Liberal Groupthink And Media Matters

A look from the inside of Media Matters. Where the media hatchet jobs come from, and what the stenographic mainstream media and the Obama administration does with it. Simply put, if you are not part of the liberal community, and you are an effective communicator, you become the target of Media Matters.

Never willing or able to counter the political Right on the issues, they do it the Chicago way. Eliminate the competition in any other way possible.

This is the first in a Daily Caller investigative series on Media Matters For America, a George Soros funded media company, and its founder David Brock.

Some nuggets in this issue . . .

  1. 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.
  2. 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.”
  3. The group scored its first significant public coup in 2007 with the firing of host Don Imus from MSNBC. Then came Lou Dobbs at CNN.
  4. It was Media Matters that orchestrated much of the opposition to Beck. “We called it ‘fingerprint coverage,’” explains one former staffer, “where you know it was the result of your work.” As an example, he cites the left-wing group Color of Change, co-founded by the controversial former White House “green jobs” czar Van Jones, which received much of the credit for pressuring advertisers to drop their sponsorship of Beck’s show. But in fact, he says, Media Matters developed the campaign that cowed Beck’s sponsors.
  5. Stories about Fox News were especially well received by MSNBC anchors and executives: “If we published something about Fox in the morning, they’d have it on the air that night verbatim.”
  6. Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,” a Media Matters source said, “all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”
  7. Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. They also began a weekly strategy call with the White House, which continues, joined by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. Jen Psaki, Obama’s deputy communications director, was a frequent participant before she left for the private sector in October 2011.
  8. Eric Burns, then president of Media Matters, had focused much of its considerable energy on the Fox News Channel.  Fox, he said, “is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda.”  Less than a month later, in language that could have been copied directly from a Media Matters press release, White House communications director Anita Dunn leveled almost precisely the same charge, dismissing Fox as “more a wing of the Republican Party.”

There is plenty more on this story, right HERE.

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