Soros-Funded Media Matters Attacks Conservatives

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 defeating President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Having failed, they have grown increasingly angry and determined.

MMFA has a staff of 59 and is headquartered at 1625 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. in Washington, D.C. MMFA employees have at various times worked for Al Gore, John Edwards, Barney Frank, Wesley Clark, the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Center for American Progress, Greenpeace, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (recently rechristened the American Association for Justice) and the Alliance for Justice.

MMFA is the creation of David Brock, a self-described “hit man” and self-confessed liar and gossip peddler. Brock’s own past casts a shadow over his current self-proclaimed dedication to truth-telling. At one time or another, Brock has viciously attacked the Clintons and the 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.” Reviewing Brock’s 2002 memoir, Blinded by the Right, journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote, “I would say without any hesitation that he [Brock] is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it. The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation.” Cultural critic Camille Paglia, a left-leaning Democrat, ridiculed Brock’s confession: “Behold, the writhing snake pit of amoral media ambition!”

Brock’s media career began on the right. Born in 1962, Brock was a conservative student at the University of California, Berkeley, and active in conservative campus journalism. Upon graduation, he entered the national conservative movement, working in the 1980s at the Heritage Foundation, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times. He made a name for himself in 1992 when the American Spectator published his article attacking the truthfulness of Anita Hill, whose allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas transformed his Senate confirmation hearings into what Thomas denounced as a “high-tech lynching.” A year later, Brock’s book, The Real Anita Hill, extended his attack on Hill’s claims and character. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks despite scathing reviews from the liberal media. Paglia, always independent, defended the book as “solidly researched” and dismissed Hill’s defenders as “the feminist establishment.”

Even as the book earned attention and headlines, Brock whipped up another perfect storm by penning an article in the January 1994 issue of the American Spectator telling the sleazy tale of “Troopergate,” the allegation by Arkansas state troopers that they arranged sexual liaisons for then-Gov. Bill Clinton. One was with a woman identified only as Paula. The story caused Paula Jones to file a lawsuit against President Bill Clinton, alleging that Clinton had sexually harassed her. Subsequently, the Paula Jones story became entangled in the Whitewater investigations of Justice Department special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and led to, well, so much more. Brock’s stories were responsible for the American Spectator’s nearly fourfold increase in circulation. Brock was riding high, observed journalist Laura Kipnis writing in Slate, and he was earning an “unheard of $500,000 three-year contract at the Spectator.”

Then came Brock’s personal Road to Damascus -- the political transformation he has told, and re-told -- as a sequence of vivid eye-opening events.

With a $1-million advance from a conservative subsidiary of Simon and Schuster, Brock was commissioned to produce a biography of Hillary Clinton. What he wrote was not what the signers of the check had bargained for. Rather than a hit-piece, a la The Real Anita Hill, Brock offered up, in 1996, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. Brock portrayed the then-First Lady as an earnest do-gooder, a hapless Middle America nerd, devastated and walked down the primrose path by her slimy, philandering husband. The book generated little controversy, and years later, Brock claimed the book was tame because he could find no evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton. Others, however, suggest he was simply not able to find sources who would speak to him and, with a tight deadline from his publishers, could not produce the spectacular revelations everyone was expecting.

Brock’s journalistic career stalled. In need of a jumpstart, he produced a series of self-dramatizing mea culpas published in Esquire magazine. The first, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man” (July 1997), proclaimed his disillusion at conservatives’ disdainful reaction to his Clinton book. Brock confessed his feelings were hurt when the late Barbara Olson disinvited him to a dinner party she was hosting for a select group of Washington conservatives. The second Esquire article (April 1998) apologized to Bill Clinton for the “Troopergate” exposé, which he blamed on conservatives who had manipulated his desire for a good story. Brock said he regretted his attacks on Clinton’s sexual behavior, which he should have treated as a private matter.

Subsequently, Brock wrote two more works that completed his political conversion: Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, yet another self-serving memoir, and The Republican Noise Machine, an anti-conservative screed that claimed the public’s support for Republican candidates was actually a brain-washed reaction to incessant conservative chatter in magazines, think-tanks, websites, cable TV and radio talk shows. Brock said conservatives had created an intellectual infrastructure -- a Republican noise machine -- that was dominating the news media and overwhelming any alternative political commentary.

The arguments in The Republican Noise Machine inspired Brock to establish Media Matters, an Internet-based watchdog project dedicated to attacking the conservative media for lying and to attacking the mainstream media for uncritically repeating conservative lies.

