Free Republic

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Senator John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist. The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA. The...

Media Matters for America (MMFA) was created in spring 2004 in time for the presidential election campaign. Funded by an estimated $2 million in contributions, the group promotes itself as an online watchdog protecting the public from the deceptions and errors of the mass media that has been bullied or blinded by conservatives. In fact, MMFA is a cog in the growing machine of “progressive” activist and advocacy non-profits, including the online radical agitators at MoveOn.org, the liberal policy wonks at the Center for American Progress and the Democratic get-out-the-vote forces at America Coming Together. These groups were obsessed with...

MOST HILLARY WATCHERS have had a chance by now to view the controversial YouTube video in which the junior senator from New York brags that she has personally helped flood the Internet with a "network" of leftwing blogs. Her boast raises troubling questions. On a practical level, just how exactly does a U.S. Senator go about exerting her power to stack the blogosphere in her favor? One obvious method is to buy favorable coverage. Hillary's boast carries a strong implication that she has subsidized bloggers. Regular readers of Poe.com will be reminded of Bloggergate -- a little-known, but ever-burgeoning, scandal...

Media: A manufactured flap over Rush Limbaugh has stirred talk of new "fairness doctrine" hearings in Congress. That's just what Media Matters, the flacks behind it, were after. Their agenda is worse than it looks. Media Matters, a left-wing nuisance group, recently sought headlines by distorting a Sept. 26 conversation between conservative radio commentator Limbaugh and a listener about a soldier who misrepresented his military record. Media Matters screamed that Limbaugh, whose record of supporting U.S. troops is long and real, was insulting anti-war soldiers as "phony." The claim was as silly as the one Media Matters made a week...

Last week, covering the Rush Limbaugh “phony soldiers” controversy, I described Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group, as an “avowedly political institution.” Media Matters quickly took issue; a few hours after my article appeared on National Review Online, a posting on the group’s website declared, “Media Matters is not, as the National Review claims, ‘an avowedly political institution,’ but a nonpartisan, progressive nonprofit that is unaffiliated with any political party or candidate.” Indeed, Media matters has to be nonpartisan, if not nonpolitical. It is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable institution, meaning it is...

I want to talk about an online slime machine known as Media Matters for America. It is a tax-exempt organization which states its purpose as countering conservatives in the media. I have said before that Media Matters was started with help from Hillary Clinton and took George Soros' money. Media Matters has written to me and all my bosses saying my charge is a lie, that it is an independent organization which plays no political favorites and has never received slime machine cash from Soros-funded Democracy Alliance. Here are the facts: Media Matters was started in offices provided by the...

Last week, two of the leading conservatives in the media, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, were dishonestly and unprofessionally attacked by press outlets that cherry-picked out of context remarks from lengthy radio broadcasts in order to vilify outspoken personalities whose opinions they don’t agree with. Unfortunately, as folks around the country saw this play out on their television sets and newspapers, few were at all familiar with the organization behind the smear campaigns, or that this same group started the firestorm which ended with radio host Don Imus being terminated by NBC and CBS in April. Maybe more importantly, even...

Media Matters For America was created by David Brock, a self-described “hit man,” self-confessed liar, and gossip peddler. His past casts a shadow over his current self-proclaimed dedication to truth-telling. Previously he viciously attacked Clintons and Bushes, Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and National Public Radio, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Each time he recants a prior assault he lunges out at a new political enemy. Brock puts himself in the position of someone who says, “I’m a liar. Believe what I tell you.” Journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote Brock “is incapable of recognizing the...

Excerpt - Matt Sheffield's post over at Ace's place ("The Attempted Crucifixion of Frank Luntz") noted the heat PBS had received for having GOP pollster Frank Luntz participate as an analyst at last Thursday's Democrat debate: The blog left's puppet master, David Brock, sends out an "alert" informing them that someone who might possibly be conservative is going to be allowed to report as a "mainstream" journalist. ..... Thankfully, PBS has not backed down. Luntz, who is a respected pollster and is often quoted in liberal publications is not getting the shaft, making him one of the very few Republicans...

Media Matters apparently tried to cover their lie with a half-truth. http://mediamatters.org/items/200606150010 Media Matters attacked Dick Morris for saying that Democrats are supporting Left-Wing Rockefeller Republican Kathleen McFarland for the New York Republican Primary. They posted that the Democrats that supported Clinton only gave money to McFarland during her race for the House, and that Democrats are not supporting McFarland. They were partly correct. The citings that Dick Morris made were indeed false in that they did not support McFarland during her Senate Race, but in her house race. This is completely irrelavent to any conservative Republican; a Republican backed...

