Sunday Morning Talk Show Thread 15 April 2007

FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; the Rev. Al Sharpton; Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

THIS WEEK (ABC): New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; comedian Rich Little.

LATE EDITION (CNN) : Walter Mondale, former vice president; Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Jim Webb, D-Va.; Marc Morial, president and CEO, National Urban League; Amy Holmes, one-time speechwriter for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist; Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president, Children's Defense Fund; Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute; Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh.

What do you need? I posted a lot of stuff on threads yesterday.

Media Matters for America
From SourceWatch
Media Matters for America (MMFA), “a new Web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,”[1] was founded by David Brock in mid-April 2004.

“Because a healthy democracy depends on public access to accurate and reliable information, Media Matters for America is dedicated to alerting news outlets and consumers to conservative misinformation — wherever we find it, in every news cycle — and to spurring progressive activism based on standards and accountability in media,” explains their website [2] “For the first time, Media Matters for America has put in place a system to monitor the media for conservative misinformation - every day, in real time — in 2004 and beyond.” [3]

The site “was devised as part of a larger media apparatus being built by liberals to combat what they say is the overwhelming influence of conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.” The “project was developed with help from the newly formed Center for American Progress, the policy group headed by John D. Podesta,” Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff. “Brock said he hoped it could help provide fodder for fledgling liberal radio talk shows being started across the country, including those of the comedians Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo.” [4]

“Mr. Brock, who has also spoken with Senator Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota and former Vice President Al Gore about his project, said he was ready to face skepticism. ‘I think all ideological converts face a reality on that question,’ he said. But, he added, ‘I’ve found people very open to the idea that people can change.’”

MMFA has apparently retained Aman & Associates to promote their first book.

Funding
Funded with “more than $2 million in donations from wealthy liberals.” “Among Mr. Brock’s donors is Leo Hindery, Jr., the former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, who is co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and is close to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and Ms. Buell’s husband Mark; and James C. Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist whose appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg was delayed for a year and a half in the late 1990’s by conservative lawmakers protesting what they called his promotion of a ‘gay lifestyle.’ [5]

Media Matters for America is funded in part by the Democracy Alliance.

Books
MediaMatters.org, Misstating the State of the Union: Right-wing media distortions about the Clinton and Bush presidencies, Akashic Books, ISBN: 1888451807, October 2004.
Related:

David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-wing media and how it corrupts democracy, ISBN: 1400048753, Crown 2004.
[edit]People
Katie Barge
David S. Bennahum
Max Blumenthal
Darrin Bodner
David Brock
Nicole Casta
Amanda Fazzone
Jamison Foser
Marcia Kuntz
Shant Mesrobian
Kevin Nix
Andrew Seifter
Naomi Seligman
Gabriel Wildau
Paul Waldman
Oliver Willis

Contact Details
Media Matters for America
1627 K Street NW
Suite 800
Washington DC 20006 Telephone: 202-756-4100
Fax: 202-318-0836
Website: http://mediamatters.org/
RSS Feed: http://mediamatters.org/tools/syndication/latest.rss

[edit]SourceWatch Resources
Democracy Alliance

External Links
Schema-root.org: Media Matters for America - current and archive news feeds

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Media_Matters_for_America

1333 “H” Street NW
10th Floor
Washington, DC
20005

Phone :202-682-1611
URL: Website

Leftist think tank run by Hillary Clinton and former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta
Helped launch Media Matters for America

The Center for American Progress (CAP) describes itself as “a nonpartisan research and educational institute” aimed at “developing a long-term vision of a progressive America” and “providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals.”

Robert Dreyfuss reports in the March 1, 2004 edition of The Nation: “The idea for the Center began with discussions in 2002 between [Morton] Halperin and George Soros, the billionaire investor. … Halperin, who heads the office of Soros’ Open Society Institute, brought [former Clinton chief of staff John] Podesta into the discussion, and beginning in late 2002 Halperin and Podesta circulated a series of papers to funders.”

Soros and Halperin recruited Harold Ickes — chief fundraiser and former deputy chief of staff for the Clinton White House — to help organize the Center. It was launched on July 7, 2003 as the American Majority Institute. The name was changed to Center for American Progress (CAP) on September 1, 2003. The official purpose of the Center was to provide the left with something it supposedly lacked — a think tank of its own.

