Mma2 Bak
capt 7 25
SEE MAIN
1/22
NOTE TARGET trump 5 25 musk PAXTON 4 24
note sys
used as marker of freq mma content
no merri
see monetization of conspiracy
bak 7 25 image fail?
Media Matters files for preliminary injunction to block FTC’s retaliatory investigation (https://www.mediamatters.org/justice-civil-liberties/media-matters-files-preliminary-injunction-block-ftcs-retaliatory)
07/14/25
PRESS SUPPRESS MAFIA DON SHAKEDOWN
AN 7 25
On July 1, CBS News' parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay $16 million (https://www.alternet.org/trump-media-shakedowns-salon-paramount/) to settle a lawsuit from President Donald Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) —who claimed that CBS edited a 2024 interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris (https://www.rawstory.com/tag/white-house) in a way that amount to election interference. Many Trump critics attacked the lawsuit as frivolous and baseless, arguing that Paramount was submitting to a shakedown (https://www.salon.com/2025/07/04/too-corporate-to-fight-for-a-free-press/) just to be done with the matter.
Now, Fox News is drawing criticism for its editing of a 2024 interview with Trump, and critics argue that it was edited in a way to make Trump look good — not edited for journalistic purposes.
CNN's Andrew Kaczynski, in a July 14 post on X (https://x.com/KFILE/status/1944769200310137127), formerly Twitter, tweeted video of the Fox News interview and noted their editing of comments on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
READ MORE: 'You dress as a cowgirl?' Kristi Noem bashed at homestate fundraiser (https://www.alternet.org/kristi-noem-mocked/)
Kaczynski posted, "I had not seen this Fox News extended interview with Trump from 2024 — where they deliberately edited his (Jeffrey) Epstein answer — where he won't commit to releasing the full files because of 'phony' stuff in it."
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Kaczynski, comparing the unedited interview to Fox News' edited version (https://x.com/KFILE/status/1944769522160025986), tweeted, "Check out what Trump said vs what Fox edited."
In response to Kaczynski's tweets, Media Matters' Matthew Gertz (https://x.com/MattGertz/status/1944778463925108944) — obviously mindful of Trump's CBS News lawsuit — posted, "My understanding based on the CBS News precedent is that this is an illegal interference with the 2024 election that should result in Fox News paying tens of millions of dollars to orgs chosen by Kamala Harris and facing an FCC probe. Quote Andrew Kaczynski @KFILE."
In a separate tweet, Gertz posted (https://x.com/MattGertz/status/1944779569413730582), "At least that's the result when the president is engaged in a corrupt abuse of power crying out for more scrutiny."
READ MORE:There's far more to Trump and Epstein's relationship: Trump biographer (https://www.alternet.org/epstein-trump/)
Former Trump supporter turned Trump critic A.J. Delgado tweeted (https://x.com/AJDelgado13/status/1944772585230598503), "Yup, I was tweeting about this last October, as were others, and no one seemed to care. It's insane that Fox edited the answer (the only reason the full answer came out is, I believe, that Will Cain later absentmindedly shared the full answer on his own show. That's the only reason we even know.)"
The Trump War Room account on X posted (https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1797720117737865557) Fox News' edited version of the interview in June 2024.
Observations from Kaczynski, Gertz and Delgado's tweets on Fox News' 2024 interview with Trump are drawing a lot of discussion on X.
Former Obama Administration official Tommy Vietor wrote, "Time for Kamala to sue Fox News???"
X user Michael Serdikoff tweeted (https://x.com/MSerdikoff/status/1944778264548954217), "This is same (guy) suing CBS for editing Harris' remarks."
Another X user, Cindy Cooper commented (https://x.com/CindyCoops/status/1944782251885224161), "So the Fox News network via Fox News Radio did air the entire answer. Thanks."
Watch the video belowor at this link. (https://www.alternet.org/trump-interview-fox)
06/23/2025
by
Kyle Mantyla (https://www.peoplefor.org/post_author/kyle-mantyla)
Alex Galbraith @ Salon (https://www.salon.com/2025/06/22/back-then-we-had-dumb-presidents-vance-explains-key-difference-in-current-middle-east/): "Back then we had dumb presidents": Vance explains key difference in current Middle East war
Vice President J.D. Vance served in the Iraq War a full six years before troops were withdrawn. Because of that, you might expect some hesitancy from the veep as President Donald Trump waltzes his way into another Middle Eastern war. Instead, the second-in-command of the Trump admin can confidently say that this time will be different, because past presidents were "dumb."
Janna Brancolini @ The Daily Beast (https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-demands-treason-charges-for-democrats-threatening-to-impeach-donald-trump-over-iran/): Giuliani Demands Treason Charges for Dems Threatening to Impeach Trump Over Iran
Disgraced former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani railed against Democrats calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment over his unilateral strikes against Iran.
Alex Griffing @ Mediaite (https://www.mediaite.com/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-rips-trump-breaking-campaign-promises-were-entering-a-nuclear-war-world-war-iii/): Marjorie Taylor Greene Rips Trump Breaking Campaign Promises: ‘We’re Entering a Nuclear War, World War III’
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) joined Steve Bannon’s WarRoom on Monday and fumed at President Donald Trump for breaking his campaign promise not to engage in wars in the Middle East.
Angry White Men (https://angrywhitemen.org/2025/06/23/dave-reilly-boise-is-clean-and-there-arent-any-black-people/): Dave Reilly: Boise Is ‘Clean’ And ‘There Aren’t Any Black People’
On Friday, white nationalists Dave Reilly and Rebecca Crockett hosted their podcast, The Backlash, from Boise’s Heterosexual Awesomeness Festival — a sparsely-attended anti-LGBTQ event hosted by the Old State Saloon. While speaking with Old State Saloon owner Mark Fitzpatrick, who appeared on the show before, Reilly praised Boise for not having “any Black people.”
Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/defiance-courts-texas-put-ten-commandments-public-schools-rcna214514): In defiance of courts, Texas to put Ten Commandments in public schools
The Supreme Court has already ruled against Ten Commandments in classrooms. Republicans in several states are approving new laws anyway.
Media Matters (https://www.mediamatters.org/justice-civil-liberties/media-matters-files-suit-federal-court-block-retaliatory-ftc-investigation): Media Matters files suit in federal court to block retaliatory FTC investigation and protect its First Amendment rights
Investigation into Media Matters is the latest example of Trump administration abusing power to target perceived political opponents.
good analysis
MMA June 19, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
ALICIA MENENDEZ (ANCHOR): As Donald Trump flirts with the greater American involvement in the conflict, it's caused deep division in the MAGA movement, upsetting some of his most influential America first figures, the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, who was spotted today outside the White House. Bannon has warned against any American involvement in the conflict. Joining the conversation, president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, Claire McCaskill, is still with us. Angelo, describe this division between the two factions of MAGA here.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Yeah, I think it's so big that it then — it even expands out to the larger sort of right wing media echo chamber because, as you noted, Fox is pretty heavily in the, you go to war with Iran camp. They've been pushing this for a very long time. This they see as an opportunity, and they know know that they have Trump's ear. I mean, even though the last election, there's much to be made about the podcast and the inner, you know, these online shows that Trump deployed and used, that's not his go-to day to day. The lens through which he sees the world, even still as president, is cable news, and Fox News is the main vehicle for that. That's why when he was criticizing Carlson, he said, look, tell him to get a TV network, and then maybe people will listen to what he has to say because that's still the mindset. And so Fox is all in on this, and they are reflective of a part of the MAGA base.
MENENDEZ: But why? Why, Angelo? Why are they all in on this?
CARUSONE: I mean, look. Part of it is straight bigotry. I mean, they really — they have really spun this narrative, we shouldn't forget about that, that Islam is a fundamental problem, that we are in a battle for good and evil. And even though has been a little bit sidelined in terms of his day-to-day involvement in this particular decision, let's not forget that Pete Hegseth, who is very reflective of the Fox News worldview, was somebody that described the great conflict, not as one between the United States and China or other great powers, but as between Christianity and Islam, and that we had to go out there and do everything we can, including using our military, to put that back in check.
So they see this larger geopolitical world through that framework, and that is something that they've been pushing for a very long time aside from just having — that is also part of their their foreign policy. They don't believe that you should democratize other countries. They're just — they're warmongers.
They believe in might makes right. And even though they are repeating Trump's line of peace through strength, they actually don't mean peace through strength. They mean, strength first and then, you know, have peace because you have nothing left after that. I mean, that's honestly what they're actually saying, and it's core to the Fox News base. It also plays really well on TV. Like, we shouldn't lose the sight of that.
Rupert Murdoch cut his teeth in the tabloids, and one of the big things that he always did was find the most horrible, horrific things that he could tell stories about crimes, violent things, and exaggerate them, but also lay them into a demographic fight. That's part of how he came to be. He sees news through that storytelling perspective. And then you have people like Carlson and Bannon who have their own world view, and a lot of it is hyper nationalist, and we shouldn't be celebrating that in that even though they are taking a position here that seems more reasonable, it's coming from a really scary place. It is coming from either straight up bigotry, you know, antisemitism, or a real deep intense nationalism, that is — even if they get to a destination there that seems peaceful, it's because they want to turn their energy internally on what they see as domestic enemy.
That's the part that doesn't get sort of carried through here is that they see the real threat not as foreign entities, not as these foreign entanglements, but as you and me, as members of the media and as advocates and people that are participating in civic spaces. That's who they see as the real target right now as enemy number one. So we shouldn't lose sight of why they're advocating for peace, but the net effect of all of this, though, and this I think Claire McCaskill really illustrated this well in the first segment is that this is the confusion. This is why Trump is on the sidelines.
If Bannon and Tucker were either quiet or were in uniform with this idea that he should be bombing Iran, it would have happened already. And because part of how he sees the world is through these stories, he's trying to see how this particular chronicle plays out a little bit. You know, who wins in this narrative for hearts and minds for audience share. And that's a big part of this, is seeing how the story plays out, because he honestly isn't sure there's something grounding him. And now it's just what's going to end up capturing the imagination of his base, of his audience, and where is he going to get the best ratings for himself.
MMA
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rules in Media Matters’ favor on First Amendment grounds: Angelo Carusone statement
Written by Media Matters Staff (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/media-matters-staff)
Published 05/30/25
Media Matters President and CEO Angelo Carusone issued the following statement after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously upheld (https://media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/docs/2025/05/24-7059-2118197.pdf) the district court’s decision last year to block Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s civil investigative demand of Media Matters on First Amendment grounds.
“Elon Musk encouraged Republican state attorneys general to use their power to harass their critics and stifle reporting about X. Ken Paxton was one of those AGs who took up the call, and his attempt to use his office as an instrument for Musk’s censorship crusade has been defeated. Today's decision is a victory for free speech.
“We are also buoyed that yet another court has seen through the fog of Musk’s ‘thermonuclear (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/18/musk-threatens-thermonuclear-lawsuit-against-media-watchdog-calls-advertisers-oppressors.html)’ legal onslaught and recognized it for the meritless attack to silence a critic that it is."
Key takeaways from the ruling:
The judges ruled that “Media Matters is the target of a government campaign of retaliation” for exercising First Amendment rights, which “reflects concrete and present harm. And as the target of an arguablybad-faith investigation, Appellees are also experiencing special burdens on their newsgathering activities and operation of their media company.”
“In addition, Paxton’s contention that Appellees’ conduct is not constitutionally protected because their articles were deliberately designed to mislead consumers about X is meritless. The record is utterly devoid of evidence to support such a claim.”
“As to the first element, Appellees – a media organization and news reporter – are obviously engaged in conduct protected under the First Amendment. Indeed, the underlying incident that precipitated their claim involved their news reporting on a public figure and alleged political extremism on a popular social media platform. Their reporting on public issues are quintessential First Amendment activities."
The same day that X Corp. filed a meritless lawsuit against Media Matters for America for an accurate report on the platform’s extremism, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened (https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-opens-investigation-media-matters-potential-fraudulent-activity) a similarly specious investigation into Media Matters under Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Paxton subsequently issued an overbroad and invasive civil investigative demand – even though Media Matters has no relevant connection to Texas. The law firm Stone Hilton (https://www.stonehilton.com/), led by former Paxton deputies Judd Stone and Chris Hilton, is representing X Corp. in its case against Media Matters. In April of 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.263967/gov.uscourts.dcd.263967.37.0.pdf) Media Matters a preliminary injunction against Paxton.
In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California ruled that (https://www.courtwatch.news/p/121-a-week-of-betrayals)“it seems almost certain that the X entities’ decision to file multiple suits in multiple jurisdictions is designed more to bully Media Matters and inflict financial hardship upon it than to actually vindicate those entities’ rights.”
The nonpartisan U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which catalogs press freedom violations in the United States, recently added an incident report (https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/texas-attorney-general-subpoenas-media-matters-after-report-on-x/) related to the Texas attorney general's investigation to its database.
ANALYSIS MMA
On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how the right-wing media landscape made the idea of mass death acceptable
Written by Media Matters Staff (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/media-matters-staff)
Published 05/30/25
Video
Citation
From the May 30, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): So, Angelo, you framed my political worldview around this idea of narrative dominance. I would say, and I know this isn't universal, but this is an example of slippage in that category here.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Oh, yeah. It really is actually because -- and this ties into what John was saying before about an example. There's not -- I can't think of a political figure that's made that point, but I can think of right-wing media figures that have been saying that starting in 2020 with COVID. Tucker Carlson was the one when there, you know, there was a point with COVID where, you know, there was a little bit conspiracies, but people still wanted to protect themselves. And we largely agreed that, you know, we shouldn't just have mass death. Now, we had very different opinions about how to survive that, but we weren't cool with mass death.
And then Tucker got out there, you know, in the early summer and started saying, "We're all going to die," literally, on the timeline, we're all going to die. So, we have to put all these policies and all these efforts to protect ourselves from COVID on that scale. And since we're all going to die anyway, all of these Republicans that are lining up that are supporting policies that are restricting access to schools or thinking about how to sort of mask policies, all these things, they're taking away your life, your quality of life when you're going to die anyway. So, they're the enemy and you need to start putting pressure on them. And what he did was plant a seed in that larger landscape that started to take off and then they weaved in conspiracies to help grow it and propagate it. But that was one of the big turning points.
That and a few other conspiracies that really started to shift and soften the ground about where the tolerance level was for mass death, not the individual policies, but it shifted it. And yeah, it's not their whole scale perspective, I think, but it really has an example of the change because it's not that that's their overall angle, but what is a reflection of this other piece of the slippage that you're referring to is the rot. They've become callous and cruel and indifferent, nihilistic. You know, for the people that largely believe in something, right, these are supposed to be the religious people too, they're really nihilists.
She went right to the void. And I thought that was when she voted for Hegseth, like John said before, it was -- she sort of really gave up her position as a steward, as a legislator and whatever principle she had and said, "No, I'm all in for Trump now." If you can rationalize that, you can get up there just a few months later and say the thing that she said. And the last thing that's I think critical -- so one is that they've sort of tested this before and it worked; two, that they got cruel and callous and indifferent and nihilistic, and that's just a consequence of the poison being pumped into the system. And the third is that they are so confident or I don't think it's stupidity, I don't think it's indifferent.
But they've looked at their opponents, sized them up, at Democrats, and they've said, given what we're confronting and given the terrain that we stand on, which is our information landscape, and today has proved it so far -- no is going to write a peep about Ernst's comment in the right-wing media. Not one, not one critical, not even one saying, "Well, I'm an armchair quarterback and I think that's stupid." No, no, no, they're just quiet about it. She's not going to suffer any repercussions, at least in the larger landscape. She will politically a little bit, but she's sizing up her competition and she says, they're so bad, and I have so many advantages already with this larger terrain that Trump sort of is the conductor for, but I'm going to win no matter what I say, that I could literally tell my constituents to die, and I'm still going to beat whoever they put up against me. And that's the problem when you add it all up. And that's what I see. I see that overconfidence based on an assessment of the landscape, real cruel politics.
rww 05/23/2025
by
Kyle Mantyla (https://www.peoplefor.org/post_author/kyle-mantyla)
Ian Ward @ Politico (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/23/doug-wilson-new-right-pastor-hegseth-trump-officials-00355376): Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening.
Doug Wilson has built a theocratic regime in Moscow, Idaho, where men rule and biblical teachings guide everything. Now he’s taking the model national, with a receptive crowd in the GOP.
Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-admin-regulators-launch-investigation-media-matters-adding-patte-rcna208780): Trump admin regulators launch investigation into Media Matters, adding to pattern
If it seems as if there have been a lot of new federal investigations into Democrats and their allies lately, it’s not your imagination.
Molly Redden @ ProPublica (https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-administration-immigration-invasion-rhetoric-courts): The “Invasion” Invention: The Far Right’s Long Legal Battle to Make Immigrants the Enemy
The Trump administration is using the claim that immigrants have “invaded” the country to justify possibly suspending habeas corpus, part of the constitutional right to due process. A faction of the far right has been building this case for years.
Angry White Men (https://angrywhitemen.org/2025/05/22/white-nationalists-praise-trumps-promotion-of-white-genocide-conspiracy-theory/): White Nationalists Praise Trump’s Promotion Of White Genocide Conspiracy Theory
Yesterday, during a televised meeting, President Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with a farcical presentation about a “genocide” of white South Africans. But while the claim of a “white genocide” in South Africa is a racist fiction, the white nationalists who spent years pushing it celebrated Trump’s remarks.
Greg Sargent @ The New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/article/195699/trump-ramaphosa-lie-dead-white-farmers): Trump’s Lie About Dead “White Farmers” Just Got Even More Grotesque
Because President Trump deeply values accuracy and integrity in public conduct, he will be mortified to learn that a photo he brandished during his recent Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa perpetrated a massive deception. The photo was supposed to display dead white South African farmers—a Trump obsession—but instead, it showed body bags from the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is producing humanitarian horrors.
Charlie Nash @ Mediaite (https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/congressman-tells-fox-news-i-dont-drink-out-of-a-straw-brother-thats-what-the-women-in-my-house-do/): Congressman Tells Fox News, ‘I Don’t Drink Out of a Straw, Brother – That’s What the Women in My House Do’
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told Fox News on Thursday that he doesn’t “drink out of a straw” because “that’s what the women in my house do.”
===}:
REF RWW
Trump admin regulators launch investigation into Media Matters, adding to pattern
If it seems as if there have been a lot of new federal investigations into Democrats and their allies lately, it’s not your imagination.
(https://www.msnbc.com/author/steve-benen-ncpn433601)
May 23, 2025,
By Steve Benen (https://www.msnbc.com/author/steve-benen-ncpn433601)
Donald Trump has an odd habit of demanding investigations (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/targeting-perceived-foes-trump-keeps-pushing-federal-investigations-rcna208543) into all kinds of people and entities whom he perceives as political foes, indifferent to whether his targets have actually done anything wrong. Often, the presidential calls amount to meaningless chest-thumping and go ignored (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/targeting-perceived-foes-trump-keeps-pushing-federal-investigations-rcna208543).
But it’s important to remember that many of the White House’s political antagonists are, in fact, facing the kind of investigations that Trump has in mind. The New York Times reported (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/technology/ftc-investigates-media-matters.html):
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday opened an investigation into Media Matters, a liberal advocacy organization that has published research on hateful and antisemitic content on X, according to two people familiar with the inquiry. The regulator said in a letter sent to the organization that it was investigating the group, which is aligned with Democrats, over whether it illegally colluded with advertisers, according to the people.
It’s worth emphasizing for context that Trump’s top campaign donor and White House adviser, Elon Musk, sued the progressive media watchdog a couple of years ago, raising similar allegations, and as the Times’ article noted, the FTC’s regulators “also asked Media Matters to turn over all the documents it had produced or received from X in that litigation.”
Media Matters’ president, Angelo Carusone, said in a statement, “Right-wing media figures holding key posts and abusing government power to target critics are two hallmarks of the Trump administration. Threats won’t work, our mission continues.” (The commission, meanwhile, did not comment.)
Time will tell what, if anything, comes of the investigation, but if you’re thinking it seems as if there have been a lot of these kinds of probes lately, it’s not your imagination.
The public has learned in recent weeks that the administration — led by a president whose second-term “revenge tour” (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/donald-trump-revenge-tour-rcna201791) has been unsubtle — is also investigating and/or prosecuting a variety of Democratic officials and candidates, including Rep. LaMonica McIver (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/rep-lamonica-mciver-arrested-ice-new-jersey-alina-habba-rcna207334?icid=previouspost_bot) of New Jersey, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/cuomo-investigation-trump-justice-department-doj-rcna208209), New York Attorney General Letitia James (https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/trump-doj-prosecute-new-york-ag-letitia-james-rcna201554) and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/alina-habba-new-jersey-phil-murphy-matthew-platkin-immigration-rcna200902).