The MMFA site has no lack of political opinions. However, one of the first things that strikes you when you visit Brock’s creation is its reliance on personal attacks in lieu of substantive or fact-based arguments. Entire sections are devoted to assailing specific media personalities. What results is not fair comment or analysis of what they say or write, but personal scrutiny, including minute parsing of every comment and its presumed meaning. Conservatives are attacked as though their opinions are inherently offensive and necessarily dangerous.

Mainstream media figures such as Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Chris Matthews also are put on a Media Matters watch list. Apparently, their crime is that they do not always and immediately contradict conservatives’ assertions. Brock’s group searches out moments whenever the media says anything less than supportive of liberals and Democrats.

For instance, in 2005 MMFA named MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews its “Misinformer of the Year.” Matthews was once an aide to the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the legendary liberal Democrat from Massachusetts. He also was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. He has been highly critical of the Iraq War and has fawned over anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan in interviews. Anyone who regularly watches Matthews knows he is quite open about his liberal political leanings and more or less endorsed John Kerry in 2004. Matthews’s offense? Well, he occasionally said nice things about George W. Bush (“Everybody sort of likes the President, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left. I mean, likes him personally.”) Matthews called one Bush speech “brilliant,” and on occasion, he has criticized Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. Then there is MMFA’s 2006 “Misinformer of the Year”: the ABC television network. Media Matters points an accusing finger at ABC News political director Mark Halperin who appeared on the Fox News shows “Hannity & Colmes” and “The O’Reilly Factor” and admitted that “old media” (meaning TV network news and newspapers) were “biased against conservatives.” MMFA endorses media fairness in theory, but in practice it treats an admission of past news media bias against conservatives as evidence of current media bias against liberals!

Another ABC crime was its airing of The Path to 9/11, a two-part docudrama that pointed out Clinton Administration failings in dealing with the threat of Osama bin Laden and other terrorist groups. As proof of bias, Media Matters observed that ABC Vice President Judith Tukich was an evangelical Christian who accepted an award from the conservative Liberty Film Festival for helping to produce and promote The Path to 9/11.

Strange as it may seem, MMFA claims that the American mainstream media are overtly conservative. MMFA essentially agrees with radical journalist Eric Alterman, author of a 2003 book, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, who argues that the mainstream media are biased in favor of the right. From Alterman’s perspective, New York Times Editor Bill Keller is a “neoconservative” and the New Republic magazine is right-wing. This would likely come as news to both Keller and the New Republic.

If you add Brock’s slippery hold on the truth to Alterman’s radical political outlook, you get MMFA’s unique contribution to American journalism. MMFA’s typical mode of operation is to isolate a small facet of a media story that can be twisted in such a way as to suggest that the reporter or news commentator is a liar or hypocrite. That is then used to suggest that everything he says must be false and deserving of censure.

One of the earliest Media Matters targets was talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh. Radio’s most listened-to talker, Limbaugh is a predictable object of attack. In the aftermath of the initial Abu Ghraib revelations, Limbaugh made comments comparing the behavior of the soldiers at the prison to fraternity initiations. He suggested that military personnel were merely “blowing off steam” and that their actions were all-too-understandable.

These comments became a pretext for Brock and MMFA to launch an anti-Limbaugh campaign. They spent $100,000 to broadcast anti-Limbaugh ads on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and ESPN. Brock wrote to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asking that Limbaugh’s program be removed from the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS), the Defense Department’s broadcasting service to American forces overseas. Limbaugh had “condoned torture,” argued Brock, and American troops needed to be shielded from his ideas.

In challenging the Defense Department to remove Limbaugh’s show from its broadcast line-up, Brock and MMFA showed they were not afraid to create controversy or stage a major confrontation. Brock and MMFA pronounced AFRTS guilty of leaning politically to the right. In reality, most of the AFRTS broadcast programming is music. AFRTS does offer a standard sampling of radio and television programs from back home. A soldier can hear pretty much the same sort of news broadcast in Baghdad, the Korean DMZ, Okinawa or Kabul as he would hear in Ohio or Hawaii. National Public Radio (NPR) is well-represented, but so is Limbaugh.

Media Matters also took on Republican-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting, which broadcast a film called Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal on its 62 stations during the 2004 election cycle. The documentary featured Vietnam veterans who had been prisoners of war. They said their captors’ cruelty was fuelled by John Kerry’s anti-war posturing after he had served his tour of duty. MMFA called Sinclair unfair and said the film lacked “balance.” In December 2004, a mysterious website appeared that criticized the film and provided e-mail addresses and phone numbers for Sinclair’s biggest advertisers—Staples, Kraft Foods Inc., Target, Geico, Sprint and McDonald’s. One month later, in January 2005, Staples pulled its advertising from Sinclair news broadcasts and “The Point,” a daily conservative commentary. Staples said it received “numerous” e-mail complaints about Sinclair. Though the office supply chain did not mention the website, MMFA was happy to take “partial” credit for the outcome, saying that while it had not intended a boycott, it was happy to raise advertiser awareness of Sinclair’s actions.

