Post Script around 7 p.m.: The Blue Virginia blog is deliberately distorting my article. I tried to add a comment and their commenting system refused to let me post. It could be a malfunction. After a half dozen attempts, I’m giving up. Here is the comment (plus a bit I just added now) that I wanted to post:
You are deliberately taking the passage out of context. The left believes 9/11 is a “Republican” day, not me. That’s what I wrote. As I wrote, Keith Olbermann said the same thing last year. The week after the Republican Party convention last year Olbermann said:
But 9/11 has become a brand name. A Republican campaign slogan. Propaganda of the lowest form. 9/11 has become 9/11 with a trademark logo. “9/11 TM” has sustained a president who long ago should have been dismissed, or impeached. It has kept him and his gang of financial and constitutional crooks in office without — literally — any visible means of support. “9/11 TM” has made possible the greatest sleight-of-hand in our nation’s history.
Post Script around 7:45 p.m.: Welcome Alan Colmes, former liberal punching bag on the earlier incarnation of Sean Hannity’s TV show. Alan has difficulty understanding simple words. He claims I wrote the phrase “extremist radical” in the article. No, Alan. I referred to Color of Change as an “extremist racial-grievance group.” Extremist racial, not extremist radical. That would be redundant. Get a proofreader, Alan. In your zeal to condemn me you are making silly mistakes.
The left-wing media hit men at Media Matters for America can’t stop lying.
The absolutely loony Eric Boehlert who claims the media is somehow dominated by America’s right wing, now claims that Color of Change’s effort to have advertisers drop the “Glenn Beck Progam” is a “grassroots campaign.”
Ha!
If “grassroots” means run by a group founded by a communist who is one of the president’s czars, then yeah, it’s “grassroots.”
It’s kind of fun watching the paid professional liars at Media Matters for America spin their wheels trying to defend the Democrats’ indefensible healthcare proposals.
The left-wing character assassins at Media Matters for America highlight a brief July 13 segment from Glenn Beck’s radio show in an effort to make Beck look ridiculous.
Beck says
The ACORNs of the world, that’s not, that is not about voter registration. That is about framework. That is about community organizing. That is about getting people to stand up and extort other people. It is, in the future, those kinds of organizations will be about riots, planned riots.
In fact Beck is correct. He describes both the tactics of the leftist Machiavelli Saul Alinsky and the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis that was long ago embraced by ACORN. ACORN founder Wade Rathke acknowledges at page 122 of his new book Citizen Wealth the debt that the so-called welfare rights movement owes to Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven for devising the “overwhelm the system” strategy for radical political change.
Rathke, who was booted out of ACORN last year for his role in covering up his brother’s nearly $1 million embezzlment from the group for eight years, calls the strategy “an exciting call to arms.”
Never forget that Media Matters, which I profiled in Townhall magazine (read the article here), was founded and is headed by serialliarDavid Brock.
Media Matters is the journalistic equivalent of a roving, extremely well-funded death squad.
ConWebBlog, which previously called me a “sucky researcher,” praised me, sort of, for not bearing false witness. Alas, not lying should not normally be the basis for a compliment, however thin, but there it is.
Krepel works for the serial truth-killers at Media Matters for America, which is run by confessed serial liar David Brock. Like his master, Krepel is a practitioner of dishonest text-parsing and therefore arguing with him is generally a waste of time.
Disagree with the Media Matters line on anything and you’re branded a crank, a liar, or in extreme cases, a conservative!
…CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, MSNBC and CNBC for uses of the following terms: Socialism, Socialist, Socialists, Socialistic, Communism, Communist, Communists, Communistic, Marxism, Marxist, Marxists, Marxistic, Fascism, Fascist, Fascists and Fascistic.
Presumably, Media Matters, which was founded by and is run by serialliarDavid Brock, created this index because it considers it an affront whenever anyone uses the above -ism words to describe the left’s program in America.
It appears I relied on outdated information in writing on June 5 that the Center for Independent Media and Media Matters for America shared office space in Washington, D.C. as of that date.
Paul Schmelzer of the Center for Independent Media’s Minnesota outfit, the Minnesota Independent, explains that CIM used to rent office space from Media Matters but no longer does so. Although there is an extensive (electronic) paper trail showing the two groups sharing the same address, I am told that information is outdated and given Schmelzer’s explanation this seems like a credible explanation to me, hence this correction. To put not too fine a point on it, the Center for Independent Media did not lie when it said it was not at that time sharing office space with Media Matters.
An important distinction between the two is that the Center for Independent Media is the (nonprofit) parent company of several legitimate media outlets but Media Matters, which was founded and is now headed by serialliarDavid Brock, is the journalistic equivalent of a roving, extremely well-funded death squad. Media Matters tolerates no dissent in the media from the progressive line, but the Center seems more, well, independent.
Note: This item was corrected a few days later. The two organizations used to share office space but do not appear to do so now.
* * * * *
It appears I have outworn my welcome at the Minnesota Independent website. This kind of thing often happens in the blogosphere when lies are exposed. No matter. I waste far too much time on the Internet, anyway.
So, that left-wing site is no longer accepting my comments. I suspect it has something to do with an argument I was having with the contributors to the site over the relationship of the Center for Independent Media to Media Matters for America. (Minnesota Independent article and comments section)
I wrote earlier that the two organizations are joined at the hip. As an example of the closeness of the two entities, I pointed out that they share office space. They said I was wrong and mocked my research skills.
I just right now tried using different browsers to post a long, detailed response. The Minnesota Independent’s website would not accept this new comment regardless of how many pieces I broke it up into.
I would rather post the response over there but since I can’t, I’ll post it here. Here it is:
* * * * *
Now to this question about whether Media Matters for America and the Center for Independent Media share office space.
I did rely on the DiscoverTheNetworks.org entry when I wrote the above comment. For the reasons cited below, it looks like I made a good decision.
Let’s get into the details: It is claimed that the address of Media Matters is 1625 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC and that the address of the Center for Independent Media is 1825 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC.
However, in addition to a pile of evidence that the two organizations share office space, there certainly is a lot of overlap between Media Matters and CIM. It goes on and on and on.
CIM’s current help wanted page at idealist.org shows CIM’s address as 1625 Massachusetts Ave. NW. How can that be? That’s supposed to be the address of Media Matters. Check it out here. And don’t bother pulling a Carol Browner: I already made a screen grab.
Jeff Fecke writes (quoting someone else): “To clarify, the Center for Independent Media is not receiving funding from Media Matters. The only financial arrangement they have is to rent office space.” This same statement is repeated at the Wikipedia entry on the Minnesota Monitor which is now called the Minnesota Independent.
This document, which purports to be a CIM document, indicates CIM is located at 1625 Massachusetts Ave., 3rd Floor, Washington DC 200036. This seems to be a longer version of the same document.
I just did a “Locate a Business (Nationwide)” search on Nexis for 1825 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC. Interestingly, Nexis returned hits for both Media Matters and CIM at the Connecticut Ave. address.
Here are some of the hits:
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 1825 CONNECTICUT AVE NW STE 625
WASHINGTON, DC 20009-5733
D.C. COUNTY
Contact Name: BENNAHUM, DAVID
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 1625 MASSACHUSETTS AVE NW FL 3RD
WASHINGTON, DC 20036-2212
D.C. COUNTY
Contact Name: BENNAHUM, DAVID
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 1625 MASSACHUSETTS AVE NW FL 3RD
WASHINGTON, DC 20036-2212
D.C. COUNTY
FEIN: 33-1137541
In the search results for 1825 Connecticut Ave., this address, namely 2040 S St. NW, Washington, DC, kept coming up.
I did a Nexis search for 2040 S St. NW. Here are the first three hits:
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 2040 S ST NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20009-1110
D.C. COUNTY
Contact Name: BENNAHUM, DAVID
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 1825 CONNECTICUT AVE NW STE 625
WASHINGTON, DC 20009-5733
D.C. COUNTY
Contact Name: BENNAHUM, DAVID
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 1625 MASSACHUSETTS AVE NW FL 3RD
WASHINGTON, DC 20036-2212
D.C. COUNTY
Contact Name: BENNAHUM, DAVID
Farther down the search results page, the Media Matters address on Massachusetts Ave. pops up yet again in a hit about CIM:
Business Information
Company Name: CENTER FOR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
Address: 1625 MASSACHUSETTS AVE NW FL 3RD
WASHINGTON, DC 20036-2212
D.C. COUNTY
FEIN: 33-1137541
Let’s compare the Tax Year 2007 IRS Form 990s (tax returns) for the two entities. Here is the 990 for Media Matters. Here is the 990 for CIM.
The tax returns of Media Matters and CIM were prepared by the same firm, Drolet & Associates. (see page 9 of both documents) Both list Bonner Group, Inc. under the heading Compensation of the Five Highest Paid Independent Contractors. (see page 10 of both documents)
All in all, that’s an awful lot of evidence and an awful lot of overlap.
Unlike Media Matters most of the time, I would gladly correct the record if I were convinced I had made a mistake, but I’m not convinced.
Unburden your conscience, Minnesota Independent. It’s time to come clean. Media Matters and the Center for Independent Media are joined at the hip. How can you deny it?
I just found out that the Center for Independent Media and George Soros’s professional character assassins at Media Matters for America (headed by admitted liar David Brock) are bosom buddies.
Not only are they political allies that receive money from some of the same funders, they also share the same office space.
It must be very cost-effective. David Brock can just walk across the hall and give the Center for Independent Media, which runs a number of aggressively left-wing online media outlets such as the Washington Independent, its talking points every day. Now that’s smart management.
The Center for Independent Media has taken the following grants in in recent years:
$100,000 from Tides Center in 2007
$75,000 from Tides Center in 2007
$60,000 from Tides Foundation in 2007
$12,500 from Tides Center in 2006
$10,000 from Tides Center in 2007
$6,000 from Tides Center in 2006
That’s a total of $263,500 from Tides Center and Tides Foundation in the last three years alone.
Tides has long supported the most radical left-wing and progressive groups in America.
It is run by Drummond Pike, a radical leftover peacenik from the 1960s. After the brother of his friend Wade Rathke embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN Pike came to the rescue of ACORN and paid off more than $700,000 in restitution owing to ACORN. Wade Rathke was on the board of Tides until fairly recently when news of the ACORN embezzlement scandal broke. Pike is also an officer of the Democracy Alliance, a George Soros-led donors’ collaborative that seeks to permanently move America to the left.
The Tides Foundation has given Media Matters for America a whopping $2,326,197 to date ($15,000 in 2007; $23,225 in 2007; $122,475 in 2003, and $2,165,497 in 2004).