This dovetails with the president directing the Justice Department to go after Christopher Krebs (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/authoritarian-fashion-trump-orders-probes-two-ex-officials-defied-rcna200574), who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; which came on the heels of Trump pressing the Department of Homeland Security to investigate Miles Taylor (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/authoritarian-fashion-trump-orders-probes-two-ex-officials-defied-rcna200574), a former high-ranking DHS official.
The president did this not because there’s evidence of Krebs or Taylor having done anything wrong, but because they defied him (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/authoritarian-fashion-trump-orders-probes-two-ex-officials-defied-rcna200574) several years ago. They went on his enemies list, and now he’s exacting revenge.
Around the same time, Trump also directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-signs-order-targeting-democrats-fundraising-platform-sparking-au-rcna202970), the Democratic Party’s most important fundraising platform.
Recommended
Maddowblog (https://www.msnbc.com/maddowblog)Judges reportedly eye new security measures as Trump’s rhetorical attacks get worse (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/judges-reportedly-eye-new-security-measures-trumps-rhetorical-attacks-rcna209252)
Maddowblog (https://www.msnbc.com/maddowblog)Why Trump’s radical offensive against Harvard won’t affect just the university (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-harvard-university-grants-foreign-students-rcna209237)
And did I mention the investigation into former FBI director James Comey? Because that's underway, too (https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/james-comey-trump-retribution-powerful-rcna207964).
The Times also recently highlighted the broader pattern (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/us/politics/trump-republicans-attack-democrats-actblue.html):
Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
Trump and his team are also going after law firms (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-houses-latest-law-firm-offensive-different-rcna200610), universities (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-admin-blocks-harvard-enrolling-international-students-escalating-rcna208587) and news organizations (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/tensions-trumps-bizarre-lawsuit-cbs-news-chief-steps-rcna207766) they consider political foes of the White House.
What’s more, given Ed Martin’s new responsibilities (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/trump-justice-department-ed-martin-weaponization.html) at the Justice Department, this overtly and abusive partisan pattern is likely to intensify.
My conservative readers will likely see this and say, “Well, during the Biden administration, Donald Trump was subjected to investigations, so what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
But that talking point remains absurd. Trump faced federal criminal investigations, not because of a retaliatory agenda, but because of voluminous evidence that he committed a variety of alleged felonies.
Axios recently noted (https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/trump-retaliation-revenge-biden-security-clearance), “In the final days of the 2024 campaign, Axios identified a list of perceived adversaries (https://www.axios.com/2024/11/01/trumps-enemies-within-list) who fit what Trump ominously described as ‘the enemies from within.’ As president, he has taken steps to retaliate against virtually all of them.”
That was two months ago. The problem is vastly worse now, and there’s no reason to believe conditions will improve anytime soon.
*This post updates ourrelated earlier coverage (https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/donald-trump-revenge-tour-rcna201791)
Steve Benen (https://www.msnbc.com/author/steve-benen-ncpn433601)
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
an 5 25
Trump's administration has now officially opened an investigation into a progressive advocacy group that has long been a thorn in the side of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
The New York Times reported Thursday (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/technology/ftc-investigates-media-matters.html) that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now looking into whether Media Matters for America (MMFA) — which focuses on debunking claims propagated by right-wing media — illegally colluded with advertisers on the social media platform X (which is owned by Musk). The FTC probe comes amid a lawsuit by Musk in which he's seeking damages from MMFA, alleging that the group damaged his relationship with advertisers and prompted a mass exodus (https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/20/tech/x-sues-media-matters) of advertising dollars from the platform.
MMFA published a report (https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/musk-endorses-antisemitic-conspiracy-theory-x-has-been-placing-ads-apple-bravo-ibm-oracle) in 2023 finding that ads sometimes appeared next to extremist content on X. The report found that major advertisers like Apple, IBM and Oracle had ads placed in close proximity to accounts that tweeted pro-Nazi content. Musk's lawsuit alleged that MMFA misrepresented data and insisted that the chances of an advertiser's paid post appearing next to extremist tweets were "rare."
READ MORE:'Extreme response': 11 Republicans slam Trump admin attorney Alina Habba (https://www.alternet.org/republicans-trump-arrest-lawmaker/)
"Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform,” the complaint (https://www.pacermonitor.com/view/57Y7P3A/X_Corptxndce-23-011750001.0.pdf?mcid=tGE3TEOA) read. “Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”
IFrame Content (https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.695.1_en.html#fid=goog_1585543708)
IFrame Content (https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.695.1_en.html#fid=goog_1585543709)
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In response to Musk's lawsuit, MMFA President Angelo Carusone called the litigation "frivolous" that was "meant to bully X's critics into silence."
"Media Matters stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court," he said.
Click here (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/22/technology/ftc-investigates-media-matters.html) to read the Times' article in full (subscription required).
READ MORE:'Off the rails': Poll reveals a new Trump weakness in an unexpected place (https://www.alternet.org/donald-trump-polls/)
MMA FEVER SWAMP EXPLAN
February 17, 2025 edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Back to Project 2025 which was so wildly unpopular that Donald Trump said he had never heard of it. After deporting people in this country illegally who committed violent crimes, you have a majority of Americans who oppose everything else, majority of Americans oppose retribution if it means that FBI agents are purged or prosecutors are purged, and the IRS having more reach and having more political people with more fingers and grubby hands on your personal data is almost universally opposed.
What is going on?
ANGELO CARUSONE: Yeah, I mean, and Project 2025 sort of teed this up. Their proposal for sort of getting to where we are right now was to, and the objective, and that's the thing, the objectives were stated pretty clearly, which was to increase the politicization of the IRS so that it could be another instrument of revenge, and that's the important thing to consider here.
:{:{A lot of these initial actions are as much about sort of aggregating and consolidating power as possible, but the through line, the part that he's appealing to and It's not the majority of Americans, it's the most intense sort of fervent part of Americans that have been pickled in misinformation and rage for decades. That’s who he’s appealing to here. That’s why he announced his campaign in Waco which is a site of an attack against the government, it’s a symbol.}:
It’s to say we are going to be revenge. And so part of it was to turn the IRS into that and what they were proposing was adding in additional appointees into the IRS. It’s one of the agencies that has very few. I think it’s one or two, they wanted to add an additional seven and that was to help politicize it to speed it along. And what DOGE provides and it provides it not in this context but also more broadly, is essentially an accelerant for Project 2025's objectives and policies and that's that's really the difference maker here is that something that was already going to move at breakneck speed is actually going to speed up quite a bit.
And the other part that’s illuminating – why the IRS, why this data, what’s the point? Sarah sort of got to it about a bunch, when she was talking about how it could be weaponized and deployed and as a tool to shrink civic spaces. And so to really understand why they were going after the IRS in Project 2025 and now it’s that you have to look at it from the perspective of somebody that has been sitting in the right-wing fever swamps for a while. And if you have been, if you’re a consumer of the same kind of content Trump consumes every day what you believe is that there’s a massive conspiracy by liberal billionaires and the deep state to fund protesters, to feed, to fuel the deep state attacks on you, to turn the IRS into an instrument of revenge against conservatives over the past few years.
So what this is designed to do is validate those falsehoods and then operationalize them. And that’s the scary part.
January 18, 2025 edition of MSNBC's Ayman
AYMAN MOHYELDIN (HOST): Angelo, David Remnick has a new piece in The New Yorker where he writes that these "multi-billionaires have shamelessly dispensed with principle to seek an indulgent new president's favor and enhance their fortunes." How dangerous could this get for everyday Americans? Is this just about, I mean, maybe walk us through how when these billionaires make more money and have more involvement in our politics, how does it become worse for the ordinary American?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I think that's the question here about this in this moment, because as has already been discussed, money and politics has had a corrupting and corrosive effect ever, you know, even more so since Citizens United. That's been with us for a while. So what's the so what, what's different about this moment? And what's different about this moment is sort of what you said up there, which is that you have these in part, these sort of tech oligarchs, right, who have an enormous -- and not just them, but then sort of their the people who one step outside of them -- who control our information landscape or have disproportionate influence over it. And so one of the effects is that we start to -- we're at this inflection point where we can't go back. We're not just managing corruption and corrosive effects in politics. We're sort of moving to and dealing with sort of anti-democratic effects of having money in politics. We're on the other side now where we no longer have a functioning democracy.
And what that means in practice is the following: you have not just them giving donations and hoping to get extra money and tax breaks, you know, sort of the standard fare political kind of corruption. On one layer on top of that, Zuckerberg was very explicit. Not only is he going to roll back a bunch of policies and tip the scales in favor of right wing Trump sort of narratives and agendas, but he's also going to expect something from the United States government. He's going to want Trump, the Trump Administration, to pressure Europe in particular, to stop, to deregulate the sort of the rules that have been put in place against Facebook. So there's going to be this feedback loop between all of these players now that have put a bunch of money into the system, that are not just going to want some direct benefits to them, but they're going to want to leverage the United States government for more power and larger systematic changes. And I think we've just seen the effects of this in the last 24 hours. I mean, there's a massive crypto party launched by, again, a new industry that's dumping a bunch of money into the politics. And while all these people are there yukking it up and partying because Trump is promising to do all kinds of things, including, you know, naming the sort of crypto czar that's going to help, you know, boost policies, maybe even have a strategic reserve. So dump a bunch of American public money into the crypto industry. He launches his own meme coin that is now worth, you know, had, you know, almost 100, 200% growth and had $30 billion market cap already. So this is the new environment they're heading into.
So to me, to sum it up, the so what is this, we're at an inflection point where we're not just managing corruption, we're at a transform -- it could transform into a place where our democracy no longer functions. And that's kind of what the president was getting to in his speech.
[...]
MOHYELDIN: Let's talk about the role of misinformation and disinformation. And obviously, as we saw, and we were kind of talking about this with Mark Zuckerberg and canceling the fact checking program at Facebook. Trump and his allies have already promised retribution against some in the media. How do journalists go about holding the line in this time around? I mean, media, legacy media, institutional media is coming under such intense attack from all different directions, fact checking, being rolled back. How do Americans spot the truth? How do they stay up to date with accurate information?
CARUSONE: This is the antidote to the, to dealing with a lot of the harms that are likely to unfold. We're going to need truth vigilantes, which is what journalists are supposed to be. And so that starts at the top. Companies are going to have to stiffen their spine. There's been already a lot of sort of rolling over and settling. There was just some reporting recently that Paramount was considering settling its defamation lawsuit, the Trump defamation lawsuit against CBS. So because they have other deals that they want to make sure to get approved and are afraid if that litigation goes forward, you know, that will slow it down. They can't, you have to fight these things out. We have to one, be truth vigilantes. And then the second thing I would say, and it's a small bright spot, but it's an important thing, is that is to remember the following. That Trump is starting as a lame duck does not mean that he cannot be harmful, that he does not have power, but his power is going to be propped up, not just by these oligarchs, this money in politics. But we're on the verge of an information autocracy. So it's important that not just that journalists continue to stiffen their spines and to recognize that reality and speak truth to power and be truth vigilantes, but that individuals not get cowed so quickly into submission that this emperor has no clothes moment actually ends up becoming the reality. We can't be fooled by sort of the projection of power and the illusion of power that he's presenting, because it is truly anti-democratic. It's not going to be with the people. This sort of faux populism that's been discussed. We have to pierce that bubble.
So to me, those are the two things we need journalists to actually do -- this is their moment to shine, and it's probably their last chance if they don't, if they don't sort of follow through with their profession. But the second part is that we all have to remember the reality of this moment, and that doesn't mean we have to be hysterical and overreact, but we also have to recognize that we can't sort of anticipate and sort of immediately fold because of fear, because that's the only thing that's going to let all of these things sort of topple over. Information autocracy, actual autocracy -- those are the two ingredients here. We're in a social media environment, our own participation matters, but it starts with journalists.
December 16, 2024, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
JOY REID (HOST): So where -- I mean, that is the kind of society we're in, Angelo. What does it mean -- particularly from a media point of view, that's what you follow and study -- when the people now that are going to run the government believe conspiracy theories and push them as well?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERES PRESIDENT): I mean, it's like getting gasoline to the fire. I mean, one of the things that Trump did in '16, again in '20, and it really just became fully operationalized in 2024, and now it's part and parcel with the entire Republican Party is that they built and organized power on what used to be considered the fringes. And one of the ways that you do that is you pluck ideas and narratives from the fringes, you turn them into a story, you validate them by giving them air time and oxygen and legitimacy and the imprimatur of a national figure campaigning and organizing around it. And then, once you're in positions of power, you start to then take actions or use official mechanisms to then stamp those as legitimate.
And so that's how you get something -- you know, there's whacky things like birds aren't real and that kind of stuff that are rising. But then you get examples of this playing out in real time. So, you go from the "great replacement" theory, a really racist, fringe idea decades ago that Jews and Democrats were importing people from other countries in order to sort of dilute the white population and entrench themselves political power permanently -- that was relegated to the fringes. But when you start to get people that are now going to be in positions of power, on their rise up taking it, validating it, organizing it, talking about it, now it's just -- now that's standard Republican Party orthodoxy.
So, what does it mean? Everything gets worse, because you're no longer just using an alternative reality to sort of win the news cycle day to day. You're actually taking that alternative reality, and in many cases the nightmare scenario, and you're using your power and the positions of power in government to make it a reality, even though it's totally disconnected from fact. And that's the part that's so disturbing about this is that it's about to get worse.
...
REID: And it's so lucrative. I mean, they do it because it makes money, right? They had to pay out $787 million to Dominion Voting because they fueled the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen and that led in part to an insurrection in our Capitol. People literally broke the law and smashed into the Capitol because they deeply believed that the election was being stolen, Angelo. I mean, there are real world consequences here, including to Fox, but their shareholders paid that. It didn't hurt them personally, right?
And it's so lucrative. Alex Jones became a multimillionaire, pushing things like the Sandy Hook conspiracy and 9/11 conspiracies. But those things couldn't actually exist if people had a fundamental trust in the government. And let's just be honest, sometimes the government does lie. George W. Bush administration literally did lie to get us into a war. Look at trust in government. You can see the dips, and this is just trust in government. Look how it's declined, Angelo. It has really declined. The Iraq War did it, the Vietnam War, the lies there. There are reasons to sometimes distrust the government, right? But now we're going to have a government where the incoming president was found by The Washington Post to have lied, 3 -- 4,000 times. But now he's in charge of the whole apparatus.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, this is the part that I find really disturbing. As you noted, one, it's really profitable. Two, they've also taken down some of the safeguards. And David was sort of referencing this before. One of the things -- as you noted in your monologue -- this has always been a part of America. We've always had these fringey ideas, these conspiracies. It's a little spicy, in some ways, it adds a little flavor. What was different in the past is that they weren't connected. You had all these disconnected conspiracists that had very, very small audiences. One of the things that technology and social media has done, it has connected otherwise disconnected audiences. It's supercharged these ideas. It's found individuals are likely to be receptive to it and then pushed it directly to those. And the effect of that is not only to spread it, but to make it extremely profitable.
So, when that Chinese spy balloon went across America a while ago, the right-wing media was selling prepper kits like crazy after that. So not only did they have an incentive to push it for political reasons, but they had really intense financial reasons to do it. And now we're living in an environment over the last year -- and you've seen this play out in the lead-up to Trump coming into office -- where you attack the social media platforms and you neuter them. So that not only are they not only enforcing the existing rules that they had, but they're actually enabling the proliferation of these conspiracies by eliminating a whole bunch of safeguards that were there in the first place to sort of slow down the spread of these lies in the first place.
aha not pm
msnbc 12 24
carusone says tucker has taken place of limbaugh as setting major uber narrative [ // bannon?], so not nec literally picking cab but trump has to cast to fit the story?
mma 11 24
On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains the role extremists in conservative media are playing in the Trump transition
Written by Media Matters Staff (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/media-matters-staff)
Published 11/19/24
Video
From the November 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): At a time when global tensions are high, the war in Ukraine is intensifying, Donald Trump's decision to tap Tulsi Gabbard as his incoming Director of National Intelligence is raising alarms, as you heard there. New reporting uncovers how she has become a favorite among the state media, of one of America's adversaries, Russia.
That's according to The New York Times, which reports, "In Russia, the reaction to her potential appointed has been gleeful, even if Putin's government remains weary of American policies, even under a second Trump administration. 'The CIA and the FBI are trembling,' a Russian newspaper wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting positively, that Ukrainians consider 'an agent of the Russian state.' A state television channel called her a Russian 'comrade' in Mr. Trump's emerging cabinet." The Times goes on to report, "among members from both parties, her tacit support of Russia's war games in Ukraine, and her repetition of Kremlin disinformation have raised doubts about whether she should be given oversight of the intelligence agencies, including the responsibility of preparing the highly classified daily intelligence briefings for the returning president."
Which, we have just learned Trump is now receiving as the President-Elect after having chosen not to receive them while he was a candidate. Trump receiving intelligence briefings is remarkable, for the fact that just last year he was criminally charged for mishandling national defense information and classified information. His already established as disregard for the safety of our nation's secrets makes his cabinet choices, especially those with access to top intelligence, all the more serious.
...
WALLACE: Angelo, there's something so impossible to articulate about the MOU that officially commences the landing team's arrival of the national security agencies and green lights this process that we're all talking about.
But the reason it's hard to bring that to life is because it's never really been an issue, even in 2000, where there was a recount, even in 2020 when Trump refused to concede the election, there was a transition. There were teams named, there were government officials to be selected, so that the FBI could back them and you would take an oath and you would swear that your allegiance was to the United States. That is the process that has a been aborted in the Trump transition. And with your expertise in what the plan was all along, just share your thoughts and reflections on where we are.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, the thing that is worth keeping in mind -- we're all pointing out your accurate assessment. And part of it is that they've spent the last four years -- and it started before them, but the last four years -- really entrenching this idea that all of the United States government is the actually enemy, is enemy number one.
So, every time you point out, accurately, that they want to dismantle it, undermine it, that it's going to make us less safe, they say "Yes, yes that is exactly right because that is the enemy number one." And where that starts from, what that originates, who that benefits, those are all real questions, and as has already been discussed, we don't even know necessarily to what extent, in this case, Gabbard's relationship is with foreign entities and whether it is just sympathies or something deeper than that because it is not being investigated. The normal channels and processes of a transition are not even being followed this time, which is a reflection of the fact that it is so deeply internalized that all of these institutions are the enemy and they need to go away or be dismantled or be destroyed.
To just put a wrapper on it, I think there's something unsettling that's hard to articulate, here. And so, the best way that I can sort of illustrate it is to start with, yea there is something unsettling here. And some ways to understand that is, where the news about Tulsi Gabbard's appointment was broken in the first place.
It was broken by Alex Jones on InfoWars. It wasn't broken by a far right-wing outlet or something like that, it was broken there. That's where that news came out first and that's significant. It wasn't by accident, it was by design, that the news of her being put there came first because that is a reflection of where the power is being organized now. It is being organized on what used to be considered the fringes.
And Gabbard is an example of somebody that came in as a Democrat, at least ostensibly, and she validated as a Democrat all of the right-wing narrative that they were telling about these government institutions and in a way, "See, even a Democrat believes all the things that we're saying about the deep state, about the nefarious forces."
And so, not only was she a part of that validation process, but she's also an illustration of what that transition is and how you live and survive and thrive in the right-wing fever swamps. And so, when you pull it all together, she not only helped validate and cultivate that narrative and is clearly a responsive to that audience and landscape, but now she's going to be in a position where when Trump was previously getting from right- wing media -- and we saw that play out in his first term -- is now going to be echoed in whatever the internal intelligence that he receives because the underlying institutions are in fact going to be actively and intentionally dismantled, or at least disrupted. And that's the reality that we're heading into here.
WALLACE: I mean Angelo, let me illustrate that this is Tulsi Gabbard describing the court approved search of Mar-a-Lago to retrieve classified national defense information on Fox News.
...
The only people known to have been targeted by all those agencies were Trump's political adversaries. I mean, the complete inverse is what comes out of her mouth, which is, again, whether her sympathies lie with Russia or whether it's something deeper I think is a known unknown, but the tactics are straight out of a Russian disinformation playbook.
