David Brock has spent the last decade apologizing to liberals for his role in creating the vast right-wing conspiracy. Now he’s trying something more ambitious and hoping it gains him the respect he craves from the White House.
by Jason Zengerle
There may be no greater testament to David Brock’s central role in the vast left-wing conspiracy than the lengths to which Rupert Murdoch will go to avoid him.
In November, a researcher at Media Matters for America, the liberal press-watchdog group that Brock founded seven years ago, noticed that the website Charitybuzz was auctioning a “friendly lunch” with Murdoch to benefit the Global Poverty Project. That one of Brock’s worker bees would be keeping tabs on the News Corp. chairman’s calendar should not be terribly surprising. At Media Matters’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., scores of headphone-wearing staffers spend their days (and nights) staring into their television screens and computer monitors, waiting for the latest bits of “conservative misinformation” to emerge from the Fox News Channel and other corners of the right-wing media landscape, all of which are saved on “the big TiVo”—270 terabytes’ worth of hard drive that store over 300,000 hours of TV shows—so that the offending clips can be uploaded to Media Matters’ website. Are you in need of a compendium of the “50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said on Fox News”? Fear not, Media Matters’ site has one.But in the past few months, the group has begun to do more than merely monitor Fox’s programming. “What happened after the Obama election, I think, is that Fox morphed into something that isn’t even recognizable as a form of media,” Brock recently told me. “It looks more like a political committee than what it looked like pre-Obama, which was essentially talk radio on television. It’s more dangerous now; it’s more lethal. And so as Fox has doubled down, we’ve doubled down.” In practice, that means no longer just pointing out inaccuracies. Instead, Media Matters is going on the offensive.
“The truth is that the more responsible the media outlet, the more responsive they are to constructive criticism. But with a Sean Hannity, you can correct the same lie ten times and he’ll keep saying it, so you reach your limits with what you can do defensively,” Brock continued. “Now the idea is: What does it take to get the attention of people above the News Channel? What does it take to get the attention of Murdoch?”
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