To be criticized by the character assassination factory, Media Matters for America, is an honor and tends to suggest that the person criticized is doing the right thing.
I feel so honored to have had my research referenced in a report about the vast crime syndicate known as ACORN. The racketeers at ACORN also posted the report on their own website.
I was celebrated by these lefties for my influential American Spectator article, “SOS in Minnesota,” which is referenced under the subheading “2008-2009 Minnesota Senate recount” in the Media Matters report.
Both ACORN and Media Matters are funded by George Soros’s Democracy Alliance.
Rabidly partisan hack Eric Boehlert of the left-wing slander site Media Matters for America is a fundamentalist incapable of rational thought.
In a blog post called “BYU study proves right-wing blogs are irrelevant,” the hopelessly deluded Boehlert, who likely spends his days repeating the conservatism-is-dead mantra over and over again in the hope that somehow it will magically become true, argues journalists’ reported preference for liberal blogs over conservative blogs means liberal blogs are better.
Burying himself under a mountain of logical fallacies, Boehlert writes
My take is that journalists are mostly college-educated professionals in search of new and interesting information and when they visit sites like Talking Points Memo and Michelle Malkin’s blog it becomes blindingly obvious that one site is serious in its approach to information gathering and sharing, and the other is, um, not. (I’m feeling charitable today.)
So it’s not surprising that journalists would spend more time at the sites that are insightful and are intellectually honest, and spend less time at the sites that are, categorically, not.
So, liberal blogs are by Boehlert’s own definition “insightful” and “intellectually honest,” while conservative blogs by definition cannot be, and by extension, the smarter, more educated people are, the more likely they are to favor liberal blogs.
Of course unlike Boehlert, I do not claim to know with certainty why the journalists in the study did what they did. A more plausible explanation might be that journalists are overwhelmingly left-of-center and this ideological proclivity drives them to favor lefty blogs. Just a guess.
It’s no surprise that Michelle Malkin previously gave the notoriously inaccurate Boehlert her clown of the day award for his wild anti-war bloviations.
Left-wing fabulist Eric Boehlert of the character-assassination factory, Media Matters for America, has outdone himself this time.
At the George Soros-sponsored smear site Boehlert falsely accuses Michelle Malkin of defending racist skinheads because she criticized the Department of Homeland Security’s report that labels all conservatives, libertarians, and returning veterans as potential terrorists.
Quoting left-wing fanatic David Neiwart (who considers all right-of-center political speech to be hate speech by definition) Boehlert disingenuously notes that
The [DHS] report — which in fact is perfectly accurate in every jot and tittle — couldn’t be more clear. It carefully delineates that the subject of its report is “rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” “white supremacists,” and similar very real threats described in similar language. Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.
This is too cute.
The infamous DHS report that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has publicly defended does not use the word conservatives, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t referring to them.
In fact, the report lumps all political beliefs and movements on the right together, putting Nazis and skinheads together with people who think their property taxes are too high. Here is the explanation of “rightwing extremism” found in the DHS report:
Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.
Indeed, that’s pretty broad.
But the kind of distortion that Boehlert uses here is standard operating procedure both for Boehlert and his colleagues at Media Matters.
I profiled Media Matters in the current Townhall magazine. (Read the article here.) I wrote that Media Matters commentary can be
petty, mean-spirited and deeply personal. On the group’s blog, Eric Boehlert committed to text a puerile hissy fit against Matt Drudge’s influential Web site, the Drudge Report. The site “has become largely irrelevant,” and Drudge’s personal influence on the news cycle has “cratered,” he wrote in October posts.
“[A]s the White House campaign hits its final stride under the ominous shadow of the Wall Street meltdown and the deep recession that’s hurtling this way,”
Boehlert wrote, “perhaps the only silver lining—the one unexpected pleasure—has been watching the Drudge Report be completely neutered by current events.”
Boehlert also pushed the all-conservatives-are-crypto-terrorists theme in another Media Matters post, implying that David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh, and accused Pittsburgh cop killer Richard Poplawski somehow inspired or were connected to the recent tea party protests.
Expect the smears from Media Matters, which is run by serial liar David Brock, to continue and probably intensify.
Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum has an article on George Soros’s character assassination factory, Media Matters for America, in the April print edition of Townhall magazine. (Executive Editor Chris Field previews the April issue here.)
With special permission from Townhall, we are providing the article, “What’s the Matter with Media Matters?” (PDF) here on the CRC blog. Note that the PDF file is quite large (9.2 MB). (A smaller version of the file taking up just 3.4 MB is available here.)
We ran Rondi Adamson’s excellent profile of Media Matters for America in the July 2007 issue of Foundation Watch. Adamson’s fine research laid the groundwork for the new article. (Her blog may be found here.)
Media Matters for America, the George Soros-funded* organization that even the New York Times calls a “highly partisan research organization,” is deliberately misrepresenting the political purge of GM CEO Rick Wagoner by the Obama administration.
“In fact, the government did not ‘fire[]‘ Wagoner, but made his departure a condition of further government aid for the company,” according to Media Matters.
If one were to be charitable toward the Media Matters mendacity factory, one could say, if it’s not a lie, it is at a minimum lawyerly sophistry.
But I’m not feeling charitable toward Media Matters at the moment. It is abundantly clear that the GM chief was fired. Lawyers might call it “constructive” dismissal, but it’s dismissal nevertheless. President Obama or Treasury Secretary Geithner might just as well have said, “Wagoner, either your signature or your brains are going to be on this contract.”
And I’m sure Erwin Rommel thought he was being given a choice too.
AP’s Tom Krisher and Dan Strumpf apparently didn’t get the memo. They reported Wagoner was fired by the U.S. government: “While ousting Wagoner, the Obama administration made no management changes at Chrysler LLC, which also is getting government loans.”
*Soros funds Media Matters directly and/or indirectly. Soros is the dominant player in the billionaires’ club known as the Democracy Alliance, which funnels millions of dollars to Media Matters, and openly collaborates with Media Matters CEO David Brock on political projects such as Progressive Media.
The liberal media isn’t going to spell out exactly how it goes about smearing conservatives, so Bill O’Reilly helpfully explained it last night on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Boiled down it goes like this: George Soros (and others) fund one of the left’s most prominent noise machines, Media Matters for America, which distorts statements made by conservatives and then urges reporters to provide saturation coverage of such statements as proof conservatives are hypocritical and sinister.
In his “talking points” segment, O’Reilly references the Obama administration’s strategy of attempting to marginalize its most vocal opponent, radio talk show giant Rush Limbaugh:
BILL O’REILLY: The Limbaugh-Obama controversy is thankfully just about over, but the far-left smear machine that propelled it to our attention is just getting started.
At the top of the smear chart is the MoveOn organization. George Soros [is] heavily invested in that. The propaganda arm of MoveOn and other far-left pressure groups is Media Matters, run by a guttersnipe named David Brock. Brock and his character assassins distribute out-of-context statements to a carefully selected group of corrupt media, headed by MSNBC, and to the Internet. Sometimes the entities even cooperate. The aforementioned Newsweek, for example, provides far-left commentators to MSNBC on a daily basis. The goal, of course, is to smear conservatives in the media, to convince ill-informed Americans that those on the right are racist, homophobic, extremist, whatever.
Unfortunately, the smear machine works on some levels. The Obama administration apparently picked up on a poll done by Democrats that showed Mr. Limbaugh’s popularity to be low among Americans under 40. Then the president’s men tried to portray Limbaugh as actually running the Republican Party. Short term, it worked. A controversy exploded and the head of the RNC, Michael Steele, came off looking bad.
But as I wrote in my newspaper column this week, a backlash is in the air. Americans want the economy fixed, not silly games.
As for Limbaugh saying he wants Obama to fail, here’s something you’ll never hear on NBC News or read in The New York Times. According to a FOX News poll taken in August 2006, 51% of Democrats said they wanted President Bush to fail. Fifty-one percent. I believe NBC and the Times were in that group.
The Obama administration should understand that Americans are wising up to the smear factory. [...]
O’Reilly has performed a valuable public service.
But in his brief op-ed, he left out a few details some may find helpful.
George Soros, the hedge fund tycoon and currency speculator, is the preeminent funder of America’s left. Soros is rarely depicted by the media as a political puppet master. Usually, he is portrayed as a wise elder statesman-like figure or a visionary. Last month Bloomberg News gave him an opportunity to dishonestly denounce America’s financial system as an example of free markets run amok.
Soros bloviated about “market fundamentalism,” while ignoring the role that the U.S. government played in the crisis, e.g. the Community Reinvestment Act, artificially low interest rates, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and so on. (BB&T chairman John Allison has demolished the argument that the free market caused the subprime mortgage collapse. In a recent talk available here he shows that the financial services sector is one of the most heavily regulated sectors in our economy.)
Soros and Brock work closely together. Last year they collaborated on a project called Progressive Media USA that vowed to spend $40 million trashing GOP presidential candidate John McCain.
Media Matters for America is a well-funded slander shop run by discredited journalist David Brock. It exists solely to combat what it calls “conservative misinformation.”
Even the New York Times describes Media Matters as “highly partisan.”
Apart from the occasional profile of Media Matters, don’t expect to hear more from the media about how the left manipulates the news.
Finally, the New York Times has published an article that calls George Soros’s character assassination machine, Media Matters for America, a “highly partisan research organization.” Apparently the New York Times didn’t get the memo from Media Matters that –wink, wink– it’s officially nonpartisan.
We knew years ago that Media Matters was aggressively partisan because it’s our mission to monitor the drivel that liberal groups say. (For more information, read Rondi Adamson’s excellent profile of Media Matters in the July 2007 issue of Foundation Watch.)
Of course, the NYT piece is otherwise sympathetic to Media Matters, but this is probably the most one can expect from the Old Gray Lady.
Today I received the following email via Facebook from Dan Mitchell, a New York Times reporter. It was a reaction to my appearance last night on the satirical news show, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” On the show I talked about community organizing, ACORN, electoral fraud and related matters.
Mr. Mitchell wrote:
I notice that you have a picture of you and Oliver there. This seems to be fairly common among people who have humiliated themselves before millions of people on shows like the Daily Show — they pretend they were in on the whole thing and it’s all just a big laugh. But it doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of people who know you will *always* know you as a giant asshole. And this will never change. This video will be online forever, haunting you, and superceding everything you have ever done or ever will do. And rightfully so. You deserve it.
The photo he is referring to is a profile photo I posted in Facebook that was taken of me with reporter/comedian John Oliver after the taping a few weeks ago.