CARUSONE: They are, and the thing that I always jump to is not only was she a fixture on Fox News for a while, but she guest hosted -- she used to be a guest host for Tucker Carlson, who as you know, did increasingly more sympathetic Russian content. He did that whole big thing in the supermarket laughing and talking about how great the country is and how what we're being fed is a lie.
And I think that to me is the tie-in here, is that we already know what she's going to do in this role because she's been doing it in the right-wing media for the past few years, which is taking these attacks on American institutions and American credibility -- and I agree with what Frank was saying, we shouldn't always defend reflexively institutions and bureaucracies that need to be adapted, modified, improved, optimized, that should always be something we aspire to.
But that's not what -- that what it sort of sounds like they are talking about to their audiences, but they're talking about something deeper. They've identified an enemy, which is the government and they're acting accordingly. And that is why they're not participating in this process, this transition, because they don't even want to undermine their own argument and their own narrative to the audience that they've been feeding this to. So every action and every day that goes by, they further reinforce the very story that they've been telling as they get one step closer to those official positions.
Video
From the November 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Some alarming news to tell you about, of Russia's unprovoked illegal invasion of Ukraine that proves the stakes have perhaps never been higher when it comes to supporting our Democratic ally over Vladimir Putin's Russia. Putin just formally lowered his own threshold for using nuclear weapons, now saying Russia can conduct a nuclear strike is attacked by not only a nuclear power, such as the United States, but also a nation that is backed by a nuclear power, such as Ukraine.
It was a long planned move that Putin first announced back in September after warning that he would do so for years. The Kremlin says the use of nuclear weapons still would be a "last resort measure" but its timing makes it appear to be a clear signal to the West from Vladimir Putin. U.S. Officials telling NBC News that Ukraine fired into Russia overnight, using U.S.-made missiles, the time after Joe Biden gave the Ukraine military the go-ahead over the weekend.
From the New York Times, "the doctrine's publication on Tuesday appeared to be the latest suggestion from the Kremlin that Russia could use nuclear weapons to respond to attacks by Ukraine carried out with American support and that the response could be directed against American facilities as well as Ukraine itself.
...
WALLACE: Angelo, the person who authored the most scathing report and indictment of Donald Trump's affinity for, ties to, and questions about Trump and Russia is his incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. When he took over from Richard Burg for the Senate Intelligence Committee. Do you think they know that, do you think they don't care, do you think the chaos is the point in this mishmash of Gabbard and Rubio's Trumpian-mixed messaging? What do you think?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I think they don't care, and I think ultimately, Rubio is sort of one small piece of it but it's certainly not reflective of the larger administration or their posture. And I think ultimately what has been signaled, both during the campaign and as well as by who he is putting into these places from Pete Hegseth on down, that the affinity for Russia is not just sort of the geopolitical worldview or that they have been fed right from the ground up because they are consumers of the right-wing media, what Russia has been doing with our information landscape for quite a while, and sort of seeing the ground.
But that we should also not lose sight of the fact that there's an affinity there that is born out of there that Russia is an ethno-nationalist state and that is one of the biggest appeals that Tucker sort of pushed into it, which is this idea that like with Mike, that Mike makes right. And that was one of the things that Tucker was advocating for when he was on Fox, when he was holding it up as an exemplary, saying, "Yes, we have to know who our enemies are, Russia's never hurt us, but more importantly look how well their society is because they embraced ethnic nationalism."
And if you put that in the context of other attacks on DEI or all these other issues, it does sort of boil down to this core idea that there is something there in Russia that is if not aspirational for them, at least something that we should take and incorporate into our society. And so Marco Rubio is not going to have a lot of influence or power in the broader administration and I feel like everybody knows that.
Video
From the November 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): The idea that Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025 -- never read it, had no idea what was in it, never seen these people before -- it was of course never the whole truth, no matter how many times he repeated it during the campaign because it became so unpopular. Well, as if we needed more proof of that, Trump is now welcoming one of the chief architects of Project 2025's 900 page radical, deeply polarizing and unpopular agenda, to potentially play a starring, high-profile role in his new administration.
ABC news is reporting this, "Russ Vought, who authored a chapter on executive office of the president for Project 2025's 'Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise' is under consideration for a cabinet-level position in the next administration and has been vetted by Trump's transition team, sources say." They added this, "Vought not only authored the chapter, but he was also deeply involved in drafting Project 2025's playbook for the first 180 days of the new Trump administration."
He is now one of several Project 2025 alums being considered for crucial high-profile roles in the Trump cabinet. Joining our conversation is the former congressman from Florida, MSNBC political analyst David Jolly. Angelo Carusone is still with us.
...
WALLACE: Angelo, the only possible slowing mechanism is it's deeply unpopular. And I want to show you, Fox News' Brit Hume breaking the news, that Donald Trump does not have a mandate. We're going to pull that up. Here's what Brit Hume said on Fox News. "Mandates, real mandates are rare and landslides are even rarer. The president would be wise to ignore the talk from his supporters about what an enormous mandate he has and what a great landslide he won because thinking that can lead to trouble."
Thinking you have a mandate and proceeding with the deeply unpopular Project 2025 feels like a recipe for Trumpian disaster.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I would like to think so. What I would just note at the top, and I'm not dismissing that because I think that's a reality that we have to keep reminding over and over again, part of the reason why we even have to point out that the slimness of the outcome is not necessarily a mandate, is because for the past few weeks, what has been happening in right-wing media more broadly and over and over again, is reverberating and echoing this idea that it was this massive mandate.
That the victory was so significant and total that it was a reflection of the popular will of the people. And as a result of that, he has to go full steam ahead with all of these promises and directives. And so, we're already dealing with a landscape and narrative that is deeply setting in, and so now we're working uphill. But we shouldn't lose sight of that.
But as you know, you're right. It is deeply unpopular, it always was. And there's a lot of assumptions that have been played out that he's not going to do many of the things that he said he was going to do which is how some people sort of made those last-minute decisions because they thought "Ah, he's authentic. Yah, he said some things, but he's not going to do those things."
But what I would note, and this is the part that is especially unsettling among all the things we've talked about so far -- all the others, have all sorts of deficiencies and issues and concerns and anxieties. The thing with Russ Vought that scares me a lot is that he has the plan. He didn't just help drive the 900-page document that everybody knows about.
As you noted, he has that 180 day agenda, he was the author of the private document. And it isn't just a step by step guide, one of the things that it includes is least 350 specific documents, draft memos, individual instruction, executive orders, agency notes, all the legal work that has to be done for a series of directives and what he has been crystal clear about from the beginning is that when they come in, they're going to rapidly engage in a mass deportation effort. And part of that is to fulfill that promise and part of that is to elicit a backlash where they can smash-and-grab and shock people into submission.
And then the last thing he said and he's been saying it repeatedly -- not just once or twice -- is that one of the goals here in these initial six months is to end multiculturalism in America. That the era of multiculturalism has to end as well as the independent of these agencies.
And that's where it gets scary, that we are not just going to go to rely on the boomerang effect of not having the popular mandate because they know it is not popular and are baking that into their plans. And we have the advantage now that knowing this is about to happen, and that's where we have to start putting some more antibodies into the system.
Video
From the November 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
[CLIP BEGINS]
RUSS VOUGHT: If we are not fearless at the point of attack, if we don't have courage, then we will step away from the battle. It will be convenient not to be there, but our view is that that's where the country needs us and we're not going to save our country without a little confrontation.
[CLIP ENDS]
NICOLLE WALLACE: That is Russ Vought.
...
Let me actually show you the results, now that most of the counting is done. Donald Trump, ticking just below 50% there David jolly, 49.9%. Vice President Kamala Harris at 48.2%. Obviously Trump's still the winner of the popular vote and in an electoral, not landside, but swept the battleground states.
But this morning from Brit Hume, it was intriguing to me, Angelo, in this regard. Winners also misread their mandates. In '04, I think, when George W. Bush won there was a sense that he had a mandate for comprehensive immigration reform and privatization of social security. There was no comprehensive immigration reform and social security has never been privatized.
I mean, it happens when you lose as well, to David jolly's point, misreading a mandate of defeat that everything was so wildly unpopular, you scrap everything. I mean, this is still -- this is a country almost completely cleaved into two, to your great reporting, consuming totally different information, two totally different sets of facts, two totally different sets of reality, that impacted everything from climate change to the weather, the military to just about everything in American life. What are your thoughts heading into the last stretch here before Trump grabs the levers of power in terms of how sort of fact- based earth one interests are organized and promoted?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): The dynamics that you just played out, they recognize -- just to bridge this from what we were talking about before with Russel Vought -- he likens this period right now to 1776 or 1860, the Civil War. In fact, when he talks about the policies that he was putting together, the plans, he mentions it internally when he talks about it. That it -- he was drafting them in mind with a country that is reflective of 1860. He's aware of the dynamics at play.
And on the public side, they may talk about "mandate" and "massive landside" and they may build that narrative on a house of cards but internally. when they're really thinking about how they execute and drive an agenda, they are seeing the landscape clear-eyed. That it is a fairly balanced country and that a lot of things that they're going to be pushing through are not going to be popular.
And that's where I think about this moment which is we know what's in front of us, what's about to happen. You have to -- one -- start to name it plainly and clearly to anticipate it, not to be hysterical, not to feed into impotency, not to make people feel so powerless or scared that they disengage, that they retreat, that they duck and cover -- because that's not going to serve anybody well.
What this is a time for is clarity of purpose, stiffening our spines a little bit, and being clear-eyed about what they're saying. Because a lot of what they're going to do is going to hurt people or the people are not going to really like it. And the task for the media, for the public, for all individuals in this moment is to be able to identify when that starts to happen, why it's happening, who it's affecting and where those decisions came from.
And that's going to be the responsibility, as the last election illustrated, that goes beyond the main news media, but it is going to be an individual effort. Not to name and shame individuals for what they voted or what they supported, but to help people understand why the things that are happening in this moment and why they're being driven.
And that's going to be the process that we go through step-by- step. The thing that I think is very important and the most significant thing is not stepping on any bear traps. They are designing an agenda, as I noted, that is anticipating a certain degree of backlash -- that they can implement The Insurrection Act -- that is going to help create and so they can fuel impotency fast and hard.
And for us, that's my horizon point is clarity and purpose but also making sure that anything I do day to day, both in my own personal life and also in my public work, is not fueling that impotency because that is what they are counting on in order to take advantage of the dynamics that they think they ride.
WALLACE: Alright, I think you just articulated our mission for our next segment on these topics.
mma
November 6, 2024, edition of MSNBC's *Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): We're back with Ian, Angelo and Tim. I mean, I don't want to embarrass you, but we have been talking a little bit about how crippling it is to contemplate, Angelo, that the substance of Project 2025 — I feel like one of the great accomplishments of the summer was that because of your work and some great work in The New York Times and other places and Taraji P. Henson, Project 2025 was front and center before the country. And I'm sure no one read all 900 pages but you. But I read a couple hundred. And it's scary, you know, S-H-I-T. And people voted for Trump knowing about Project 2025. Tell me where your thoughts are today about that.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I think one of the tie-ins with the early discussion about democracy too is many of people voting for Trump also thought they were voting for democracy, in a way. Because in this — and part of the, one of the signature cruxes of Project 2025 is this idea that we're going to go in, execute schedule F, which is the ability to fire tens of thousands of federal employees, and obviously that, for Project 2025 that's about giving the effort control. It's sort of removing all the potential obstacles, as they see it, and you can then put in your people and move forward, move fast.
But for one of the audience — for the larger right-wing audience and national audience, I mean, we have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage. And one of the stories that they've heard, not for one year but for eight years, is that there is a deep state, a universe of people in government that are out there that have the real power. They're the ones with the real power. They're taking power away from you, the individual. And the only person that can give you back that power is Donald Trump. He's going to — and that's why they hate him so much, because he's going to come in and he's going to get rid of them once and for all. He's not going to be duped again like last time. And he's going to give you back your power.
And so, yeah, there's a lot of policies to it and it's all scary, and we can get into it. But at its core, this is a discussion about democracy. I'm not so blinded to think that they all are deeply pro-democracy. Many of them don't believe in democracy as a principle and they want something more autocratic and authoritarian. But there's another part, a much larger part, that actually believe that a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for democracy because they have validated and internalized the idea that there's an anti-democratic secret cabal that is actually preventing their desires and exercise of democratic power from being implemented and put in place, and that only Trump can restore their power.
And that's the part that's so frightening about this, is that it not just means that Project 2025 becomes more of a reality, and that a lot of the things we see of it, going after opponents and everything else, in their minds, in many people's minds, that will be acceptable because those — they have it coming to them. And the through line, the foundation upon where all of this is, is a large right-wing misinformation engine that has created an environment where, and a lens through which people see the world that is not the way that it is. And so, that's how you get so many people going out there and saying, “Oh well, he does it because he has to,” or “he's not really going to do those things,” or “he's going to do them, but they have it coming to them.” Because they are also in belief that they're being democratic and defending the system.
WALLACE: What is the role of the fear that a document like Project 2025 creates, just to sort of come back to the beginning of obeying in advance —
CARUSONE: Yeah.
WALLACE: I mean, friends in same-sex marriages are frightened that their families will be destroyed. Friends who have worked in DOJ, in places that maybe weren't in the crosshairs last time, had nothing to do with Russia, are afraid they'll be dismissed as people like Jeffrey Clark take over. People who serve in the military around the world are frightened that they'll be given illegal orders and are too far down the food chain to know how to deal with them or who to — I mean, what happens now, Angelo?
CARUSONE: Yeah, I mean, when Ian was talking before, that's all my brain could go to, was exactly the question that you just asked which is, one of the things that Project 2025 talks about early on, aside from getting rid of all this personnel and replacing them, is that you have to immediately weaponize the DOJ in order to shock and awe people, that you take a bunch of grand swift actions, mass arrests, mass prosecutions, harassments. And the goal isn't to get all those people ultimately in prison or something.
It's to show a force very early on that we mean business, in hopes that most people do the natural thing, the thing that comes instinctually, which is to duck and cover. There's a reason why, it's so concerning about anticipatory obedience because it does speed up the process of giving authoritarians more power. And they're very open about it in Project 2025. That's the tactic. It's not just about revenge, although that's a part of it. It's also about sending a message that this is the new order and everybody else best get in line.
And that is an intention of that very first few months, is to execute that shock and awe thing. It was one of the first things Steve Bannon said last night, that they're coming for you, FBI. They're coming for you, deep state. He listed the places they're going to go after. And it's to show that nobody's safe, to get in line. So teachers, librarians, educators, they will all be systematically targeted and identified. It won't just be government bureaucrats, who do very good work. It'll also be anyone that they've identified as sort of a vanguard of this culture war that they've oriented around.
And it's really is — to your point, it's to get everybody else to have to press the question, “Is this worth it or is it better for me to just go along to get along?” And that's what they want to instill right away because you get rid of the personnel, you change that norms, and then you drive forward with the larger anti-democratic agenda. And that's the reality that we are heading into. It doesn't have to be. We're going to have to fight. We have to stiffen our spines and put some bulwarks in. There's a lot of work to be done. But that's why they're doing it and that's the intention.
mma 10 24
October 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's *Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): The Trump campaign in the final four weeks is amplifying content that is against FEMA, the White House, and the local residents, the very people he's trying to win over. This feels like hyperspiral to something different than what we've been covering for nine years.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, I think that's right. And I appreciate that you acknowledged that this is different. And the last discussion when Vaughn was sort of talking about, you know, in a way that part of this is sort of, you know, sowing the seeds, incubating narratives that they can pluck back up if the election doesn't go their way and point to — that's all being sown right now.
And I think one of the things that's different and why this is so scary from my perspective is that you know, one of the things that Rupert Murdoch acknowledged right before January 6, 2021, was that Fox News was the only entity that could've corrected the record about who won the election. And ultimately they decided not to issue any statements or do any reporting saying that Trump lost in that time period, then we have January 6. But he was right back then. In 2021, that was true, that you could actually — because of where Fox was positioned, if they told the truth, a large enough segment of that audience would have consumed it, and it would have had a neutralizing effect.
What you ask what the difference is and note that — this is the difference. The difference is that no longer is there a single entity in sort of that fortress of lies — I love that description — that Trump is behind that can actually penetrate that and neutralize those lies. It's scattered them out. So if one of them decides to go rogue, the effects of it are really limited. And, you know, 60 Minutes said no fact-checking, but the part I marveled at is that Laura Ingraham fact-checked Donald Trump during that rally when he said that Vice President Harris hadn't been in North Carolina, and she had to correct him in the real-time and say, well, actually, she's there right now.
And of course, that doesn't land, that doesn't have the same penetrating effect, because of exactly what you acknowledged, this is different. That the seeds are being sown across multiple social media platforms and the position that X has is in many ways the position that Fox News had a few cycles ago. They're simply too big, too influential, and too many narratives have been seeded there and incubated that it'll be impossible to singularly swab them down. Even if Fox News turned on a dime, my assessment is that it wouldn't really have much of an impact in terms of, you know, that fortress of lies.
WALLACE: So where are we then, Angelo?
CARUSONE: We are in a, you know, increasingly difficult place, and that's the part that I find so scary. There are a lot of — lot of antibodies in the system, and I'm not a medical professional, but, to me, I look at misinformation in many ways that, it follows a lot of similar patterns that public health does. It's viral, that's why we call it viral when something goes viral, right? Because it follows very similar behaviors.
The only way to really deal with misinformation is not to correct it on the backend, especially nowadays when there's so little faith in institutions, is that you have to have antibodies in the systems. You have to have some trusted sources, and you have to have some friction in the system, some mechanisms that slow it down from spreading, so that good information can get out there and get in front of it.
And that's the thing that is really scary from my perspective. Forget about the lack of antibodies. A lot of the friction that had been in the system is not only being removed, but it's actually being accelerated. So that all of the platforms are not just letting this stuff happen, they're helping boost it and saturate it and amplify it, in ways that have also not existed in previous cycles.
So the opportunism to exploit that vulnerability is great, both from foreign adversaries and from the Trump campaign. And because it is no longer something that they're building on the fly, challenging the election is their plan B. They have been planning for this. That's what makes this so different. We are in a really scary position.
WALLACE: It feels like that's the conversation we have to have next, like, tomorrow, because that is being seeded. And I guess the last thing I would say that I learned from both of you is that despair and hopelessness is their tactic, so the real antibody is us. We are the answer. We are the answer. And our faith and our ability to vote and reject it, that's the answer, that's what they're most afraid of. So all of it is designed to make us think that it's impossible, but it's definitely possible.
mma 11 24
Angelo Carusone and Molly Jong-Fast discuss how American discourse is “pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage”
Written by Media Matters Staff (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/media-matters-staff)
Angelo Carusone Fast Politics excerpt, 11/7/24
November 7, 2024
CitationFrom the November 7, 2024, edition of IHeart's Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fast-politics-with-molly-jong-fast/id1645614328)
MOLLY JONG-FAST (HOST) Let's talk about growing power from the fringes. So does that look like McCarthyism?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. But you know what's so different about — and that's one of the reasons why you mentioned McCarthyism as opposed to, say, the John Birch Society. Right? Because McCarthy actually was able to get some power. Right?
And whereas the John Birch Society, they hey. Yeah. They were influential, but they didn't —. Here's the difference, and it gets it, and there's a modern analog to it. The difference is that America has always had fringes, just like any society. We've had a little bit more fringes. In part, that's what makes us a little spicy. Our fringes are kind of a feature in a way, but what we haven't had is the fringes being connected. Right? And so you can't build power unless you connect otherwise disconnected audiences.
That's where McCarthyism comes in. Obviously, McCarthy was a demagogue, so the tool was demagoguery. But what it did was it connected otherwise disconnected audiences, and he used a platform that he had to do that. And what we have now, the modern analog, and, like, to your point about McCarthyism, in a way, it's McCarthyism on steroids because McCarthy still needed to rely on traditional means. And one of the things that we have now is that you have extremely powerful algorithms that connect otherwise disconnected audiences.
:{If you like one piece of QAnon content or two pieces QAnon content, even if you don't intentionally know it's QAnon or not, the algorithms will feed you more and more and more of that and move you down a rabbit hole and move you and intensify or capture you. They will convert you and they will connect you to new people. :{And so that is partly what we're dealing with now is that we are dealing with a McCarthyism that does not need to dilute itself to speak to mass audiences.}:
And believe it, the McCarthy thing strangely enough was diluted. It needed to be diluted in order to reach broader and broader audiences. What happens when you don't need to dilute to have the same reach and saturation because the tools that we're using, the tech platforms, are automatically distributing that content to those individuals. And I just wanna make one point on that because I think it helps tie into the outcomes here.}:
The major platforms had put in place many safeguards since the last election about about about what was recommended, about who they were recommending content to, about not accelerating extremism. And in the last year, most of those safeguards have all been systematically eliminated or reduced as a result of pressure from right-wing influencers. They worked the refs at these platforms. So they knew what they were doing because they knew that in order to scale and execute organizing power on the fringes, you needed the runway and the tools that these tech platforms provided. So I would say it looks like McCarthyism, but strangely enough, a more raw and nondiluted version of McCarthyism.