NEW YORK Ben Domenech's conservative blog Red America lasted all of three days at the Washington Post. He quit today after numerous examples of alleged plagiarism in his work surfaced. Yesterday, in a seprate matter, he had apologized for calling Coretta Scott King a "Communist" the day after her recent funeral. The embarrassing episode for the Post culminated Friday afternoon when washingtonpost.com executive editor Jim Brady posted the following notice on the Web site: "In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting...

On November 8 of this year, David Brock of Media Matters attacked me following my appearance on MSNBC's The Situation With Tucker Carlson by providing faulty and incomplete evidence to call me a liar.

Tell CNN Not to Ditch Coulter by Robert B. Bluey Posted Nov 29, 2005 David Brock's Media Matters for America today asked it supporters to "Tell CNN to ditch Coulter". The fundraising and publicity pleads: "It's time for CNN to stop helping Ann Coulter to spew her false and offensive bile to the American public". Coulter, HUMAN EVENTS' Legal Affairs Correspondent, is a favorite of Brock's to attack. She appeared on the network last week, apparently prompting the dispatch from Media Matters. As a public service for conservatives, I'm sharing Media Matters' email with you. As liberals bombard CNN with...

For liberal talkers, still failing to carve a significant niche in a fiercely competitive media environment, today apparently won't bring their hoped-for "Fitz-mas". Yes, that's how they describe the elusive ratings windfall indicted senior Bush Administration officials might (in a Rhodesian fantasy world) bring to floundering "progressive" talk shows. Al Franken used the term (which refers to special counsel Patrick J Fitzgerald) during a Wednesday CNN interview, as have his radio counterparts, repeatedly. As the New York Times is now reporting, however, Karl Rove is not likely to face charges for now, if ever. Can "Scooter" Libby alone save liberal...

Rather than taking on one of the left's sleaziest characters, is maintaining a stuffy media pecking order more important? Or can this blunder be chalked up to pure ignorance? Exposing a key danger of conservative disunity, a Wall Street Journal columnist has needlessly allowed Air America talk show host Al Franken to score points at his expense. And it's forced the Radio Equalizer to address one of the conservative media's biggest weaknesses: structural quirks that interfere with good story judgment. Is it about rivalries, or other issues?

Throughout the 1990s, David Brock was a muck-raking and highly-paid investigative reporter for the conservative magazine The American Spectator. On a contract which paid him $350,000 he produced just six articles. But these focused on President Clinton’s sexual farragoes and brought Brock much notoriety and fame. Brock had achieved public prominence with a book called The Real Anita Hill, in which he described the accuser of Clarence Thomas as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” discredited claims and exposed the leftwing smear campaign against the future Supreme Court Justice. Soon thereafter, Brock accepted a million-dollar advance from...

The left is preparing to up the ante in what they see as their bid to take control of Congress and the White House. They announced their plans in a Washington Post story on August 7, describing how at least 80 wealthy Democratic Party supporters each pledged to put up at least $200,000 a year for five years, with an overall goal of raising $200 million dollars to invest in "a network of think tanks and advocacy groups." This follows the intervention of billionaire George Soros in the 2004 presidential election, using a loophole in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law...

On August 19, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann pronounced nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh "once again, today's worst person in the world" Olbermann named Media Research Center (MRC) president L. Brent Bozell III "a very close second" after the MRC accused Olbermann, in naming Limbaugh "worst person in the world" on his August 17 program, of distorting Limbaugh's August 15 statement.

A left-wing website rescues clueless Democrats in the confirmation fight. When Melody Townsel, the Texas woman who claims that U.N.-ambassador nominee John Bolton chased her through a Moscow hotel, throwing things at her and "behaving like a madman," first tried to tell her story to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the committee showed no interest. It was only after she turned to the influential far-Left website DailyKos that Democrats on the committee realized Townsel might be a powerful weapon in their campaign to defeat the Bolton nomination. The story began on Friday, April 8, when Townsel e-mailed her story to...

In its upcoming issue, Vanity Fair has done an investigation into the current cause of the kooky left, the case of disgraced White House reporter Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. And reporters David Margolick and Richard Gooding have uncovered...nothing. No White House wrongdoing. No secret plotting or illicit Gannon affairs with White House staffers. No Karl-Rove-master-plan-to-undermine-democracy hijinks. Nothing. "As time passed, Gannon came to seem, to at least some of the [left-wing] bloggers, as more like a freelance zealot than the linchpin of some much larger conspiracy," Margolick and Gooding write. "They now admit that for them Gannon emerged as less a...