Regarding the new think tank proposed by Soros and Halperin, Hillary Clinton told Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine on October 12, 2003, “We need some new intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build the 21st-century policies that reflect the Democrat Party’s values.” She later told The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, “We’ve had the challenge of filling a void on our side of the ledger for a long time, while the other side created an infrastructure that has come to dominate political discourse. The Center is a welcome effort to fill that void.”

Persistent press leaks confirm that Hillary Clinton, and not Podesta, is ultimately in charge of CAP. “It’s the official Hillary Clinton think tank,” an inside source confided to Christian Bourge of United Press International. Robert Dreyfuss notes in The Nation, “In looking at Podesta’s center, there’s no escaping the imprint of the Clintons. It’s not completely wrong to see it as a shadow government, a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile — or a White House staff in readiness for President Hillary Clinton.” Dreyfuss notes the abundance of Clintonites on the Center’s staff, among them Clinton’s national security speechwriter Robert Boorstin; Democratic Leadership Council staffer and former head of Clinton’s National Economic Council Gene Sperling; former senior advisor to Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget Matt Miller; and others.

In addition to the aforementioned individuals, CAP’s key personnel also includes Director of Media Strategy Debbie Berger, daughter of Clinton national security chief Sandy Berger; Sarah Rosen Wartell, who serves as Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and General Counsel; Mark David Agrast, Senior Vice President for Domestic Policy; and Robert O. Boorstin, Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy. One of CAP’s primary missions is to carry out “rapid response” to what it calls conservative “attacks” in the media. To this end, CAP maintains more than a dozen spokespeople ready to appear on short notice on national talk shows to debate or respond to conservative commentators. Among CAP’s expert commentators are its own President, John Podesta; Eric Alterman, who claims expertise on the subject of media; and CAP Senior Vice President Morton Halperin, who offers to speak on national security.

On May 3, 2004, CAP helped to launch David Brock’s Media Matters for America - which claims to serve as a “watchdog” organization monitoring “rightwing” media for ethics and accuracy. According to The New York Times, Brock conferred with Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle, and former Vice President Al Gore about Media Matters before embarking on the project. “Mr. Brock’s project was developed with help from the newly formed Center for American Progress,” notes the Times, and John Podesta “introduced [Brock] to potential donors.”

CAP also posts daily “Talking Points” to guide the likeminded in their disputes with conservatives. The organization has also established an American Progress Action Fund as a “sister advocacy organization” that “transforms progressive ideas into policy through rapid response communications, legislative action, grassroots organizing and advocacy, and partnerships with other progressive leaders throughout the country and the world.”

The March 2004 Foundation Watch newsletter of the Capital Research Center reports that CAP raised $13 million in 2003. Part of that money came from George Soros, who had pledged $3 million, to be paid in $1 million increments over three years. Part came from Herbert and Marion Sandler, co-CEOs of the Oakland, California savings and loan holding company Golden West Financial Corporation (S&L).
Other recent donors to CAP include the Rockefeller Family Fund; the Irving Harris Foundation, the Philip Murphy Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the Overbrook Foundation, the Peninsula Foundation, the Robert E. Rubin Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, the Bauman Family Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Robert and Irene Schwartz Foundation.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6709

re: Media Matters

Go see the connections pics and groups:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/group.asp

On David Brock:

Brock’s Self-Borking
You don’t sell credibility like David Brock’s all at once.

By Jonah Goldberg

One of the oldest jokes in the world is the one about the three-legged pig. There are dozens of versions, but they all basically go like this:

There’s a traveling salesman making his way through the backwoods when he approaches a farmer to make a sale. He sees a three-legged pig hopping around behind the farmer and asks, “Hey, why does your pig only have three legs?”

“That’s no ordinary pig!” exclaims the farmer. “That is the smartest pig in the whole world. It saved my family’s life.” The farmer continues, “Last summer, the stove done broke and gas was leaking all over the place. That there pig pounded on the door and woke everybody up.”

“Okay, but why is it missing a leg?”

“And then, last summer, the pig pulled my wife out of the lake when she’d done cramped up and near drown.”

“Yeah, but why only three legs?”