And I don't think we should joke about the demon thing. When I said that before, it's a joke, but think about it. There's the increase of Christian nationalists, the rise of this evangelical strain, of this intense religious strain, this idea that there are demons among us doing bad things — that is going to be something that they start to name. They're going to start identifying — I'm not even joking. When I talk about Qanon and, like, you know, back in 2018, people, donors, supporters, they really thought I was losing my mind.
And I talk about demons now, not because like, it's a focus point of mine, but I look where they get their information. And it's like they're gonna start screaming that person's a demon. That person's being motivated by demons. And that is a tactic of the same thing that McCarthy is. They will have — they will they will build up new boogeymen, new labels that they can then apply to individuals in order to harass them, persecute them, and all of that is designed to sort of make examples out of people fast so that more and more people duck and cover.
JONG-FAST: Yeah. Let's just keep going with this for a minute. What do we think that we do next? I was on a show this morning. It was on the late-night MSNBC, and we're talking about, like, what went wrong.
CARUSONE: Yeah.
JONG-FAST: Which is what we're gonna be talking about for the next five hundred — until the midterms. And one of the things that, you know, there was a lot of, like, this and that, and this went wrong, this went wrong. But, like, one of the things that I think is that it seems to me like there is a real information problem. Right? Like, we — there are parts of this country that don't have news. The news they're getting is red sludge. Remember how, you know, the thing that Elon shared after Paul Pelosi has been you know what I mean? So what — what's the solve there?
CARUSONE: I would say there are three sort of immediate things, and they — and part of it's you know, a lot of this all starts too with the with the recognition early on that I was describing about how they're organizing and building power. And because that — sort of then is you're working toward countering that.
I think there's sort of three things that are important in terms of the next step here. One is everyone I think a lot of people talk about messaging and say, oh, we need better messaging. I look at it a slightly different way. You know, there's three ways that you can talk to somebody. You can talk to their head, their heart, or their gut. That's it. It doesn't matter what the message is. It's either to their head, their heart, or their gut.
And if you look at the bulk of Republican and conservative and right-wing message you know, messaging, what they're saying, it's almost all to people's gut. Sometimes it'll be to their to their heart, never to their head. If you look at Democratic messaging, it's almost always to people's heads, sometimes their heart, never to their gut. And why that matters is that we live in — we have this information asymmetry, but obviously people say, well, not that many people watch the news or read papers. Sure. But they still live in an information world because they — you get it through word-of-mouth.
You get — you don't get the individual facts or the threads, but you get the narrative. We all live in a narrative or narratives. And when that narrative when the right wing has narrative dominance, and as you noted, that narrative dominance is really just a reflection of right-wing sludge, you're just pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage all the time. Even if you don't consume a drop of it, you're still pickled in it because your friends are, because indirectly you're getting it, it's on the television, you see the chyron when you're picking up your bagel in the morning. You form a narrative. That's what happens. And so I think we need to, 1, think about how it is that we communicate, and communicators need to recognize that we need to rethink about that.
The second, there were two more structural pieces. One is that there's no shortage of creators on our side, but the one thing that the right-wing does, and they've done this for decades and they do it better, is they invest in people.
There's no reason why our content creators should not be getting — have to have other jobs. You know? Some of our best people are you know, it's not their primary position. They're not full-time, you know, you know, video creators or podcasters. It's something they do on the side incidentally, and we've never really made robust investments in them, whereas they have, and they have a pipeline for that.
JONG-FAST: Which they have. Yeah.
CARUSONE: You know, there are people on Instagram that got grants from Charlie Kirk years ago that will make their way to or have already made their way to Daily Wire podcasts after a few years. Right? And that's how it works. And so you get the benefits immediately of you balance out the scales because you have your own people out there pushing information, and it's it's authentic. You're not trying to come in and control it, but then you're also building revolving capital in businesses that are designed to build and shape narratives. So unless that challenge is confronted, you know, and liberals are so burned by what they — by Air America. It's like, well, we tried to combat right-wing radio in the ninety you know, in the late nineties and early two thousands and it failed. So let's give up forever. You know? And that's a mistake.
And then the last thing I'll say is — so one is we need to do grapple with that, and that's not no. We'll spend one point five billion dollars on ads that we know don't work, but we won't spend a hundred million dollars to incubate and seed a new generation of creators and talkers and storytellers. That's ridiculous. That's stupid.
And that's a mistake. And then the third thing I'd say is that the tech platforms are going to kill us. They are. And we need to deal with that. And the Democrats you know, Republicans worked the refs in newsrooms, and then they took the same strategy.
JONG-FAST: And it worked.
CARUSONE: And it worked. And it worked. And they did it again here. You know, every time you know, YouTube or another major platform rolled back another election policy as a result of right-wing pressure, there was no Democratic counter-response.
There was no talk of them cheating or yelling and screaming. I wasn't surprised by what happened with Jeff Bezos or what we saw in Silicon Valley as the spring rolled by because those seeds were sown months ago. They were scared from Republican pressure that they were getting. And that needs to be something that Democrats really grapple with. And it's not only because that will help, again, balance out the scales, but it's also that they'll maybe get some insights into that the political landscape is realigning. They need to be more responsive to what is happening, and that political landscape is actually a reflection of what the larger information landscape is.
You know? Obviously, I'm at Media Matters, whenever I talk to them about the media, people say, well, not that many people watch CNN or read The New York Times. Like, sure. But they get a podcast secondarily. They sit online. They get push alerts on their phones. All these things add up.
JONG-FAST: Right, it's downstream.
CARUSONE: Yes. And that's it. And Republicans understand, and Trump in particular, you know, I think we need to internalize the lesson. He's a media creature, and he was able to do a lot because he is a media creature.
And, you know, part of what allowed people to say, oh, he doesn't really mean it is a thing called kayfabe, which exists in WWE. It's a wrestling thing. It's a character. And people sort of— all the stuff that people that really has turned him off to people, they say, oh, but he's just a character. No one thinks the Undertaker really murders their villain in the, you know, their opponent in the ring and brings them underground. It's a joke. And I think a lot of times, what Trump was able to do was not only manipulate the media to have narrative dominance and to coordinate, you know, take advantage of this massive right-wing megaphone that they've had, but also rely on the benefit of the doubt and the sort of the way that consumers engage with those characters and in particular him. And we need to recognize that that is a thing that we're gonna have to grapple with as well because he won't be the last. That's the scary thing.
Tucker will be a rising political force, and we need to accept that as a thing that is true. We will have to accept that, look out the trail, and look who performed in terms of engagement. Very few people cut across right the right-wing landscape in the way that Trump does, and Tucker is one of those few figures. Obviously, Musk as well. That's it.
That's the next step. And it doesn't solve everything, but I don't think circular firing squad or trying to figure out some of the micro things that would have been different are gonna be helpful because what took place here is macro, and we need to think about it at a bigger level.
mma 8 24
On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains how the media privileges the Trump campaign’s misinformation “in an attempt to inoculate themselves from cries of bias”
Carusone: “If they have not adapted yet to sort of be the vanguard, they can at least be the laggard by covering the effective work that the campaign is doing and because they can't ignore it”
Written by Media Matters Staff (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/media-matters-staff)
Published 08/09/24
Video
CitationFrom the August 9, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Throughout Donald Trump's time in our politics, there has been an added responsibility, a burden really, placed on anyone opposing him and everyone covering him. The responsibility to fact check the barrage of lies he spews at an alarmingly high and growing rate. Trump lies about things big and important and small and meaningless.
The size of his crowds, the results of the 2020 presidential election, immigration statistics, COVID statistics, economic indicators, the fact that Mexico would pay for his wall, his knowledge or familiarity with Project 2025, crime rates, and what actually happened on January 6th. You get the picture. The Washington Post counted that Trump lied more than 30,000 times while he was president, and the rate of those lies, as we said, increased as the years went on.
Trump's lying has, of course, continued since he's been out of office, defeated by Joe Biden. At the debate against President Joe Biden in late June, he lied more than 30 times in 90 minutes, and it was barely mentioned in the coverage that ensued.
And there was yesterday's incoherent, rambling, nonsensical, grievance-filled press conference yesterday at Mar-a-Lago that garnered wall to wall media coverage. In it, Trump uttered more and more lies, including the outrageous false claim that more people attended his January 6th insurrection in Washington DC than were at Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
He said that. Our network fact-checked him immediately, which is no easy feat, considering the shear volume of lies. And very soon after, the networks did their fact-checking, came the fact-check to end all fact-checks from the Harris Walz campaign. A thorough, itemized, pithy takedown, not just with the facts, but with the evidence and the receipts and a bit of cleverness and humor, an epic and important trolling of the ex-president that we can only assume made his blood boil.
The list the Harris Walz campaign provided, we read most of it on the air, was 31 fact-checks. It was important for a lot of reasons, not just because it got the truth out immediately, but it's a really important and healthy display of this campaign's competence and strategy for the next 88 days. Be quick, be straightforward, be accurate, mix in a little bit of humor, and wouldn't hurt to be a little sharp-edged while you do it.
They called it, "Donald Trump's Very Good, Very Normal Press Conference" and proceeded to say things like this: "We work to pin down reality so Donald Trump, bless his heart, doesn't have to."
Here are a few of their fact-checks again: "People have spoken to bigger crowds than Donald Trump, Obama, Clinton, literally anyone at Lollapalooza, Coachella, or the World Cup. Trump said they have commercials at a level no one else does. He's being drastically outspent on the airways. Governor Josh Shapiro is actually a great guy. Trump said he was not complaining. He, in fact, very much was. Trump does not know the difference between asylum seekers and an insane asylum. After-birth abortion does not exist. Minnesota and Virginia are not the same. There are no polls that say Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide."
This afternoon, the campaign pushed their fact checking endeavors even further, putting out a second press release on what they called "Trump's Temper Tantrum." This time, with many visuals and many quotes from publications further correcting and pushing back against his copious lies.
As we take stock of that powerful display by the Harris Walz campaign, begs a question, has Trump finally met his match as a liar? Questions where we start the hour with some of our favorite experts and friends.
..
Angelo, my colleague, Lawrence O'Donnell, did so -- let me just show you what he did. Did something rather extraordinary on his broadcast last night. Let me play a little bit of it.
...
I play that because Harris actually did answer questions yesterday. She walked to the press before she got on the plane. She answered all of their questions. I don't think they were shouting at her, when she walked away. And, I don't know that everyone even sitting in her live events.
We were, because we heard they were -- they were happening when we were on the air. But just explain to me, in any way you want to, anecdotal, systemic, why the press is still struggling with how to cover Donald Trump?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, in part, I think, at the few reasons. One, I think in part it ties in with what Anne was talking about before that this is what happens when you're confronted with this avalanche of lies. You just, you flood the zone, and then they drown. They haven't adapted, and that in some ways is a failure of the industry to sort of figure out a new approach that is professional but is also responsive to that moment.
There's also another part that's just basic muscle memory, which is that I think it's worth keeping in mind that this is the first election in 30 years, first election in 30 years, where Rush Limbaugh is not the single largest get out the vote operation. And by that, I'm not I mean -- I'm using that as an illustration to point out the fact that we've been dealing with, for decades, a massive right-wing media echo chamber that has not just been an amplifier of lies and false narratives and misinformation, but has also repeatedly beaten up the press such that they, in an attempt to inoculate themselves from cries of bias, have actually started to privilege all kinds of misinformation, false narratives, and worse, have sort of adopted a double standard as a matter of course.
And, you know, there's all kinds of examples of that. I mean, in the weeks after Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, he didn't do any sit down interviews except for one with Fox. You know, he sat with Fox. But he didn't do a real interview with a reporter. There wasn't any clamoring in the press asking why he wasn't doing interviews. Yet, there have been clamoring this weekend, attacks and criticisms of Harris that somehow she's not doing something from major publications by not sitting down for an interview. That's a double standard.
Or how about back in May when Donald Trump made it, you know, reportedly made an offer to oil executives to spend a billion dollars on ads and in exchange he would roll back a whole bunch of environmental policies. The only network, national network, that covered that was MSNBC.
And then if you look on social media, every single major news channel and news operation that week on their social media channels cover the fact that that Vice President Harris said the "f word," but not a single one of them talked about that deal and that report about Donald Trump. So, I think that's really what's going on here.
It's the -- they're confused and disoriented, and there's also some muscle memory here that has been built up over decades.
WALLACE: The asymmetry, Angelo, has been, I think, the biggest dynamic that has aided Donald Trump. And I remember talking about it on The Today Show in the 2015 Republican primary. The asymmetry, and I think it was Mitt Romney who wrote it up and called on Trump to release his taxes. Maybe that was in the beginning of 2016. But, this -- the double standard that the press either accepted or didn't know how to sort of find the strength to push back and require the same standard for Trump as everybody else.
Do you see any signs? I see signs in this fact-check that happened yesterday, that the Harris campaign, it may be, the first institution to try to push back against that asymmetry.
Do you see any signs that make you think maybe this gig is up for Trump?
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, usually when we talk, it's always about something sort of a little bit depressing and unsettling, but this a green shoot. This is a positive thing, and it's real. I mean, this is a real positive thing because one of the things that the right-wing has is that their audience has baked in this amplification imperative.
So, not only do their people lie, but then they reflexively, they'll go ahead and repeat that. They amplify it. They saturate it. And then you have the media that's not playing this referee. What the Harris campaign has done, really effectively so far, is they understand that these packages are not only for news outlets.
They're also for their audience, their people who then go and can take that content and amplify it. They want to amplify it. It's designed in a way to actually empower individuals to share it to others. It's fun to share, not just to stick it to them because it's actually truth. And this is -- you know, there's that famous saying about how, you know, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on. And the only way to sort of counteract that asymmetry is that they -- because lying is a cheat code. It is an advantage, is to actually do this not only because it allows our people to spread it, but it actually then generates a backward effect on actual traditional news outlets. If they have not adapted yet to sort of be the vanguard, they can at least be the laggard by covering the effective work that the campaign is doing and because they can't ignore it because their people are helping saturate it.
So, I think it's a really positive thing.
mma 6 24
The recent extreme heat event (https://www.axios.com/2024/06/05/southwest-us-heatwave-california-vegas-arizona) that swept across the U.S. Southwest in early June — the first major heat wave (https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/06/06/western-us-heat-wave/) of the year, which was made three times more likely (https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-shift-index-alert/climate-shift-index-alert-north-america-june-2024) because of climate change — served as a stark reminder of the escalating climate crisis. It also demonstrated the urgent need for national TV news coverage that consistently connects extreme weather to human-caused climate change.
Yet corporate broadcast and cable news shows largely ignored the climate connection in their coverage, and they missed other crucial opportunities as well: to connect the heat wave to recent climate attribution studies, to spotlight extreme heat’s impact on vulnerable populations, and to inform viewers about the climate implications of the 2024 election.
Topline findings
A Media Matters review of national TV news coverage of the extreme heat wave from June 4-9 found:
National TV news networks covered the extreme heat event for 167 minutes across 97 segments. Climate change was mentioned in only 12% (12) segments.
Cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — aired a combined 114 minutes across 54 segments about the extreme heat event. Climate change was mentioned in 5 segments.
Corporate broadcast TV networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a combined 54 minutes across 43 segments about the extreme heat event. Climate change was mentioned in 7 segments.
CBS performed the best among all networks, airing as many segments that connected the heat to climate change as the three cable news networks combined. Nearly half of its total segments (12) included a mention of climate change (5).
Only 4 climate segments also included a mention of how the extreme heat event could impact a socially marginalized population.
How national TV news covered 2024’s first major extreme heat event
The first major (https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/06/06/western-us-heat-wave/) heat wave (https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/06/05/southwest-heat-wave-temperatures-california-arizona/) of 2024 set records for high temperatures (https://www.axios.com/2024/06/07/southwest-us-heat-wave-california-vegas-phoenix-record) across California and the Southwest (https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/07/weather/heat-dome-wave-record-temperatures-southwest/index.html), while creating significant health hazards for millions. The dangerous heat also impacted notable political events, such as former President Donald Trump's rallies in Arizona and Nevada, where multiple attendees at both events required medical attention for various heat-related conditions (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/scorching-heat-trump-rally-las-vegas-sends-6/story?id=110974299).
National TV news networks aired extensive coverage of the heat wave, as they typically do for highly visible extreme weather events. Multiple segments highlighted the anomalous and record-breaking nature of the heat wave, yet the coverage failed to consistently connect the event to climate change, despite the clear and robust connection (https://www.vox.com/22538401/texas-heat-wave-weather-definition-record-temperature-climate-change) between extreme heat and global warming (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-heat-and-health).
On cable, CNN devoted 53 minutes to the extreme heat event across 25 segments, with 2 segments mentioning climate change. MSNBC aired 46 minutes of coverage across 16 segments, with 3 segments that mentioned climate change. And Fox News aired 15 minutes across 13 segments, without any mention of climate change.
On the corporate broadcast networks, CBS aired 16 minutes across 12 segments, with 5 segments mentioning climate change. NBC aired 27 minutes across 17 segments, with 1 segment that mentioned climate change. And ABC aired 11 minutes across 14 segments, with 1 segment that mentioned climate change.
While national TV news largely failed to connect the extreme heat to global warming, there were a few notable segments that made the connection between climate change and its consequences such as extreme heat.
Some of those came on the June 7 episode of NBC Nightly News (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4020890) and the June 9 episode of MSNBC’s Alex Witt Reports. The latter featured a wide-ranging interview about the causes and effects of the heat wave with climate scientist Kim Cobb, who also called for fossil fuel accountability.
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CitationFrom the June 9, 2024, episode of MSNBC's Alex Witt Reports
National TV news shows also missed key opportunities to provide deeper context about the extreme heat event.
National TV news shows missed key opportunities to contextualize the extreme heat event
Missed opportunity to discuss the impact of extreme heat events on vulnerable populations
National TV news coverage of the extreme heat event largely failed to report on how these events disproportionately harm (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-health-care-consequences-of-extreme-heat-are-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/) vulnerable populations such as the elderly, low-income communities, and laborers (https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/floridas-recent-heat-protection-preemption-law-could-disproportionately-affect-hispanic-and-noncitizen-immigrant-workers/), among others. This lack of coverage overlooks the real-world consequences of inadequate climate action.
However, there were some notable segments that did report on how extreme heat harms vulnerable communities. One of the strongest segments that aired during the studied period was on the June 6 episode of MSNBC's Chris Jansing Reports, which featured interviews with Basil Smikle, director of the Roosevelt House Institute of Public Policy at Hunter College and author and climate reporter Jeff Goodell, among others.
The segment detailed the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, particularly communities of color, low-income families, and the imprisoned, and emphasized the urgent need for a climate justice approach that is responsive to these communities’ specific challenges.
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CitationFrom the June 6, 2024, episode of MSNBC's Chris Jansing Reports
The June 8 episode of CBS Saturday Morning explained that some scientists are reassessing the heat index to more accurately ascertain how heat and humidity damages the human body and the impact of extreme heat on vulnerable populations such as the elderly. The segment highlighted the need for a better understanding of the damaging effects of heat and humidity, as well as the need for stronger policies to protect the vulnerable, with the key message being, “We can do better for our seniors.”
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CitationFrom the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning
Missed opportunity to incorporate recent climate attribution studies into extreme heat coverage
National TV news shows missed an opportunity to incorporate climate into their extreme heat coverage, despite findings (https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/extreme-heat-in-north-america-europe-and-china-in-july-2023-made-much-more-likely-by-climate-change/) that clearly link global warming to the exacerbation of extreme heat events and increased mortality rates (https://apnews.com/article/record-heat-deadly-climate-change-humidity-south-11de21a526e1cbe7e306c47c2f12438d). Notably, research from Climate Central indicated (https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-shift-index-alert/climate-shift-index-alert-north-america-june-2024) that the heat wave from June 5-7, which affected over 229 million people across North America, was made at least three times more likely by human-caused climate change.
