PolitiFact took MSNBC host Chris Matthews to task for a claim he made on his program last week where he criticized a 2011 Florida law that imposes a 48-hour deadline on new voter registration groups. “The 48-hour rule basically makes it impossible to meet the deadline if you’re working right to the end of the week,” said Matthews. PolitiFact rated this claim as “false”RELATED: Media Matters: The Message is More Important Than the Facts
In a June 4 interview with the Florida Republican party Chairman Lenny Curry, Matthews accused Curry and his party of instituting voter registration laws that intentionally restrict voter’s abilities to register.
On his program, Matthews read from a Florida judge’s ruling on the law: “if the goal is to discourage voter registration drives, and thus also to make it harder for new voters to register, this may work,” Matthews read.
“Lenny Curry, you’re the chair of the Republican Party down there. Was the intention to suppress the vote down there, as Judith says, or it had some other purpose,” Matthews asked. “Why would you set a requirement you got to get your petitions in, in 48 hours? Why did you set such a requirement and a law?”
Curry responded in the negative and said that, in his view, such a deadline was reasonable. Matthews disagreed:
“Well, wait a minute. I’m going to call you there because everybody watching can figure this one out. If I’m working in front of a Safeway somewhere and I’m collecting registrations — I’m registering people who aren’t registered — and it’s Friday afternoon at 5:00 p.m., I can’t even technically turn those in until Monday. That means it’s already elapsed, the 48 hours.“So, under the law, nothing I get done late Friday afternoon is of any value and probably some of the stuff early Saturday morning. The 48-hour rule basically makes it impossible to meet the deadline if you’re working right to the end of the week, right, Lenny?”“You don’t have to be a lawyer to own a calendar or know what a weekend is,” Matthews continued. “A weekend is 48 hours.”
Matthews ended the interview by suggesting that he would take Curry to minority neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia to participate in securing voter identification. “I could take you to some interesting neighborhoods, buddy,” said Matthews.
PolitiFact took issue with Matthews claim that voter registration organizations would be unable to process new voters if they turned their petitions in on a Friday:
There’s no doubt the deadlines were deterring groups from going out to register voters. After the law’s passage, the League of Women Voters said they wouldn’t conduct their usual voter registration drives because the new requirements were too difficult to meet.But Matthews said that Florida’s 2011 voting law made it impossible for third-party groups to register voters on Friday afternoon, because a 48-hour deadline to turn in those applications would expire before the elections office opens Monday morning.That’s not correct. The law factored in weekends and holidays and gave voter registration groups until the next business day. We rate Matthews’ claim False.
The effort to boycott advertisers on the Rush Limbaugh radio program appears to be drawing to a close, according to the Washington Post. Limbaugh had sparked the ire of a number of progressive groups for his multi-day attacks on Sandra Fluke for advocating Congress mandate copay-less insurance coverage of birth control and contraceptives. On Wednesday, WaPo’s Paul Farhi declared the boycott on Limbaugh’s advertisers was largely a failure.RELATED: Limbaugh Advertiser: Coordinated Effort To Ruin My Company Is ‘Internal American Terrorism’
“The dark clouds hanging over Rush Limbaugh appear to be lifting,” writes Farhi. “On Monday, the 600 or so radio stations that air Limbaugh’s program were told by his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, to resume running “barter” ads during his program.” Clear Channel, Premier’s parent network, had previously suspended barter ads while Limbaugh was in the news.
The boycott was initially successful, forcing fewer than five of Limbaugh’s national advertisers to cease funding the program. However, boycott organizers who claimed that over 100 advertisers dropped Limbaugh’s program were stretching the truth as “some of these companies weren’t regular Limbaugh sponsors in the first place.” Most of the advertisers who opted to drop their ads from Limbaugh’s program were only airing those spots in regional markets.
At the height of the controversy, Limbaugh lost two small syndicated stations in Western Massachusetts and Hawaii. All of the major markets that carry Limbaugh’s program opted to weather the storm – now it seems the clouds are clearing.
The organizers of the boycott effort are not done yet. The liberal group MoveOn.org has organized a petition with SignOn.org which asks for signatures to force Limbaugh’s program off his 180 stations. But with interest in the month-old scandal waning, the likelihood of further success in the “Stop Rush” is in doubt.
