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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend....
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To: Sully- who wrote (14661)10/3/2005 1:04:06 AM
From: Sully-   of 35834
 
The Brock Rule

David Frum
OCT. 2, 2005

And speaking of doing unto conservatives ... my heart goes out to Bill Bennett this week. All of us who speak and write for a living have the experience of saying something less perfectly than we might later wish. If only life were like the Congressional Record, and we were all free to revise and extend our remarks. Still, even so, it seems to me almost incredible that anybody could have construed Bill Bennett's now controversial words about abortion and crime as anything other than a statement of his commitment to the equal value of all human life.

That Bennett's words have been so widely misconstrued is a perverse triumph for David Brock's new endeavor, a left-wing media criticism project called Media Matters for America. Media Matters successfully ballyhooed the story into a major media event - the site's first major score since it was launched last May.

Like many conservative journalists, I have been made intermittently aware of Media Matters since it appeared last May. From time to time it would harumph over something I'd posted or written or said on television. Over the following 24 hours, I'd get a couple of dozen unusually outraged emails. It was always instantly obvious who had inspired them, if only because they were simultaneously so ferociously indignant and so barely literate.

I appreciate that people on the left need just as much as anyone to ventilate their rage. Still, I never did quite see the point of organizing an elaborate and lavishly fund website just in order to mobilize angry emails to conservative writers who would promptly delete them. I get it now, though: The real value of Brock's site is that it can invoke the values of honesty and integrity in media and then go on to damagingly distort the words and beliefs of its conservative targets. It seems a lousy way to make a living - but there's no denying that after a decade in the wilderness, David Brock is once again exerting his special and inimitable influence on American politics.

frum.nationalreview.com
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