The latest installment of The Daily Caller’s exposé on Media Matters concerns an e-mail regarding an action plan against Fox News which included hiring private investigators to go after Fox News executives, lawfare, and other acts of disruption:
A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.
“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”
“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”
It is unclear how many of these tactics ultimately were used.
While the DC article provides some new details, the MMFA war on Fox is old news.
Ben Smith, who oddly enough was named in an earlier DC article as being someone to whom MMFA fed stories, exposed the MMFA plan in late March 2011, Media Matters’ war against Fox. I wrote about it in my post Media Matters Plans “Guerrilla Warfare and Sabotage” on Fox News And Conservative Websites:
Media Matters has transformed itself into a very dangerous organization which engages in sabotage to disrupt opponents. None of this is surprising. When Media Matters says it wants freedom of speech and freedom of the press, what it means is that it wants freedom for its speech and its press.
Guerrilla warfare and sabotage. It’s what the most active Democratic media operation has come to. Scary times ahead.
And you don’t think they will do absolutely anything to get Obama reelected?
Update: Maybe not old news completely, as DC is claiming Smith withheld key information from an MMFA memo in his prior report, Politico reporter withheld information about liberal Media Matters For America. Smith, who now is at BuzzFeed Politics, has put the entire memo online at BuzzFeed.
And related, John Nolte, Inside Media Matters: What Did Ben Smith Know and When Did He Know It?
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With George Soros’ fifteen billion dollars bankrolling them, weekly meetings with high level White House communication’s reps, the old propagandameister, Joseph Goebbels, never had it so good.
These are perilous times, America, even more perilous than the Civil War, WWI and WWII were. Victory disease went to your head and you elected Barack Hussein Obama, the perfect Trojan Horse to funnel the enemy in from the inside.
Shoot, Bad Luck Barry himself has been in open war with Fox.
Which is unprecedented in all of American history. He makes Nixon look like a raving ACLU member.
The guy is a dictator wanna be, who’s getting to be. This is no spit.
“The progressive movement is in need of an enemy,” “so we will have an excuse for getting them to pay for our activities.”
There, I’ve fixed the thought to reflect the reality. It also explains why the Liberals no longer have a place in the Democratic Party at the national level, because to tolerate this kind of corrupt enemy manufacturing is the antithesis of the Liberal ideal of using what’s good from all sources.
Unless Karl Frisch an immediate and stiff correction (he should have been fired), he, David Brock and Eric Burns are venal.
I would recommend frequent exposure of their activities. They do not report the story, they are the story.
… and apparently they have hired two armed guards to ward of the Spanish Inquisition.
This whole MMFA thing just beggars the question that we need serious reform of “non-profits.” There seriously needs to be a differentiation between passive non-profits (have no contact) and active non-profits (deal directly).
Exactly whom has MMFA benefited who doesn’t have the resources to do it themselves ?
If the Democratic Party wants to run a propaganda operation, so be it, but neither the DNC or MMFA should be non-profit.
I think the “MMFA really, really hates Fox News and other conservatives” Daily Caller story is meant to highlight that Ben Smith is now at BuzzFeed, and get Ben Smith to post original memos such as the one from Media Matters on BuzzFeed.
http://twitter.com/#!/BuzzFeedBen/status/169161814779764736
http://bigjournalism.com/edulis/2012/01/19/ben-smith-uses-buzzfeed-to-land-lower-blows-on-gop/#more-262652
…no matter what Smith’s intentions may or may not be, he’s got a fun concept going on at Buzzfeed…and a sweet name to boot…
I don’t know why anyone one would go after Fox,they are drifting so far to the left(on there own)they are not worth watching.
Hotair.com has an interesting timeline which is attached to the MMFA story. Well worth the visit!
Media Matters is one reason it is so incongruous when Obama goes out and does a speech about ‘well-financed’ opposition. “And we don’t know where the money comes from,” he says.
In his case it is certainly true. We know about Soros. And that is just the beginning.
Media Matters is one reason it is so incongruous when Obama goes out and does a speech about ‘well-financed’ opposition. “And we don’t know where the money comes from,” he says.
It’s what psychologists call projection. One way to figure out what the left is up to is to examine what they accuse conservatives of doing.
A nitpick, but this is not an example of what psychologists call projection, which occurs subconsciously as a defense mechanism. Obama, et al, are fully conscious when they tell such lies about their opposition.
“Media Matters has transformed itself into a very dangerous organization which engages in sabotage to disrupt opponents.”
Scary how much this sounds like Romney’s campaign.
More liberal attempts to silence opposing viewpoints and obliterate free-speech through thug tactics.
Media Matters is a typical leftist organization. It’s run by creepy vindictive drugged out freaks like this David Brock goon. Homosexuality,perversion, drug use, corruption and thuggery are recurring themes in any leftist movement.
Media Mattters’ war on Fox is “old news” but the breadth, depth, and organization of the corruption and rot is, admittedly, bigger than supposed. And it is all across the country– the media, industry, finance, education at all levels, science, religion, the courts, law, law enforcement, labor, government – it continues to amaze. It is everywhere; from executive suites in Hollywood and Wall Street down to dupes and dopes at the nearest festering Occupy site; the newsroom at the local newspaper; city councils that will fire neither mayors nor sheriffs who openly refuse to enforce laws; corporate boards, election boards, school boards, parole boards (governors); non-/not-for profits, NGOs, foundations; the list is endless. There is no action that cannot be rationalized nor any inaction in response that can’t be rationalized because so many everywhere are on the take; money, connections, the next job, a favorable ruling, a favorable decision, a clause, an exemption – the payoff comes in every imaginable size and shape. This is a cancer that has metastasized and ridding ourselves of it is going to be a big, difficult job. Its widest possible exposure – old story or not – is a good thing. Name names, say them over and over everywhere so that even the most obscure and low profile become instantly recognizable as individuals and organizations to be called out, greeted with great skepticism, avoided, ostracized.
Keep the old news new and make the new news old. Don’t stop.
“When Media Matters says it wants freedom of speech and freedom of the press, what it means is that it wants freedom for its speech and its press.”
It seems more malicious than that … more Orwellian.
“Freedom = Slavery”
Under the banner of free speech, they conspire to control speech. The medium is the message, and they want the medium to act as their slave. If the medium/slave tries to run to freedom, it will be assaulted and beaten. FOX is under assault, but bloggers have escaped to the free North. On the Big Screen though, tea party style bloggers are hated as racist, bigots, ignorant bitter clingers.
A civil war is under way … the elite versus the rest of us. Many of “us” are still under media control … “Let My people GO”. 🙂
“They” don’t want free speech just for them, they want media domination for their propaganda, while shooting any free speech messenger. “They” have always been at war with freedom of speech. But as Gutenberg aided the reformation and the American Revolution, the internet is allowing free thinkers to publish and overcome big media controls. But “they” are still the Goliath.
Tax Exempt non-profit Media Matters.
Be sure to point this out EVERY time you mention them.
I don’t begrudge the socialists their partisan supporters, but its outrageous to have them hiding under the cover of a non-profit status as if they’re some neutral arbiter of truth in the media.
Instapundit has the link to Dershowitz saying MMFA could be Obama’s Reverend Wright problem in 2012:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/137155/