“Well, son, with a pig that special, you don’t eat it all at once.”

Badum bum.

Well, we have a new version of the pig joke. This time the pig is David Brock. And the punch line goes something like, “You don’t sell credibility like mine all at once.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s David Brock was a prized hatchet man for the American Spectator. He wrote a devastating piece exposing the obvious fact that the forces and individuals arrayed against Clarence Thomas were hardly political rubes. Of Anita Hill, he said she was “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” I can’t say a word about the slutty, but the “nutty” assertion didn’t require an investigative reporter to nail down; all you had to do was read her academic writings. But that’s a different story.

Later, David Brock wrote some articles in The American Spectator about the fact that, as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s behavior toward state female employees was akin to Fredo Corleone’s behavior toward cocktail waitresses after the family sent him to the Tropicana.

Then, something happened.

Brock took a mammoth, $550,000 advance to write a book about Hillary Clinton, but by the mid 1990s no liberal source in the world would talk to Brock. The famed investigative reporter of the Right couldn’t get the story, unless by “getting the story” you mean dissecting a stack of newspaper clippings compiled by an intern. So, in a desperate gamble to save his reputation and the lifestyle to which he’d grown accustomed, Brock tried to make his failure a selling point: If I, the greatest and most attractive investigative reporter in the world, can’t get the story, there must be no story!

The idea was inspired. Declare that you’ve closed the book on Hillary Clinton simply because you couldn’t write one in the first place. Now, the market for your dull and plodding clip job is vastly broadened by Clinton fans everywhere.

Alas, while writing The Seduction of Hillary Clinton, Brock was seduced himself, by the coprophagic Clinton sycophant Sid Blumenthal. Whether the smell of sulfur caused him to further lose his senses is unknown. But, the fact remains, a process had begun. By claiming, implicitly and explicitly, that Hillary Clinton’s critics were all wrong, Brock won himself few friends on the Right. Meanwhile, perhaps, Brock discovered that the cocktail parties on the liberal side of the ledger were very accommodating to a man like him who was willing to trash those knuckle-dragging meanies on the Right.

Like the pig best eaten slowly, Brock — once hailed by the Washington Post as the “Bob Woodward of the Right” — started feeding on his own reputation and credibility. In an essay for Esquire, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” he assured readers that while his own credibility was always and everywhere accurate, the people he had associated with were hate-filled ideologues, largely because they didn’t like his book. As Ramesh Ponnuru put it in an excellent essay, Brock “mostly confessed other people’s supposed sins.”

Oh, and before I forget, Brock punctuated his sincerity by showing readers his own nipple as he bound himself to a tree for an Esquire photo that perfectly typified that magazine’s ever-increasing New York gay sensibilities and Brock’s own self-involvement.

The internal logic of Brock’s own personal fire sale soon took over. Though hailed by liberals for “coming clean,” they would never really trust him. As Jill Abramson told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, “the problem with Brock’s credibility” is that “once you admit you’ve knowingly written false things, how do you know when to believe what he writes?”

Brock tried to write standard-fare hit pieces about conservatives like William Bennett, but that didn’t work because no one on the Right would tell him anything interesting either (not that there’s much salacious info about Bennett to be told). Suddenly, the only “reporting” available to the fallen would-be Woodward was news about, well, himself. Indeed, he became the one and only source who would tell him everything and anything he wanted to hear, true or not.

So, then, amidst the Lewinsky scandal, Brock wrote another Esquire opus, an open “Letter to the President,” this time sans nipple (because that would be gratuitous). Here he questioned his own work even more forcefully. “I’ve had occasional pangs of doubt: Is it possible that [Clinton’s State troopers] took me for a ride, embellishing their account for fame and fortune?”

You can almost see David sitting at his computer typing the words as Sid cooed words of encouragement and applied a friendly back rub.

But the reality is likely far closer to the fact that Brock was now taking himself for a ride. He was rewriting and embellishing his own accounts to preserve what was left of his own fading fame and fortune and to keep the cocktail invites coming.

“Perhaps it was my own tortured experience as a muckraker that has made my reaction to Ken Starr’s attempt to find a crime in the Monica Lewinsky case so different from that of almost anyone I know in Washington,” he wrote. That’s right; the story isn’t about the various and sundry transgressions of the president — it’s about David’s own tortured “experience” — quotation marks required.