This crucial scientific context, while referenced during the June 4 episode of CBS Evening News (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4020883) and the June 5 episode of ABC’s Good Morning America (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4020889), was largely absent from the coverage, leaving viewers without a full understanding about the direct link between climate change and the heat wave they were experiencing.
Missed opportunity to connect climate change impacts to the 2024 election
National TV news largely failed to connect Trump’s campaign rhetoric and climate policy actions to the tangible impacts of climate change, notably during coverage of his rallies in Arizona and Las Vegas where attendees required medical treatment due to extreme heat (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/scorching-heat-trump-rally-las-vegas-sends-6/story?id=110974299).
The Trump administration rolled back (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html) environmental protections, and he has promised (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/lessons-one-month-national-tv-news-coverage-trumps-1-billion-big-oil-scandal) to reverse Biden administration climate actions in exchange for fossil fuel industry campaign donations, as well as mocked (https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trumps-nonsensical-jab-rising-133549399.html?guccounter=1) those harmed (https://x.com/Acyn/status/1799885852736434421) by climate change impacts. But TV news coverage did not effectively link these policies and actions to the immediate and severe consequences of extreme heat at his events.
It's essential (https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-studies-climate-change-coverage/how-broadcast-news-programs-covered-climate-and-2024) for national TV news to provide this context, as informed voting on climate policies is crucial, especially in regions (https://capitalandmain.com/in-mega-hot-arizona-climate-is-not-on-the-ballot-but-it-might-as-well-be) that are increasingly experiencing the consequences of climate change.
Notable segments that attempted to address this angle included the June 5 episode of CNN’s The Lead (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4020888), where climate correspondent Bill Weir used the occasion of extreme heat to note the harmful climate implications of Trump’s climate policies and his attempted quid pro quo with the fossil fuel industry, and the June 9 episode of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, which mentioned Trump's climate denial in the context of people passing out at his Arizona and Las Vegas rallies.
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CitationFrom the June 9, 2024, episode of MSNBC's PoliticsNation
How national TV news can improve its coverage during discrete extreme weather events
National TV news networks can implement several strategies to provide audiences with a more comprehensive understanding of how climate-driven extreme weather impacts their lives:
Tell extreme weather stories through a climate lens
Coverage should consistently explore whether and how climate change may have influenced specific weather events, addressing the impact global warming has on these occurrences.
Contextualize extreme weather events
Networks should strive to connect individual extreme weather events to the broader narrative of the global climate crisis. This approach helps illustrate the cumulative effects of climate change and the urgent need for action.
Incorporate climate justice
When covering extreme weather, TV news media must discuss climate justice, which focuses on the disproportionate effects of climate change on socially marginalized communities. These impacts often manifest most acutely during extreme weather events.
Link extreme weather events to the 2024 election
It is crucial for coverage to show the relationship between extreme weather events, climate change, and candidates’ political platforms. This helps voters understand how candidates' policies might or might not mitigate future climate-related challenges.
Demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry
Broadcast and cable news networks must consistently hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its significant role in driving global warming. This includes discussing how industry actions contribute to climate change and highlighting the environmental and social consequences of their operations.
Methodology...
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mma 4 24
media Matters President and CEO Angelo Carusone issued the following statement after Judge Amit Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted (https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/D8File/2024/04/12/gov.uscourts.dcd.263967.37.0.pdf) Media Matters a preliminary injunction against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Elon Musk encouraged Republican state attorneys general to use their power to harass their critics and stifle reporting about X. Ken Paxton was one of those AGs that took up the call and he was defeated. Today's decision is a victory for free speech.
Key takeaways from the order:
As Judge Mehta noted, Media Matters’ investigative journalism and reporting “are core First Amendment activities,” and any “loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
Judge Mehta prohibited Paxton from taking any steps to enforce his unlawful demand to rifle through Media Matters’ confidential documents.
The same day that X Corp. filed a meritless lawsuit against Media Matters for America for an accurate report on the platform’s extremism, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened (https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-opens-investigation-media-matters-potential-fraudulent-activity) a similarly specious investigation into MMFA under Texas’ deceptive trade practices act. Paxton subsequently issued an overbroad and invasive civil investigative demand – despite the fact that Media Matters has no relevant connection to Texas. The nonpartisan U.S. Press Freedom Tracker which catalogs press freedom violations in the United States recently recorded an incident report (https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/texas-attorney-general-subpoenas-media-matters-after-report-on-x/) related to the Texas attorney general's investigation in their database.
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BROCK BENEFIEL (HOST, THE CLIMATE POD) : On the other side, on the flip side of that, just recently, just within the last month, we've seen so many layoffs, especially of climate journalists, investigative reporters. We've seen this at Vox and Washington Post and CBC, Conde Nast. Like we’re seeing really good climate media — if not entirely disappear — be somewhat, resources being diminished.
And it just makes me very nervous about the way climate will be covered in the United States and in so many other countries if there are not more journalists being hired to cover climate, more good journalists having the time and the resources that they need to cover climate. And I just always get really worried about the business models for journalism, just writ large.
I had this conversation with Jane Glove a couple weeks ago talking about local journalism and, with climate journalism, this show would not exist without amazing climate journalists who are doing the real work, the real investigative work that is time-intensive, and it's resource-intensive. and it's really, really hard. I think that there's like a chilling effect when you see these layoffs to someone even wanting to do this work. I'll just open it up, though, to a bigger question of if you see any bigger trends unfolding in climate media that we should be aware of as we go into 2024.
EVLONDO COOPER (SENIOR RESEARCHER, MEDIA MATTERS): You know, it's interesting just speaking on that, I think any of these individuals who've done this amazing reporting would be an asset for any major news organization that's looking to deepen their climate reporting. I mean, to me this is an easy way to instantly 10x, 100x your reporting. And it does concern me as well, this kind of consolidation of media, the laying off of investigative reporters, people that kind of really dig in and do the hard work of exposing waste, fraud, and abuse, of exposing the fossil fuel industry. And it's concerning as well.
And as far as trends, I don't know. I think it sounds like a broken record. I think, you know, we've seen improvement in the last two years, specifically around broadcast coverage of climate. This year was a little concerning. I feel like they fell back into some of those same patterns of failing to connect extreme weather, of failing to provide these kinds of important climate moments, like the National Climate Assessment, COP28, the coverage they deserve. Missing big climate policy stories.
And so I think going forward, it's critical. I'll tell you one trend that excites me, and I hope that it translates over to how the media covers climate change. There are increasingly large number of polls being produced that show that majorities of Americans, including a majority of Republican or conservative Americans, are concerned about climate change and want to see something happen. And I think that reality has to penetrate the way national TV news networks cover climate change because despite what they say, people are concerned. But they don't want to just watch the doom and gloom all the time. They want to know what they can do. They want to feel empowered. They want to feel engaged. They want the government to do something about it. So you should be asking the politicians on your show, “What are you going to do to address the concerns of your constituents who are tired of seeing these extreme weather events happening in their communities, who want stronger climate policies, who want clean energy, and renewable energy?”
And so I think that's a trend, a positive trend, that if these broadcast networks and cable news networks were smart, they would respond to the will of what their viewers want. And instead of saying, “Oh, it's a ratings killer,” or. “Nobody really—” produce the reporting, and then people will come. You know, you have a podcast like yours and many others that have really great audiences who are concerned about this.
A lot of these folks migrated away from cable news and broadcast news because they no longer, you know, discuss the things that are important to them or has the depth that's important to them. And if you want to see some of that audience return, address some of the things that are important to them, like climate change, and do deep and substantive reporting because people do care, they are concerned, and they want to see something done.
National TV news coverage of COP28 was sparse and inconsistent (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/national-tv-news-coverage-cop28-was-sparse-and-inconsistent)}:
:{12/15/23
- ### National TV news covered Trump’s buried climate assessment with gusto. Biden’s assessment barely made the air. (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/national-tv-news-covered-trumps-buried-climate-assessment-gusto-bidens)
:{11/17/23
- ### National TV news coverage of this summer’s record-breaking extreme weather exposed troubling trends (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/national-tv-news-coverage-summers-record-breaking-extreme-weather-exposed)
09/27/23
mma 6 23
ALICIA MENENDEZ (MSNBC HOST): I leave you to the work of keeping your ear to the ground on what the far-right is saying all about this so that I don't have to, and then I can just learn about it from you. I mean I thought it was interesting, given that he called on his supporters to come rally for him. There wasn't necessarily the optics of what he potentially wanted, but I have often been cautioned by those who study and follow the far-right on this program, that sometimes it is happening underground, in ways that might not be as visible to the naked eye.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah, and I think that's an important thing, to that observation, because a large part of the reason why people weren't there is a reflection of the type of people now that are really his supporters, the people he's speaking to. And a big reason why the people didn't show up is that they were told by the organizers, the sort of now tip people, you know the people that are actually leading the narrative for Trump, don't show up, because it would be a false flag. Don't show up, because there's no way not to commit violence. It's too early to be doing that. That was the narrative that we were hearing in the right-wing fever swamps. Not that we should be committing violence, but that it's too early. It's not the right time. And if you go, they're going to try to set you up, and they're going to try to have some informant that sort of, false flags the situation and gets you worked up to sort of take action. But it's too early, so keep your powder dry. That's the part that's really alarming, is that people didn't show up, not because they didn't support him, but because the principal organizers backing Trump right now in the fever swamps, which is where he's organizing power, on the fringes. And that's what makes this whole thing so scary is that it's very real. They said don't go. Even Alex Jones's people are saying don't go. It's too early, we're not ready yet. And this will inevitably lead to violence, and we just don't have our ducks in a row for it. And that is the scary part. It's that they didn't come because they're planning and preparing for something bigger.
...
ALICIA MENENDEZ: Right. And Angelo, part of the reason why I wanted to have you and Ruth on together is that you're both always able to articulate that this is not about a single person. This is about an apparatus that is built around them. And I was struck by the fact that you have a Fox News pundit reportedly helping convince Trump not to return the classified documents. How would you describe Trump's relationship with right-wing news? If you can even call it that at this point?
ANGELO CARUSONE: At this point, it is an instrument for organizing power. They have this massive media apparatus, but the way in which Trump organizes power on the fringes is through this vehicle.That is the mechanism for organizing, but it's also the delivery system for disinformation. So you began your segment with Ted Cruz, part of the way you get to that cycle and feedback loop is that you inject this poison into the ecosystem, and it gets reverberated through this right-wing media for ten months that it's politically motivated. Just this week, Fox News then spends several hours talking about the fact that nearly 50% of Americans think that this indictment is politically motivated, which is actually a reflection of the poison that they've been putting in the system. And then you have people like Ted Cruz coming on and validating that.
ALICIA MENENDEZ:And you think the specific verbage, that banner, the wannabe dictator banner, reportedly got this producer fired. But then you have a U.S. Senator using the same language.
ANGELO CARUSONE: Exactly. And that is what is so concerning about this, is that we've always had fringes, the society has fringes. But what would answer your question, this is bigger than just one person. Because it has activated a muchlarger piece of infrastructure, that actually has the power and it's currently doing, dismantling our democratic institutions, our civic norms,all of the things that we're seeing with misogyny, with anti-lgbt activity, all these groomer narratives, the increase in violence, the bloodthirst, the attack on our institutions. It is all a reflection and an indication, andan alarm bell of these systems in action. And Trump has really been the catalyst for that system. So you take him out of it, it's still going to continue to cascade and they've been eroding the very buttresses that would prevent it from getting out of control.
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aLICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, I am so glad that Andy reminded us that 1/6 is a part of this continuum here. Philip Bump at The Washington Post reports, quote, "Fox News's coverage since mid-2020 has disproportionately involved clips of isolated criminal activity to generate a sense of unconstrained violence in urban areas -- despite evidence that the increase in crime since the pandemic also occurred in rural areas." You touched upon that, but what I want to come back to is the fact that this week, you had the GOP-led House leading a field hearing about crime in New York City, which then Fox News covers, and it just becomes part of this endless feedback loop where the circus becomes reality.
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ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT AND CEO): Yeah, and I think the part that concerns me the most is -- I think, that it's one thing when it's just a misinformation, feedback loop,that itself is a problem, but in a way, it's actually less scary than the current scenario because a couple of years ago -- and now, it's really just fully formed -- there was a switch. And basically the Republican party, via the right-wing media, decided that they were going to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And so once they sort of moved those fringe and set them right and directly front and center in the Republican core, it actually basically pulls in people that are most likely to act on these types of ideas, on this misinformation feedback loop. So what they're basically doing is taking an already simmering cauldron of anxiety, of fear, of hate, of rage, and they are ratcheting up that temperature, bit by bit. And so every time they sort of misrepresent, missample the threat of crime, who's actually responsible, that it's coming for you, they are basically raising the temperature on that cauldron. So it shouldn't be a surprise that it's increasingly starting to spill over and boil over. It's kind of what they're doing. They are organizing power on the fringes. This is what you get when you move the fringes front and center.
mma 4 23
cHRIS HAYES (HOST): Fox News has settled the defamation suit brought against them by Dominion Voting Systems, but the underlying problem -- and it's a deep and profound one -- is not going anywhere. And now Fox has to pay 787 million dollars for a bind they got themselves into. It's a bind that the whole country is in, in a certain way, but what I'm talking about is the problem, which is that tens of millions of our fellow citizens live in such a constrained informational environment and are so distrusting of any alternative sources of information, they operate in what is basically an entirely separate informational sphere.
I think the best way to understand this is just to look at some data, right? The spectrum of sources, for instance, that the median Republican primary voter consumes versus the median Democratic voter. So, Democrats consume and trust a wide variety of sources -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, this network -- a broad spectrum of the mainstream media, the progressive media, across the board. The spectrum of what Republicans consume is way, way smaller. First and foremost, they trust Fox News. That is their dominant source along with just a few others, like talk radio and OAN. It's a very, very small universe of ideologically partisan-aligned sources of information.
And here's the thing, that didn't happen by accident. That is the product of a successful effort by Fox News and others, a lot of other conservatives who have waged a decades-long war -- going back to the 1960s -- on the mainstream media and any other trusted American institutions.
The late Rush Limbaugh enshrined the battle lines in what has become a famous or infamous model -- monologue on what he called the Four Corners of Deceit.
[CLIP BEGINS]
RUSH LIMBAUGH: So we have now the Four Corners of Deceit, and the two universes in which we live. The Universe of Lies, the Universe of Reality, and The Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit.
[CLIP ENDS]
HAYES: Government, academia, science, the media. Corrupt, exist by virtue of deceit.This is what Limbaugh and the conservative movement taught people, hammered into their heads after day after day, month after month, year after year, that they -- the Rush Limbaugh's of the world, the Fox News's of the world -- are the sole source of reality. They exist in the universe of reality and everyone else is in the universe of lies. And you can't trust anyone but them, the Rush Limbaugh's and the Fox News's. You can't trust the government, government official or government statistics. You can't trust scholars. You can't trust scientists or the mainstream media reporters.
And, of course, knowledge, what we know about the world is inescapably predicated on trust. We just can't verify firsthand the overwhelming majority of things we know about the world. I wasn't there for the randomized control trials for the vaccine, for instance, right? So, what we do is we use trust as a means of coming to know about the world. For example, if a reporter from the New York Times says, "I have seen this atrocity happening on the ground in Ukraine and I've talked to folks who saw it, firsthand witnesses, they told me about it," I can't go check for myself, right? My disposition is to trust that it's true. And not completely, right? I would look for other verifications, see if other outlets report similar findings as a kind of verification. We've seen that with atrocities and massacres that have happened in Ukraine.
But trust is the foundation here. And those trust relationships -- with credible media sources, researchers, again, government bureaucratic statistical entities -- they end up being the way that we form a lot of knowledge of the world.The American right has made it their mission to sever each of those trust relationships, to cut their base off from any other institution that produces knowledge.
Now, this has created this incredibly dangerous situation, in which conservatives are -- really are -- severed from any connection, again, to the main institutions of knowledge production in our society. Think about it, think of what the Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science and media. Because they are severed from those institutions, these tens of millions of folks can then be sort of captured, dominated entirely by Fox News and its conservative allies.This is an incredibly lucrative thing. They've got customers who only come to them. Rush Limbaugh -- who died a very, very, very, very wealthy man -- understood this.
But here's the thing. Disconnecting their audience from other possible sources of authority has also left Fox vulnerable. They're vulnerable to someone else who is even more of a grandiose liar, an even more effective demagogue coming along and winning over their audience's trust. And this is precisely what happened with the phenomenon of Donald Trump.
Now, remember, in the beginning, when he first got in the 2016 race, Fox and the Republican establishment wanted Trump out.
[CLIPS BEGIN]
GLENN BECK: I am really trying to understand how conservatives can look at Donald Trump's record, which he himself self-identifies more as a Democrat than as a conservative or a Republican, and say, "That's our guy."
RICH LOWRY: He's insulted and bullied his way to the top of the polls
KARL ROVE: We saw an angry, defiant, you know, fuming, threatening bully.
MEGYN KELLY: You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I don't think I've ever heard such a stream of disconnected ideas since I quit psychiatry 30 years ago.
[CLIPS END]
HAYES: Of course, that didn't work. The base decided they trusted Trump more than they trusted Fox. And again, here's -- this is what's key here, Fox themselves had produced a situation in which they were helpless to do anything, right? They created an audience that was completely unwilling to believe anyone else who would say, "Yes, he's a sexist and a crook and he's dangerous."
And we saw the same thing play out again after the 2020 election. Fox wanted to, in the main, institutionally, rely on their trust relationship with their audience and tell the viewers the basic truth that Joe Biden won the election. It wasn't rigged, and that what Donald Trump did was, as Rupert Murdoch actually wrote in an email, "Pretty much a crime." I agree, Rupert. So Fox tried that for a couple weeks after the election. But the viewers started to turn away because they no longer trusted Fox, they trusted Donald Trump who was telling them that the election was stolen.
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott understood this. She laid it out plainly in another e-mail made public, again, thanks to the Dominion lawsuit: "We have damaged their trust and belief in us." Yes, it was basically a trust showdown. One that Fox couldn't win unless they adopted Trump's line, which they did.
Because here's the thing, they couldn't go to their base and tell them, "Hey, look, don't just listen to us. Look at every other independent assessment of the election. Look at the official numbers provided by government. Look at the courts, another part of the government. Look at the reporting in the media, in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the LA Times and NPR and on and on and on." They couldn't do any of that because they are the ones who told their audience not to believe any of those people, because those people were -- in Rush Limbaugh's words -- the Four Corners of Deceit. So Fox was left on its own, desperate to win back their audience. And so they decided to peddle Donald Trump's lies.
And this is still a very much live issue because, listen to me here, the exact same problem is happening now, again, in the 2024 Republican primary. When Donald Trump attacks his likely opponent, Ron DeSantis, claiming, for example, that "He is, for a Republican, an average Governor who got 1.2 million less votes in Florida than me," DeSantis can't really hit back. So in that example, right, Trump fails to mention that he won Florida by less than four points. DeSantis swept the state, with a margin of nearly 20 points. I mean, he only got fewer votes because it was a midterm, not a presidential.
But again, who is going to say that? Who is going to inject that context? Republican primary audience is so cut off from reality those facts can't get through. And where can Ron DeSantis turn to appeal to? Like a Washington Post fact-check? Not going to work. There's no referee. Fox News and the conservative movement destroyed the conditions for that.
So now, it's just a head-to-head battle of who you like more, who you believe, who you trust more. They trust Donald Trump. And until Rupert Murdoch and Suzanne Scott and the rest of the Republican party and the political operatives -- Ron DeSantis will be working on his campaign -- unless they figure out how to dismantle the situation they themselves built, Fox News and the rest of the right will always lose to Donald Trump or anyone else who can out-demagogue him.
Angelo Carusone is the President and CEO of Media Matters For America -- a watchdog group for right-wing media -- and he joins me now. How much, do you think -- we played that Ben Smith clip in the opening -- when it comes to the Dominion case itself, Fox has put it on the air for about a few seconds, maybe a few minutes. There's a very funny graphic of their website in which it's just like utterly buried and there's just 200 words and doesn't name the settlement figure. How much have they just kept their viewers away from this entire story?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT) Oh, entirely. They've just entirely kept them away. Even when they've mentioned it, they haven't mentioned the settlement to their audience, like the number, they just sort of say "settled." And when they talked about it, to your monologue, they actually talk about it in the context of "It's gonna sure disappoint the rest of the news media that was so excited for this trial to take place." That's how they framed it for their audience. They actually frame it within the context of the Four Corners of Deceit.
