NY Times: Media Matters exists to 'misdirect' attacks on Hillary

[Theowl32]

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters appeared on MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner yesterday to discuss the controversy surrounding the Clintons. The issues were whether or not they provided favors in return for money that either they or their family foundation received over the years, as alleged in the new book Clinton Cash, and how they were handling the allegations.

Peters felt that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has started to take steps to address the problems by using sycophants to misdirect and obfuscate any criticism leveled against them, as David Brock from Media Matters has been trying to do for the last several weeks:

"The Clinton campaign has certainly already taken some steps to try to get ahead of public relations problems, like that, for example, Hillary resigned from the board. I think they’re going to have to be more transparent about the speaking fees, because those questions are going to keep on piling up.

You know, what I wonder is if the Clinton message machine ever decides to kind of recalibrate and dial it back a little bit because right now, and this isn’t all coming from the Clinton camp itself, but it comes from that orbit around them, where you have these people whose main goal is to misdirect and obfuscate every time there is this slightest bit of criticism about the Clinton’s leadership.

They are misdirecting. Exactly. They are definitely misdirecting here, this is what Media Matters exists to do."




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Man oh man. I wish the conservatives would not fall for this shit put out by the main stream media. As bad as the old hag his and as pathetic as Clintons have been, they are 1000 times better than their real hero.

Pocahontas will make obama look like Reagan. I will put it to you that way.

 

[Stephanie]

Holy smokes. that's the first Truthful things I've seen come out of the NYslimes I think in YEARS.

hell is going to freeze over

THEY ARE also using what they are famous for. Character ASSASSINATIONS against anyone who speaks out against them

You want eight more years of being treated like dog shit by these TYRANTS in the progressive party, vote for the nasty, corrupted witch. HILLARY or Lizzy Warren or the 100 year old Bernie baby Sanders.

 

[Obiwan]

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/mediamattersagendasandactivities.html
Functioning, in effect, as a clearinghouse for leftwing outrage, the organization's stock in trade is feigning outrage at perspectives that clash with the far-left prejudices of its directors. As a consequence, Media Matters has a well-earned reputation for portraying honest differences of opinion as lies or worse.

In this, the organization takes its cues from its founder and CEO, the self-described former "right-wing hit man" turned left-wing hit man, David Brock. A former dirt-dishing reporter for the conservative magazine The American Spectator in the 1990s, Brock today claims to have undergone a political epiphany. He has renounced his past writings, critical of liberal figures from Anita Hill to President Bill Clinton, as a confection of lies and slanders. But the evidence suggests that while he now identifies with the political left, his modus operandi is unchanged. As his tell-all books, Blinded By The Right and The Republican Noise Machine demonstrate, dishing dirt and distorting the facts remain his stock-in-trade.

A case in point is Brock's justification for Media Matters. In Brock's judgment, and against all evidence, the mainstream media has fallen under the sway of conservative ideology, thus explaining, in Brock's conspiratorial view, the many discussions about "liberal bias" in prominent media outlets. "The right wing in this country has dominated the debate over liberal bias. By dominating that debate, my belief is they've moved the media itself to the right and therefore they've moved American politics to the right," Brock says. Hence the supposed need for Media Matters: "I wanted to create an institution to combat what they're doing."

During a February 2005 talk at the leftwing Center for American Progress, Brock said: "We have seen the mainstream media increasingly accommodating conservatism and this is not an accident. This is the result of coordinated and financed effort by the right wing to pressure, push and bully the media to do that. The media today is a political issue. I believe it is conservatives that have politicized it." The same theme pervades Brock's 2004 book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, in which he claims that the "most important sectors of the political media—most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites," provide a "structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism." It does not seem to occur to Brock that such alternative media outlets, unlike the ostensibly non-partisan news media that they charge with liberal bias and that reach many times the audience, are designed specifically to express conservative opinions.

Although polls indicate that Americans overwhelmingly reject the assertion that mainstream media outlets espouse a conservative bias, the claim has found an enthusiastic audience among increasingly bitter Democrats and leftwing political operatives eager to account for the diminished fortunes of the Democratic Party and the dwindling appeal of welfare-statism and liberal appeasement attitudes as a governing ideology. So when Brock announced his intention to counter the supposedly bullying influence of conservatives on the media, leftwing billionaires lined up to bankroll his cause.

Standing behind Brock was John Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration and the head of the "progressive" Washington DC think tank, the Center for American Progress. Beyond helping Brock develop Media Matters, Podesta provided Brock with office space in the capitol for his fledgling outfit. Well-to-do liberals followed in short order. Media Matters received over $2 million in seed donations from a roster of affluent donors. (This was a sum larger than a ten year budget for a site like www.frontpagemag.com.)

