Who is behind Media Matters?????? With all the lopsided news and the potential to have Free Speech for Republicans short leashed, I started to wonder just who Media Matters for America really was.....
Starts here:
Media Matters for America --- wiki says about David Brock...
en.wikipedia.org
>>>>>>>>>>David Brock (born 1962) is an American journalist and author and the founder of Media Matters for America. He was a conservative journalist during the 1990s.[1] During that time he was best known for his book The Real Anita Hill and authoring the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. After declaring his homosexuality, he became a liberal. He tells his personal story in his memoir Blinded by the Right and criticizes the "conservative media machine" in his book The Republican Noise Machine. His work on the latter book led him to found Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization that describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."[2]<<<<<<<<<
>>>>>>>>>>Three years later, Brock surprised conservatives by publishing a somewhat sympathetic biography of Hillary Clinton, titled The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. Having received a $1 million advance and a tight one-year deadline from Simon & Schuster's then-conservative-focused Free Press subsidiary, Brock was under tremendous pressure to produce another best-seller. However, the book contained no major scoops. In Blinded by the Right (2002), Brock said that he had reached a turning point — he had thoroughly examined charges against the Clintons, could not find any evidence of wrongdoing, and did not want to make any more misleading claims. Brock further said that his former friends in right-wing politics shunned him because Seduction did not adequately attack the Clintons. He also argued that his "friends" had not really been friends at all, due to the open secret that Brock was gay.
In July 1997, Brock published a confessional piece in Esquire magazine titled "I Was a Conservative Hit Man," in which he recanted much of what he said in his two best-known American Spectator articles and criticized his own reporting methods. Discouraged at the reaction his Hillary Clinton biography received, he said, "I... want out. David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead." Four months later, The American Spectator declined to renew his employment contract, under which he was being paid over $300,000 per year.
Writing again for Esquire in April 1998, Brock apologized to Clinton for his contributions to Troopergate, calling it simply part of an anti-Clinton crusade. He told a more detailed story of his time inside the right wing in his 2001 memoir, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, in which he settled old scores and provided inside details about the Arkansas Project's efforts to bring down Clinton. Later, he also apologized to Anita Hill.
Brock directly addressed the right-wing "machine" in his 2004 book, The Republican Noise Machine, in which he detailed an alleged interconnected, concerted effort to raise the profile of conservative opinions in the press through false accusations of liberal media bias, dishonest and highly-partisan columnists, partisan news organizations and academic studies, and other methods. Also in 2004, he featured briefly in the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, giving his updated account on what was behind conservative allegations against Bill Clinton.
About the same time he founded Media Matters for America, an Internet-based liberal political organization "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." MMFA employees have previously worked for the presidential campaigns of Democrats Al Gore, Sen. John Edwards, and Gen. Wesley Clark, the National Organization for Women, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Alliance for Justice, and Greenpeace. MMFA receives significant funding from pro-Democratic foundations. |