If you turned on The O’Reilly Factor tonight hoping to hear Bill O’Reilly go on about liberal media bias, you’re in luck! O’Reilly’s entire first segment of the show focused on how influential, mainstream media outlets are getting information from left-wing media watchdogs and it has a disturbing influence on the general public.RELATED: Tucker Carlson Suggests White House Is Coordinating With Media Matters To Attack Fox News
O’Reilly brought up the last interview Andrew Breitbart ever did, accusing Media Matters of being in collusion with both MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee. O’Reilly reminded viewers that he’s been sounding the alarm bells about that website, and its ties to billionaire George Soros, for years, and then revealed that there is more evidence that what Breitbart said is correct. Remember when several media outlets noticed a divergent trend between Fox News coverage of rising gas prices under George W. Bush and Barack Obama?
Well, it came from a video compiled by Media Matters. And in the video, O’Reilly is saying that any politician who says they can lower gas prices is full of “BS.” But in the full context of the clip, O’Reilly does criticize the Republicans (which he says included Bush) for letting “big oil do whatever it wants” while refusing to “reign in corrupt speculators” who are trying to raise gas prices. O’Reilly then accused MSNBC of deliberately taking his words out of context, before explaining that unlike in previous years, when liberal media bias was just simply noticed in their selection of stories that reflected positively or negatively on both sides, “national news agencies are actually lying to you.”
O’Reilly warned that the presidential election might end up being reported unfairly by many major news outlets, before getting to the big problem at hand.
“But if Andrew Breitbart’s contention is true, that the Democratic party is now coordinating with Media Matters, who is coordinating with MSNBC, that is troubling, and a blatant corruption of the First Amendment.”
Then O’Reilly brought on Bernard Goldberg, who actually disagreed with O’Reilly’s contention that such collusion would have a noticeable effect on voting trends. He said that while Media Matters does have some allies in the media, these allies are not necessarily in positions of power, and Goldberg noted that Media Matters isn’t necessarily making journalists more or less liberal than they already are. Goldberg agreed that Media Matters is “annoying,” but its influence on the electorate is negligible.
O’Reilly shot back by referring to the out-of-context clip of himself being picked up by mainstream media outlets, suggesting that such a strong, mobilized effort to get the video out there would certainly affect people. Goldberg admitted that it might have a slim effect on certain voters, but maintained it would not affect the outcome of the November election.
On Sunday, conservative news and opinion site The Daily Caller published a lengthy report on Media Matters, the high-powered — and, the article reports, highly influential — liberal media watchdog group. The article, published by site founder Tucker Carlson and senior online editor Vince Coglianese with contributions by reporters Alex Pappas and Will Rahn, takes a look not only at the organization’s influence on major media outlets, advertisers and the White House, but also offers a portrait of Media Matters’ head, David Brock.RELATED: Tucker Carlson To Bill O’Reilly: Media Matters ‘Basically Writes’ MSNBC Primetime
Media Matters’ power is not only in drawing attention to or commenting on instances of media bias or quibbles among various political personalities, notes the Daily Caller, but on enacting real changes in networks, usually by going after specific news makers with the help of kindred organizations. For example, Media Matters — working in conjunction with the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the National Action Network — was instrumental in bringing attention to radio host and former MSNBC personality Don Imus comments regarding the Rutgers women’s basketball team — attention that ultimately saw Imus being fired from the network. The same held true for the organization’s efforts regarding those advertisers working with CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Fox News’ Glenn Beck.
That influence, the Daily Caller adds, also extends to essentially creating news for a certain major cable news outlet:
High profile though these victories against conservatives were, Media Matters has perhaps achieved more influence simply by putting its talking points into the willing hands of liberal journalists. “In ‘08 it became pretty apparent MSNBC was going left,” says one source. “They were using our research to write their stories. They were eager to use our stuff.” Media Matters staff had the direct line of MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and used it. Griffin took their calls.
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.”
That influence also extends to print and online outlets, with several well-known reporters named in the report as being particularly amenable to Media Matters’ tips and stories. Among those named is Ben Smith, formerly of Politico and currently of BuzzFeed. According to an unnamed former staffer, Media Matters knew Smith would “take stories and write what you want him to write.”