MMFA’s triumph was brief, however. A few weeks later, as the story got out among conservative websites and talk radio, the backlash Staples experienced compelled the company to restore the advertising.

MMFA has congratulated itself for helping instigate the firing of radio personality Don Imus and has prepared a blacklist of other talk-radio hosts who merit dismissal. According to the Wall Street Journal, Media Matters researcher Ryan Chiachiere was “assigned to monitor Imus’ program.” Watching “Imus in the Morning” as the host made his “nappy-headed hos” comment, Chiachiere promptly posted online a transcript and video of the remark and sent e-mails to the press and activist contacts. Soon after, MSNBC began fielding angry calls and messages. When CBS radio announced it had fired Imus, MMFA posted, under the title “It’s Not Just Imus,” a list of pundits who should meet a similar fate. The list included Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish and John Gibson.

Brock’s confessional writings make clear that he yearns to schmooze. Deeply wounded when the conservative A-list turned against him, he now associates with Hollywood glitterati, champagne Socialists and establishment movers and shakers who are financing his online mud-wrestling at MMFA. According to the New York Times, MMFA received “more than $2 million from wealthy liberals” as start-up money in 2004. Initial donors included cable executive Leo Hindery, Jr., philanthropist James Hormel, shopping mall magnate Bren Simon, and Susie Tompkins Buell, who with her husband Douglas co-founded the Esprit clothing chain. Buell, who met Brock at a get-together of Hillary Clinton supporters, held a fundraiser for him at her San Francisco home.

Brock has been less than open about MMFA’s financing. At first Media Matters spokeswoman Sally Aman insisted that “neither Media Matters nor its president and CEO, David Brock, has received any money from [George] Soros or from any organization with which [Soros] is affiliated.” But George Soros has been a major force in funding MMFA—indirectly perhaps, but powerfully. In early 2005, MMFA, through a spokeswoman, allowed that “the group is no longer disavowing any connection” with groups “affiliated” with Soros.

The decision to come clean, more or less, was preceded—or perhaps, expedited—by Cybercast News Service, which looked into MMFA’s financial ties. According to a March 3, 2005, CNS article, “there were numerous and extensive links between Media Matters and several Soros ‘affiliates’ such as MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress and Soros ally Peter Lewis.”

And in an e-mail to CNS regarding MMFA’s financial backers, Aman wrote: “In response to your query regarding donor funding, Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros.” Aman acknowledged support from MoveOn.org and the New Democrat Network. She also named as a donor Soros’s friend Peter Lewis, the insurance tycoon who founded Progressive Corp. Soros and Lewis were the top two donors to anti-Bush “527” political pressure groups during the 2004 election campaign. Each gave more than $20 million to the ostensibly independent organizations.

Another Soros-backed think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has also supported MMFA. John Podesta, CAP’s president and Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, told the New York Sun that in 2004 CAP aided Brock by offering office space and administrative assistance.

According to its tax records, MMFA took in $155,100 in grants in 2003 and $3,564,471 in grants in 2004. Its tax return dated December 31, 2005, lists income of $8,489,663 and assets of $6,344,165.

Major funders of MMFA include the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, whose president is PBS pundit Bill Moyers, the Gruber Family Foundation, the Barbra Streisand Foundation, the Arca Foundation, the Bernard & Audre Rapoport Foundation, the Bohemian Foundation and the Glaser Progress Foundation. At least two funders—the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation and the Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation—gave money to MMFA through the Tides Foundation, which serves as a financial intermediary for left-wing non-profits and foundations.

According to press reports, the Democracy Alliance, the Soros-inspired consortium of extremely wealthy liberal donors, has committed to give $50 million to selected left-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations. MMFA and the Center for American Progress were among the first beneficiaries.

While purporting to hold the media to high standards, Media Matters traffics in gossip and finger-pointing. It’s striking that so many wealthy liberal donors and foundations have committed major sums to this online start-up operation created by a discredited political operative. That they are prepared to get down and dirty testifies to the anger and desperation they must feel.n

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Rondi Adamson is a Canadia journalist who has been published in the Jeruselum Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and many other publications.

www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org

Date: 10/30/2007 10:38:40 PM

DAVID BROCK

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

MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA (MMA)
1625 Massachusetts Ave. NW Suite 300 Washington, DC 20036	Phone :202-756-4100 URL :http://mediamatters.org/
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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