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- Conservative journalist turned left-wing activist
- President and CEO of leftwing watchdog group Media Matters
- Complains about the “undue influence” of the “right-wing media”
Born in 1962, David Brock is an openly gay author, a former conservative turned leftist, and the founder of Media Matters for America, which monitors the media for evidence of “conservative misinformation.”
Brock first achieved public prominence with his 1993 book The Real Anita Hill, in which he exposed the leftwing smear campaign against the future Supreme Court Justice. Throughout the 1990s, Brock was a muckraking investigative reporter for the conservative magazine The American Spectator. On a contract that paid him $350,000, he produced just six articles; these focused on President Bill Clinton’s sexual farragoes and brought Brock much additional fame.
Soon thereafter, Brock accepted a million-dollar advance from a conservative publisher (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 for this projected best-seller. But Brock failed to produce the book he had promised. When The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was released in October 1996, it was a pedestrian account of a well-intentioned liberal, misunderstood by the “mainstream media,” and “seduced by the talented boy from the Arkansas backwoods.” As word of the book’s tepid contents spread, its sales plummeted.
In the June 1997 issue of Esquire magazine, Brock wrote “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” in which he claimed that conservatives were now punishing him for his independence of thought in refusing to vilify Hillary Clinton. Brock followed up his Esquire article with a March 1998 public letter of apology to Bill Clinton, in which he repudiated his own past reporting on the former President’s private life. Brock also condemned the Arkansas state troopers who had been the sources for his 1994 “Troopergate” story on Clinton, now claiming that they had “greedy and had slimy motives.” He similarly denounced Clinton’s Arkansas critics as “segregationists” who “hated Clinton for his progressive record on race.”
In 2002, Brock published the book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, a series of ad hominem attacks on his former conservative colleagues. Brock interrogated the ethics of his onetime friends and co-workers, heaping contempt on everything from their views to their wardrobe. “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.
Brock was now working as a research assistant for Democratic political operative Sidney Blumenthal, a former top advisor and confidante to President Clinton. In his sympathetic 2004 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.
In May 2004, Brock announced the creation of Media Matters, a political rapid-response website for the Democrats’ Shadow Party operation. George Soros and former Clinton chief-of-staff John Podesta helped Brock raise $2 million for the venture.
“The right wing in this country has dominated the debate over liberal bias, Brock 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.” “My view,” said Brock, “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.”
In February 2005, in the course of giving a talk to interns at the Center for American Progress run by 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.”
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 those views 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.
In 2005, Brock joined forces with Thomas Athans, Executive Director of the 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 [conservative] point of view” which is “presented in a manner not conducive to the listeners’ receiving the facts and range of opinions necessary to make informed decisions.”
Notably, in the aforementioned 2004 interview with Mother Jones magazine, Brock, dismissing conservative complaints about liberal bias in the news media, 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.”
This profile is adapted from the article "David Brock: Media Liar," written by Jacob Laksin and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on September 21, 2005.
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| www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org |
Date: 10/30/2007 10:40:16 PM |
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| MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA (MMA) |
1625 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Suite 300
Washington, DC
20036
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Phone :202-756-4100
URL :http://mediamatters.org/
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- Self-described “progressive” media “monitor” which tracks content that “forwards a conservative agenda.”
- Creation of Democratic Party funders and operatives and former conservative writer David Brock
Established in May 2004, Media Matters for America is a "web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center" seeking to "systematically monitor a cross-section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation." But in addition to "news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible," the organization’s concept of “misinformation” includes anything that "forwards the conservative agenda." Thus political differences of opinion are often portrayed by Media Matters as lies or worse.
Media Matters' founder and CEO is David Brock. A reporter for the conservative magazine The American Spectator in the 1990s, Brock (in the aftermath of his biography of Hillary Clinton that brought disastrous reviews) engaged in a public self-denunciation, characterizing all his past writings critical of liberal figures as a confection of lies and slanders. In Brock's present judgment, the mainstream media have fallen under the sway of conservative ideology. He believes that conservatives have moved the mainstream media “to the right and therefore they've moved American politics to the right. … I wanted to create an institution [Media Matters] to combat what they're doing."