Here is a screen grab of the email:
How do I know Dan Mitchell is a reporter for the New York Times? Because when I attempted to block Mr. Mitchell from communicating with me, this helpful information box popped up (another screen grab):
Isn’t it interesting how the New York Times has been using Facebook to attack conservatives? Just two weeks ago it was revealed that New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor went snooping around on Facebook and sent an email to the youngest daughter of Senator John McCain, Bridgette, in hopes of scoring an exclusive interview.
We’ve received quite a few negative comments related to my appearance on “The Daily Show,” but the last thing we expected was harassment from a reporter for the nation’s supposed newspaper of record.
The New York Times is major-league biased. Big time.
[A]s the White House campaign hits its final stride under the ominous shadow of the Wall Street meltdown and the deep recession that’s hurtling this way, perhaps the only silver lining — the one unexpected pleasure — has been watching the Drudge Report be completely neutered by current events.
Matt Drudge is still doing his loyal best to boost the chances of the GOP down the homestretch in the form of a blizzard of anti-Obama and pro-McCain links on his site. (Last week, it was the half-baked McCain “comeback” that Drudge hyped relentlessly.)
And there’s no question that Drudge’s Web traffic remains strong and continues to grow, thanks to a burgeoning international audience. But in terms of setting the ground rules — in terms of setting the campaign agenda — Drudge has been AWOL since mid-September when the credit crisis erupted. [...]
While important, Matt Drudge has never set the agenda – and he hasn’t been AWOL either. Drudge is an important part of the media. He is not the media. Even Drudge, as filled as he is with robust self-esteem, knows he’s not Citizen Kane.
It’s good to hear again from the mendacious masochists at the Media Matters spinoff, ConWebBlog, who, like moths to a flame, have returned to the CRC Blog for another good beating.
As Barack Obama’s campaign does everything in its power to deny Obama’s strong ties to ACORN (which his campaign paid around $800,000 to in the current election cycle) ConWebBlog says I have “accuracy issues” for pointing out that ACORN and ACORN’s Project Vote are virtually indistinguishable now and were virtually indistinguishable in 1992 when Barack Obama worked for Project Vote.
ConWebBlog must be getting behind in its research because it relies on an Oct. 5 Huffington Post entry which I refuted in my reply Oct. 8.
An article by Toni Foulkes of ACORN dispels all doubt about the connection circa 1992 between ACORN and Project Vote and Obama. In the article, “Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign,” which appeared in Social Policy magazine in 2004, Foulkes makes it abundantly clear that ACORN and Project Vote were partners in the voter registration drive led by Obama. The article is available here as a PDF file.
Moreover, ACORN’s organizational structure is opaque and fluid and deliberately designed to help the organization avoid outside scrutiny. When ACORN is accused of wrongdoing –which is often– it simply shifts the blame to an affiliated group. This legal shell-game approach has served the group well.
As James Terry of the Consumers Rights League testified (PDF) Sept. 24 before the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and House Administration Subcommittee on Elections Joint Hearing on “Federal, State and Local efforts to Prepare for the General 2008 Election,” ACORN’s “practice of juggling funds and blame between entities has often created good deal of confusion as to which crimes are allegedly committed by ACORN and which activities are those of subsidiaries such as the ‘non-partisan’ 501(c)(3) Project Vote.”
The argument is over. Obama worked for ACORN and Project Vote, training, lecturing, and getting out the vote. ACORN says so.
You’ve got to expect obfuscation from professional obfuscators.
Not surprisingly, the spin doctors at the Huffington Post microscopically lawyered my post Media Matters-style to attempt to get away from the fact that Project Vote is a vital part of left-wing ACORN’s empire of vote fraud and political agitation. (And incidentally, for 30 years ACORN has been laying the groundwork for the subprime mortgage meltdown.)
And as I write this post, news is circulating that police in Las Vegas, Nevada, raided the local ACORN office. Authorities allege that ACORN canvassers “falsified forms with bogus names, fake addresses or famous personalities.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports “that most members of the Dallas Cowboys appeared to be registering in Nevada to vote in November’s general election.” And in Ohio, ACORN admits voter fraud is just part of doing business.
Meanwhile, the HuffPost denies that Project Vote is now and has for years been the voter mobilization arm of ACORN.But now that ACORN is getting bad press by the bushel, HuffPost writer Seth Colter Walls argues that when Barack Obama ran Project Vote in 1992 it wasn’t technically a part of ACORN. (Background: Walls’s original post criticizing Seton Motley of the MediaResearchCenter is here; Motley’s post in response is here; and my post in response to Walls’s original post is here.)
In the immortal words of Tommy Flanagan, Jon Lovitz’s pathological liar character from “Saturday Night Live”: Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Walls produces statements from the Obama campaign and Obama supporters at the ostensibly nonpartisan Project Vote who –surprise, surprise— proffer an invented claim that Project Vote and ACORN didn’t become closely aligned until 1994, which is after they say Obama left Project Vote. Of course there is no credible evidence we’re aware of that substantiates the claim. The HuffPost hasn’t provided any.
Walls’s article is meant to serve as a distraction from the fact that Obama has long been directly involved with ACORN. And unlike the HuffPost, we have proof.
An article by Toni Foulkes of ACORN dispels all doubt. In the article, “Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign,” which appeared in Social Policy magazine in 2004, Foulkes makes it abundantly clear that ACORN and Project Vote were partners in the voter registration drive.
The blog Sweetness & Light has reprinted the text of the article. In a discussion of the primary race in March 2004, Foulkes writes:
Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with alawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).
Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends. And along about early March, we started to see that the African-American community had made its move: when Sen. Obama’s name was mentioned at our Southside Summit meeting with 700 people in attendance from three southside communities, the crowd went crazy. With about a week to go before the election, it was very clear how the African-American community would vote. But would they vote in high enough numbers?
It seemed to us that what Obama needed in the March primary was what we always work to deliver anyway: increased turnout in our ACORN communities. ACORN is active on the south and west sides of Chicago, in the south suburbs and on the east side of Springfield, the state capital. Most of the turf where we organize in is African American, with a growing Latino presence in Chicago’s Little Village and the suburbs. [emphasis added above]
So Obama was right there in the thick of things, organizing for ACORN/Project Vote, representing ACORN in court at its specific invitation and leading ACORN training seminars.
It’s worth noting that groups on the extreme left, such as ACORN’s Project Vote, often have many tentacles. That’s the way they organize themselves. They often have overlapping memberships and interlocking directorates. They align themselves in strategic coalitions all the time. Sometimes they have formal mergers and sometimes they have strategic partnerships. This is their modus operandi.
Interestingly, Foulkes’s article can no longer be accessed online. The website for Social Policy now denies access to that specific article while apparently allowing access to all other articles.
Look at the teaser for the article on the Social Policy website (visit there yourself by clicking here – free subscription required for access to archives):
The titles of articles that are available are highlighted in a brownish color. The title of the Foulkes article, however, appears in black letters indicating that access has been denied.
Guess who’s behind Social Policy magazine? Something called The Institute for Social Justice. The website indicates the address of the magazine is 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue,New Orleans, Louisiana70117. Here is a screen grab of the address from the website:
Go to Sweetness & Light blog and scroll down to the Form 990s (tax returns for nonprofits) and you will see that both ACORN and Project Vote report the same address, 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana70117.
There is also more evidence of the close relationship between Project Vote and ACORN in 1992.
We did find this item on Nexis from The Hotline dated October 8, 1992. The short article is called “VOTER REGISTRATION: PROJECT VOTE! TARGETS URBAN SWING AREAS.” It begins:
Sandy Newman, exec. dir of Project VOTE!, a national non-partisan, non-profit voter participation organization which targets African-American communities, announced that registration efforts have added “over a half million” new voters to the rolls — “most of them in swing presidential states with close Senate races,” including IL, PA, MI, OH, NY, CA, MD and CT.
It indicates that in New York City in October 1992 Project Vote was either part of or closely aligned with ACORN. The exact wording of the relevant paragraph is:
NY:In NYC, Project VOTE! with ACORN and the NY Public Interest Research Group, added more than 90,000 voters (Project VOTE! release, 10/5).
A recent article by Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 6) also lumps ACORN and Project Vote circa 1992 together:
In 1992, Barack Obama worked for Project Vote for about seven months; now Project Vote and ACORN–a coalition of community organizations serving low income families–just wrapped up a voter registration drive targeting battleground states Obama needs to win the White House.
Though officially non-partisan, the focus of the ACORN/Project Vote voter drive was on groups leaning Democratic in the presidential contest: African American, young, Latino and low income earners.
Maybe Sweet didn’t get the memo from the HuffPost.
The especially odious provision in the Wall Street “rescue” package that would have provided millions of dollars in government money for kooky left-wing activists has been deleted.
The Politico reports that the controversial provision in Henry Paulson’s Wall Street bailout package that would have funneled mountains of dough to radical left-wing community organizing groups like ACORN has been removed:
After several days of rage from conservative activists regarding a provision in the bailout bill that would send some of the profits from the sale of distressed assets the goverment buys into an affordable housing trust fund, congressional negotiators have removed section 105(d) of the bailout proposal, according to aides on both side. [sic]
ACORN, a Democratic ally, was not specifically directed any funds in the previous proposal, but money that went to state and local governments could then have been divvied out to the organization, which the GOP said was a deal breaker. Fevered opposition to the provision had become a viral sensation.
It appears that, with the removal of the affordable housing trust fund, all of the proceeds from the sale of assets will now go to retire the debt.
So while conservatism may be limping and moaning in pain right now, it’s certainly not dead, as the liberal Campaign for America’s Future insists.
Politico posted a “discussion draft” of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Wall Street bailout package (PDF of draft here, news story here) and is reporting that the proposal is likely to be voted on by the House tomorrow.
Meanwhile, conservative radio host Mark Levin, whose day job is running the Landmark Legal Foundation, notes correctly that no one is even questioning whether the Paulson bailout is constitutional. (Here is a link to Levin’s show Friday on which he discussed the issue.)
And finally, for those of us who don’t have PhDs in economics, it’s difficult to know who is right about what might happen if there is no bailout, but now Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan White House economist who is no fan of Big Government, says emphatically that the bailout is necessary:
We’re closer to the precipice than Congress or most of the public understands. Our entire economic system really is at stake – and those treating the bailout plan as just another government spending program are seriously wrong.
Failure of this plan risks another Great Depression. Really.
You can see the fear in Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s eyes and in those of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. But they dare not say how critical the situation is – lest it shake confidence and make matters worse.