In recent months this pattern has taken him into the realm of self-parody. In Talk magazine, for example, he tried to make the Florida reelection battle a mere postscript to his own experiences on the Right. And then there was his attempt to piggyback some publicity on Ted Olson’s confirmation hearings.

And then, just yesterday, comes a piece in the Washington Post by Howard Kurtz on Brock’s new book on — guess what? — more of his tortured “experiences.”

He says he “lost my soul” when he wrote untrue things about Anita Hill and attempted to discredit Thomas opponents. He says he lied about Clarence Thomas not renting porn movies. “I not only wrote a book I now believe was wrong, I consciously lied in print in a book review on this subject,” he told Kurtz from his Washington home. “I think I owe a debt to the historical record to correct it. If I made a mistake here, the mistake would be that I knew these facts five years ago and didn’t disclose them.”

As Brock devours himself to the point where he is little more than a disembodied talking head, the irony is luxuriously rich. Again, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, Brock’s early work helped create or at least broaden the notion that the personal is political. By going after Bill Clinton’s vastly more egregious personal shortcomings, and by triggering in the Clinton camp a campaign to smear all accusers at any cost (he may have used bigger words and rhymed less, but Blumenthal did call Monica a little bit nutty, and a little bit slutty, didn’t he?), Brock immunized Thomas against any such complaints from the Left.

If Brock is telling the truth — and I don’t think he is — then all Thomas is guilty of is asking an employee out for a date, watching some dirty movies, and making some off-color jokes to a mature professional woman. How exactly is that worse than the Oval Office Triple-X employer-employee action described in the Starr Report’s footnotes? How is it worse than attempting to defame an intern in Grand Jury testimony? How is it worse than the abuses of power, the perjury, etc., etc? Indeed, in the ensuing years, the cultural elite has become wedded to the idea that getting jiggy with it with an employee is a badge of honor. Even Gloria Steinem was forced to endorse the “one-free-grope” standard for politicians. Nobody ever accused Thomas of groping.

Indeed, even if such invasion into one’s private life have become, in the words of Richard Cohen, “an Orwellian intrusion by the gumshoes of the state”; even if Ken Starr was a “zealous prig out of The Crucible” for following up on Clinton’s now admitted lies under oath; even if it’s none of our business that Bill Clinton “mentored” Monica Lewinsky senseless on the presidential seal; what does that make someone whose only alleged crime was to rent On Golden Blonde or Drive This Miss Daisy”?

All joking aside, few people I know take Brock seriously. Too many people knew him and were in the room when all of the various right-wing horrors he rails against allegedly occurred. In fact, most people think he’s more than a bit sad. Clarence Thomas’s wife asked that people “pray” for Brock. Indeed, there are many who argue that we should just let Brock’s self-feeding frenzy continue without comment. That Brock’s only “source” has discovered even more wrongdoing by Brock, is old and stale and age hasn’t improved its plausibility. So why pour gravy on his meal?

It’s a fair point, but like the one about the three-legged pig, some jokes are timeless.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2I3N2NiZjE2NzViNzViNWE4NmYyZTlhZjBjZDM3MmY=

David Brock: Media Liar
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 21, 2005

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, a follow-up to his eponymous 1992 article in the Spectator 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 conservative publisher, Adam Bellow and the Free Press, to write an investigative biography of Hillary Clinton that would expose her in the sensational and salacious way he had discredited Anita Hill. An initial press run of 200,000 copies was announced and plans for a major book tour. Newsweek magazine offered to run an excerpt. But Brock failed to produce the book he had promised. His stories of Clinton philandering rang alarm bells in the Hillary camp and shut down potential sources. This would not have proven an insurmountable obstacle to a determined reporter, but Brock failed to do the legwork necessary to deliver the book he had contracted.