The list of Brock's donors included Leo Hindery Jr., a former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, a co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and a close ally of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York; James Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist who nearly served as ambassador to Luxembourg during the Clinton administration; Bren Simon, a Democratic activist and the wife of shopping-mall developer Mel Simon; and New York psychologist and philanthropist Gail Furman. Media Matters, whichcan accept tax-deductible contributions under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code,has also benefited from the patronage of Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corp. Lewis, a longtime consort of leftwing financier George Soros, has disbursed more than $7 million to so-called "527s," activist groups that affect political neutrality in order to solicit unlimited contributions under a provision of the Internal Revenue Service tax code.

Media Matters has not always been forthcoming about its high-profile backers. In particular, the group has long labored to obscure any financial ties to George Soros. The tactic met with success until December 1, 2004, when conservative journalist and author David Horowitz published a column in Front Page Magazine connecting Media Matters to Soros. Horowitz's allegations prompted an indignant response from Media Matters, subtlely titled "Proven Liar Horowitz said Media Matters Ignores the Facts," accusing him of dealing in "outright falsehood." Wrote Media Matters: "Horowitz asserted that Media Matters has received funding from billionaire philanthropist George Soros. To date, 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." (emphasis added)

But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) haddetailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros "affiliates"—among them MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress and Soros confederate Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, Media Matters was forced to retreat from its phony defense (but did not offer any apologies to Horowitz). A Media Matters spokesman cautiously explained that "Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros" (emphasis added), a transparent evasion.

Nor were groups cited by CNC the only connection between Media Matters and Soros. As investigative journalist Byron York has noted, another Soros-affiliate that bankrolled Media Matters was the New Democratic Network. In addition, Soros is reported to be involved in the newly formed Democracy Alliance, a partnership between some 80 affluent leftwing financiers who have each vowed to contribute $1 million or more in order to build up an ideological infrastructure of leftwing thinks tanks and advocacy groups. News reports reveal that one of the main beneficiaries of the Alliance's funding will be Media Matters. Brock, for his part, has no hesitation about conscripting his organization into the embryonic movement that aims to amplify the agenda of the political left. "I view Media Matters as part of a large machine that's being built," Brock told an interviewer in August of 2004. The organization's budget has kept pace with its escalating importance to the political left. By August of 2004, Media Matters' operating budget had already doubled to $4 million.

Much of this success is attributable to Media Matters' nakedly partisan mission. That mission is essentially to smear and defame every conservative spokesperson, reporter, TV anchor or public figure that comes in its sights. Typically Media Matters labels any conservative viewpoint as "a lie" "false" "a smear" "racist" or some other anti-intellectual epithet designed to discredit rather than dispute its political opposition. Media Matters compiles an archive of these distortions which the leftwing network spreads throughout the Internet.

An August 19, 2005 posting on the Media Matters website was headlined "The Angry Right Smears Cindy Sheehan." It focused on remarks made by conservative commentators critical of the anti-war activist. Notably, however, Media Matters made no effort to rebut the arguments advanced by those commentators, evidently deeming it axiomatic that the mere reproduction of conservative opinion was sufficient demonstration of its falsehood. Indeed, the only "smear" that appeared on the site was the one hurled by a Media Matters writer at David Horowitz, whom the organization denounced as "reliably offensive." Earlier, in December of 2004, Media Matters had attempted to convict Horowitz of "racial insensitivity." The organization provided no evidence for the incendiary charge. Instead, it adduced several instances in which Horowitz had criticized public figures, including Democratic Party figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for expressing racist opinions themselves.

Besides Horowitz, Media Matters nurses a special contempt for conservative and nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh. Inevitably in its zeal to shatter Limbaugh's credibility, Media Matters routinely engages in unwarranted attacks. In June of 2005, for instance, the organization lashed out at Limbaugh for his opinion on the so-called Downing Street memo, which accused the Bush administration of manipulating evidence and otherwise fudging facts in order to promulgate its policies. "Limbaugh baselessly suggested Downing Street memo 'may be a fake,'" screamed a Media Matters headline. Yet, as Media Matters was forced to acknowledge in the compass of its attack, Limbaugh's remarks, far from being "baseless," were actually derived from a report that had appeared in the Associated Press. Moreover, Media Matters itself was unsure of the veracity of the AP's account, describing it tentatively as an "apparently inaccurate AP account." This did not lead it to exonerate Limbaugh, however.