This is not to say that the administration’s plan is the best we could do. But now is not the time to come up with something better. There is no time. The program can be revised later, when the emergency is past. For now, everyone should hold their noses and vote “yes” on the bailout.
Bartlett, who has a lot of street cred in the conservative and libertarian communities, faults the Bush administration for not properly explaining to the public the need for this unpredented intervention in the marketplace.
There’s been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Sen. John McCain, but Barack Obama [sic] campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.
That’s because, after a year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama’s Democratic Party, Obama’s strategists have changed their approach.
An Obama adviser privy to the campaign’s internal thinking on the matter says that, with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies — what another campaign aide termed “the cavalry” — will come to Obama’s aid.
The Obama campaign can’t ask donors to form outside groups; it can only communicate, through the public and the media, with body language, tells and hints.
The upshot: Obama’s campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. “I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well,” another senior campaign official said.
The Obama campaign, Ambinder reports, is concerned that “a major 527 effort by Republicans could tilt a balanced electorate toward McCain and erase the resource advantage that Obama and Democrats have accumulated.”
Conservatives are indeed raising money. A new 527 group called Leadership for America’s Future is planning to run ads attacking Obama’s themes and emphasizes McCain’s strengths, the New York Sun reports.
Ambinder notes that the American Issues Project, which is actually a 501(c)(4) organization that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, has a $3 million budget for ads in battleground states that stress Obama’s ties to unrepentant terrorist William Ayers. Freedom’s Watch, another 501(c)(4), has spent $500,000 on anti-Obama ads. Vets for Freedom, a political action committee (PAC), intends to spend $10 million on ads supportive of President Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republican Majority Campaign, another PAC, has spent more than $1.3 million to defeat Obama.
The dramatic reversal by the Obama campaign comes less than three months after left-wing pressure group MoveOn.orgdissolved its 527 group in deference to Obama’s wishes. MoveOn commissar-in-chief Eli Pariser gushed at the time that there was no longer a need for the MoveOn.org Voter Fund because a new era had dawned in America:
But in light of the new politics offered by Barack Obama, I’ve come to believe it’s time to close the 527 forever-and to challenge organizations on the right to do the same. Not relying on big donors means that all of us, together, have to take responsibility.
Ahhhhh, how touching.
Although fundraising by 527s in the current election cycle is lagging, with John McCain rising in the polls and quickly erasing Obama’s formerly formidable fundraising advantage, 527s may yet come back into fashion.
And even David Brock’s fizzled 501(c)(4) group, Progressive Media USA, a left-wing hate factory, may yet rise from the ashes. (The Politico’s Ben Smith reported June 6 that the group was to be folded into the Center for American Progress Action Fund and into Brock’s signature venture, the character-assassinating Media Matters for America.)
As of September 2, in the 2008 cycle, all 527s had raised $308,875,318, which is well below the $384,848,245 and $599,202,432 raised in the 2006 and 2004 cycles respectively.
The top two 527s are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and America Votes and they’re both on the political left. SEIU donates to other 527s and America Votes plans to spend big on what it calls the “largest grassroots voter mobilization” in history. In the current cycle, SEIU has taken in $18,090,802 compared to the America Votes figure of $15,610,750.
The fourth 527 on the list, The Fund for America, was created last November by Democracy Alliance chairman Rob McKay and his lieutenants, SEIU’s Anna Burger and the Center for American Progress’s John Podesta (President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff). The new entity has raised $12,141,946 but last fall Roll Call reported that it could pump “perhaps $100 million or more into media buys and voter outreach in the run-up to the 2008 elections.”
The fifth-largest pot of money, $9,110,151 has gone to EMILY’s List, the 527 group that supports pro-abortion rights female Democratic candidates.
In the top five, only Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future is on the political right. The 527 has taken in $14,723,084.
Liberal names top the list of top individual and organizational donors to 527s.
Hollywood mogul Steven Bing is number one, having given $4,850,000. Second is George Soros at $4,650,000. Fourth is philanthropist John R. Hunting at $1,243,000.
The third and fifth names belong to conservatives. They are Sheldon Adelson ($3,597,632) and Fred Godley ($1,100,000).
Of the top five organizations to give money to 527s, the top four are liberal.
They are SEIU ($24,014,524), Soros Fund Management ($4,900,000), Steven Bing’s Shangri-La Entertainment ($4,850,000), and The Fund for America ($3,770,000).
The fifth is conservative Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. ($3,597,632).
All 527s have to be especially careful not to violate the Federal Election Commission’s confusing rules on electioneering, which Swift Boat Veterans for Truth founder Roy Hoffman has called “unconscionably vague.”
The FEC fined a slew of 527 groups, namely, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, and the two 527s of the League of Conservation Voters,a total of $629,500 for crossing the line in 2004. The FEC found that the veterans “expressly advocated” the defeat of presidential candidate John Kerry in ads and direct mail, while the LCV advocated Kerry’s election and the defeat of President Bush through voter canvassing. MoveOn made TV ads targeting Bush. If the 527 groups, which may receive unlimited contributions but are not allowed to advocate for candidates or coordinate activities with them, wanted to become involved in the election campaign as advocates, they should have registered as political action committees and filed the required disclosure statements, the FEC said.
The Democracy Alliance, as we observed in the January 2008 issue of Foundation Watch (“Billionaires for Big Government: What’s Next for George Soros’s Democracy Alliance?”), is slowly maturing and becoming more focused in its objectives.
Could it be that the Democracy Alliance has finally adopted a firm business plan?
Since its founding in 2005, the DA, a liberal donors’ collaborative that aims to create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups–a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement, has focused on fairly well-established pressure groups, watchdogs and think tanks, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations, and political action committees (PACs). These bread-and-butter liberal groups have included:
Media Matters for America
Center for American Progress
People for the American Way
New Democratic Network
Progressive Majority
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Center for Progressive Leadership
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
EMILY’s List
America Votes
Sierra Club
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
But now there seems to be a discernible shift in strategy by the DA, which was created by left-wing billionaires frustrated by John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004. The Alliance, which in the beginning went well beyond a year without having a functioning website, is now suddenly embracing the Internet as an organizing tool. It posted a request for grant applications on its website earlier this year.
The Democracy Alliance’s “Letter of Interest” invited applications for the 2009/2010 giving cycle from all nonprofit groups on the left, but expressed special interest in organizations that do the following types of work:
* Building power and capacity in key constituencies: engagement and issue advocacy work with key constituencies, primarily Latinos and young people, as well as African Americans and unmarried women.
* New media and technology: content generators, aggregators and distributors that disseminate and amplify progressive messages.
* Law and legal systems: working to advance and protect progressive values and policies at all levels of the legal system.
* Early stage idea generators: focusing on progressive idea generation and development at the early and middle stages of the idea cycle including journals, academic networks, books, and non-traditional think tanks..
* Content generation: focusing on traditional and new media vehicles that are capable of developing and effectively promoting progressive ideas.
* Civic engagement coordination: achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in mobilization and participation work through collaboration and coordination and creating economies of scale.
* Civic engagement tools: increasing capacity and availability of data services, including online organizing services for civic engagement groups.
* Election reform: focusing on structural reforms of our democratic process that will increase voter participation among progressive constituencies.
* Youth leadership development: building on the youth development part of the leadership pipeline that includes looking for organizations targeting young people that work at scale.
* Mid-career nonprofit leadership development: building on the mid-career development part of the leadership pipeline that includes looking for organizations working at scale.
The DA’s interest in coalition-building and in harnessing the power of the World Wide Web to advance the cause seems new. The focus on young people and “mid-career development” also seems new. The DA does appears to be applying a more long-term corporate-style business model to its grantmaking operations. This is not surprising given the presence in DA’s membership rolls of titans of business such as Peter B. Lewis (Progressive Insurance) and Rob Glaser (RealNetworks).
The deadline for grant applications passed August 29.
It is unclear which groups applied because the Democracy Alliance is a secretive group. Its founder Rob Stein told a Hudson Institute panel at the end of 2006 that DA activities would become more transparent over time, but from what we can tell, that hasn’t happened. Of course, we’re not holding our breath waiting.
Researchers encounter problems in attempting to identify a grant that came about through the Democracy Alliance because the DA does not generally handle the money directly. Instead, it functions as a clearinghouse, matching causes to willing donors. Unless evidence surfaces that money was funneled through the DA, who’s to say an individual grant didn’t flow to a group without Alliance involvement?
And so we’ll keep scouring databases and websites, asking questions, and waiting for the inevitable leaks.
Whenever Dr. David Madland of the Center for American Progress writes, Karl Marx must look up from the fiery torments of Hell and smile.
According to Madland, director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress (CAP), American media outlets should revert to the Soviet era, routinely churning out tedious Pravda-style articles about how heroic workers received the Order of Lenin for selflessly boosting the nation’s industrial production.
Exaggeration? Perhaps, but CAP is making the extraordinary claim that workers don’t get a fair shake from journalists. CAP, a liberal “action tank” whose stated aim is to “expose the hollowness of conservative governing philosophy, and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter,” has decided to bring Marxist class warfare to its media bias research.
In Madland’s recent study, “Journalists Give Workers the Business: How the Mainstream Media Ignores Ordinary People in Economic News Coverage,” he argues that the views of workers are ignored by the capitalism-loving mainstream media. He found that “the perspective of workers is largely missing from media coverage, while the views of business are frequently presented.”
The study examined 480 news reports about employment, the minimum wage, trade, and credit card debt. Those economic issues “were chosen because they represent a range of economic issues that impact ordinary citizens and that many citizens have defined opinions about.” The reports appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, and CNBC in 2007.
Among the study’s findings were the following:
“Overall, representatives of business were quoted or cited nearly two-and-a-half times as frequently as were workers or their union representatives. In coverage of both the minimum wage and trade, the views of businesses were sourced more than one-and-a-half times as frequently as those of workers. In coverage about employment, businesses were quoted or cited over six times as frequently as were workers.”
The study also noted that “many papers have eliminated a dedicated labor beat, meaning that there are fewer reporters who focus specifically on organized labor and workers.”
But these findings count for little because the Marxist framework that CAP now uses for its media content analysis doesn’t make sense. News-gathering is not an extension of the class struggle and journalistic fairness doesn’t require focusing equally on capital and labor. America is not seething with worker unrest and capitalist oppression.
Businesses -small, medium and large- simply produce more news. The capacity of businesses for taking on an endless variety of tasks and ventures helps them generate more news. Unions perform fewer functions. They are largely focused on negotiating contracts and organizing workers, and they simply don’t do as many newsworthy things.