Standing behind Brock was John Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration and the head of the "progressive" Washington, DC think tank, the Center for American Progress. In 2004 Podesta provided Brock with office space for his fledgling enterprise. Soon after, Media Matters received over $2 million in seed donations from a roster of affluent donors including Leo Hindery Jr., a former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, a co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and a close ally of Senator Hillary Clinton; James Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist who nearly served as ambassador to Luxembourg during the Clinton administration; Bren Simon, a Democratic activist and the wife of shopping-mall developer Mel Simon; and New York psychologist and philanthropist Gail Furman. Media Matters, which can accept tax-deductible contributions under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, has also benefited from the patronage of Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corporation and a longtime consort of leftist financier George Soros.
Media Matters has not always been forthcoming about its high-profile backers. In particular, the group has long labored to obscure any financial ties to George Soros. But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) detailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros "affiliates"—among them MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, and Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, a spokesman for the organization explained that "Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros" (emphasis added), a transparent evasion.
Nor were groups cited by CNS the only connection between Media Matters and Soros. As investigative journalist Byron York has noted, another Soros affiliate that bankrolled Media Matters was the New Democratic Network. In addition, Soros is reported to be involved in the newly formed Democracy Alliance, a partnership of some 80 affluent financiers who each have vowed to contribute $1 million or more in order to build up an ideological infrastructure of leftist thinks tanks and advocacy groups. News reports list Media Matters as a main beneficiary of the Alliance's funding. By August of 2004, Media Matters' operating budget had already doubled to $4 million.
To summarize, Soros and his Open Society Institute pour millions of dollars into the coffers of MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, and Democracy Alliance. In turn, these organizations funnel some of that money to Media Matters.
Prior to founding Media Matters, David Brock met with a number of leading Democratic Party figures, including Senator Hillary Clinton, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and former Vice President Al Gore. Today, more than a few of the organization's roughly 30 staff members are Democratic operatives. Among these are Media Matters' chief communications strategist Dennis Yedwab, who is also the Director of Strategic Resources at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Brock's personal assistant, Mandy Vlasz, is a Democratic pollster and a veteran consultant to Democratic campaigns, including the 2000 Gore/Lieberman campaign. Katie Barge, the Director of Research at Media Matters, formerly presided over opposition research for Senator John Edwards' unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign.
In 2004 Media Matters reported that its website had elicited some 150,000 comments in its discussion forums and that over 22,000 subscribers had registered to receive its e-mail alerts. Brock has also become a regular feature on leftist radio stations like Air America.
A notable figure at Media Matters is senior fellow Eric Boehlert, who was among the most passionate defenders of University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian after the latter was accused of having been the North American leader of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In an article titled "The Prime-time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian," Boehlert charged that: "In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, all four media giants, eagerly tapping into the country's mood of vengeance and fear, latched onto the Al-Arian story, fudging the facts and ignoring the most rudimentary tenets of journalism in their haste to better tell a sinister story about lurking Middle Eastern dangers here at home."
Media Matters' Senior Advisor Jamison Foser wrote on May 26, 2006: "The defining issue of our time is the media. ... The dominant political force of our time is the media. Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.”
Media Matters' Editorial Director is Marcia B. Kuntz, who formerly headed the Judicial Selection Project of Alliance for Justice.
In September 2006, Media Matters became the sponsor of Eric Alterman's media, politics, and culture blog, Altercation.
In June 2007, Media Matters released a report titled The Progressive Majority: Why A Conservative America Is a Myth. According to this study, the “conventional wisdom” which “says that the American public is fundamentally conservative,” is “fundamentally false.” “Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they’re growing more progressive all the time,” the researchers conclude. The report examines public attitudes regarding the economy, social issues, national security, the environment, energy, health care, and the proper role of government.
Media Matters (which in 2005 pulled in contributions, gifts and grants totaling approximately $8.5 million) receives financial support from the Tides Foundation, the Arca Foundation, the Peninsula Community Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation.
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