Killing the Messenger Read online

  After several days of public outcry, MSNBC and CBS Radio said they would suspend Imus for two weeks—a second attempt to distance themselves from their host without having to fire the man who brought in millions of dollars in ad revenue and who was the toast of much of the Washington media establishment he featured on his show. But the public pressure kept up, and advertisers kept fleeing. Finally, just a week after Imus insulted the Rutgers players, MSNBC announced that it would no longer broadcast Imus’s show. A day later, CBS Radio canceled it. Imus was finished—and national media credited Media Matters with taking his scalp.

  The same thing happened when we outed Lou Dobbs, a CNN regular since the network’s launch in 1980, as a “birther” who doubted President Obama’s eligibility to hold office. Far from the “Mr. Independent” image he worked hard to propagate, Dobbs routinely used his show to broadcast particularly skewed conservative political opinions—and when he talked about immigrants, which was often, he frequently crossed the line.

  We had been cataloguing and debunking Dobbs’s comments for years—such as his 2005 claim that “the invasion of illegal aliens” had caused an increase in leprosy—and when he plunged headfirst into the right-wing fever swamps, suggesting on his radio show there were unanswered questions about the circumstances of Obama’s birth, we were ready. We bought airtime to highlight “CNN’s Lou Dobbs Problem,” and worked with a coalition of Latino and progressive groups to press Dobbs’s advertisers to boycott the show. After weeks of pressure led by the National Council of La Raza, Dobbs abruptly resigned from the network that had been his home for nearly three decades. Like Imus, he ended up on the Fox Business Network—a refuge of the discredited, where both belonged.

  Of course, while we continued to accumulate more and more of these victories, we weren’t in it just to play “gotcha.” Cable news was a better place without the likes of Imus and Dobbs, but Media Matters had never been only about discrediting individual miscreants. It was about fundamentally changing the media landscape so that trafficking in right-wing misinformation was no longer a good business model. It was about bringing accountability to the airwaves—not just accountability for the mouthpieces who spewed lies, but for the outlets that offered those mouthpieces microphones, for the advertisers who paid for them, and for the mainstream media that still uncritically passed their nonsense along.

  Media Matters had grown enormously in its first five years. No longer anything resembling a start-up, by 2009, we were well established, well funded (with an annual budget above $10 million), and increasingly looked to as a top media watchdog.

  But the stakes had grown, too. With President Obama’s election, it was clear that progressives would now have a chance to lead—and that, committed as ever to doing the conservative movement’s bidding, the right-wing media would represent a serious threat to the new president’s agenda.

  During the campaign, Americans were treated to a constant stream of false accusations about then Senator Obama’s alleged connections to radical black activists and even domestic terrorists, not to mention the assertion that he had been born in Kenya and was ineligible to serve. And as he took office, the right’s rhetoric reached a boiling point, as hosts warned of the demise of American democracy and even urged their audiences to hoard guns and food in preparation for some kind of Obamapocalypse.

  Some of the attacks were silly, the kind of thing you’d get in an e-mail forwarded from your crazy uncle. More than a few were downright racist. But all of them, taken together, represented a serious threat to Obama’s ability to govern. We couldn’t afford to sit back and let the far right try to take down another Democratic president with a campaign of lies and distortions. It was time for us to go on offense. And we decided to start by attacking the heart of the beast.

  So we declared war on the Fox News Channel.

  For years, we had tried to contain Fox’s influence. We knew that its hosts were strictly in the business of spreading right-wing misinformation, and we saw our job as quickly calling it out so as to discourage more credible outlets from repeating it—the same strategy we used with any right-wing media mouthpiece.

  But now, in a campaign spearheaded by Media Matters President Eric Burner, we would attempt to go from ring-fencing Fox to actually assaulting it directly, going after what was said on its airwaves but also hitting the network where it really hurt: in the wallet. We wrote an eighty-five-page plan to focus our organization’s efforts against Fox—and geared up to put it in place.