The ultimate goal of CAP’s quest for “balanced” media is equal sourcing of business and unions even though union influence decreases daily. Union members account for just 12.1% percent of employed wage and salary workers, down dramatically from 20.1% in 1983. (In the public sector, 35.9% of workers are unionized versus just 7.5% of workers in private industry.)
CAP’s desire for 50/50 sourcing is as unnecessary as it is wrong.
Another left-wing group, Media Matters for America, which was jump-started by the Center for American Progress and with millions in dollars from wealthy liberals, last year “discovered” new evidence of conservative bias in the news media. The George Soros-funded group’s study, “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over,” asserts that there are more conservative than liberal op-ed columns in American newspapers. Of course, op-ed columnists have little, if anything, to do with bias in the media. They’re writing pieces that readers understand are opinion-based commentary.
And as Jonah Goldberg points out on National Review Online’s blog, The Corner:
It’s also worth pointing out that op-ed columnists are often selected as an alternative perspective to the editorials of the paper itself. Not that I would wholly trust Media Matters’ accounting,* but it’d be interesting to know what the breakdown of liberal to conservative editorial boards is. Also, not all newspapers are equal. With the exceptions of the Wall Street Journaland theNew York Post, I’m hard pressed to think of a top 20 newspaper that isn’t liberal editorially.
Media Matters, as usual, misses the point.
The American people know that the media is biased to the left. A poll conducted by Zogby International in February 2007 asked approximately 1,800 consumers of news about bias in the mainstream media. A vast majority of respondents, 64%, detected a liberal bias in the media, while only 28% believe there is a conservative bias. This poll joins a large and growing body of evidence that support the idea that the mainstream media is skewed left.
(Capital Research Center intern Matthew Hallam conceived of this article and conducted research on which it is based. Cross-posted at NewsBusters.)
The leftward tilt of journalists is not a figment of your imagination, no matter what the political hacks at Media Matters for America say.
And now there is yet more proof that media employees are putting their money where their mouths are.
Employees of the “Big Media” have contributed 100 times more money to Democrats ($315,533) than to Republicans ($3,150) in the current election cycle, according to William Tate (writing in Investor’s Business Daily today).
I’m not sure that I agree with Tate’s methodology, though, because he excludes contributions made to two GOP contenders who dropped out of the race (Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani). He explains his reasoning thus:
The contributions add up to $315,533 to Democrats and $22,656 to Republicans – most of that to Ron Paul, who was supported by many liberals as a stalking horse to John McCain, a la Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos with Hillary and Obama.
What is truly remarkable about the list is that, discounting contributions to Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who was a favorite son for many folks in the media, the totals look like this: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans (four individuals who donated to McCain).
Let me repeat: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans – a ratio of 100-to-1. No bias there.
But even if donations to the Paul and Giuliani campaigns are included, we are still left with $315,533 for Democrats versus $22,656 for Republicans — yielding a ratio of 14 to 1 in favor of the Democrats.
David Brock’s Progressive Media USA (PMUSA), which vows to spend $40 million attacking John McCain in coming months, has just launched its website.
It isn’t quite a carbon copy of Brock’s Media Matters for America site, which hunts down an elusive creature in the media jungle known as “conservative misinformation,” but it seems to have been modeled on it.
Here is an excerpt from the site’s welcome message date-stamped yesterday:
Welcome to Progressive Media USA, your home for pushback against the right-wing media machine!
For too long, right-wing messages have gotten a free ride in America’s media landscape. The press consistently fails to ask hard questions about failing conservative policies and leaders, often showing little regard for balance, fairness, accuracy, or truth. Progressive Media USA exists to combat this troubling trend.
Progressive Media USA is a new non-profit working to inform you about the risks of conservative policies and leaders by ensuring that progressive voices are heard in the public debate. We will work tirelessly to make sure you know the truth, fact-checking conservative policies and accusations, reporting and researching progressive ideas, and providing a platform for prominent progressive voices to be heard loudly and clearly.
Working with folks like you, we will ensure progressive ideas are heard throughout America.
Given that the left already has the bulk of the news media, Hollywood, and academia incessantly blasting the progressive message to all corners of the several states, it’s hard to imagine Brock turning up the volume any higher, but to each his own.
TPM Election Central reports that PMUSA has also launched a separate anti-McCain site called McCainSource.com complete with news articles, op-eds, and custom-made videos. According to its “about” page:
The goal of McCainSource.com is to make sure the public understands that the policies of John McCain are just like the policies George Bush – the same old commitment to endless war, trillions to Iraq, tax cuts for millionaires, no plan for universal health care and no plan for our economy.
Meanwhile, PMUSA scores a mention in today’s New York Times article on liberal and Democratic campaign finance efforts.
Not too many commentators seem to have noticed that George Soros is slowly but surely becoming the mainstream media that is the focus of the analysis we do at NewsBusters. The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.
As we reported in a recent paper, three years ago Soros acquired 2.6 million shares of the huge diversified media company Time Warner. In 2006 his companies, Soros Strategic Partners and Dune Capital Management, paid $900 million to buy the DreamWorks SKG film library from Viacom, a move that gave Soros the DVD and rebroadcasting rights to films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Gladiator (2000), and American Beauty (1999). As James Hirsen noted, the transaction gives Soros “some highly desirable film rights at a time when the marketing and distribution model is changing to video on demand, video iPods and other forms of digital distribution.” But more importantly, it gives Soros “a presence in Hollywood where likeminded libs are ready, willing and able to collaborate in cinematic social engineering.” Soros is also a funder, whether directly or indirectly, of Media Matters for America, the reflexively liberal noise machine and pretended media watchdog whose modus operandi is to mau-mau the media into mouthing the politically correct platitudes that pass for profound insights on the far left.
Soros is also venturing into media overseas. Earlier this year Soros Fund Management plunked down $100 million for 3% of India’s Reliance Entertainment, a $3 billion conglomerate that aims to provide Internet-based TV programs in India. Reliance also churns out movies and owns movie houses, radio stations and social networking websites in the country with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. When in the 1980s Soros set up offices in Eastern Europe for his philanthropy, the Open Society Institute (OSI), he helped to finance publishers, independent TV and radio outlets, and political parties.
Soros has long been a player in Hollywood. As Rondi Adamson reported in “George Soros, Movie Mogul: ‘Social Justice’ Cinema and the Sundance Institute,” (Foundation Watch, March 2008), OSI has been underwriting “social justice” documentaries since 1996, and in 2001 Soros let actor-director Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute take over his Soros Documentary Fund (since rechristened the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund).
Why is Soros so interested in film? “Documentary films raise awareness and inspire action,” he said. “The Open Society Institute gave vital support to filmmakers working to expose human rights abuses and helped the films find the widest possible audience.” Adamson writes:
Soros, who has given away an estimated $5 billion to various causes since 1991, started his documentary fund as a form of political activism. Gara LaMarche, former vice president and director of U.S. programs for OSI, explained his boss’s motives: “Nonfiction film can spur awareness and action, sometimes touching audiences beyond the reach of other methods.” Movies “teach us about the world, what is happening to our fellow travelers on the globe-what is happening to us-and what we might do about it.” Using the well-worn language of political correctness, LaMarche, who left OSI in April 2007 to head the Atlantic Philanthropies (2006 assets $3.2 billion, grants $748 million), notes that a decade of work by Soros and the Sundance Documentary Fund has helped highlight “marginalized groups and their quest for rights and recognition from one end of the globe to the other.”
Soros’s lieutenant praises the political impact of films like Al Gore’s 2006 global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, a 1960 TV documentary on the plight of farmworkers. He observes that only film images can adequately reveal the meaning of Rodney King’s police beating, of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square, and the extent of “Joseph McCarthy’s deficit of decency”-a characterization of the late senator hotly disputed by scholar M. Stanton Evans in his book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (Crown Forum, 2007).
What’s great about Sundance documentaries, LaMarche writes, is that they can contradict the false image of Iran that George W. Bush projects when he places it in “the so-called Axis of Evil.” And they can overcome the fear created by “nativist vigilante groups like the Minutemen patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border and demanding Draconian treatment of undocumented workers.”
Adamson observes that “most of the documentaries that receive Sundance funding are highly critical of some aspect of American life, capitalism or Western culture. The projects generally share George Soros’s worldview that America is a troubling if not sinister influence in the world, that the War on Terror is a fraud and terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters, and that markets are fundamentally unjust.”
Adamson continues:
Films such as An American Soldier and Persons of Interest (a film about Justice Department detention of Arab and Muslim immigrants after 9/11) and Why We Fight, the much-publicized 2005 Sundance Festival winner (“an anatomy of the American war machine”) underline Soros’s views on the U.S.-led War on Terror. Soros derides the War as “a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies.”
In his view, the phrase War on Terror is a conversation-ender that strikes terror in the hearts of those hearing it. The expression “has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society,” he says. The application of this “misleading figure of speech” has “unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world,” he wrote at the Huffington Post blog (September 29, 2006). It is true that some who support the War on Terror may question the semantic limitations of the “War on Terror” phrase (after all, how does one fight “terror,” a tactic?). But when Soros blames the strife in Gaza, Lebanon, and Somalia -violence-prone regions long before September 11, 2001- on the U.S.-led War on Terror, he betrays his ‘blame America first’ mentality.
From Adamson’s article, here are some examples of films that have been funded by Soros directly or indirectly or that have been screened by the Sundance Institute or shown on the Sundance Channel:
Soldiers of Conscience (2007): “Their country asked them to kill. Their hearts asked them to stop. From West Point grads to drill sergeants, from Abu Ghraib interrogators to low-ranking reservist mechanics; soldiers in the U.S. Army today reveal their deepest moral concerns about what they are asked to do in war.” (film website)
An American Soldier (2008): “A disproportionate number of people serving and dying in Iraq come from small-town southern America. How they get there, rather than why, is the point of ‘An American Soldier.’ It’s a film about process: the seduction process.” (Washington Post film critic John Anderson)
Semper Fi: Always Faithful (in production): “Two retired marines lead the fight for justice for U.S. soldiers exposed to dangerous toxic chemicals while stationed at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base in North Carolina.” (film critic Agnes Varnum)
Our Oil (in production): a documentary about Nigerians and Americans “amid the poverty, corruption and violence of oil production in Nigeria, one of America’s top oil suppliers.” (Sundance Institute press release)
My Baghdad Family (in production), in which a “family in Baghdad grapples with massive changes in their lives after the end of Saddam’s rule. Will their dreams of a new life gradually turn into a nightmare?” (Sundance press release)
Control Room (2004), a documentary about Arabic-language network Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war, which critics have said amounts to pro-Islamist propaganda.
