Media Matters: The Left’s Media Attack Watch Dog

MEDIA MATTERS’ LATEST ATTACKS
The Latest Three MM Emails

With liberals firmly in control of ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Times, TIME, Newsweek, and most big city daily newspapers, what’s there to do for a liberal media ‘watch dog’?

Short answer: Not so much.

Longer answer: Monitor FoxNews, NewsMax, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal: practically the only news organizations where conservative thought isn’t reflexively labeled “far right” and “extreme”.

Best answer: There’s not much to do, but we have to earn a paycheck. How about we attack popular commentators who are not news people, but commentators. Oh, and if anyone on one of the “in-house” networks (such as CNN) leaves the reservation on a topic, not only monitor and report, but organize campaigns to get the offenders fired.

That’s the quandary of Media Matters, a “watchdog” set up to watch the media. The only problem, as was stated, there’s not nearly as much to watch as conservative media groups (such as NewsBusters and Accuracy in Media), since Big Media and its employees are essentially liberal institutions–like most of academia and Hollywood.

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Watch Dog or Political Group?

One issue that won’t be addressed in this article is that Media Matters is a thinly-disguised front group set up by the Clintons, in an effort to control the media spin. Google “Media Matters, Clinton front group” and the search engine returns 374,000 references.

Back to whether MM is a “watch dog”.

What’s Media Matters’ latest causes? Let’s take a look at the last three emails sent out by the group in the last week. Then the readers can decide if this is a Watch Dog–or an Attack Dog.

LOU DOBBS

From Media Matters’ latest email appeal, October 6 2009 13:43:

Thanks to all of you who signed our petition last week calling on Lou Dobbs’ advertisers to stop supporting his hate speech. The response was overwhelming — thousands of signatures poured in from concerned people across the country. But there is more work to be done. Now is our chance to step up the pressure and keep building momentum.

The next step in our effort to increase pressure is to help air a new advertisement from America’s Voice — one of our partners from Drop Dobbs campaign — that calls out CNN for giving Lou Dobbs 260 hours a year to peddle fact-free hate speech and right-wing paranoia. We need your help today so that we can help air it on CNN. Preview the ad now, and help us get it on the air:

Dobbs’ crimes?

He supports policing our borders and wonders why the president has spent over a million dollars fighting lawsuits that want to see his original birth certificate.

That’s too dangerous to be left on CNN, one of the Left’s reliable allies in controlling the news. So, Lou Dobbs must go and Media Matters is helping lead the charge. Call it being a “pro-active watchdog”, maybe?

Donate Now to the Media Matters-led charge against Lou Dobbs.

For reference, America’s Voice’s website has the tagline: “Mobilizing Immigrant Voters”–not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Immigration Watch Dog (see how easy it is to label someone a “watch dog”?), American Patrol:

(Frank) Sharry now leads ‘America’s Voice,’ a new gaggle of open-borders advocates.
One Ali Noorani now runs the NIF dog-and-pony show.

One note: America’s Voice is an open advocate for its position and does not try to pass itself off as a neutral referee.

Media Matters does, though not very successfully.

‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings

Media Matters: Right-wing media lynch mob gay-baits White House, facts be damned
For the better part of a week, conservatives in the media have been on a witch hunt for Kevin Jennings, the director of the Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Led by Fox News, the right-wing media have claimed that 21 years ago, when Jennings was a 24-year-old teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, he “cover[ed] up statutory rape” by not reporting to authorities a conversation he had with a student who told him about being involved with an “older man.”

Right wing media “claims”?

This MM email, dated Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 3:58 AM, goes on to attack Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan, Michelle Malkin, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck–in short, anyone who commented on the story. The email dismisses concerns with, “The attacks on Jennings, the latest Obama administration official in the right’s crosshairs, have been disgusting, misleading, baseless, and at times pointedly anti-gay.”

Perusing the email for something that would put an end to this “gay-baiting” lynch mob, one finds one sentence buried in the nine paragraphs:
In a 2004 letter, Jennings’ attorney wrote that the student was 16 years old at the time of the incident, which is, and was at the time, the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.

One sentence is all it takes to demolish this frenzied right wing hate mob, apparently.

BACK TO LOU DOBBS

In an email Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 11:14 AM, MM is on the Dobbs’ trail once more.

As Media Matters has spent years detailing, Dobbs represents a shocking stain on CNN’s credibility. His tendency to traffic in anti-immigrant rhetoric and outlandish conspiracy theories recently culminated in his promotion of racially charged fringe theories about President Obama’s birth certificate. When a company sponsors his program, it is enabling Dobbs to use his CNN platform as a powerful perch from which to spread hate, fear, and misinformation. Now you have an opportunity to tell those companies that it’s time to Drop Dobbs.

Sign the petition and tell Dobbs’ advertisers to stop sponsoring hate: http://www.dropdobbs.com/take-action/

Dobbs has taken notice of our recent efforts to expose his hate, frequently lashing out at Media Matters over the past few months. He has implied we are a “hate group,” called us “fleas,” “really pathetic,” “attack dogs,” and “the Swift Boat of the left.” But we’re not going to be deterred by name-calling. Just this past week, we ratcheted up the pressure, highlighting how Dobbs has frequently echoed stories pushed by leading conservative demagogue Glenn Beck. In recent weeks, as Beck himself has come under fire from a progressive coalition of activists led by ColorOfChange.org, more than 60 advertisers have reportedly dropped their support of his program. As it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Dobbs and Beck, it’s time CNN’s “Mr. Independent” faced that kind of pressure, and long past time for Dobbs’ advertisers to take a close look at the type of hate they are sponsoring.

Style points are awarded for “a shocking stain on CNN’s credibility”. As if.

LET THEM EAT RED MEAT

MM never runs out of attacks. It just recycles left boogeymen Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck over and over. Limbaugh, Beck and Sean Hannity are “red meat” for liberals. Lou Dobbs is now in that regular rotation.

Limbaugh and Beck make a good living delivering commentary. Media Matters also makes good money from attacking them, using the opinions espoused by them to gin up donations.

Limbaugh calls himself an “entertainer”, while Beck regularly declares, “I’m not a journalist.” They make their money delivering fact-based opinions.

Limbaugh and Beck make good livings at stating their opinions. Media Matters monitors those opinions and has a obviously-different take.

That’s all good. Differing opinions make for great discussions.

The difference is: Limbaugh, Beck, and their fellow commentators clearly label their product as “opinion and commentary”. Media Matters tries to pass off their opinions, fundraising letters and political activism as part of being a neutral “media watch dog”.

Trouble is, that watch dog won’t hunt.

by Mondo Frazier
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* http://www.los-angeles-injury-lawyer-blog.com

Tags: attack, dog, emails, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Media, Media Matters, neutral, political front group, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, watch dog