When The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was released in October 1996, there was nothing new to be found in it, let alone the salacious material Brock had promised. Brock sought to rescue his project by making Bill Clinton the fall guy of the story. The book that resulted was a pedestrian account of a well-intentioned liberal, misunderstood by the “mainstream media,” and “seduced by the talented boy from the Arkansas backwoods,” suffering Bill’s manifold vices out of fealty to their “erotic/intellectual bond.” Brock, who never as a conservative laid claims to serious political views, portrayed Hillary in surprisingly sympathetic light: “Hillary had the ill-fortune to take power at a moment in history when much of the public had turned against the panacea of big government,” Brock explained. He also took extraordinary pains to defend her against a host of charges. Of Mrs. Clinton’s suspicious success in commodities trading and her subsequent evasiveness on that subject, Brock contended that the criticisms were merely “lawyerly nit-picking.” Besides, Brock reasoned, “it might simply be said that politicians shade the truth all the time.” Brock’s effusive apologetics convinced no one. Even the New York Times, hardly a citadel of anti-Clinton sentiment, scolded Brock for indefensibly straining to absolve Clinton from her involvement in the Whitewater scandal.

From the beginning the book was a bomb. When Newsweek saw the galleys, it withdrew its offer to excerpt the book. The book tour canceled. Within two weeks, huge stacks of the promised best-seller were tagged with remainder prices. The losses to the Free Press ran in the millions and Adam Bellow was fired.

While the house was falling around him, and people who had stood by him like Adam Bellow were walking the plank Brock began plotting his self-rescue – even more urgent since he had invested the million-dollar advance in expensive properties that as a failed author he could no longer afford. The plan was simple if ethically challenging: blame others for the failure and reinvent oneself as a leftist. By doing so, Brock would have a new sensational story to tell: “I Was A Conservative Conspirator.”

The June 1997 issue of Esquire magazine featured Brock’s mea ex-culpa: “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” in which Brock accounted for his “fall from grace” by claiming that conservatives were punishing him for his independence of thought in refusing to vilify Hillary Clinton. A color photo of a half-naked Brock tied to a tree in martyr position accompanied the story. In framing his alibi, Brock counted on his readers’ to forget that pro-Hillary Newsweek had panned his story and withdrawn the most important publicity venue the book had obtained. Sighed the self-pitying Brock: “there is no place for someone who steps out of bounds.” Brock echoed the same martyrdom theme in interviews about the book, insisting that a commitment to truth, was responsible for the disaster rather than his failures as a journalist – in particular to produce the book he had promised (and obviously lied about) to his publishers. “I knew it wouldn’t please a lot of people who have this image of Hillary as a demon,” Brock told Salon magazine, in one of his many exercises in self-exculpation.

Now Brock jumped into his new role – victim of the right-wing conspiracy. Warming to his faux-confessional theme, Brock followed up his Esquire article with a public letter of apology to Bill Clinton, which appeared in March of 1998 and in which he repudiated his reporting on Clinton’s private life. (Clinton accepted the apology.) Brock also denounced the Arkansas state troopers who had befriended him, by providing the sources for his 1994 “Troopergate” story on Clinton. Unrestrained by any sense of decency, Brock defamed them along the way claiming that they had “greedy and had slimy motives.”

In his new life, Brock retained all the habits of his journalistic path and in particular the determination that political opponents should not only be disputed but utterly discredited. On another occasion, Brock denounced Clinton’s Arkansas critics as “segregationists” who “hated Clinton for his progressive record on race.”

Notwithstanding Brock’s pretentious apology to the former President, the relevant facts of his reporting on Clinton’s extra-marital affairs (the so-called “Troopergate” scandal) were corroborated by subsequent reports in the Los Angeles Times. But this didn’t phase Brock who simply accused the Los Angeles Times of being …. David Brock. “Most journalists never admit they were wrong. The Los Angeles Times made many of the mistakes that I did.” Without realizing Brock it, in this statement Brock made a mockery of his own preferred narrative about a singularly malicious conservative movement bent on bringing down the Clinton presidency by lying about his affairs.

In 2002, he published the book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. Billed as a confessional account of Brock’s disaffection with conservative politics, the book was in reality a series of malicious attacks on his former colleagues. Even as he cast himself as the reformed pawn of an all-powerful conservative movement (“a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine” as he put it), Brock brazenly interrogated the ethics of his onetime friends and coworkers, heaping contempt on everything from their views to their wardrobe. For instance, Brock was not above mocking Wlady Pleszczynski, the longtime editorial director of The American Spectator who, at considerable peril to his own reputation, had been one of Brock’s staunchest defenders in the late nineties, for his “heavy brown corduroy jackets and clodhoppers.” Conservative author David Horowitz, meanwhile, stood accused by the openly gay Brock of uttering a “hateful anti-gay slur to an editor friend of mine whom Horowitz didn’t know was gay.” According to Brock, such statements were characteristic of the “real attitude of the conservative movement towards homosexuality” were the cause of his defection to the left.