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004), which argues that Fox TV news is a hotbed of conservative misinformation.
The Corporation (2003), a Canadian film that puts modern corporations on the couch and depicts them as sociopathic institutions.
My Terrorist (2002)…about Yulie Gerstel, an Israeli flight attendant who begins to suffer a delayed onset of Stockholm Syndrome after her airplane is hijacked on a flight to London. According to the film’s promotional blurb, “In a remarkable twist of faith, twenty-three years later Gerstel began questioning the causes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians and started to consider helping release the man who almost killed her.”
The Women of Hezbollah…focuses on what its promotional blurb calls two Hezbollah “activists,” Zeinab and Khadjie, examining their “commitment” to the cause. According to one review, the film offers a “complex picture of Islamism, gender relations, feminism and nationalism.”
Meanwhile, Hollywood seems more than content to keep throwing money at box office bombs. Four non-documentary movies that put America in a bad light sank like stones last year:
-The Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones, was about Iraq war combat trauma and its tragic consequences
-Rendition, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep was about an Egyptian being removed from the U.S. and shipped to Egypt by the CIA
-Redacted, directed by Brian De Palma, was about U.S. soldiers tormenting an Iraqi family
-Lions for Lambs, was about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It starred Redford, Tom Cruise and Glenn Close. In an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer about the film, Redford scolded the U.S. media for not being hard enough on the Bush administration: “At the point we found out that the cause behind the war was a lie, that’s when I think everybody should have stood up, wakened up, and moved forward.”
People who want to make inspirational movies about good things Americans have done routinely get the cold shoulder from Hollywood financiers. Action star Bruce Willis is reportedly having trouble getting movie studios interested in his proposed movie about the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, (known as the “Deuce Four”) that heroically battled Islamist fighters in Mosul, Iraq. Willis wants to spotlight “these guys who do what they are asked for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom.”
“Sounds like blockbuster material -but where are the Hollywood heavies who will help him make it and make a buck?” asks Adamson.
And don’t hold your breath waiting for Soros or Sundance to help out conservative movie makers any time soon, because when you love America and American values you’re just not considered hip in Hollywood: Conservatives have to blaze their own path. Three conservative film organizations are doing just that. They are Jim and Ellen Hubbard’s American Film Renaissance (AFR), Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo’s Liberty Film Festival, and Thor Halvorssen’s Moving Picture Institute (MPI).
American Film Renaissance has screened films such as Submission (2004), about Islam and the abuse of women (its maker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim fanatic to send a message), Indoctrinate U (2007), an expose of political correctness on college campuses, and The Call of the Entrepreneur (2007), a paean to economic dynamism. The Liberty Film Festival has screened Border (2007), about the public response to illegal immigration; Suicide Killers (2006), about Islamists’ terror tactics; and The Road to Jenin (2003), about Israel’s military reply to the Palestinian “Passover bombing.” MPI boosts movies such as Mine Your Own Business (2006), a critical look at environmental elitists fighting gold mining operations in desperately poor Romania – against the wishes of local residents who want the mine and the jobs and economic development that would come with it.
(This post is an expanded version of a NewsBusters post from April 12.)
As the adage goes, it’s dangerous to mud-wrestle with a pig because you both end up getting dirty, and the pig likes it.
Which bring us to Media Matters for America, an organization that -despite its insistence to the contrary- is not primarily interested in the truth. The group is interested in detecting and correcting media bias, specifically “conservative misinformation,” in order to intimidate conservative commentators and politically incorrect journalists to ensure they toe the correct ideological line. To this group “conservative misinformation” means conservative ideas, and it is MM’s mission to stamp out, or least marginalize, conservative ideas. Legitimate political differences of opinion are treated as untruths or thought crimes, and the Media Matters approach to content analysis is a sham.
Reduced to a crude syllogism, the Media Matters philosophy could be rendered as:
Conservatism equals hate.
Hate is bad and should be eradicated.
Therefore conservatism should be eradicated – using any means possible.
MM’s approach is similar to that employed by Morris Dees’s (ultra-wealthy) Southern Poverty Law Center. In the eyes of the SPLC, one practices “hate” whenever one fails to genuflect with politically correct reverence before every human difference. Translation: Do what we say or we’ll slander you and have activists hound you.
Similarly, MM regards people who embrace conservative ideas as infidel purveyors of hate, and conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly are routinely smeared by MM – not because they make mistakes or are biased, but precisely because they hold conservative views. In the parallel universe inhabited by Media Matters, Hardball’s Chris Matthews, who was a speechwriter in the Carter White House and an aide to the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, is a right-winger! According to MM columnist Eric Alterman, New York Times executive editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Keller is a “neoconservative” and The New Republic magazine is a right-wing rag. (Of course, talking heads on the right are not infallible and if they make mistakes, those errors should be pointed out. A bona fide media watchdog that kept its eye on the right and kept reporters and pundits honest might contribute something of value to society, but that’s not what Media Matters is, and that’s not what it does.)
The misdeeds of Media Matters are legion but no matter how long anyone spends documenting them, the group will always have a sophomoric high school debating-level comeback brimming with indignation and condescension. There is a new outrage virtually every day on the Media Matters site, but when one points out the absurdity of the latest post, the group won’t concede anything. Brock’s minions just keep on arguing and arguing and arguing while becoming progressively more haughty and obnoxious. (The MM site does contain a near-empty “Corrections” page. It shows exactly three corrections as of today. Considering the volume of bile the site churns out, three seems like a low number.)
ConWebBlog and the Rules of Evidence
Anyway, let’s now move on to yesterday’s post by ConWebBlog, a website run by a Media Matters staffer who likes to keep pointing out that the two groups are separate. (Whatever, dude. You work for Media Matters and your approach mirrors that of your employer. What’s your point?)
The writer gives the piece, a response to a blog entry I wrote, the headline ‘Powerful Circumstantial Evidence’ and I visualize someone jumping excitedly in the air shouting “eureka!” or “gotcha!” The “powerful circumstantial evidence” phrase appears in my post “Soros’s Political ‘Hit Man’ Brock Takes Aim at McCain” (NewsBusters version here, Capital Research Center blog version here).
My point was that it’s interesting how Media Matters, which specializes in a Clintonian legalistic parsing of statements, is suddenly playing dumb about the rules of evidence:
Um, how can evidence be both “powerful” and “circumstantial”? Doesn’t the fact that Vadum is resorting to circumstantial evidence to support his claim demonstrate that it is, in fact, not powerful?
No, not at all, unless all you know about evidence is what you picked up by watching TV shows. As any lawyer can tell you, circumstantial evidence is often the most powerful evidence. Eyewitnesses are often unreliable. They can be bribed and intimidated. Video and audio recordings can be tampered with, but good, solid circumstantial evidence is not easily ignored. “Circumstantial evidence can be, and often is much more powerful than direct evidence,” according to attorney Robert Precht, who noted that circumstantial evidence was strong enough to convict Timothy McVeigh of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
Here’s a textbook-style example of circumstantial evidence. A hears a gunshot and then immediately walks into a windowless room to find B dead. C is standing there alone holding a smoking gun. A cannot testify truthfully that he saw C kill B, but A can testify truthfully as to what he witnessed that happens to suggest C’s guilt. Other indirect evidence may also be brought in that points to C’s guilt such as the existence of C’s fingerprints on the gun used in the killing, results from ballistics tests, results from a lab test showing gunpowder burns on C’s hands, or testimony from another that C believed his wife was having a romantic affair with B. (Books have been written on the use of indirect evidence.) C may very well be convicted on the strength of indirect evidence even though it might not be proved absolutely that he killed B. In other words, C may be found guilty on the strength of indirect evidence alone. Is this a bad thing? Of course not.
MM’s constant, lawyerly insistence on direct “proof” sounds reasonable at first, probably because most readers don’t grasp the difference between direct and indirect proof. But once you actually think through the implications and realize that insisting on direct proof alone excludes from consideration things that are obviously true, that evidentiary standard doesn’t sound quite as reasonable anymore.
Media Matters and George Soros
This brings us to the relationship between Media Matters and George Soros. It’s true, as Media Matters has pointed out on its website, that no one (at least no one I know of) has produced a canceled check to Media Matters signed by Soros.
So what? There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence connecting the Democratic duo.
They’re on the same political team, share roughly the same worldview, and know each other. Brock met with Soros in his home last week to discuss Progressive Media USA’s planned $40 million attack ad campaign against presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain. They both attend Democracy Alliance meetings. The Democracy Alliance, which is trying to move America’s political culture to the left and in which Soros is a major player, has directed at least $7 million to Media Matters.
As I wrote in my blog post the other day:
The $7 million donation, which may have come from one or more Democracy Alliance members including Soros himself, is also referenced at page 117 of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai, a book published in 2007 by Penguin Press. In addition, Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein acknowledged his consortium’s role in directing funding to Media Matters. During a panel discussion held by the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal on November 30, 2006, Stein responded to a question from fellow panelist Byron York about “the media organizations in which your partners were putting their money – which ones were they?” Stein responded by saying (see page 22 of PDF): “The major media organization that has been publicly identified is Media Matters. But there are some others, now, that we have funded.”
If George Soros is not funding Media Matters, the group certainly expends significant resources to defend him. A search I just performed on MM’s search page for George Soros (with his name sandwiched in-between quotation marks as “george soros,” and without “start” and “end” dates) generated 235 hits. That’s a lot of defense for Media Matters to be playing, especially for someone who remains virtually unknown except by politics junkies and those interested in finance.
Much better known figures on the left haven’t been discussed as frequently on the MM website, according to searches conducted the same way. A search for Arianna Huffington generated just 31 hits. Here are the numbers I got when searching the names of other noteworthy figures on the left using MM’s internal search engine: Bill Maher got 36 hits, Hugo Chavez got 64 hits, and Jimmy Carter, who is in the news frequently, got 158 hits. (Note: Admittedly, this might not be the most scientific approach, but it does at least provide a snapshot of MM’s priorities. Also, all these figures, obtained April 14, 2008, are subject to change as MM’s site is updated.)
Could Media Matters be less interested in discussing these other figures because they don’t rely on them for funding?
David Horowitz said the two have ties, and CNSNews.com reported the following in 2005:
Media Matters for America, the group headed by conservative turned liberal writer David Brock, has changed course on its stated association with billionaire liberal financier George Soros.
After initially claiming on Dec. 1, 2004 that “neither Media Matters nor its president and CEO David Brock has received any money from Soros or from any organization with which he is affiliated,” the group is no longer disavowing any connection with groups “affiliated” with Soros.