  We hired researchers and reporters to help put together an investigative report on Fox’s operations, which we published in 2012. We dug into the sketchy professional backgrounds of Fox executives. We set up legal support to help people file suit against Fox when their privacy had been invaded or their reputations harmed. We increased our pressure campaigns against Fox advertisers.

  We published internal e-mails, like the one in which Bill Sammon, the managing editor of Fox’s Washington bureau, told reporters when covering health care reform not to use the phrase “public option” when they could use the more loaded term “government-run health insurance.” We aired secret recordings, like the one of Sammon on a conservative cruise revealing that he intentionally ran “what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”

  We even looked up the corporate ladder to take on Fox’s parent company, News Corporation, and its CEO, Rupert Murdoch. At the time, Murdoch was moving to take over a British broadcaster—so we established a presence in London to bird-dog him every step of the way. We hired Ilyse Hogue, an executive from MoveOn.org to organize among News Corporation shareholders. We worked to pressure regulators to hold the company’s feet to the fire. As a publicity stunt, I even bid in, and won, a charity auction for a chance to have lunch with Rupert Murdoch. (Murdoch refused and returned my money rather than sit down face-to-face.)

  “Fox News,” as we wrote in our battle plan, “is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials, and the public.”

  Our first major success was our offensive against Fox News star Glenn Beck, the ringleader of Fox’s effort to discredit the new president and sow fear, even paranoia, among conservatives about Obama.

  Beck had been hired for this task by Roger Ailes—the Republican political consultant and former Limbaugh producer who ran the Fox “news” operation and whose own history was a rich tapestry of race-baiting. One of the architects of the Willie Horton attack that invoked the specter of a furloughed African-American convict to portray Michael Dukakis as soft on crime, Ailes reportedly said, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”

  It came as no surprise, then, that the network’s attacks on Obama had a decidedly racial tinge, with Fox hosts using Obama’s former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and outright inventing links between Obama and radicals like Louis Farrakhan in order to depict Obama as some kind of modern-day Black Panther.

  Beck was the star of the show. And, frankly, he was good at what he was hired to do: playing to conservative fears. If, today, he’s mostly remembered as a clown, tearfully ranting in front of inscrutable chalkboard diagrams, it’s also worth recalling that, for a time, he was a clown who got results. It’s largely because of Beck’s exertions that Van Jones, a progressive African-American activist who had been tapped as a White House environmental advisor, was transformed in the eyes of the right into, in Beck’s words, an “unrepentant Communist revolutionary” and, after a massive pressure campaign, forced to resign.

  With Jones’s media lynching, Beck turned his sights to an official at the Department of Education named Kevin Jennings. A former high school history teacher who had started the country’s first Gay-Straight Alliance student club, Jennings had later gone on to found the Gay & Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN),
an organization that fought against bullying in schools, before being named to the Obama administration to coordinate antibullying efforts.

  Between the right’s general paranoia over the administration’s “czars,” Jennings’s career exposing the harsh realities of discrimination against gay and lesbian students, and his status as an openly gay man, he was a natural target for Fox and its allies on the right. Jennings was falsely accused of “encouraging” and “covering up” statutory rape, of being a “pedophile,” of having “personally pushed books that encouraged children to meet adults at gay bars for sex.” Karl Rove even uttered the particularly vile lie that Jennings had engaged in “high-profile, in-your-face advocacy of things like NAMBLA”—the infamous pedophilia apologist organization.

  Not knowing the facts, the White House was slow to defend Jennings. That was why a group like Media Matters was so essential. We closely examined the allegations and soon found the evidence to disprove them; for example, in one case, where the right was claiming that Jennings had covered up the sexual abuse of one of his students, we found the alleged victim, who told us that nothing of the sort had taken place.