On Thursday’s O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly strongly pushed back against a report by ABC News’ World News Tonight that he had advanced the narrative that First Lady Michelle Obama was an “angry black woman.” “ABC News didn’t tell the audience it got its clip they used on me from the far-left web site Media Matters which is in business solely to smear non-liberal media people,” O’Reilly opined. “We brought the situation to ABC’s attention today they say from now on they will call people like me who are injected into their news coverage. I think it’s important because I’m simply not going to let the presidential campaign degenerate into a race-baiting media propaganda exposition…let’s cut the crap.”RELATED: Michelle Obama rejects 'angry black woman' label
According to O’Reilly, ABC News used audio extracted from a Media Matters blog post from September 16, 2008:
During the “Obama Chronicles” segment of the September 16 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly stated of Michelle Obama: “Now I have a lot of people who call me on the radio and say she looks angry. And I have to say there’s some validity to that. She looks like an angry woman.”
During the segment, O’Reilly asked Vogue magazine contributing editor Rebecca Johnson: “The perception is that she’s angry in some quarters. Valid?”
“That sounds kind of bad, does it not?” O’Reilly acknowledged. “Here is the context — that interview was done three and a half years ago when the country was still getting to know Mrs. Obama, who did have some problems in the beginning. You will remember the ‘proud of her country remark.’”
During the segment defending himself, O’Reilly played a montage of every nice thing he has ever said about the First Lady.
“For ABC to paint me critical of her is flat-out dishonest,” O’Reilly exclaimed. “A lot of us have a lot riding on America’s future. It’s about America’s future. Let’s cut the crap. Can we?”
Juan Williams appeared on Fox & Friends and told Brian Kilmeade it was laughable that Media Matters is considered a charitable institution when they are dedicated to silencing honest debate. Kilmeade was shocked that Media Matters searches for disgruntled Fox News employees to help with their campaign against the network, and now Williams and other Fox personalities seem ready to fight back.
Williams described the evolution of Media Matters:
“Obviously it’s not an honest watchdog group anymore. They used to monitor the media and point out things that were wrong, false, inappropriate, which is fine, but what you are hearing from Ari Rabin-Havt [Executive Vice President of Media Matters] is that really now they’re involved in opposition research. They are digging up dirt on people. They’re trying to ruin people’s lives and reputation because they disagree with their politics. And, in specific here, what they disagree with is conservative politics and they really don’t like Fox News.”
Williams mentioned that even his former employer NPR may be guilty of only giving one point of view, but that offense is nothing when compared to Media Matters, which sets out to destroy their political opponents. And with many Fox News shows now targeting Media Matters, it seems like a full-scale war between both sides has officially begun.
In the political debates regularly covered here at Mediaite, this New York Magazine story would fairly be described as “the other story.” Not the explosive one on Roger Ailes and Fox News that we have, thus far, written three pieces about, but the one on Media Matters founder David Brock. His story as a conservative turncoat is a fascinating one, replete with apologies for his errant ways and his new commitment to taking down the group he once represented. But much of the piece focuses on his near obsession with Fox News which he says has transformed “into something that isn’t even recognizable as a form of media.”
So one would think that in a landmine filled topic like this one, author Jason Zengerle would take great care to avoid broad generalizations and instead stay focused on facts and storytelling, in the way that Gabriel Sherman admirably did with his piece on Ailes. Nope. Penning a soft, glowing portrait of Brock is one thing, but vastly overstating Media Matters influence is far more biased. After all, media…matters, am I right?
First he points out that “What began in 2004 as a ten- person shop with a $3 million annual budget now has around 90 employees and plans to spend $15 million this year.” That is striking and demonstrates the enormous fundraising operation that they have created. But that is not translating into readers. With that budget and staff, they should be about the size of a site like Politico, but the numbers tell a far different story. According to web traffic evaluator, Quantcast, Politico averages 5.6 million monthly unique visitors, Media Matters a mere 646,200. Even if you give Media Matters the benefit of the doubt and double that number, they are still doing a fraction of the traffic of sites its size (at 1.3 million, it would still be far smaller than little Mediaite, with ten times the staff). That’s something that clearly should have been pointed out in the story.
But its not just the author’s unwillingness to dig into their true influence, but he gives them credit for events for which Media Matters cannot legitimately claim responsibility.
The article states:
Last month, Media Matters scored what it considers to be its biggest victory to date against Fox when the news channel and Glenn Beck decided to end his show. Beck had become the face of the Media Matters anti-Fox campaign. Not only did the group keep a running tally of Beck’s most offensive statements, but it was also part of an effort to persuade more than 300 advertisers to boycott Beck’s show—which, Brock believes, is what ultimately convinced Fox that it could no longer afford to have Beck on its air.