The Media Matters shift came after Cybercast News Service questioned the group’s financial ties and demonstrated that there were numerous and extensive links between Media Matters and several Soros “affiliates” like MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress and Soros ally Peter Lewis.
Media Matters for America (MMA) spokeswoman Sally Aman responded to Cybercast News Service’s questions with an e-mail. “In response to your query regarding donor funding Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros,” Aman stated, no longer denying any relationship with organizations affiliated with Soros.
She went on to reference the “early support from Moveon.org, and the New Democrat Network,” that Media Matters had received.
Search Google using the terms “george soros” and “media matters” together. I just did and got 62,800 hits. Use “george soros” and “david brock” and you’ll get 13,200 hits. The two must have a lot in common.
And why is Media Matters so afraid of being linked to Soros? Most major groups on the right already take it as a given that Soros funds MM anyway.
ConWebBlog’s Admissions
ConWebBlog fails to respond to other key points in the same post, such as the fact that Brock is in the habit of not telling the truth, but offers some encouraging admissions.
The blog repeats my comment that Brock’s assumption of the chairmanship of Progressive Media USA is tantamount to Brock publicly unmasking himself “as a partisan political operative, as opposed to a mere liberal ideologue.” This is true, and I’m glad that ConWebBlog is honest enough to admit it, though it responds with an infantile but-you-guys-did-it-first argument.
The blog continues: “Vadum doesn’t note that the precedent for such ‘partisan political operative’ activism was set by … the Media Research Center.” Really? Tell someone who cares. I was writing about Media Matters, not the Media Research Center.
I do not and cannot speak for the Media Research Center, a group with which I’ve been associated only since last year. I do not work for MRC and I speak only for myself in my NewsBusters blog posts. On NewsBusters, some of the writers work for MRC, and some don’t. (I get zip, zero, nada for my blog posts.) The Media Matters site, on the other hand, is a far more monolithic paid operation. NewsBusters is more of a true blog: posts are not screened by editors before they go up on the website. Media Matters has a different approach. Its posts speak for the organization and apparently have to be approved by senior management before they appear on the MM website.
Although I’ve heard they’re fine individuals, I don’t know Brent Bozell or Scott Hogenson personally and confess I am not familiar with their resumes.
Illogical Thinking Rules at Media Matters
Logical thinking is in short supply at Media Matters, so it’s no surprise that Eric Boehlert pummeled Chris Matthews in his MM column today for what he alleged were misogynistic comments. It is true that Matthews has been harshly critical of Senator Clinton, but the fact that he was harshly critical of her is not proof of misogyny.
And were the comments complained of actually misogynistic? First we need a definition of misogyny: the word means “hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women.”
Boehlert doesn’t waste time explaining what “misogyny” is because he knows his fellow-traveler readers are on the same politically correct wavelength and they understand the sense in which he is using the term.
According to Boehlert (who refers back to a colleague’s earlier column for examples), Matthews is misogynistic, that is, a hater of women, because he
* featured a Photoshopped image of Clinton sporting “She Devil” horns while discussing Republican efforts to demonize her;
* repeatedly likened Clinton to “Nurse Ratched,” the scheming, heartless character from the mental hospital drama One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest;
* described her laugh as a “cackle,” suggested she was “anti-male,” “witchy,” and was on a “short … leash”;
* referred to Clinton as “Madame Defarge” and described male politicians who endorsed Clinton as “castratos in the eunuch chorus”;
* compared Clinton to a “strip-teaser,” wondered whether she was “a convincing mom,” referred to Clinton’s “cold eyes” and the “cold look” she supposedly gives people;
* claimed that “some men” say Clinton’s voice sounds like “fingernails on a blackboard.”
It’s pretty thin gruel and it’s also the same old militant gender-feminist piffle that millions of Americans have been forced to pretend to agree with in order to escape college. I have not seen the clips complained of, but let’s go out on a limb and assume the quotations and descriptions are accurate, and, relying exclusively on Boehlert’s work, let’s go through this supposed evidence that Matthews is a member-in-good-standing of the He-Man Woman Haters Club:
* featured a Photoshopped image of Clinton sporting “She Devil” horns while discussing Republican efforts to demonize her;
It seems like Matthews was trying to demonstrate how Republicans were characterizing Hillary Clinton. It doesn’t seem like Matthews was asserting that he necessarily agreed.
* repeatedly likened Clinton to “Nurse Ratched,” the scheming, heartless character from the mental hospital drama One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest;
Is the mere fact that Matthews compared a public official who happens to be a woman to a villainous female character in a movie proof that Matthews is a woman-hater? Matthews certainly wouldn’t be the first pundit to accuse Mrs. Clinton of being scheming and heartless. The larger implication here is that any criticism of Mrs. Clinton is unacceptable to Media Matters, and that the group believes anyone who criticizes her should be vilified and demonized. MM is not merely interested in making sure Mrs. Clinton is treated fairly.
* described her laugh as a “cackle,” suggested she was “anti-male,” “witchy,” and was on a “short … leash”;
Matthews is not the first to criticize Mrs. Clinton’s laugh for sounding forced, phony, and odd. Criticizing her laugh does not prove Matthews is misogynistic. She is certainly not the first candidate for president in the history of the Republic to be criticized for her personal idiosyncrasies. I confess I have no idea what Matthews is talking about when he calls her “anti-male,” but the mere fact that he labeled her as anti-male does not in itself prove he is misogynistic. Although the “witchy” descriptor is not what immediately pops into my head when I think of Senator Clinton, Matthews is not the first to liken Hillary to a witch. When you run for the White House, you have to expect people will say nasty things about you, but the fact that nasty comments have been made is not proof of habitual hatred of women. (Or maybe this is a case of Media Matters striving for accuracy in reporting? Naaaaaaah.) As for Hillary being on a “short…leash,” she is, reportedly. I’ve read numerous media accounts about how scripted she is on the campaign trail, and how her appearances are tightly choreographed. What’s so offensive here, anyway? Is the word leash a code word of some kind?
* referred to Clinton as “Madame Defarge” and described male politicians who endorsed Clinton as “castratos in the eunuch chorus”;
The comparison of Mrs. Clinton to a villainous figure in Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities may be harsh, but again, comparing her to a fictional character doesn’t by itself show that Matthews is misogynist. (I’ve always thought disgraced terrorist lawyer Lynne Stewart was more the Madame Defarge type, but that’s just me.) As for comparing male politicians who endorsed Hillary to castratos, again, it’s harsh, even crude, by what does it actually have to do with hating women?
* compared Clinton to a “strip-teaser,” wondered whether she was “a convincing mom,” referred to Clinton’s “cold eyes” and the “cold look” she supposedly gives people;
Comparing Hillary to a stripper is harsh, but so what? Ditto the arguments above. Questioning her mothering skills or her perceived mothering skills is quite harsh and probably irrelevant but how is it an example of woman-hating? As to “cold eyes” and a “cold look,” as a reporter I got up close to Senator Clinton a few times and beg to differ. When I saw her, she -I hate to admit it- exuded warmth and had a kind of star quality. Nevertheless, saying she has “cold eyes” and a “cold look,” is hardly a misogynistic statement.
* claimed that “some men” say Clinton’s voice sounds like “fingernails on a blackboard.”
I’ve heard this many times. I don’t mind her voice but I’ve heard from many men and many women that they don’t like the senator’s voice. How is a statement indicating that a group of men don’t like her voice an example of woman-hating?
Hitchens and his Comment
The intolerant, politically correct, militant gender-feminist outlook of Media Matters was illustrated in a particularly ridiculous, frivolous post earlier this month labeled “On Tim Russert, Hitchens said to Sullivan: “Oh, well don’t be such a lesbian. Get on with it.”
The silly post discusses the word “lesbian,” which Christopher Hitchens used on a talk show. The other guest shown in the video clip MM provides, Andrew Sullivan, hesitated during a discussion and Hitchens said “Oh, well, don’t be such a lesbian. Get on with it.”
The web page urges readers to contact Tim Russert and NBC executives Steve Capus and Phil Griffin to express their concerns.
It’s worth noting that “lesbian” isn’t a swear word as such, and some (myself included) may wonder why Hitchens used it. But it’s not at all clear from the MM post why exactly we’re supposed to be offended. Sullivan, who is openly gay and quite capable of expressing outrage on his own, didn’t seem offended at all. In fact, he laughed.
What point is Media Matters trying to make? Is it that it’s bad to call someone, anyone, a lesbian? Or perhaps it’s bad to call someone who, by virtue of being a male, cannot by definition be a lesbian. Maybe it’s bad to use the word as an epithet and throw it around without properly genuflecting to the PC gods first.
Whatever the reason, MM believes we’re supposed to be offended by the L-word, and we’re all just supposed to know instinctively why we’re offended.
But what’s more interesting than what’s in the post, is what’s been left out of the post.
The post may be motivated, at least in part, by MM CEO Brock’s personal hostility toward Hitchens. In a review of Brock’s memoir of his political epiphany, Blinded by the Right, Hitchens wrote, “I would say without any hesitation that he [Brock] is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it.” (See the paper my employer, Capital Research Center, published on Media Matters last year in Foundation Watch, which I edit.) Yet no reference to the past run-ins between Brock and Hitchens is referenced on the post. It’s surprising that MM, which screams about fairness daily, fails to disclose the history of animus between Hitchens and himself. It’s a pretty serious omission that speaks volumes about Media Matters.
Add to that the fact that MM analysts are always going for the jugular. Once the target has been acquired, the group makes no effort to distinguish between statements that are serious assertions and those that are facetious or tongue-in-cheek. If a figure on MM’s enemies list makes a statement that leaves the group any kind of an opening, even if the statement is clearly intended as a joke, MM pounces, context be damned.
Anyway, I still want to know why I am supposed to be offended so I just sent an email to host Tim Russert:
Hi Tim.
The Media Matters website implied I was supposed to be offended by comments made on your show.
On Tim Russert, Hitchens said to Sullivan: “Oh, well don’t be such a lesbian. Get on with it”
Summary: On MSNBC’s Tim Russert, responding to Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan said, “And now you’ve made me forget my second point,” to which Hitchens replied, “Oh, well, don’t be such a lesbian. Get on with it.”
Why do you think I am supposed to be offended? Is “lesbian” a bad word?
If I get a substantive, non-form letter response, I’ll post it.
