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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