Its true that Media Matters helped engage in a campaign against Beck that had some impact. But to quote, without further context, Brock’s assertion that Media Matters “ultimately convinced Fox” to get rid of Beck shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Fox and its often quirky personalities.
Yes there was an advertising boycott primarily led by Color of Change, but there are a myriad of complicated relationships (and, yes politics) that went in to Beck’s announced split from Fox News. To assert that the decision was a direct reaction to Media Matters’ “convincing” of Fox News executives is almost a laughable conceit.
But maybe the most egregious journalistic faux pas was in Zengerie’s broad assertion that “over time, Brock and his group have come to be viewed as relatively responsible arbiters.”
Huh? As we have noted here at Mediaite, Media Matters has struggled to be taken seriously by anyone apart from their own loyal following. That is not to say that we do not trust their investigative pieces. We often do. But, as we have reported before, the vast majority of their stories fall on deaf ears because they are not viewed as responsible arbiters.
The effort by liberal media watchdog group Media Matters to convince half a dozen leading national advertisers to pull their dollars from the Fox News Channel got a high-profile snub Thursday when Orbitz, the travel company, not only declined to participate, but fired back at Media Matters, calling the “Drop Fox” campaign a “smear effort.”
According to the Drop Fox website, Orbitz is one of seven key advertisers targeted, including Best Western, Priceline, Delta Airlines, Ocean Spray, Netflix and Southwest Airlines. The campaign suggests viewers sign a petition asking the advertisers to pull spending from Fox News for being “a political operation masquerading as a news network,” advancing “anti-LGBT bigotry,” (including a letter signed by Courage Campaign, GLAAD and Equality Matters sent to Orbitz, a company described by the groups as progressive in its support for LGBT issues) and “misinformation about climate science.” The campaign argues that advertising on Fox associates brands with this “misinformation”:
Fox’s record, as evidenced by the examples listed in the below indexes, raises two questions:
Given Fox News’ history of deplorable or irresponsible conduct, why would any respectable advertiser sponsor Fox in the first place?
Why would an advertiser want to risk being connected to Fox News when the next inevitable firestorm over Fox’s conduct erupts?
But Orbitz shot back, describing Media Matters as “a political organization that has been funded pretty extensively to go after one network, and we aren’t going to engage in that fight,” Orbitz spokesman Brian Hoyt told The Hollywood Reporter:
“We have a strict policy of tolerance and non-discrimination, and that means we don’t favor one political side over another. Tolerance is a two-way street,” he said. “We’re going to advertise on conservative TV stations, liberal TV stations and — if there are any out there — unbiased news broadcasts.”
The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.
The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.
“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.
The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”
In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.
Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor. (In the interest of full disclosure, Media Matters last month also issued a report criticizing “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy’s criticism of this reporter’s blog.)
Last Thursday, Media Matters published an extensive (and somewhat breathless) account from an anonymously sourced individual that was only identified as a former Fox News Insider. The report included lots of detail that alleged Fox News’ bias, with pithy quotes like “they’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news” and “stuff is just made up,” and was clearly intended as a scathing indictment of Media Matters’ mortal enemy, Fox News.
While the story made some ripples in like minded sites like Think Progress and The Young Turks, the story made barely any mention in mainstream news outlets, and ended up serving as a stark reminder of Media Matters’ growing irrelevance in the world of media criticism.
The report, written by Eric Boehlert, was likely seen by the progressive media watchdog group as a coup de grâce in their war against Fox News. The opening sentences give a clear indication of the direction, and point, of the article:
Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”
Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.
“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”
The story continues to explain the reasoning, process and evolution of how news and opinion intermingle on Fox News. But for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the provocative article was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media. When reached by Mediaite, Ari Rabin-Havt, Executive Vice President at Media Matters, claimed the impact of the article was significant.
“More than 200,000 people read the story on MediaMatters.org this in itself shows the broad interest in this story.”
Regardless of the actual numbers, imagine if this report had appeared on another site, such as Salon, Slate (or even, say Mediaite), there would likely have been some pick-up from various cable news outlets, websites, and newspapers.