David Brock, the president and CEO of the George Soros-funded character assassination factory, Media Matters for America (MM), which euphemistically describes its mission as “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” isn’t even pretending to be nonpartisan or fair anymore. Brock has assumed the chairmanship of Progressive Media USA (PMUSA) and in that role will spearhead “a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain,” the Politico reports. “We’re a little behind where we need to be,” Brock said last week of the fledgling group’s fundraising following a Manhattan meeting with Soros, the left-wing philanthropist, and Paul Begala, the ubiquitous TV talking head and longtime Democratic Party operative. As a 501(c)(4) organization, PMUSA doesn’t have to disclose its donors, the article notes, adding that Brock said he will form a related 527 group, Progressive Media Action, so the campaign can take in donations from unions and other sources.
According to Brock, who is author of the new book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, presumptive GOP presidential nominee McCain is a shameless flip-flopper who’s gotten a pass from an adoring media. Brock says reporters have “fallen down on the job” when covering the Arizona senator and are “in love with John McCain.” PMUSA, he says, can help do what journalists ought to be doing while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama duke it out for the Democratic nomination. “Brock’s words, and his unpaid chairmanship, reflect alarm that Democrats are missing an opportunity to define McCain, even as the presumptive nominee tours the country telling his own story,” writes the Politico’s Ben Smith.
Conservatives ought to welcome Brock’s refreshing honesty. At last he has publicly unmasked himself as a partisan political operative, as opposed to a mere liberal ideologue. Such candor from Brock, the self-described former “right-wing hit man” turned left-wing hit man, is a rare occurrence indeed. (For more on Brock’s mendacity see Rondi Adamson’s profile of Media Matters. Although Adamson’s report is thorough, it barely skims the surface of Brock’s various deceptions. For more on Brock and his tall tales, a good place to start is the “Articles and commentary” section of Wikipedia’s entry on Brock.)
It’s worth noting here that media content analysis, at least as it applies to political news, has traditionally been concerned with the detection of bias, as opposed to functioning as a means of stamping out views with which the content analyst may disagree. Brock seems likely to bring his unique brand of media content analysis -which involves mau-mauing the media into mouthing the politically correct platitudes that pass for profound insights on the far left- to his anti-McCain campaign.
Media Matters relies on what could be called a Leninist approach, complete with paid professional revolutionaries, in an ongoing effort to shame Americans who deal in ideas into embracing, or at least not opposing, their political agenda. This tack motivates the faithful and silences opponents.
These perpetually humorless PC language enforcers are doing their best to alter political discourse by trying to make certain words and the ideas they represent socially unacceptable. Readers of NewsBusters need hardly be reminded that when such ideas are expressed in major media outlets, MM leaps into action, marginalizing those who express them, and urging activists to write complaint letters and e-mails. In some cases, the group tries to have the offender removed from the media outlet (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter).
Astonishingly, Media Matters continues to vigorously deny that it is funded by George Soros, but the group’s denials, which rely on hairsplitting, evasion, and shall we say, ‘lawyerly’ use of language, are hard to believe. When denying receiving money from Soros, MM typically notes that there is no actual paper trail proving Soros funds the group, but self-servingly leaves out powerful circumstantial evidence that suggests Soros funds MM at least indirectly. (Examples of the Soros dance appear here and here on the MM website.)
It has been reported that MM has received at least $7 million under the auspices of the Democracy Alliance, a Soros-led consortium of wealthy liberal donors that matches donors to causes the group considers worthy. The $7 million donation, which may have come from one or more Democracy Alliance members including Soros himself, is also referenced at page 117 of The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai, a book published in 2007 by Penguin Press. In addition, Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein acknowledged his consortium’s role in directing funding to Media Matters. During a panel discussion held by the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal on November 30, 2006, Stein responded to a question from fellow panelist Byron York about “the media organizations in which your partners were putting their money – which ones were they?” Stein responded by saying (see page 22 of PDF): “The major media organization that has been publicly identified is Media Matters. But there are some others, now, that we have funded.”
If George Soros is not funding Media Matters, the group certainly expends significant resources to defend him. A search I just performed on MM’s search page for George Soros (with his name sandwiched in-between quotation marks as “george soros,” and without “start” and “end” dates) generated 235 hits. That’s a lot of defense for Media Matters to be playing, especially for someone who remains virtually unknown except by politics junkies and those interested in finance.
Much better known figures on the left haven’t been discussed as frequently on the MM website, according to searches conducted the same way. A search for Arianna Huffington generated just 31 hits. Here are the numbers I got when searching the names of other noteworthy figures on the left using MM’s internal search engine: Bill Maher got 36 hits, Hugo Chavez got 64 hits, and Jimmy Carter, who is in the news frequently, got 158 hits. (Note: Admittedly, this might not be the most scientific approach, but it does at least provide a snapshot of MM’s priorities. Also, all these figures, obtained April 14, 2008, are subject to change as MM’s site is updated.)
Could Media Matters be less interested in discussing these other figures because they don’t rely on them for funding?
Thank you, ConWebBlog, for taking the time to read my recent NewsBusters/Capital Research Center post on the money Al Gore stands to make from the growing global warming industry. (The item was cross-posted here. ) Unfortunately, though, you appear to have missed the point of the post. Let me explain.
In that entry and in the April 1 item (cross-posted here) I wrote that Al Gore, the former Vice President-cum-tycoon who is now worth much more than $100 million, is trying to create an artificial market in the U.S. for the right to generate carbon dioxide emissions. He’s pressing his point through a $300 million advertising campaign and apparently through Google, Inc., where he has served as a senior advisor since 2001.
If he succeeds and carbon trading comes to this country, he will be uniquely positioned to cash in through his involvement in the London-based investment firm, Generation Investment Management LLP (GIM), and through the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Both of these firms invest in so-called green industries.
However, for reasons known only to Gore and his handlers, he is now denying the obvious, namely, that he stands to profit from the expansion of carbon trading. This is a patently absurd assertion for Gore to make given that he was the star of An Inconvenient Truth, and is now a fabulously successful businessman who is already knee deep in the global warming industry and who has been profiled in Business Week, Fortune, Fast Company, and in other business media outlets.
It’s as plain as the beard nose on his face. You’ll have to ask Gore why he has become a global warming profit denier. If he tells you, please let me know.
You seemed to have gotten the wrong idea about my views on making money. I believe that capitalism is a wonderful thing.
But when business transactions are predicated on fraudulent premises, that is an entirely different matter.
Global warming, if it’s even happening, isn’t the threat Gore and his fellow climate alarmists make it out to be.
Global warming activists don’t even have the facts on their side. This flurry of activism comes despite the fact that warming peaked in 1998, there has been no net warming since 2001, and the atmosphere has actually shown a cooling trend of late, according to the government’s own data [microwave sounding unit (MSU) data are available at http://www.atmos.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt].
People who try to make money by playing the role of Chicken Little and playing up a nonexistent threat are dishonest hucksters.
Speaking of snake-oil salesmen, I noticed from your blog that you are affiliated with Media Matters for America, an in-your-face group headed by admitted serial liar David Brock, and known for its hyperbolic hairsplitting, half truths, and somewhat entertaining sophistry. You might enjoy this profile Rondi Adamson wrote for us on Media Matters last year.
Another left-wing boot camp has arrived on the scene and it’s a spinoff of MoveOn.org, the radical group created to rationalize Bill Clinton’s presidential peccadillos.
As reported by “Alyson” of RedState, the New Organizing Institute (NOI) just recently hosted an all-expenses paid training session for 40 lefty bloggers. What is odd is that the bloggers, a category of people for whom digital logorrhea is the norm, are largely remaining silent about their experiences at the Blogger Summit and Training that took place March 14 through March 16. The event was co-hosted by George Soros affiliates the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Media Matters for America, along with Center for Independent Media.
The New Organizing Institute itself was founded by two former labor activists who worked on the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, Judith Freeman and Zack Exley. According to their posted bios, Freeman was a senior political strategist in the AFL-CIO’s political department, and Exley was Organizing Director at MoveOn.org, and “played a part in early [Howard] Dean Internet strategy.” Yeaahaaah!!! Exley is currently a Senior Strategist with D.C.-based fundraising and communications firm, O’Brien McConnell Pearson (OMP), which does work both for the William J. Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Today’s Washington Times has a fascinating article by Donald Lambro on Senator Hillary Clinton’s close ties to two hard-driving left-wing nonprofits — the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America. As Lambro writes, “An extensive political network of advocacy think tanks and bloggers that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her campaign donors helped create and bankroll is playing a strategic role in her bid for the White House.”
Rondi Adamson’s excellent article on Media Matters for America, the George Soros-funded liberal attack machine run by David Brock, was republished in Human Events. Media Matters claims –amazingly enough– that the mainstream media deliberately promotes “conservative disinformation” and must be exposed in order to protect a gullible public. The original article appeared in the July 2007 edition of Foundation Watch.
Herbert and Marion Sandler are the billionaire California financiers who contributed $13 million to pro-Kerry 527 organizations in 2004–including $2.5 million to the MoveOn.org Voter Fund–and subsequently joined George Soros’s Democracy Alliance (of fellow billionaires) to build a liberal think-tank infrastructure. The New York Times reports that they have committed $10 million to start a nonprofit that will hire investigative journalists. The group, called Pro Publica, whose chairman will be Mr. Sandler, plans to hire 24 journalists to write stories about business and government misdeeds. Pro Publica plans to give away its stories to interested news organizations at no cost. Besides the Sandlers, the group has received funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies (whose new CEO is Gara LaMarche, former U.S. program director at Soros’ Open Society Institute) and the JEHT Foundation.
If this Times story concerned Rupert Murdoch it would probably have caused more commentary. The Times only says the Sandlers’ project is an innovative response to newsroom cutbacks. However, Slate’s Jack Shafer questions whether what he calls ”foundation journalism” can be non-partisan and non-ideological, for which he is chided by Eric Alterman, of all people, writing in Media Matters. Alterman is shocked, shocked that liberal activism would be imputed to the promotion of serious investigative journalism.
Of course, ideological advocacy and investigative journalism have gone hand-in-hand since the days of Ida Tarbell. The Nation magazine has an affiliated Nation Institute with $3 million in revenue (2005) and Mother Jones is the principal product of the Foundation for National Progress (2006 revenue: $9.6 million). Reporter David Corn recently announced he’s leaving the Nation to head up a new seven person news bureau at Mother Jones.
Byron York’s National Review column today takes a look at the moneymen behind the 501(c)(3) charitable group Media Matters, which is helping to coordinate the Senate Democrats’ effort to get Rush Limbaugh’s radio show kicked off Armed Forces Radio. Capital Research Center also reviewed the group, its connections and its founder David Brock in the July issue of Foundation Watch.