It is a measure of Media Matters' disdain for Limbaugh that the organization has put its website at the service of his most virulent critics. When liberal MSNBC host Keith Olbermann pronounced host Rush Limbaugh the "worst person in the world" in August of 2005, Media Matters gleefully splashed the slander on its website. In 2004, David Brock even hired Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin to conduct a survey focusing on, among other media-related topics, public perceptions of Limbaugh. Journalist Byron York recounted the survey's not quite earth-shaking revelations: "Among other things, Garin found that a majority of those surveyed believe Limbaugh often presents views that are biased, 'rather than impartial and balanced.' Garin also found that a large part of Limbaugh's audience is politically conservative." York noted that Media Matters assigns two full-time researchers to monitor Limbaugh's statements and transcribe his program. That's something money can definitely buy.

Media Matters' zeal to bury conservative viewpoints under a mountain of smears is not surprisingly accompanied by a disdain for the First Amendment. In August 2004, Tim Chavez, a columnist for The Tennessean, reported receiving an email from a Media Matters employee named Melissa Salmanowitz. In it, Salmanowitz, a Deputy Director of Media Relations at Media Matters, pressed Chavez to write about Media Matters' efforts to get chain book retailers to ban sales of Unfit for Command, a book critical of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Chavez did not comply. Media Matters launched a month-long assault on Unfit for Command and the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," the group responsible for the book, devoting its website to a blitz of denunciatory articles that attempted to discredit its members as, alternatively, Republican shills and liars.

Driving Media Matters' fusillades against the Swift Boat veterans was its partisan support for Democrat John Kerry. Even as it paid lip service to fairness, stressing that "honest scrutiny of [John Kerry's] record might be 'fair game,'" its provenance as a Democratic Party hit squad made the Media Matters team's gesture of objectivity seem even more empty than usual. Media Matters spent the months leading up to the 2004 presidential campaign dismissing conservative criticism of Kerry as nothing more than "distortions." To take one example, Kerry's critics disproved his claims that he spent Christmas of 1968 "sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia." Rather than making a concession to this reality - which was generally conceded -- Media Matters brazenly portrayed all attacks on Kerry's record as "unfounded, contradictory, and discredited." The leftwing Tides Foundation, evidently impressed by Media Matters' willingness to place pro-Democratic partisanship above accuracy, gave Media Matters $100,000 in 2004 for what it described as "voter education."

The length to which Media Matters went to protect Kerry from conservative critics was representative of its intimacy with the Democratic Party, whose operatives, led by Podesta, were in fact responsible for its creation. Prior to founding Media Matters, David Brock met with a number of leading Democratic Party figures, including Senator Hillary Clinton, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and former Vice President Al Gore. Today, more than a few of the organization's roughly 30 staff members are Democratic operatives. To cite just a handful of examples, Dennis Yedwab, the chief communications strategist for Media Matters, is the erstwhile director of strategic resources at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Similarly, Brock's personal assistant, Mandy Vlasz is a Democratic pollster and a veteran consultant to Democratic campaigns, including the 2000 Gore/Lieberman campaign.Katie Barge, the director of research at Media Matters, formerly presided over opposition research for Senator John Edwards' unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign.

In its short history, Media Matters has established itself as one of the most vocal and irresponsible combat organs of the Democratic Party. In 2004 the organization boasted that its website had elicited some 150,000 comments in its discussion forums and that over 22,000 subscribers had registered to receive its e-mail alerts. Brock has also become a regular feature on leftwing radio stations like Air America, where he appears every Wednesday. The show, according to Brock, "is a great means for us to be able to disseminate our material…" More specifically, programs like those of Air America provide Brock with a venue to defame conservatives as individuals who "are simply willing to lie," and who "are not necessarily trying to win these arguments on a factual level" - a perfect self-description. Media Matters staffers are also favorites of such supposedly non-partisan radio programs as National Public Radio's On The Media, which invites them to complain, as Media Matters senior advisor Jamison Foser did during a July 2005 appearance, that media coverage of the Bush administration is insufficiently critical.

 

[midcan5]

When the media outlets don't agree with your partisan biases, they must surely be wrong. The trouble is who is to say.

The power of one woman to make the right wing absolutely crazy is fascinating stuff. Is it simply misogyny or something much deeper? Is it a sign of male impotence, a failure of the gender to face the fact women can be strong? If you compare this woman to the empty rhetoric of those whose only accomplishment is criticism you are left bemused. Are they - the right wing conservative republican - now only a group of schoolyard bullies who can only browbeat the other to hide their own personal weakness? You cannot address the assumtion not because there are no answers, but rather because no reasonable answer will be excepted. The empty words of the right in America were here when Bill Clinton was President, they accomplished nothing then and they will accomplish nothing now as they show only the immaturity and the useless place the right now occupies. Tracing the history and creation of bitterness and failure that is the conservative republican today would be a fascinating task, a compendium of sources, I wonder if the thoughtful (?) would be proud of what they have accomplished? Or is this simply what they are?