So, there's no acknowledgment -- even that little bit of acknowledgement they gave to the court that said, "Well, we acknowledge what the court said, that maybe some of the things we said were false," they don't even give that statement to their audience. So, they are keeping them pretty far away from it.
And the other parts of the right-wing media, because there is this sort of resorting, reshuffling that's happening right now. You know, they've been waiting for Fox to be on the ropes too because it meant bigger audience share and more power for them. Other parts of the right-wing media, like the Daily Wire and elsewhere, which is sort of the closest analogue to a Fox competitor, an emerging Fox competitor, they mention it, but barely.
They'll say, "Well, yeah, Fox kind of lied because they had to give something to their audience. They whiffed it here, but Fox is still pretty good. But it does show you that, maybe, you should think about some other places, perhaps like our show." So, they're even being very careful with how they sort of introduce this to the sort of larger Fox ecosystem.
HAYES: Well, you would think, right, you would think there's an opening here. I mean, I've seen Steve Bannon get up and say, "Read the transcripts. They think nothing of you." About Fox, right? And this is purely a self-interested thing for him to say. He's got his podcast while he awaits trial, which is cute. And he wants people to listen to that rather than listen to Fox. And he's trying to pry them away in exactly the way that Trump pried people away from Fox. It's all just these trust relationships, but no one can referee any of it. There's no one to appeal to outside of this universe
CARUSONE: No, and to your, you know -- one of the mechanics of how Trump was able to hijack the Fox audience is that he used those other outlets as a cudgel. You know, the first time One America News and others were used against Fox was not the election. You can go all the way back to 2016, when Trump was boycotting Fox News for two weeks and Sarah Palin suddenly had a show on One America News where Donald Trump was the featured guest. Or during COVID, where they had Chanel Rion from One America News come in and say all the things that Fox News wasn't saying for a couple weeks, until Fox News finally started to get in line on some of this, right? So, he used -- because there is a fusion of the right-wing media and the Republican political power. So, whoever sort of has the key within the right-wing media then gets to exercise that political power.
HAYES: And this is the thing that I think is important, and one of the takeaways from Dominion and from the primary, is they're chasing as much as they're leading. And they're more dangerous the more they're chasing. This is the thing that everyone has to understand, right? That like, the further they're chasing, the more they're driving down to the most lizard brainparts of their audience. They're just trying -- that is the most dangerous it gets, but that's always the project.
CARUSONE: Yes, what you just said is so very important because now, it's starting to transcend well beyond just misinformation and false ideas and false narratives. There's a bloodthirstiness within the right-wing media. Because, keep in mind, in 2022, it was the first time in a quarter century that Rush Limbaugh wasn't the single largest name in the get out the vote operation in the country. Fox News has been on its heels for the past year and a half because they're trying to figure things out. And the entire right-wing echo chamber's resorting.
There's a bloodthirstiness right now, and Fox News just got a license to lie. They are going to satisfy that bloodthirstiness, because they're back off their heels and they need to shore up that power, fast. Before somebody else comes in and hijacks it
many msg show bad trinity knew lying
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/they-knew-it-was-lie-behind-scenes-happenings-fox-while-network-pushed-false-claims-about
https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/msnbc-angelo-carusone-says-dominion-filings-show-keyhole-view-what-fox-inside
https://www.mediamatters.org/2020-election-lawsuits/two-days-after-2020-election-fox-news-chief-political-anchor-bret-baier
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/abc-susan-glasser-details-how-fox-executives-lied-about-their-panic-over-ratings-amidst
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/cnn-contributor-breaks-down-how-fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-shows-fox-promoted-lies-led
https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/angelo-carusone-there-will-be-serious-business-consequences-fox-news-because
https://www.mediamatters.org/2020-election-lawsuits/fox-news-lied-about-dominion-and-2020-election-compete-far-right-newsmax
https://www.mediamatters.org/rupert-murdoch/rupert-murdoch-told-fox-ceo-suzanne-scott-fox-news-would-concentrate-helping-any-way
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/new-filing-shows**-tucker-carlson-tried-get-fox-reporter-fired-correctly-fact-checking (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/new-filing-shows-tucker-carlson-tried-get-fox-reporter-fired-correctly-fact-checking)
https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/msnbc-angelo-carusone-explains-how-dominions-new-filing-shows-fox-news
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/angelo-carusone-explosive-new-court-filings-prove-crystal-clarity-fox-knew-it-was-pushing
https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/media-matters-angelo-carusone-not-single-thing-can-ever-get-better-country-until
~ norms democ
an 2 23
fox News lawsuits will expose the 'dishonest' network and threaten 'alt-reality media': conservative (https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-lawsuits-expose-dishonest/)
Sarah K. Burris (https://www.alternet.org/author/sarah-k-burris) Raw Story (https://www.alternet.org/author/raw-story)
February 15, 2023
Fox News was denied their motion to dismiss (https://www.rawstory.com/fox-news-smartmatic-lawsuit/) the case by Smartmatic voting systems this week, meaning the case is going to trial and the network can't stop it.
Only one county in the U.S., Los Angeles County, use...
html categorically
mma 1 23
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): There's also another thing that I've been watching happening on the right, and I think this is because of the sort of polarization around low trust, high trust. But the InfoWars-ization of right-wing media, and I say this even in the like, even when you move it outside the bounds of polarizing, like did aliens build the pyramids? This is like a hoary conspiratorial cliché for decades, right? That’s the kind of thing you’re seeing right-wing media people talk about now. It doesn’t even score a political point. It's just this view that, like, everything they tell you is a lie, that is more and more taking over that entire universe.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yes, and I think that what's concerning about that, and sort of the fact that has led into it is that, one, obviously social media and, in particular, the metastasizing of the QAnon conspiracy in the spring of 2020 coupled with all of the COVID stuff really helped that sort of, just that toxicity spill over.
But the other factor is that, it's worth keeping in mind that a very large segment of Republican leaders started to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And as they started to increasingly organize power on what used to be considered the fringes, using the right-wing media as a conduit for accessing that, they brought all that stuff that, you know, used to be on the fringes more toward the center. That's why something like groomers and pedophilia would be sort of far out there stuff years ago. And that is mainstream Republican orthodoxy now, it's not even controversial to say that, you know, Democrats are sexualizing children. Everyone is saying that in Republican politics. You don't have to be an extremist to make that point.
HAYES: There is a final point here, which I didn't note in the monologue, which is Elon Musk's particular role in this, who purchased Twitter and one of the first, most notable things he did in Twitter. And it was the first time I ever encountered this ludicrous, gross conspiracy theory that the two men had some relationship and that this was, like, a lovers' quarrel or something like that, was Elon Musk tweeting about it in a response to Hillary Clinton. That really put rocket fuel. He has since said he's apologized, but, like, Elon Musk owns a huge share of this entire thing.
CARUSONE: He does, because -- and this is exactly the danger for him being in charge. I mean, he supercharged that conspiracy theory. And it's worth noting that that is sort of the function of Twitter now after Elon Musk, is that it's kind of become a red pill PEZ dispenser, where these conspiracies, these really far out things are increasingly getting supercharged because they're gettingalgorithmic boosts.So even things that Elon Musk doesn't promote, we're actually seeing get supercharged all the time now.
scalp /win?
no lnx
DirecTV just dealt a major blow to right-wing viewers
Meaghan Ellis January 15, 2022
DirecTV has announced its decision not to renew its contract with the right-wing media operation, One American News Network (OANN). On Friday, January 14, the cable service provider released a statement to Bloomberg with details about the decision.
“We informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires,” DirecTV said in a statement to Bloomberg.
Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning non-profit Media Matters, also released a statement on Friday commending the cable provider's decision as she acknowledged how influential OAN has been for the spread of misinformation “DirecTV made the responsible decision to drop OAN. OAN is a cauldron of misinformation and extremism,” Carusone said in a statement.
The decision comes after Media Matters' relentless campaigning in hopes of getting cable television providers to drop the right-wing operation. Although they acknowledged DirecTV's effort to make better decisions for the new year, Carusone went on to explain how the damage has already been done.
Media Matters highlighted how miscommunication continued to run rampant for the last 12 months due to the cable provider's renewal of the contract last year. In short, the organization described the 2021 contract renewal as "a negligent mistake."
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“DirecTV made a negligent mistake in 2021 when it renewed its contract with OAN even after OAN spent weeks attacking the election and stoking the embers that helped fuel the Jan. 6 insurrection. They gave OAN a full year to undermine our democracy — and our country suffered for it.”
She added, DirecTV has been “functionally propping up OAN for years. Without DirecTV, OAN would certainly not exist in its current form, and possibly not at all."
Following the heightened controversy surrounding the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, OAN emerged as an epicenter for misinformation often echoing election falsehoods and conspiracy theories promoted by former President Donald Trump and his allies.
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from bigthinker
Clio Chang, Alex Shephard/December 19, 2016
What Happens to Media Matters in a Post-Hillary World?
The media watchdog was Clinton's biggest defender this election season. Now it's seeking a new identity.
STEPHEN B THORNTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
On December 6, exactly four weeks after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election, Media Matters for America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating conservative misinformation in media, announced it would be undergoing a makeover. In its twelve-year history, Media Matters’s main antagonist had been Fox News—a worthy, if unsurprising target for an organization devoted to conservative bias. But after surveying the media landscape in the aftermath of Clinton’s surprising defeat, Media Matters decided that it would focus on exposing falsehoods circulated online. “It used to be simple, Fox News was the gatekeeper ... but now there are so many potential bad actors,” Angelo Carusone, who was made president of Media Matters at the time of the announcement, told Politico. “Now there are places like Facebook who aren’t bad actors but can be enablers of misinformation.”
It would seem to be a logical next step for the media watchdog. In an interview, Carusone told the New Republic that Media Matters was already pivoting in this direction. But in a subtle way, the shift was actually a significant reinvention. The organization had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned itself at the center of a group of public relations and advocacy outfits whose mission was to help put Clinton in the White House. Seen in this light, the shift to focusing on the country’s much-discussed fake news problem, which allegedly facilitated Donald Trump’s victory, is a way of keeping in business after Media Matters and its founder David Brock had little to show for years of being Clinton’s first line of defense. In fact, this wasn’t even the first time Media Matters had declared it was going to stop focusing on Fox News.
The allegiance to the Clintons has always sat uncomfortably beside Media Matters’s ostensible goal of holding media accountable. Any journalist on Twitter knows that even mild criticisms of Clinton would almost instantaneously raise the hackles of some Media Matters staffer, giving the distinct impression that the whole project was about protecting Clinton from unflattering press rather than ensuring journalistic integrity. But Media Matters depended heavily on its association with the Clintons. Brock, a formerly conservative journalist who wrote a biography of Clinton that portrayed her as a hardcore leftist Lady Macbeth, has always been an object of suspicion among liberals, his conversion reeking of snake oil. His elevated stature in the world of Democratic politics comes not from any deep roots in liberalism, but the fact that the Clintons blessed his enterprise. That Media Matters both checks conservative media and protects the Clintons has been instrumental in Brock’s ability to raise money for his network of organizations, which also includes the website Shareblue (formerly Blue Nation Review) and the super PACs Correct the Record and American Bridge. (Brock did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
That tension, according to more than half a dozen former staffers of Media Matters, comes from Brock, despite the fact that he was rarely involved in day-to-day operations. (Most staffers agreed to talk about Media Matters and Brock only on condition of anonymity, due to the fact that they were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.) Media Matters faces a series of questions going forward. What is its identity now that Hillary Clinton’s political career is effectively over? Will liberal donors buy into this new identity, fashioned by a group whose leaders have shown no real investment in liberalism as a governing project? And can it fulfill its core mission—which nearly every former staffer we spoke to believes is important—with Brock at the helm?
In our numerous conversations with past Media Matters staff, there was a consensus that in the lead-up to Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy in 2015, the organization’s priority shifted away from the mission stated on its website—“comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation”—and towards running defense for Clinton. The former staffers we spoke to largely felt that this damaged Media Matters’s credibility and hurt the work it did in other areas. “The closer we got to the 2016 election the less it became about actually debunking conservative misinformation and more it became about just defending Hillary Clinton from every blogger in their mother’s basement,” one former staffer told us. This was, moreover, a repeat of what Media Matters did in 2008, when there was a rift between staffers and management over the favoring of Clinton in her race against then-Senator Barack Obama.
“There was actually like a really big fight in our research room that day because nobody wanted to go after Terry Gross.”
The former staffers pointed to Media Matters’s attack on NPR’s Terry Gross as a clear example of editorial standards being ignored to protect Clinton from criticism. All the way back in June 2014, in an interview with Clinton that occurred months before her formal announcement of a presidential run, Gross brought up the fact Clinton opposed same-sex marriage as a senator, before supporting it in 2013 when she was secretary of state. Gross asked, “Would you say your view evolved since the ‘90s or that the American public evolved allowing you to state your real view?” Gross’s question seemed like an alley-oop—it’s hard to imagine a friendlier way of framing a change in position. But Clinton was caught off-guard. After Gross tried to clarify Clinton’s responses multiple times, the interview became tense, with Clinton finally snapping, “I don’t think you are trying to clarify. I think you are trying to say that I used to be opposed and now I am in favor and I did it for political reasons. And that’s just flat wrong.”
In response, Media Matters published a piece titled “How NPR’s Terry Gross Created A False Impression That Hillary Clinton Stonewalled On Marriage Equality.” The article pointed out that Clinton supported civil unions for same-sex couples as a senator and claimed that Gross was being unfair in repeating the same question, since Clinton “consistently and repeatedly answered Gross’s question.” She didn’t, as you can see for yourself.
“There was actually like a really big fight in our research room that day because nobody wanted to go after Terry Gross,” one former staffer told us. “She had a total right to ask Hillary Clinton about this. … Our researcher director ended up having to be the one to write it because no one else wanted their name on it.” Another said, “It was a situation where the researcher assigned to it was like, ‘I’m not writing this. I’m not going to attack Terry Gross for asking Hillary Clinton questions.’”
The former staffers said the reluctance of researchers to byline pieces was not unique to this instance. While it didn’t happen daily, it happened enough that “there was just a sense of ‘I really don’t want to be associated with this,’” one said. Media Matters in effect criticized Gross for doing her job—and nearly everyone we spoke to who worked there at the time felt that a similar article would not have been written about a different politician.
In March of 2015, The New York Times broke the news about Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state, which in retrospect turned out to be the most damaging story of the entire campaign. In response, Media Matters flooded its site with posts attempting to counter the narrative that was quickly forming—that Clinton had broken the rules and had something to hide. “It was all hands on deck,” one former staffer said. “Everyone was just supposed to be looking out for Clinton stuff all the time.” Left unaddressed was whether the story itself was guilty of conservative misinformation.
Employees were asked to stay late or work on the weekends specifically to cover Clinton, which many felt came at the expense of other stories and the organization’s mission. Nearly every former staffer we spoke to felt that researchers, in particular, were underpaid and overworked, and that these problems often surfaced when they were forced to work on stories they felt were dubious. As one former staffer described it, “They were paying me $35,000 a year to watch Fox all the time and to do rotating shifts where I’d have to change from a day shift to a night shift every two weeks. It was just a miserable job.”
When it came to the organization’s research standards, most former staffers we talked to agreed that they were lowered when it came to Clinton-related content. One former staffer told us that, compared to “the amount of evidence we would have to collect to go after another story,” Clinton pieces had a “much lower bar. It literally just had to involve Hillary Clinton and that was it.” Another said that they often weren’t allowed to publish Clinton-related pieces “until they had been read by someone in leadership.”
Then there was James Carville’s guest column for the site. In his inaugural post, the longtime Clinton ally stated his intention was to use the space to defend the Clintons: “That’s what happens when you have one standard for the Clintons, and a different one for everybody else, which is why I’ll be writing regularly in this space.” (Bradley Beychok, who was president of Media Matters from 2013 until early December, and who was thought responsible for enforcing the site’s pro-Clinton bent, is close to Carville.) Media Matters derives its credibility from its objectivity—its posts are dry, often consisting almost entirely of transcripts that aim to show how conservative media is misleading the public. Media Matters is also classified as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group in the tax code, which means that it cannot explicitly advocate for a political candidate. The organization is careful not to step over that line, always framing pieces with a media angle—for example, “New York Times’s Maureen Dowd Writes Yet Another Anti-Clinton Column.” But with Carville’s column, that veneer of objectivity was tossed aside. Media Matters also had one standard for the Clintons, and a different one for everybody else.
Carusone rejected the idea that Media Matters focused too much on Clinton, telling us, “It’s a perspective that people have and it’s convenient, but I don’t really think it’s backed up by the data.” He pointed to the broad array of issues that Media Matters covers—LGBT rights, the NRA, climate change, and right-wing extremism. “I’m really comfortable standing on the totality of the content,” he said. Carusone noted that Media Matters published 7,000 pieces in the last year—hundreds were about coverage of Clinton (who, in fairness, was a major party nominee for president), but many more were about other topics.
One former staffer said that they often weren’t allowed to publish Clinton-related pieces “until they had been read by someone in leadership.”
However, when asked if Media Matters had different editorial standards for Clinton, Carusone hedged. “There’s not a shift in editorial standards. The editing process is the editing process,” he said. “The strategies are different. ... I’m comfortable that the standards are the same and uniform but certainly the strategies are different. It has to be. The audiences are different.”
One former staffer, Carlos Maza, who worked at Media Matters from 2011 until last week, told us that, in his experience, “there was never a directive from on high to write about the Clinton campaign or be tied with it.” Maza also disagreed that research standards were lowered for Clinton—the opposite, in fact. He said, “I think because we had a fear that we were being seen as Clinton shills, there was an extra emphasis on every Clinton thing we were writing being super, super tight and making sure the evidence is really solid for it.”
Contra Maza, the other former staffers pointed out several stories that fell within Media Matters’s ambit that should have been better covered, including the rise of Breitbart, Roger Ailes’s sexual harassment scandal, and Facebook’s fake news problem. Another example of its tilt: On the site, there are 1,468 posts tagged with “Hillary Clinton” as opposed to just 26 tagged “Bernie Sanders.”
With the proliferation of conservative misinformation and the rise in popularity of far-right websites like Breitbart, there is a need for organizations like Media Matters now more than ever. However, having a partisan like Brock behind the curtain has only damaged the organization’s credibility. The former staffers we spoke to believe that the only way for Media Matters to fulfill its original mission is if Brock takes a step back. “Media Matters could be really good and there is good work that goes up on that website,” one former staffer told us. “But when you go so far off on a tangent about Terry Gross, then when you have a legitimate complaint, nobody listens to you because you wasted all your good will.”
Brock’s recent assertion that he wants to make his social media platform, Shareblue, a “Breitbart of the left” reveals a man who sees himself more as a propaganda minister than someone who takes journalism seriously. Asked if Media Matters should continue with Brock at the helm, one former staffer said, “Based on everything that I’ve seen from him since the election, I would say it can’t happen with him because there seems to be a lack of understanding of where the problem actually was. I guess he’s angry; he didn’t get his ambassadorship that he’s been working for 12 years now. I just don’t see how throwing money at him can be a viable strategy for anyone, in terms of advancing the Democratic Party.”
In a 2011 interview with Jason Zengerle in New York magazine, Brock said, “I’m still more pitched at fighting the right than I am about building a progressive platform for the future. It’s fair to say that that conversation doesn’t interest me as much.” But is it possible to combat the right without having something to proactively fight for, other than money and influence? As one former staffer noted, the path for Media Matters going forward is simple: “You need to put somebody in charge who actually does have a guiding progressive compass.” Throughout his career, as a conservative journalist and a Democratic-aligned impresario, Brock has been guided almost entirely by his disdain for his opponents. Twelve years after Media Matters was founded, that may not be enough.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated that Bradley Beychok, the former president of Media Matters, was James Carville’s godson. It also mistakenly said Brock’s website Shareblue was a nonprofit venture. We regret the errors.
Clio Chang @cliomiso
Clio Chang is a freelance writer in New York City.
Alex Shephard @alex_shephard
Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic.