But neither claim had any basis in truth. In fact, Brock was “outed” not by conservatives but by leftwing journalist and New York Times columnist Frank Rich. When Rich’s malicious column appeared, Brock was defended by conservatives who rallied to his side. Even as an outed gay conservative, Brock was one of the highest paid journalists in the country – and by conservative sources. Far from being “anti-gay” as Brock claimed, Horowitz is the most outspoken conservative defender of gays. Moreover, the source for Brock’s “gotcha” remark categorically rejected the claim that Horowitz was anti-gay. Nonetheless, in Brock’s book the alleged anti-gay attitudes of conservative intellectuals, along with the sleazy ad hominem attacks on liberals, of which Brock was the master, were responsible for his political turnabout.

That he was now vilifying his erstwhile political allies with recourse to the same sleazy, ad hominem attacks he claimed to deplore was an irony lost on the ethically-challeged Brock. Just prior to the publication of Blinded by the Right, Brock even embraced Hillary Clinton’s paranoid insight that her husband had been the target of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Asked by television host Matt Lauer whether he was part of the conspiracy alleged by Clinton, Brock replied, “I was, and I was stunned when she said it because I said finally somebody gets it...” Of course Mrs. Clinton made the claim in the context of denying that her husband was having the affair with Monica Lewinsky. But it was the affair and the many presidential lies that followed it that actually caused the scandal that she was alleging was purely a concoction of this conspiracy. It was a moment of pure Brockism: commit an outrage and blame the other guy.

To mark the release of Brock’s book in paperback, former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle and then-Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid hosted a party during which they announced their admiration for the author and lavished praise on his defamatory work. Daschle was particularly impressed with the book’s underlying theme of betraying Republicans and conservatives, declaring on the occasion, “To any Republicans out there: If you are willing to disavow your past and change your ways, we’ll throw a party for you as well.” Through his betrayal of former friends Brock had gained a prominence among Democrats he had never enjoyed among Republicans. His political reversal was now complete.

Having flamboyantly severed ranks with the conservative movement, Brock set about shamelessly concocting a fictional persona as an objective journalist, no longer driven by myopic political interests. “It’s only since coming out of the right wing that I’ve been able to see beyond partisan politics and careerism to what’s really important in life,” Brock said in a 2002 interview with the Washington Post. “[T]he blinders off and the anger gone” was how Brock described his newfound sensibility. The lies had become larger than life.

Brock was now working as a research assistant for Sidney Blumenthal, the political operative who, as a former top advisor and confidante to President Clinton, had set about defaming the women whom Clinton had wronged. In his sympathetic book about the scandals that had embroiled the Clinton administration, The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal revealed that Brock had helped him construct a partisan narrative that painted Clinton’s critics as agents of a well-organized ideological onslaught laying siege to the office of the presidency.

Brock’s aggressively personal attacks on his former allies on the right were rewarded in May of 2004, when he announced the creation of Media Matters, a political rapid-response site for the Democrats’ Shadow Party operation posing as a critical journal to keep conservative media honest. George Soros and former Clinton chief-of-staff John Podesta helped Brock raise $2 million (about ten years of the comparable investment in a conservative website like Frontpagemag.com. Again the air was thick with irony. In a March 2002 appearance on NBC’s Today Show, Brock had claimed that conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife (and his contributions of “more than $2 million”) was the engine behind the supposed vast right-wing “conspiracy” that Brock had so sonorously renounced. The fact that Brock was now the beneficiary of far more money than had ever been put at his disposal as a conservative contradicted the organizing theme of Media Matters, namely that the conservative movement was so well-financed that it exercised an “undue influence” on what is popularly believed to be the province of the political left: the mainstream media.