"Early issues of the 'Journal-Champion' carried numerous articles calling the faithful to the fight to cleanse America of sexual sin: homosexuality, pornography, and abortion. But interwoven with this campaign were descriptions of the economic and political crisis facing the United States. 'The greatest threat to the average American's liberty does not come From Communistic aggression, crime in the decaying cities or any other external cause," read an article in the June 1978 issue. "It comes from the growing internal encroachments of government bureaucrats as they limit the freedom of Americans through distribution of rules and regulations, many times called guidelines." The newspaper criticized OSHA's "insulting or silly" regulations, and published an open letter to Congress denouncing the "faceless bureaucrats who sit in strategy meetings and formulate federal guidelines," saying that they "pinch our pocket books, restrict our work privileges, govern our spending habits, determine the 'safety' restrictions of our businesses and influence the type of homes we live in."" Kim Phillips-Fein (p229 'Invisible Hands')

Edit: I am not a big fan of the Clintons, but given the judicial choices of the republicans only the blind ideologue could vote for them today. We have enough corporate puppets in our courts already. For any freedom loving American the selection of another judicial ideologue should be given serious thought.

 

[Theowl32]

Holy smokes. that's the first Truthful things I've seen come out of the NYslimes I think in YEARS.

hell is going to freeze over

THEY ARE also using what they are famous for. Character ASSASSINATIONS against anyone who speaks out against them

You want eight more years of being treated like dog shit by these TYRANTS in the progressive party, vote for the nasty, corrupted witch. HILLARY or Lizzy Warren or the 100 year old Bernie baby Sanders.

Don't kid yourself. The left wing moron voters have made it clear that even though the left (obama administration along with NY Times) have been leaking and attacking the clintons, they will blame the "vast right wing conspiracy."

It will turn into the poor "woman" being attacked by the right. They are hoping the right viciously goes after Hillary. They will oblige like they have. They will pin the right as being woman haters along with every perceived minority like they have been doing for close to 60 years.

They will then turn it around and use it to promote the lying commie native.

The democrat tactics cannot get low enough in order to get their pure socialism in.

 

[Obiwan]

More o George Soros

Is George Soros a US Citizen and a Nazi Yahoo Answers
Look back to the terribly shocking admissions which came out of Soros' own mouth during a CBS 60 Minutes interview of Soros, by Steve Kroft, on Dec, 20, 1998.

Britain's own Hungarian Jewish emigre Soros is known, by his own admission, to have had his character shaped, still today, by his experience during the Nazi occupation of his native land. Then, by his own admission, during those awful months, teenager Soros had been employed as a supposed gentile, in assisting the implementation the Nazi program of looting, and then exterminating, Soros' own fellow Jews.

What came out of Soros's mouth in that interview was a set of cold-blooded admissions which should have shocked any reader of celebrated U.S. journalist Ben Hecht's account given in a former best-seller documentary, Perfidy!, on the Eichmann case.

When Soros was questioned by Kroft, as to how he reacted to this experience as a teen-age runner for the Eichmann apparatus, Soros displayed not only his total lack of conscience at the time, but insisted, still in 1998, on justifying, still today, what he had done for the Eichmann apparatus back then.

That CBS interview elicited from Soros' autobiographical accounts, presented an image of Soros' mind which, still today, makes the blood run cold. LaRouche said of that interview: " I compare my own knowledge from eyewitness reports of former inmates, including a close professional associate who had been in the camps even during the earlier, 1933-1940 interval, or the account of a leading psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelhim, who had been a victim of the Nazi camps himself."

CBS's Kroft asked Soros: "And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps."

Soros replied: "Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made."

Soros had gone on in that broadcast, to reply to Kroft, that he felt no guilt whatsoever. In fact, according to the introduction to his father's book which Soros himself wrote, "these were the happiest days of his life." Soros had added: "It is a sacreligious thing to say, but these ten months [of the Nazi occupation] were the happiest times of my life.... We led an adventurous life and we had fun together."

Lyndon LaRouche's evaluation of that CBS interview was: "Even as late as 1998 George Soros could react to the line of questioning by CBS's Kroft, by portraying himself, in that interview, as a man who has been broken by a brutal interrogation into identifying himself emotionally with his oppressors. In Soros's case, he, in that 1998 CBS interview still identified himself as having had, still, the same craven submission to the fearful Nazi operation, as he had experienced it fifty-four years earlier!"