Why would such a provocative and interesting piece get lost in shuffle? Perhaps because, in the current hyper-partisan landscape of opinion media (and watchdogs) it’s difficult to take seriously a post that alleges that “stuff is just made up” from a story that is unwilling to identify its source. Boehlert’s lack of a primary focus on journalism (versus agenda) undercuts the story as well as the fact that his sourcing narrative is often confusing (at one point, it seems as though he’s referencing two different sources), and he fails to negotiate an attribution that would help the reader judge its credibility. Was this an on-air personality? An intern? A producer? Did this source leave Fox recently? Based on Boehlert’s attribution, the source could be Keith Olbermann as far as the reader knows.
An extremely disturbing video is hitting the airwaves showing a man named Clay Duke opening fire on a school board meeting in Florida earlier today. Duke, apparently upset over the firing of his wife, later fatally shot himself.Major props to that lady, Ginger Littleton, who tried to knock the gun out of that crazy guy's hands with her purse--that took some major cojones.
Anderson Cooper reported on the incident on CNN, and showed video of Duke spray-painting a red “V” with a circle around it (think the movie V For Vendetta) before telling several people in the room to leave. At one point, a woman tries to knock the gun out of Duke’s hand, but is unsuccessful. Superintendent Bill Husfelt pleads with Duke to let it go, and then Duke fires several shots. Duke is then shot by Mike Jones, a security officer for the school district (Jones was off-camera). An absolutely surreal scene.
Also disturbing, arguably, is CNN’s exploitative handling of the video. They take pains to repeatedly warn viewers how graphic and upsetting the images will be, but wait until after they’ve played the video (twice, once in slow motion) to telll viewers that all of the assailant’s shots missed. This seems to confirm the rather obvious fact that “Graphic footage!” warnings are about gluing eyeballs, not shielding them.
Glenn Beck isn’t one to hold back, and when it comes to efforts against himself by George Soros and Media Matters, of course he was going to speak up. He did on today’s program, and it had plenty of maniacal laughter, George Soros impressions, and eventually all roads led back to one of Beck’s most oft-made points: progressives think you’re stupid.
As always, he was a fine showman. He called Media Matters founder David Brock “the hero of the downtrodden” while gleefully reminding his audience that even though “they’ve tried to monitor every word I’ve said for years and years,” in the end, “they’ve done everything they can to shut me up – that didn’t work.”
So why did they try so hard to shut him up? Well, Beck said it’s actually not about him (which a screen behind him helpfully pointed out). Rather, it’s about shutting the American people as a whole up. From there, it turned into a monologue about the First Amendment and how Beck doesn’t want his opponents taking off the air, complete with references to Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Jefferson. Sure, it was something of a paint-by-numbers Beck segment, but you can’t say he doesn’t know how to do them. Plus, it’s impressive to watch the segment morph from a laugh at the expense of Media Matters to Beck galvanizing his audience, expressing confidence they’ll be the “peacemakers” of tomorrow.”
It’s been only a few weeks since Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert enacted a mutual detente with arch frenemy Andrew Breitbart, but Boehlert hasn’t shied away from making new foes, the loudest of which is Fox News’ Red Eye host (and future Muslim gay bar proprietor) Greg Gutfeld. After allegedly tweeting “EPIC FAIL” at him, Gutfeld dedicated a special Greg-a-logue (and Robot Theater!) to his new rival.
Gutfeld’s special comment didn’t only attack Boehlert, though he did take the hardest punches. It also took on the New Hampshire politicos wishing for Sarah Palin’s death online for the same thing: using social networking sites like political soapboxes. Two notes on that point: (a) ranting about adults talking like children on social networking sites and mentioning Sarah Palin without pointing out that she may be the absolutely worst offender? and (b) there is an argument to be made that, if you’re on Twitter anyway, there’s nothing wrong with using internet speak. There is no hard and fast rule for political discourse on Twitter or Facebook, and plenty of strong arguments to be made for not holding what is said on such platforms to the same standard as what one is paid to write in a publication.
That said, it’s all quite hilarious:
Where did all the grown men go? Seriously, why the hell are adult males writing like catty preteens on Facebook? Have we turned into a nation of 12 year old girls, pining for the Jonas Brothers, planning sleepovers and fighting over padded bras?… It’s not just Facebook. Seriously, how can a grown man feel compelled to write “EPIC FAIL” on a tweet? Yeah, I’m talking to you Eric Boehlert of Media Matters. You’ve gone gray: time to stop braiding the hair of your Barbie Doll.
Posts
All Comments