Read More: Politics, Media Matters, David Brock, Hillary Clinton, American Bridge, Fundraising, Democratic Party, Democrats, Angelo Carusone, Bradley Beychok
http://mythopedia.mediamatters.org/tags/Environment%20&%20Scienc (http://mythopedia.mediamatters.org/tags/Environment%20&%20Science)
eg
November was the second straight month that Sunday morning political shows did not air a single, substantive climate segment (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/november-was-second-straight-month-sunday-morning-political-shows-failed-air)
12/11/19 10:27 AM EST (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/november-was-second-straight-month-sunday-morning-political-shows-failed-air)
== == (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/november-was-second-straight-month-sunday-morning-political-shows-failed-air)
mma (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/november-was-second-straight-month-sunday-morning-political-shows-failed-air)
Right-wing media outlets The Daily Caller and the Washington Free Beacon have often acted as de facto press offices for Scott Pruitt's Environmental Protection Agency. Media Matters has (https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/november-was-second-straight-month-sunday-morning-political-shows-failed-air)documented (https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/05/21/Scott-Pruitts-EPA-has-cozy-relationship-with-Daily-Caller-and-Washington-Free-Beacon/220264) how the two publications have defended Pruitt in the face of his many scandals (https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/03/14/A-timeline-of-scandals-and-ethical-shortfalls-at-Scott-Pruitts-EPA/219623) and tried to discredit sources of information about his misdeeds. Now we learn from Washington Examiner reporter John Siciliano, who covers energy and environment for the conservative-leaning newspaper, that the EPA's press office tried to strong-arm him into writing flattering pieces about the agency and complained to his editors when he refused.
Speaking on June 11 on a panel about media coverage at a conference (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/2018-conference/) organized by Citizens' Climate Lobby, a nonpartisan climate activist group, Siciliano recounted the EPA’s attempts to coerce him and his paper to print favorable stories, which he described as “a really bizarre pressure play on their part that I’ve never experienced from an agency, a cabinet-level agency, to enforce an agenda on a journalist.” Siciliano also discussed how the agency referred to him in pejorative terms and pitted him against other journalists -- practices (https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/03/22/How-Scott-Pruitts-EPA-is-attacking-journalists-and-stifling-the-media/219699) the agency has used (https://twitter.com/adamgoldmanNYT/status/1004463423919480834) against other environmental journalists.
From the June 11 panel (https://www.facebook.com/CitizensClimateLobby/videos/10155371884965808/) titled “Covering Climate Change in the Current Political Landscape (https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/citizensclimate/en/2018cclconference/schedule/2379/Covering+Climate+Change+in+the+Current+Political+Landscape)”:
....
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Fox News Vaccine Hesitancy Fox News’ relentless and outlandish attacks on every vaccine mandate except for its own
Sean Hannity calls for “means testing” immigrants to make sure they won't be “a burden on the American people”
Sean Hannity calls for “means testing” immigrants to make sure they won't be “a burden on the American people”
10/21/21 10:10 PM EDT
Fox news logo with a syringe
Fox personalities are trying to distance themselves from Fox's vaccine mandate
10/25/21 8:30 AM EDT
Bongino Boothe 10/23/21
Fox News contributor says she is not getting vaccinated “as a giant middle finger to Joe Biden's tyranny”
10/25/21 9:17 AM EDT
Featured:
Tucker Carlson on Kamala Harris as Vice President: “What does it tell you about how they feel about African American women that that's the one they picked?”
10/21/21 8:57 PM EDT
In an attempt to undermine the Build Back Better plan, Fox has mocked and misrepresented its climate and environmental justice provisions
10/21/21 12:08 PM EDT
similar accounts -- instagram
Instagram’s suggestion algorithm is promoting accounts that share misinformation
10/20/21 3:21 PM EDT
Tucker Carlson: "The vaccinated spread COVID just like the unvaccinated. There's no difference, actually"
Tucker Carlson: “The vaccinated spread COVID just like the unvaccinated. There's no difference, actually”
10/20/21 9:09 PM EDT
NewsCorp-climate
The fantastic hypocrisy behind Murdoch’s net-zero editorial campaign
10/20/21 10:37 AM EDT
Facebook has been working hard to spin recent press around the company in its favor
10/20/21 12:55 PM EDT
January 6 attack on Capitol building
Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe and guest claim that January 6 prosecutions are an effort to silence “dissent” over the 2020 election
10/20/21 2:11 PM EDT
Steven Crowder mocks a local reporter for having an “aggressively Asian face”
10/20/21 11:57 AM EDT
Alex Jones claims his conversations with Tucker Carlson are monitored by the government
Tucker Carlson has been defending Alex Jones for years
10/14/21 10:49 AM EDT
Terry McCauliffe and Glenn Youngkin
The right’s cynical “critical race theory” obsession breaks through in the VA gov race
10/12/21 1:39 PM EDT
Image of the Supreme Court with a "Keep Abortion Legal Sign" next to it
The media’s blatant failure in warning about the threat to Roe v. Wade
09/01/21 4:44 PM EDT
THE LATEST
OAN directs viewers to push for election audits
10/25/21 11:11 AM EDT
Fox News host praises organizer of anti-vaccine protest that stormed Barclays Center — despite the network’s own COVID-19 policies
10/25/21 10:52 AM EDT
Fox host calls vaccine mandates “government-sponsored suicide”
10/25/21 10:29 AM EDT
The Federalist’s suggestion that dying from COVID “is a good thing” is the latest example of the outlet's reckless pandemic coverage
10/25/21 9:25 AM EDT
Fox News contributor says she is not getting vaccinated “as a giant middle finger to Joe Biden's tyranny”
10/25/21 9:17 AM EDT
The website of far-right broadcaster Real America's Voice is full of QAnon content
10/25/21 8:56 AM EDT
Fox personalities are trying to distance themselves from Fox's vaccine mandate
10/25/21 8:30 AM EDT
Rep. Eric Swalwell details death threats from Tucker Carlson fan who “threatened to kill my entire family”
10/22/21 5:28 PM EDT
Media headlines dangerously sensationalize Parkland gunman's guilty plea
10/22/21 5:23 PM EDT
Tucker Carlson's latest Fox Nation documentary on wind energy rehashes the same debunked talking points
10/22/21 4:53 PM EDT
OAN guest Jeffrey Lord likens the January 6 committee to a “lynch mob”
10/22/21 4:38 PM EDT
Cumulus Media gives a platform to some of radio’s biggest anti-vaccine peddlers despite its own vaccine mandate
10/22/21 3:10 PM EDT
On YouTube, Dennis Prager says “there might be secession” in the United States
10/22/21 2:41 PM EDT
Steve Bannon says Democrats are trying to “steal” the Virginia governor's race
10/22/21 1:28 PM EDT
On Steve Bannon's podcast, Mike Lindell says he is “canvassing” for voter fraud in 20 states
10/22/21 1:07 PM EDT
Newsmax host defends “patriot” Steve Bannon: “Reject squish establishment Republicans”
10/22/21 10:34 AM EDT
Fox News’ relentless and outlandish attacks on every vaccine mandate except for its own
10/22/21 9:19 AM EDT
Sean Hannity calls for “means testing” immigrants to make sure they won't be “a burden on the American people”
10/21/21 10:10 PM EDT
Tucker Carlson on Kamala Harris as Vice President: “What does it tell you about how they feel about African American women that that's the one they picked?”
10/21/21 8:57 PM EDT
While defending Steve Bannon, Fox host Mark Levin announces he’s holding the House of Representatives in contempt
10/21/21 6:48 PM EDT
Fox News:
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch with Tucker Carlson
The Murdochs want Tucker Carlson’s blood-soaked conspiracy theories
09/23/21 11:48 AM EDT
Fox News Vaccines
Fox has undermined vaccines nearly every day in the last six months
10/05/21 8:19 PM EDT
Fox host blames Native American struggles on “alcoholism” and “government dependency”
Native American group calls for firing of Fox News hosts after derogatory statements
10/18/21 9:34 AM EDT
One America News:
Logos for DirecTV and One America News grouped together against a red background
OAN personality Christina Bobb fundraised for her “audit” nonprofit on air 22 times in a single month. Those 22 separate appeals aired over 140 times combined.
10/06/21 12:05 PM EDT
Screenshot from OAN's live coverage of Mike Lindell's cyber symposium
OAN aired more than 30 hours of Mike Lindell’s election fraud scam symposium
08/12/21 11:28 AM EDT
A stylized graphic of two hypodermic needles breaking apart, flanked by partially translucent OAN logos on either side, all against an orange background.
OAN’s months-long campaign against COVID-19 vaccines
08/02/21 12:44 PM EDT
Facebook:
Facebook_Right-leaning_content
Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm, and right-leaning pages are reaping the benefits
10/08/21 12:00 PM EDT
All the misinformation Facebook's Nick Clegg spouted on CNN’s Reliable Sources
10/04/21 6:23 PM EDT
Months after Facebook promised to keep election misinformation off its platform, it continues to thrive
Months after Facebook promised to keep election misinformation off its platform, it continues to thrive
10/08/21 10:43 AM EDT
COVID-19 vaccines:
Fox vaccines
Fox News keeps turning vaccine resisters into culture war heroes
10/08/21 8:31 AM EDT
fox vax 2
Swiss study finds connection between watching Fox News and vaccination rates going down
09/01/21 9:52 AM EDT
Fox News COVID-19 vaccine misinformation
Fox's effort to undermine vaccines has only worsened
08/19/21 10:00 AM EDT
Fox memo details mask requirements and vaccine passport system — while the network keeps railing against them for everyone else
08/18/21 12:13 PM EDT
Fox News has spent the last 8 months mocking and downplaying the threat of COVID-19 variants
08/10/21 11:08 AM EDT
Fox covid vaccine
The right-wing sabotage behind the anti-vax persuasion problem
07/19/21 2:43 PM EDT
Mike Lindell:
An OAN screenshot of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell doing a remote interview on screen left, with screen right showing larger file footage of Lindell in a different OAN interview. Chyron reads "Mike Lindell reflects on 3-day Cyber Symposium"
On OAN, Mike Lindell promised a second “cyber symposium” spreading his election lies
08/16/21 2:27 PM EDT
Lindell 8/10
Here are the places airing Mike Lindell's elections lies at his “cyber symposium”
08/11/21 10:44 AM EDT
An OAN screenshot of Eduardo Bolsonaro, third son of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, at Mike Lindell's election fraud cyber symposium, holding his thumb and index finger in an L-shape on his forehead, for "loser." Chyron reads "Mike Lindell's cyber symposium underway"
Mike Lindell's “cyber symposium” hosts Jair Bolsonaro's son to predict widespread fraud in Brazilian elections
08/10/21 5:16 PM EDT
A grayed image of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell with a backdrop of predominantly blue OAN logos, and, to the right, a ballot being inserted into a drop box.
OAN ran ads for Mike Lindell’s nonsense “cyber symposium” more than 150 times in just one week
08/06/21 10:44 AM EDT
Mike Lindell Newsmax
Newsmax airs Mike Lindell's “cyber symposium” ad over 170 times in a single week
08/09/21 2:22 PM EDT
Tucker Carlson Mike Lindell
Mike Lindell says he’s pulling MyPillow ads from Fox News. Here’s what that means.
07/30/21 11:33 AM EDT
Sinclair Broadcasting:
Sinclair Broadcast Group's coverage of COVID-19
Sinclair anchor calls out COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that Sinclair's featured national host has shared
08/13/21 8:29 AM EDT
Sinclair Broadcast Group's July 26, 2021, Question of the Day: "Is the January 6th committee about partisan politics?"
Sinclair pushed a GOP talking point about the January 6 committee in its misleading “Question of the Day” aired on local TV stations
08/04/21 12:46 PM EDT
Sinclair's Jan Jeffcoat and Heritage Foundation's Cully Stimson
Sinclair Broadcast Group guest uses antisemitic language to attack progressive prosecutors
04/28/21 4:40 PM EDT
Critical Race Theory:
Fox News
A guide to right-wing media’s “critical race theory” strategy
08/03/21 10:20 AM EDT
Fighting back against critical race theory
Fox News' obsession with critical race theory, by the numbers
06/15/21 9:02 AM EDT
Fox chyrons
Fox’s anti-“critical race theory” parents are also GOP activists
06/17/21 9:07 AM EDT
Special
PROGRAMS
Dedicated teams focusing on core progressive issues.
ABORTION RIGHTS & REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH
Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer spreads extreme anti-abortion rhetoric and calls Biden a “purported Catholic”
10/08/21 3:22 PM EDT
Right-wing figures co-opted “my body, my choice” to attack vaccine mandates
09/22/21 3:22 PM EDT
The media’s blatant failure in warning about the threat to Roe v. Wade
09/01/21 4:44 PM EDT
CLIMATE & ENERGY
Steve Milloy
Ahead of Big Oil's congressional hearings, longtime industry shill Steve Milloy is keeping their legacy of climate denial alive
10/13/21 4:04 PM EDT
National TV news coverage of the California oil spill exposes the hidden costs of relying on fossil fuels
10/08/21 11:16 AM EDT
The infrastructure and reconciliation bills are an important climate story. Cable news refused to cover it this way
09/30/21 1:35 PM EDT
GUNS & PUBLIC SAFETY
Right-wing media erroneously use FBI crime report to blame murder spike on police reforms
Right-wing media erroneously use FBI crime report to blame murder spike on police reforms
10/04/21 2:59 PM EDT
Cable news fails to cover gun violence like the public health crisis it is
04/20/21 1:06 PM EDT
NRATV is now finished -- but here are the bigotry, lies, and hatred that the NRA tolerated for years
06/26/19 1:36 PM EDT
LGBTQ
Virginia
Right-wing media blame trans-inclusive policy for a sexual assault in VA. It wasn’t even in place at the time.
10/19/21 12:57 PM EDT
TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes
10/05/21 9:03 AM EDT
YouTube fails to protect trans people from misgendering or deadnaming
08/12/21 10:01 AM EDT
These are Fox News' leading advertisers
07/26/19 1:37 PM EDT
These are Tucker Carlson’s leading advertisers
12/19/18 12:00 PM EST
These are Laura Ingraham's leading advertisers
10/29/19 12:15 PM EDT
These are Sean Hannity's leading advertisers
07/26/19 1:43 PM EDT
These are Jeanine Pirro's leading advertisers
07/23/19 2:28 PM EDT
Fox News is still having major advertiser problems
08/19/19 5:07 PM EDT
6/8/20
Trump campaign sent a request (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d6166c4b57e57ddf90abe684359ff73de41db3aee632d79957b9c508f66d66f2bc5bac211e6c45e116f5483e6857524db71) to Media Matters, demanding that we retract this article (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d61fd05ea7fc3441c0f9ddf856ae495b0a04d2214d3f6fd3f67956a07c7384f67abeeef3ec95b3ce4f0697448a47122c5ab) about Fox News glorifying Trump's photo-op after tear gas was used on peaceful protesters at Lafayette Square. Our response was simple: No.
The fact of the matter is that Trump's own CDC classifies the spray in question as “tear gas.” Subsequent reporting also showed that the Trump administration was lying (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d616fc253c442601a844ae7d281f497c2ad1428e54e5dd2606309cf11089bd724f74207faee45fb18175446948eaed46b00) about what was even used at Lafayette Square. The images of people on the screen desperately trying to clean their eyes told the story from the beginning anyway.
The Trump administration and the Trump campaign are trying to bully journalists. (Even today, attorney general Bill Barr denied (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d61d1d1288970f313329909a65a64e97e299ee21052ea42cbea39b157ea4b0b3733a27578ba8c15c515a8483029ee5c43cb) that a "chemical irritant was used, a clear lie). Just like they spun Trump’s disastrous response to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, right-wing media are now leading the charge in spreading lies about the plain facts of what the administration did and are hoping to bully the rest of the media to go along. No one has to. We all saw what happened.
Many brands that claim to support Black Lives Matter are also advertising on Fox News (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d617b7c0ac8e1a34d91644259a4cd7647dcb77a662ba3c6c0806b1ea658ca53f3b7878c9e8571b67c4944e51f26e99bc759)
We have put together a list of advertisers (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d61b1ef0f086c1b67a3adff96552e05f29c0b7b43096f33107e70a39201e5998d163ee97fb998647a39239c61760eb50188) that have run advertisements on Fox News since May 27. The network’s coverage of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the nationwide uprising following his death has been viciously racist, dehumanizing, full of lies, and disturbingly anti-free speech.
These advertisers claim to support the Black Lives Matter movement, as evidenced by statements they’ve put out on social media. But they should put their money where their mouth is and stop funding racism by advertising on the hate-for-profit scam that is Fox News.
Also: I wrote this week (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d61fc5ba7f0aaca9e0bdf89487f7df443f9701b6d5306ff596a66522e552eccb176dbe9db1f7b6d3c489612a62dbdca917c) about Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch's hypocrisy. Murdoch wrote in a letter that "Black lives matter" and that Fox is committed to diversity -- even while Fox News attacked those ideas on the air.
Bring it on: The Murdochs have reportedly secretly hired (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d617633dd5bb40016b07cf39a9114560802e241ab26fd9082088f97cb195cd46c10b46525977c9f106c9b1351d46df4782e)a conservative operative and two former conservative bloggers to fight back against the work of Media Matters and advertiser education campaigners Sleeping Giants. From a business perspective, Murdoch has cause for concern; Fox News is actually suffering quite severely on the advertising front (due in large part to the efforts of Media Matters, Sleeping Giants, advocacy organizations, and online activists). Over the past few years, the network has actually lost hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue. We're now at a critical time (http://click.e.mediamatters.org/?qs=8a52754446280d611de34f0fb0fb6bfe43116a9119c43fadddab001add5b2c5fdf60a3121d18872982a9df796fabeea33f489e73ea3f97ef)where Fox News could actually lose a lot more money due to upcoming cable fee negotiations.
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/why-media-reluctant-cover-neo-nazi-violence
s been just a little over two months since a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters and killed a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia. It seems as if the mainstream media has already gotten bored with the story of neo-Nazi violence and domestic terrorism. Leading white nationalist Richard Spencer snagged a huge amount of coverage for scheduling a speech at the University of Florida (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/us/florida-richard-spencer.html?_r=0),which provoked stories about how much the school was spending on security, the potential for protests and the fact that the state's Republican governor felt compelled to declare a state of emergency. But when three of Spencer's biggest fans and core followers — their names are Tyler Tenbrink, William Fears and Colton Fears (the latter two are brothers) — were arrested for attempting to murder protesters (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-nationalist-richard-spencer-s-supporters-charged-post-speech-shooting-n812751), coverage of the event was relatively sparse.
Media Matters analyzed the news coverage of the incident, (https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/10/22/cable-news-almost-silent-neo-nazis-allegedly-attempting-murder-counterprotesters-richard-spencer/218296) in which one neo-Nazi allegedly fired a gun while the other two egged him on to shoot protesters. The watchdog group found that cable news networks almost completely ignored it. CNN and Fox News didn't mention the alleged attack at all, and MSNBC devoted a two-minute segment to it on one show.
Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, told Salon he didn't believe the incident necessarily deserved "hours of coverage over a few days." But the paltry coverage the alleged attack got, he worries, may contribute to the public's failure to understand how serious the threat of neo-Nazi violence really is.
Vicious attacks on anti-fascist protesters have happened on at least two occasions since the events in Charlottesville. In an early September rally in Vancouver, Washington (https://mic.com/articles/184373/far-right-protester-targets-antifa-demonstrators-in-attempted-car-attack-in-vancouver-washington#.nUMq1uxnz), there were reports of threatening behavior from motorists, with one man driving into a crowd (fortunately injuring no one), and a group of men in another car throwing things and driving menacingly around the protesters. Then there was this latest shooting associated with the Spencer event in Florida.
Just because no one has gotten hurt doesn't mean this isn't news. It's sheer luck that separates a bullet that hits someone in the head from one that doesn't. More importantly, Americans need to see the pattern of violent behavior coming from the white supremacist subculture, to understand the threat it actually poses.
Incidents like these “really underscore the risk a lot of people talked about when it comes to these rallies, and about what these groups actually bring when they hold these events," Keegan Hankes, a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center (https://www.splcenter.org/), told Salon.
Hankes emphasized that white supremacy is an inherently violent ideology, noting that "you don't have the 'ethno-state,' you don't have this kind of world that they're dreaming up without extreme violence.”
As far-right fringe groups, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, plan more rallies and public speeches, there's a real risk that the centrality of violence to white supremacist ideology gets lost in the public discourse. Part of the problem is that right-wing pundits have been working to frame the challenge posed by these groups strictly in terms of "free speech" while minimizing the problem of actual or potential violence.
“The security concerns are justified, as we see, because violence follows" where neo-Nazis and white supremacists go, Hankes said. "It's more than just that people don't want to hear their ideas or don't agree with them, and don't think they should be on campus."
Carusone characterized himself as a "free-speech purist," but felt that the public's understanding of the debate over speech on campus is incomplete if they don't understand the enhanced possibility of violence that white supremacists bring.
