a college coed called by Democrats to testify in support of ObamaCare's coverage of birth control.

Media Matters keeps a death watch on its website. It lists those Limbaugh advertisers who have canceled, then identifies sponsors still airing ads — making it clear to Occupy Wall Street and Acorn thugs which business they still need to threaten.

"Limbaugh remains in professional free fall," Washington-based Media Matters gloated Wednesday on its site. It promises its campaign will "alter," if not end, his career behind the mike.

It's not exactly an idle threat. Media Matters reportedly got conservative host Glenn Beck fired at Fox News as retribution for Beck exposing the radical Marxist views and activities of White House aide Van Jones.

Fox News explained that, according to tax law experts, internal documents showing that executives at Media Matters considered hiring private investigators to look into the private lives of Fox News hosts, commentators and executives provide evidence that the group is, at the very least, “stretching the boundaries” of what a tax-exempt organization should be doing.

And, according to an internally-circulated memo sent out by senior fellow Karl Frisch in 2009, Media Matters characterized Fox News has “the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole,” adding that “we must take Fox News head-on in a well-funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of consumers.”

Daily Beast columnist Kirsten Powers found news of Media Matters’ “mission” to take down Fox News disappointing because “overall, they serve a purpose, they monitor the media and they find where they think there’s bias or mistakes.”

NY Daily News columnist Andrea Tantaros, meanwhile, applauded Republicans looking into and asking questions about Media Matters’ activities and how the group undermines its own claims to be a charity while all the while gunning for a pro-profit news outlet because they “don’t like” their reporting.

And American Conservative Magazine‘s Jim Pinkerton noted that, not only does Fox News have a “right to exist and not be defamed,” but it also exists as a member of the media with First Amendment rights.

So is any of this enough to strip Media Matters of its tax-exempt status?

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-questions-media-matters-tax-exempt-status/

MMfA started with the help of $2 million in donations from liberal philanthropists connected to the Democratic party. According to Byron York, 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 donors. The Alliance itself does not fund its any of its endorsees, but many wealthy Alliance members acted on the endorsement and donated directly to MMfA. Media Matters as a matter of course has a policy of not comprehensively listing donors.

Six years after the Alliance endorsed MMfA, financier George Soros - a founding and continuing member of the Alliance - announced in 2010 that he was donating $1 million to MMfA. Soros said: “Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by various Fox News commentators, I have not to date been a funder of Media Matters.” Soros said concern over “recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence” had moved him to donate to MMfA, which thanked Soros for announcing his donation “quickly and transparently.”

Former chief of staff to president Bill Clinton John Podesta provided office space for Media Matters early in its formation at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that he had created in 2002. Hillary Clinton advised Media Matters in its early stages out of a belief that progressives should follow conservatives in forming think tanks and advocacy groups to support their political goals.

Media Matters hired numerous political professionals who had worked for Democratic politicians and for other progressive groups.n In 2004 article on Media Matters the National Review referred to MMfA staffers who had recently worked on the presidential campaigns of John Edwards and Wesley Clark, for Congressman Barney Frank, and for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Matters_for_America

I assume the standard dress code at Media Matters includes a Brown Shirt and Jack Boots.

No, red shirts -- according to Wm. Shirer, the uniform of Socialist street thugs in the 30's was red shirts. Don't know if they wore red or dark-blue neckerchieves, tho' .....

Back then, everybody had a "street action" group, and they fought endlessly in the streets of Paris and Vienna. Until the Wehrmacht showed up, they were the baddest of the bunch.

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