According to Brock, the very fact that the mainstream media outlets are associated in the popular consciousness with leftwing politics evidences the right’s domineering influence and proves that the political center of gravity has shifted rightward. “The right wing in this country has dominated the debate over liberal bias, he has said. “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.”

Brock made the point more simply in his 2004 book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy, an invective-fueled broadside against “biased right-wing media,” “biased right-wing commentators,” and a “mainstream media susceptible to right-wing scripting.” The argument in this book is pure fantasy. Once upon a time there was a fair, balanced and objective media; now, thanks to the influence of well-funded institutions of the right, the media has become unfair, unbalanced and biased. The mendacity that pervades every page of this book is exposed here.

Accounting for the “downward spiral” of the Democratic Party in recent history, Brock writes, “It’s the media, stupid.” So powerful is the influence of the “right-wing media,” Brock contends, that it poses a threat to America’s democratic process: “My view,” he writes, “is that unchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided.” Brock is one of the leading exponents of the conspiracy theory ascribing Al Gore’s defeat in the 2000 presidential election to the corrupting influence of the conservative media. As he told Mother Jones magazine in 2004, “The Republicans knew they couldn’t win on the issues in 2000, so they developed an explicit strategy to attack Gore’s character—and that ultimately seemed to have worked.” As though candidates in American elections have never attacked their opponents’ character, or as though the Democrats didn’t suggest that Gore’s opponent lacked the mental ability to be president in the first place.

Brock’s hypocritical claims apart, the assertion that the mainstream media displays a right-wing bias strains credulity. Polls consistently show that the staffers of America’s leading newsrooms overwhelmingly lean to left in their political disposition. Brock himself confirmed suspicions about the dubious objectivity of network news hosts when he revealed, at a June 2004 conference of leftwing activists, that television personalities had praised him off the air for Media Matters’ incessant attacks on conservatives, telling him, “Thank God you are doing this…”

But lack of evidence has not prevented Brock from maintaining that media outlets are too accommodating to conservative politics. In February 2005, in the course of giving a talk to interns at the leftwing Center for American Progress run by Brock-sponsor John Podesta, Brock stated: “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.” Trading on his role as a political turncoat, Brock explains that it makes him ideally qualified to lead a leftwing watchdog group like Media Matters because “nobody knows better than I how conservative misinformation spreads through the media.” In other words, it takes a liar to know one. The problem is a modern version of Zeno’s paradox: which liar to believe?

Spreading misinformation is precisely what Media Matters does. To hear Brock tell it, Media Matters is a dispassionate tribune of media inaccuracies. “We’re focused on the media and pundit class, Brock told an interviewer in May of 2004. “And our work is rooted in fact, not bias and commentary.”

But the reality is altogether different. Fiercely partisan, Media Matters routinely smears conservatives as “liars” or worse for presenting views at odds with Media Matters’ “progressive” political orientation. In this, it merely echoes the refrain of Brock, its President and CEO. Conservatives, according to Brock, “are simply willing to lie.” By impugning the motives of conservatives, Brock and Media Matters endeavor to discredit conservative views generally. More grandly, Brock sees his organization as an essential component in a vast “communications infrastructure” whose creation is vital to disseminating a leftwing political agenda – more left evidently than the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream media run by Brock’s sympathizers and friends. Not that Brock is honest about his partisan agenda. “Reporters, commentators, pundits and columnists know that we aren’t here to impugn their motives, but to correct misinformation in the media,” Brock incomprehensibly insisted in a May 2004 interview—a claim that does not survive a cursory review of Media Matters’ content or its creator’s view of his organization’s role. Or of the organization’s own boilerplate which describes it as “a not-for-profit progressive … center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” It would be hard to formulate a more partisan media mission.

Nor is Media Matters the only weapon in Brock’s ongoing campaign to demonize and censor the political right. Brock has become one of the leadings proponents of the jettisoned Fairness Doctrine. Enacted in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission, the unconstitutional legislation required radio and television programs to obtain licenses before broadcasting controversial views and mandated that they be presented in a fair and balanced manner—thereby setting bounds on free speech and limiting the diversity of viewpoints that could be freely aired. The repeal of the major provisions of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 ushered in a boom of new media formats, including political talk radio. But while the end of the Fairness Doctrine opened the doors to a marketplace of ideas, it has also engendered resentment among the political left, which chafes at the undeniable popularity of conservative-leaning perspectives. Finding themselves unable to compete on an even footing—by, for instance, attracting an audience with programming and carving out market share—Brock and his allies on the left have clamored for legislation to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and right what they hold to be an “imbalance” in the public airwaves. The same people, on the other hand, decry any and all attempts to hold public radio and television to the terms of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act as “censorship. The 1967 Act requires PBS and NPR programs to be “strictly fair, balanced and objective.”