LaRouche's assessment of Soros's behavior in that broadcast is, that: "I wouldn't suggest that this attitude on Soros's part makes him inclined to go out and kill Jews. Rather, as the Nazi experience might suggest, the truth remains, to this day, that Soros does go out to kill, or ruin people, in one fashion or another, who are chosen to be his current choice of what he treats as lawful prey, acting as if without conscience, and does this in a way which is similar to the way he, in his own words spoken on CBS in 1998, reacted to his conditioning, as a terrified boy, at that time, an adolescent terrified into a mental state of virtual complicity by his experience with Adolf Hitler's Eichmann apparatus."

"All of the despicable, present British asset Soros's obvious defects—his reversion to pre-Peace of Westphalia types of attacks on national states, his destruction of national currencies, and his drug-pushing, for starters, reflect, according to his own admissions to CBS, his training by the Nazis."

LaRouche said: "Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettlelheim wrote the book on cases like Soros," and noted that: "According to associates of mine who had been victims in those Nazi camps, when anyone comparable to that Soros of 1998 makes the kinds of admissions which he made in that CBS interview, I shudder in the realization that I am witnessing in Soros the mind of the monster which the Nazis transformed him into becoming, a monster, still today, as in his experience, a terrified adolescent boy, back in those terrible times. That boy, as presented to CBS by Soros himself, is, according to his own reply to Kroft's questioning, now still that monster his propitiation of Nazi killers had transformed him into becoming back then. Soros' confession, heard from his own mouth on that CBS interviw, is that he is that kind of monster, still, even to the present day.

 

[MarathonMike]

Media Splatters is a disgrace to journalism and themselves. They are the diametric opposite of the "Free Press" that the Founders envisioned would be the watch dogs of the Republic.

 

[Stephanie]

Media Splatters is a disgrace to journalism and themselves. They are the diametric opposite of the "Free Press" that the Founders envisioned would be the watch dogs of the Republic.

the Clintons has a hand in them along with Georgie the BILLIONAIR Soros.

don't think they don't.

 

[Pogo]

That would be Jeremy Peters, not "the New York Times".

Read your own link.

Man, this fallacious bullshit just announces itself in the thread title. It's like a giant "free food" sign.

 

[jwoodie]

The power of one woman to make the right wing absolutely crazy is fascinating stuff. Is it simply misogyny or something much deeper?

The power of one woman to control your thoughts is fascinating. Is it simply ignorance or a deeper emotional/mental disorder?

 

[Stephanie]

The power of one woman to make the right wing absolutely crazy is fascinating stuff. Is it simply misogyny or something much deeper?

The power of one woman to control your thoughts is fascinating. Is it simply ignorance or a deeper emotional/mental disorder?

I bet she got schooled in Saul Alinksy. Most of these progressives today has taken it to a new level. even Obama, Shrillary, etc

 

[MarathonMike]

Apparently the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" has taken over the responsibilities of the Free Press, since the MSM has denounced their journalistic oath and become a Liberal Spin and Cover Machine.

 

[HappyJoy]

Media Splatters is a disgrace to journalism and themselves. They are the diametric opposite of the "Free Press" that the Founders envisioned would be the watch dogs of the Republic.

How so?

 

[Clementine]

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters appeared on MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner yesterday to discuss the controversy surrounding the Clintons. The issues were whether or not they provided favors in return for money that either they or their family foundation received over the years, as alleged in the new book Clinton Cash, and how they were handling the allegations.

Peters felt that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has started to take steps to address the problems by using sycophants to misdirect and obfuscate any criticism leveled against them, as David Brock from Media Matters has been trying to do for the last several weeks:

"The Clinton campaign has certainly already taken some steps to try to get ahead of public relations problems, like that, for example, Hillary resigned from the board. I think they’re going to have to be more transparent about the speaking fees, because those questions are going to keep on piling up.

You know, what I wonder is if the Clinton message machine ever decides to kind of recalibrate and dial it back a little bit because right now, and this isn’t all coming from the Clinton camp itself, but it comes from that orbit around them, where you have these people whose main goal is to misdirect and obfuscate every time there is this slightest bit of criticism about the Clinton’s leadership.

They are misdirecting. Exactly. They are definitely misdirecting here, this is what Media Matters exists to do."




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Man oh man. I wish the conservatives would not fall for this shit put out by the main stream media. As bad as the old hag his and as pathetic as Clintons have been, they are 1000 times better than their real hero.

Pocahontas will make obama look like Reagan. I will put it to you that way.

The liberal media will cover anything other than the latest Democrat lie. And they take their word as if it's always true and never question anything from liberal politicians.

Dems don't even need to spend money on campaigns when the liberal media does it for free.