"Alt-right" groups, he explained, "do these sort of trolling events at campuses, not trying to make a point, but just to elicit a backlash, so that they can have these kinds of skirmishes. The net effect of the skirmishes is to create conditions such that they can not just engage in violence but also bully, intimidate and suppress their opponents.”
That too, he noted, is a free speech issue: The free speech rights of anti-fascists and leftists are endangered if they are being intimidated with violence.
White supremacists and other "alt-right" types have deliberately downplayed their own acts of violence in an effort to confuse the issue, Hankes said. Instead, they focus on a narrative claiming that they "just want a fair hearing for [their] ideas" and that it's "the anti-fascists who are committing violence," permitting them to play the victim and drum up sympathy for their extremist views.
He then began to make excuses, calling Fields a "scapegoat" and saying that Heyer's death was an "ambiguous situation." He also claimed that Fields' "vehicle was attacked," and suggested that ramming a car into a crowd of protesters was Fields "attempting to escape."Spencer himself did this during his speech at the University of Florida. When an audience member asked Spencer about the killing of leftist protester Heather Heyer, for which a white supremacist named James Fields has been charged with second-degree murder, Spencer deflected and downplayed the situation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2988&v=u2XvwcNSDmw). He claimed he is opposed to all forms of violence and has "explicitly called for peace."
Shortly after Spencer tried to spin his movement as nonviolent, three of his most prominent followers — men who have repeatedly attended Spencer's appearances and events, including the Charlottesville rally — reportedly fired a gun at protesters while shouting "Heil Hitler" and urging each other on.
The media has an important role to play here. It's not just about reporting on events like this, but also putting them into context. The shooting was part of a growing white supremacist movement that is growing ever more ambitious and more violent, and feels emboldened by a sympathetic leader in the White House. This shooting happened during a constant churn of stories about Trump's racially provocative attacks on NFL players, Rep. Frederica Wilson, Myeshia Johnson (the widow of slain soldier La David Johnson) and ESPN sports analyst Jemele Hill. It's no mystery why white supremacists might feel it's a good time to ramp up their activities. This shooting cannot be viewed as a random crime, but as the inescapable result of electing President Donald Trump.
==
==
http://www.alternet.org/media/new-york-times-russian-hacking
fail?
Talk about strange bedfellows joining forces to produce an unlikely media alliance.
That’s what happened when The New York Times reported on October 31, 2016, that FBI officials had not been able to uncover any evidence that Russian operatives, through allegedly hacking Democratic emails, were trying to help elect Donald Trump.
“Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” read (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html) the October 31 Times headline which relied on unnamed “law enforcement officials.”
Acting as an almost unofficial time-out, and one that came with the Times’ seal of approval, the article helped put the media brakes on the unfolding Russian hacking story; the same Russian hacking story (https://www.buzzfeed.com/alimwatkins/cia-nominee-believes-russians-wanted-trump?utm_term=.op74O24qA#.oo9lnNlK0) that has now morphed into a full-scale Trump scandal (http://www.salon.com/2017/01/11/donald-trumps-new-russian-scandal-we-dont-know-how-much-is-true-but-we-know-james-comey-behaved-shamefully/).
The message on October 31 from the Times’ sources was unmistakable: There’s no conclusive connection between Trump and the Russians, and the Russians’ efforts were “aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” (Question: How do you not pick sides in a two-person election if you only undermine one of the candidates, the way Russian hackers only undermined the Democrat?)
The Times piece set off audible cheers (http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/01/fbi-found-no-conclusive-evidence-of-secret-trump-russia-bank-server/) within the conservative media (http://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/11/01/ny-times-has-reportedly-seen-the-results-of-the-fbis-investigation-into-a-trump-russia-connection/), which usually holds the Times in contempt for its supposed “liberal media bias.”
In fact, pointing to the newspaper’s alleged Democratic leanings, conservative claimed that if even the liberal New York Times determined there was no Trump-Russia story, then it definitely must be true.
“And as far as liberals are concerned, the Democrats are concerned, when the New York Times clears you, you are cleared,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners (https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/11/01/this_is_not_what_happens_to_a_winning_campaign_one_week_before_an_election/) on November 1. “The New York Times carries as much weight as the FBI, and if the New York Times says there’s nothing to see between Trump and Russia and Putin, then there’s nothing to see.”
All across (http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/31/fbi-finds-no-links-donald-trump-russia/) the conservative media landscape, the Times report was held up as putting the Trump-Russia story to bed.
However, to suggest the Times’ influential October 31 report “hasn’t aged well (https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/819208261094277121),” as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently put it, may be an understatement, as the unfolding hacking scandal continues to gain momentum and more evidence tumbles out regarding claims that Russians were trying to help Trump. (Hayes also correctly recalled (https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/819208680440823808) that "At the same time the FBI was leaking like a sieve about Clinton, people around it went out of their way to dampen the Putin talk.")
The problems (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/harry-reid-spokesman-torches-nyt-over-trump-russia-story/article/2609346) with the Times article are many. First off, Sen. Harry Reid’s spokesman claimed (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/harry-reid-spokesman-torches-nyt-over-trump-russia-story/article/2609346) that Reid had been interviewed for the Times’ article, pushed back against its timid premise about there being no connection, and that Reid’s comments were omitted from the story.
More recently, we’ve seen all kinds of information revealed that contradicts the Times’ often-quoted October 31 report. For instance, FBI Director James Comey testified (http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-james-comey-russian-hacking-russia-election-2016-republicans-541276) in December that Russia had “hacked into Republican state political campaigns and old email domains of the Republican National Committee,” but did not release information from those hacks. As Reuters pointed out, that allegation “may buttress the U.S. intelligence view that Moscow tried to help Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign.”
More recently, the BBC reported (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38589427) that “a joint taskforce, which includes the CIA and the FBI, has been investigating allegations that the Russians may have sent money to Mr Trump's organisation or his election campaign.” Also last week, the Guardian reported that FBI investigators were so concerned with a possible Trump-Russia connection that they asked for a foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) warrant (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/guardian-fbi-asked-warrant-monitor-trump-aides) to monitor Trump aides during the campaign. (The warrant request was reportedly denied.)
Meanwhile, Britain’s The Independentreported (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-russia-dossier-file-investigation-hacking-christopher-steele-mi6-a7526901.html) that the former intelligence officer who wrote the recently revealed Trump dossier was frustrated that the FBI had “for months” ignored the information he passed along to the bureau about a possible Trump-Russian connection.
Note that just four weeks after the election, the Times itself reported (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/us/politics/cia-judgment-intelligence-russia-hacking-evidence.html), “Both intelligence and law enforcement officials agree that there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Russian hacking was primarily aimed at helping Mr. Trump and damaging his opponent.” (Emphasis added.)
And from NPR (http://www.npr.org/2016/12/16/505890551/fbi-cia-agree-that-russia-was-trying-to-help-trump-win-the-election): “FBI, CIA Agree That Russia Was Trying To Help Trump Win The Election.”
Here’s the larger context for the Times report and why it was seen as such a game-changer at the time.
On October 31, the FBI was dealing with two breaking news stories that were spinning out of its control and reflecting poorly on Comey.
The bureau was under withering criticism (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/31/meet-the-republicans-defending-hillary-clinton-from-fbi-chief-james-comey/?utm_term=.03217746ff65) from legal experts, journalists (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/james-comey-broke-with-loretta-lynch-and-justice-department-tradition?mbid=social_twitter), Democrats, and even some Republicans (https://twitter.com/NewDay/status/793072305719087104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) after Comey inserted insert himself into the final days of the campaign by informing Congress that the FBI was reigniting its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email while secretary of state. That last weekend in October the bureau was also battling damaging news stories (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/31/fbis-comey-opposed-naming-russians-citing-election-timing-source.html) that suggested its leadership had been slow to respond to the Russian hacking controversy as it pertained to Donald Trump.
Comey’s letter to Congress about the emails was dispatched October 28. In the days that followed, a steady stream of revelations undercut his actions. On October 30, CNN reported (http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/30/politics/clinton-emails-fbi-abedin/index.html) that the FBI had known about the new emails for “weeks” before Comey decided to go public with the information just days before the election.
The following day, news outlets reported (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/harry-reid-letter-fbi-james-comey-clinton-emails-trump-russia-ties-hatch-act/) that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) had sent Comey a blistering letter (http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-russia/) , insisting the FBI director was sitting on “‘explosive’ information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government.”
That same day, Mother Jones, foreshadowing the news last week about a dossier (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/01/bbcs-paul-wood-there-are-four-sources-possible-trump-russia-blackmail) collected on Trump, reported (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump) that, “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” had provided to the FBI with “memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.”
And that same day, CNBC reported (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/31/fbis-comey-opposed-naming-russians-citing-election-timing-source.html), “FBI Director James Comey argued privately that it was too close to Election Day for the United States government to name Russia as meddling in the U.S. election.”
The contrast was startling: Comey had publicly reinvigorated the Clinton email investigation based on emails the FBI hadn’t even read (the emails turned out to be irrelevant), yet at the same time Comey allegedly sat on new information regarding claims that Trump had ongoing ties with Russia because Comey thought the optics would look bad.
Given all this, the FBI needed a way to stop the public relations bleeding. And late in the day on October 31, the Times provided the respite.
Specifically, the article helped push back on reports Comey didn’t want to go public with any Russian information close to Election Day.
“The reason Comey didn’t announce the existence of this investigation wasn’t because it was it was ‘explosive’ and could impact the election,” announced (http://hotair.com/archives/2016/11/01/nyt-big-russia-trump-connection-story-turns-nothingburger/?fb_comment_id=1167975693257471_1167992476589126) the conservative site, Hot Air, pointing to the Times article. “It was because the FBI had already figured out it was a dud.”
In other words, FBI PR problem solved. The problems with the Times report, however, were just beginning.
Eric Boehlert is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush.
==
For this reason, Media Matters recognizes George Will as the 2014 Misinformer of the Year.
Past recipients include CBS News (http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/12/26/misinformer-of-the-year-cbs-news/197323c) (2013), Rush Limbaugh (http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/12/20/misinformer-of-the-year-rush-limbaugh/191906) (2012), Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/12/15/misinformer-of-the-year-rupert-murdoch-and-news/185340) (2011), Sarah Palin (http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/12/22/sarah-palin-winner-of-the-2010-glenn-beck-misin/174617) (2010), Glenn Beck (http://mediamatters.org/research/2009/12/21/glenn-beck-media-matters-2009-misinformer-of-th/158371) (2009), Sean Hannity (http://mediamatters.org/research/2008/12/17/sean-hannity-media-matters-2008-misinformer-of/146570) (2008), ABC (http://mediamatters.org/research/2006/12/22/misinformer-of-the-year-abc/137593) (2006), Chris Matthews (http://mediamatters.org/research/2005/12/23/chris-matthews-2005s-misinformer-of-the-year/134530) (2005), and Bill O'Reilly (http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/12/23/misinformer-of-the-year/132497) (2004).
==
Media Matters for America (MMFA), a "Web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media),"\1 (http://mediamatters.org/) was founded by [David Brock (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Brock) in mid-April 2004.
Along with former MoveOn (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/MoveOn) consultant Tom Matzzie (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tom_Matzzie) and John Podesta (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_Podesta)'s Center for American Progress (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Center_for_American_Progress), it is behind Progressive Media (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Progressive_Media), a liberal messaging campaign launched in 2008 and expanded in 2009 to become a 'war room' for promoting the foreign and domestic policies of Barack Obama (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Barack_Obama).
Media Matters for America's partner organization, Media Matters Action Network (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_Action_Network) launched Conservative Transparency (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Conservative_Transparency) in November, 2009.
Contents hide (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#)]
1 Background (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#Background)
2 Funding (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#Funding)
3 Media Matters Action Network (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#Media_Matters_Action_Network)
4 Books (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#Books)
5 People (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#People)
6 Contact Details (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#Contact_Details)
7 SourceWatch Resources (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#SourceWatch_Resources)
8 References (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#References)
9 External links (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#External_links)
Background
"Because a healthy democracy depends on public access to accurate and reliable information, Media Matters for America is dedicated to alerting news outlets and consumers to conservative misinformation -- wherever we find it, in every news cycle -- and to spurring progressive activism based on standards and accountability in media," explains their website \2 (http://mediamatters.org/items/200405010001) "For the first time, Media Matters for America has put in place a system to monitor the media for conservative misinformation - every day, in real time -- in 2004 and beyond." [[3 (http://mediamatters.org/etc/about.html)
The site "was devised as part of a larger media apparatus being built by liberals to combat what they say is the overwhelming influence of conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Rush_Limbaugh) and Bill O'Reilly (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Bill_O%27Reilly)." The "project was developed with help from the newly formed Center for American Progress (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Center_for_American_Progress), the policy group headed by John D. Podesta (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_D._Podesta)," Bill Clinton (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Bill_Clinton)'s former chief of staff. "Brock said he hoped it could help provide fodder for fledgling liberal radio talk shows being started across the country, including those of the comedians Al Franken (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Al_Franken) and Janeane Garofalo (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Janeane_Garofalo)." ^[1]
"Mr. Brock, who has also spoken with Senator Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tom_Daschle) of South Dakota and former Vice President Al Gore (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Al_Gore) about his project, said he was ready to face skepticism. 'I think all ideological converts face a reality on that question,' he said. But, he added, 'I've found people very open to the idea that people can change.'"
MMFA has apparently retained Aman & Associates (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Aman_%26_Associates) to promote their first book.
Funding
Funded with "more than $2 million in donations from wealthy liberals." "Among Mr. Brock's donors is Leo Hindery, Jr. (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Leo_Hindery,Jr.&action=edit&redlink=1), the former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Susie_Tompkins_Buell), who is co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and is close to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton) of New York, and Ms. Buell's husband Mark; and James C. Hormel (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_C.Hormel&action=edit&redlink=1), a San Francisco philanthropist whose appointment as ambassador to Luxembourg was delayed for a year and a half in the late 1990's by conservative lawmakers protesting what they called his promotion of a 'gay lifestyle.' ^[2]
Media Matters for America is funded in part by the Democracy Alliance (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Democracy_Alliance).
Media Matters Action Network
The Media Matters Action Network is a 501(c)4 organization that is a partner organization to MMFA. In December 2008, the Media Matters Action Network acquired the Media Transparency (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Transparency) website from Cursor Inc.[3]
Books
MediaMatters.org, Misstating the State of the Union: Right-wing media distortions about the Clinton and Bush presidencies (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1888451807/103-7816064-9447032?v=glance), Akashic Books (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Akashic_Books), October 2004, ISBN 1888451807 (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:BookSources/1888451807)
Related:
David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400048753/ref=pd_bxgy_text_1/103-7816064-9447032?v=glance&s=books&st=)*, Crown, 2004, ISBN 1400048753 (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:BookSources/1400048753)
David Brock and Paul Waldman, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media (http://www.amazon.com/Free-Ride-John-McCain-Media/dp/0307279405/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204255660&sr=1-1), Anchor, March 2008. ISBN 0307279405 (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:BookSources/0307279405)
People
Key personnel:[4 (http://mediamatters.org/about_us/staff_advisors)
David Brock (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Brock) - CEO
Eric Burns (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eric_Burns&action=edit&redlink=1) - President
Marcia Kuntz (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Marcia_Kuntz) - Editor-in-Chief
Jeremy Schulman (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jeremy_Schulman&action=edit&redlink=1) - Research Director
Jamison Foser (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jamison_Foser) - Senior Fellow
Eric Boehlert (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eric_Boehlert&action=edit&redlink=1) - Senior Fellow
Duncan Black (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Duncan_Black&action=edit&redlink=1) - Senior Fellow
Karl Frisch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Karl_Frisch&action=edit&redlink=1) - Senior Fellow
Jessica Levin (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jessica_Levin&action=edit&redlink=1) - Press Secretary
Contact Details
Media Matters for America
455 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Suite 600
Washington DC 20001
Telephone: 202-756-4100
Fax: 202-318-0836
Website: http://mediamatters.org/
RSS Feed: http://mediamatters.org/tools/syndication/latest.rss
SourceWatch Resources
Democracy Alliance (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Democracy_Alliance)
Niki Jagpal (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Niki_Jagpal)
Ilyse Hogue (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ilyse_Hogue)
References
- ↑ (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#cite_ref-0) Jim Rutenberg, "New Internet Site Turns Critical Eyes and Ears to the Right," (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/business/media/03BROC.html) New York Times, May 3, 2004.
- ↑ (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#cite_ref-1) Jim Rutenberg, "New Internet Site Turns Critical Eyes and Ears to the Right," (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/business/media/03BROC.html) New York Times, May 3, 2004.
- ↑ (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Media_Matters_for_America#cite_ref-2) "Media Matters Action Network acquires MediaTransparency.org from Cursor, Inc.," MediaTransparency.org, December 12, 2008. (No longer available online).
External links
Schema-root.org: Media Matters for America (http://schema-root.org/people/political/activists/media_watchdogs/organizations/media_matters/) - current and archive news feeds
Jim Rutenberg, "New Internet Site Turns Critical Eyes and Ears to the Right" (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E0DE133DF930A35756C0A9629C8B63&scp=1&sq=media+matters+brock&st=nyt), New York Times, May 3, 2004.
Jim Boyd, "Editorial Pages: Why Courage is Hard to Find," (http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100453) Nieman Reports, Spring 2006.
"Behind the Fall of Imus, A Digital Brush Fire" (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117641076468168180-TfMzyqKQiK1gcJfwRly5ONRZTEo_20080411.html), The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2007.
Jeremy Scahill, Rahm Emanuel's Think Tankers Enforce 'Message Discipline' Among 'Liberals' (http://rebelreports.com/post/94549885/rahm-emanuels-think-tankers-enforce-message), RebelReports.com, April 9, 2009.
Categories (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Special:Categories):
Media (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Media)
United States (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:United_States)
Non-Government Organizations (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Non-Government_Organizations)
Liberal Advocacy Organizations (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Liberal_Advocacy_Organizations)
Obama PR (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Obama_PR)
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/amateur-hour-did-james-okeefe-target-media-
That video is James O'Keefe describing his journalist "sting" project. In this specific case, he describes his "sting" investigating journalists for misinformation, bias and coverups, especially with respect to Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein.
It makes one wonder whether Media Matters' Eric Boehlert was a target of O'Keefe's grand plan.
Via Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/eric-boehlert-verizon-sting_n_1135026.html), a story of a bogus Verizon representative asking some very weird questions. Evidently this "Verizon employee" stopped by Boehlert's house to take a customer satisfaction survey. Verizon confirms they do not send people door to door for customer satisfaction surveys, however. After asking some fairly routine questions, it started to get weird.
"So he gets to the last questions, and he's really reading intently off of his clipboard, and he says something about making the kind of salary I do, working from home, something something about the 99 percenters," Boehlert said.
The man claiming to be a Verizon representative finally asked his question. "After he mentioned my salary and that I work from home, all the bells went off, and this is not who this guy says he is.Therefore, I kind of lost track of the exact wording of the question, but it definitely was like very accusatory of me and I'm a hypocrite and how do I have this supposedly cushy job while I'm writing about real workers and the people of the 99 percent," said Boehlert.
"So there was this pause, and I said, 'You work for Verizon?' And he just sort of looks back at me and [says], 'Will you answer the question? Will you answer the question?' And I said, 'Can I see your Verizon ID?' And he wouldn't produce any Verizon ID, and I think he asked me another time to answer the question. And basically I just said, 'I'm done so you can leave now.'"
My interaction with Eric Boehlert has been limited to Twitter, but my take on him is that he is not easily fooled, intimidated, or otherwise pushed around. And he wasn't here, either.
Boehlert decided to follow him to obtain his license plate number. By now he had realized that the man was likely pulling a political stunt, and James O'Keefe's notorious "To Catch a Journalist" project came to mind as a possibility.
"The only sort of comical part was he forget which way he was supposed to run in case I started following. He ended up sort of in the road, and he sort of turned left and then right," said Boehlert. "The last I saw him he was in a full sprint down my street running away from my house."
The police and Verizon were called. The only thing missing from this story is James O'Keefe's emphatic denial. There doesn't appear to be anything like that on the record, though Andrew Breitbart has categorically denied any involvement in this particular stunt.
In response to an instant message asking if he was responsible for the fake Verizon representative, Breitbart said no.
So what gives, James O'Keefe? Don't you think that as the director of an organization subsidized with taxpayer funds, you should step up and tell us whether you targeted Boehlert or not? A simple yes or no will do.