In 2005, Brock joined forces with Thomas Athans, executive director of the extreme leftwing talk radio program Democracy Now, and Andrew Schwartzman of the leftwing advocacy group Media Access Project, to author a petition calling for the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. The petition claimed that “news consumers…are overwhelmingly exposed to a single point of view.” In defense of this dubious claim, the petition cited a study by Democracy Radio finding that “90% of all broadcast hours on talk radio are fairly characterized as conservative.” The authors took no account of the fact that “news consumers” had no shortage of options besides talk radio to supplement their news intake, nor did they acknowledge that the audience freely chose to listen to talk radio; nor did they take into account the12 million listeners to leftwing programming on National Public Radio, including the far left Pacific Radio Network which created “Democracy Now.”

Instead, they claimed that the Fairness Doctrine was necessary to regulate the content of conservative programming, which, in their view, “was presented in a manner not conducive to the listeners’ receiving the facts and range of opinions necessary to make informed decisions.” In other words, the mere fact that some programming departed from leftwing orthodoxy justified intrusive government censorship—a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. Brock’s support for the Fairness Doctrine has its origins in his documented aversion for free-speech rights—at least for conservatives. In the 2004 interview with Mother Jones magazine, Brock sneeringly derided “this phony notion of balance—that we need to hear all sides of a story, and that everyone’s entitled to express their opinion.”

In the few years since turned on his former friends, Brock has succeeded in ingratiating himself with the foremost leaders of the political left, from top Democrats like Senator Hillary Clinton, to connected activists like John Podesta, to prominent moneymen like George Soros, whose affiliate groups have bankrolled Brock’s Media Matters (something Brock, uneager to be seen as the tool of powerful left-wing interests, has lied about). Even so, he recognizes that some, familiar with his record of mendacity, continue to doubt the sincerity of his political conversion. “I think all ideological converts face a reality on that question,” Brock told the New York Times. Still, he claims, “I’ve found people very open to the idea that people can change.” A review of Brock’s record provides little basis for such confidence in his case.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19564

From Monica Crowley’s website http://www.monicamemo.com

“We’ve caught Hillary Clinton in another lie, this time involving the Imus firestorm.

“Several days after the controversy broke out, Clinton decided it was safe for her to weigh in on the I-man’s comments. Clinton was quoted in the New York Daily News and on her website as saying, “I’ve never wanted to go on his show and I certainly don’t ever intend to go on his show, and I felt that way before his latest outrageous, hateful, hurtful comments.”

“But hold on. She never wanted to go on Imus? After all, her hubby Bill has Imus to thank for saving him in the 1992 New York primaries. Many say Bill Clinton’s appearance on the Imus radio show helped him to win in New York and launch him to the national stage. Maybe Imus could do the same for her in 2007?

“Watch Donald Trump tell Imus Hillary “really wants to get on his show” It sure sounded like the Clinton camp wanted to go there, when Imus buddy Donald Trump called into the show on April 6th. Anyone who listed to Imus knew how he felt about Hillary. He called her “Satan,” and vowed she would never appear on his program. That morning, Trump tried to change his mind:

“’As you know I mentioned that Hillary wanted to really get on your show. She has a lot of respect for you but it doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. She’s a terrific woman and she’d do your show gladly but you don’t seem to want to according to Bernard and according to watching you, you don’t seem to want her on the show.’”

The interview raises some real questions: Was Trump speaking on behalf of the Clinton campaign or was he doing this totally on his own? If you listen to the interview, it sure sounds like Trump wasn’t asking for himself. Who put Trump up to it?

re: MM/Hillary

Case in point, google:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=RNWE,RNWE:2005-01,RNWE:en&q=imus+hillary

Personal Note: I didn’t even dig my Podesta stuff up yet.

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