  In the end, CNN aired a report laying out the true facts of the Jennings case. Fox acknowledged its false reports. And Jennings himself would go on to keep his job and have an enormously successful tenure, including putting together a historic antibullying summit in the East Room of the White House.

  Defeating the attacks on Kevin Jennings did stop the political targeting of Obama officials by Fox, but Beck nonetheless continued to conjure up a sinister conspiracy afoot in the White House. Nothing was too inflammatory: Beck routinely used violent rhetoric and even invoked the specter of the Holocaust and slavery to illustrate the alleged dangers of President Obama, whom he called “a racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

  Beck’s last rant was the spark behind an advertiser boycott that led to more than twenty companies pulling their spots from his program in the summer of 2009. Over the next year, working with allied progressive groups like ColorofChange.org, we helped sustain the drumbeat of criticism. We hired the organizer who had been leading the ad boycott effort, and that number of lost advertisers would grow to nearly three hundred.

  In August 2010, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank called attention to Beck’s extremism. “Most every broadcast has some violent imagery,” Milbank wrote. “ ‘The clock is ticking…. The war is just beginning…. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government…. You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head…. The other side is attacking…. There is a coup going on…. Grab a torch!… Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers…. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered…. They are putting a gun to America’s head.’”

  By making sure that Beck’s advertisers didn’t miss these gems, we made Beck toxic to the network. He helped undermine himself, of course. As we ramped up the pressure, he responded by becoming even more unhinged, and his frequent incitements to violence became even more thinly veiled. When Sarah Palin went on Beck’s radio show to defend him, we hit back—and Palin’s fans responded, menacingly, by posting the home addresses of our young research staff online. It was one of the lowest and most personally upsetting acts of retaliation we had endured over the years.

  We beefed up security in the building, but we were undeterred—and eventually successful. Beck ultimately lost virtually every national advertiser he had, and Fox executives who could never have been persuaded by appeals to their sense of journalistic integrity were finally convinced by the effect on their bottom line.

  In what turned out to be his last days on Fox, Beck became increasingly fixated on Media Matters. We became a featured player in his chalkboard conspiracies. At one point, he even tapped on the glass, as if to reach through the screen to where our researchers were watching, to brag that despite our best efforts, he was still in business. It got pretty intense; as Beck got closer and closer to going over the edge, we got more and more focused.

  Three weeks after Beck addressed us directly on camera, I was getting ready to go into an event with some prospective donors when my phone rang with the news that Fox was declining to renew Beck’s contract. Talk about a great way to break the ice with new donors. For Beck’s last show, we threw a huge party at our new office space to celebrate our biggest victory yet.

  At the height of his influence, Glenn Beck was celebrated on the cover of Time magazine as the face of a new conservatism. By the time Media Matters and our allies were done exposing him, he was just another crank on the Internet.

  By 2013, three years after we’d declared war on Fox, the network itself, while still the outlet of choice for conservatives, had lost much of its ability to influence the broader political and media landscape.

  In a January 2014 feature story in New York magazine, Frank Rich wrote, “Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefield—and on the political battlefield as well.” Rich noted that the network’s audience is disproportionately old and white, arguing that very few Americans “do not already know that Fox News is a GOP auxiliary and view it, hate-watch it, or avoid it accordingly.” He attributed the network’s damaged reputation in part to “Media Matters, an aggressive and well-financed watchdog operation.”

  The network was still selling its version of reality to a rabid audience, but Fox could no longer credibly claim to deserve recognition as a legitimate journalistic enterprise, a “fair and balanced” arbiter of fact. The conventional wisdom had changed, the mainstream media had become much more skeptical of Fox’s reporting—and thus far less apt to pick it up.

  It was time to declare a victory of sorts. We would continue to monitor Fox’s programming, debunk its misinformation, and hold its hosts accountable, but the proliferation of new right-wing outlets online, which we’ll investigate in a subsequent chapter, meant that Fox was also losing influence as the gatekeeper between the far right and the mainstream media. So we redeployed our troops to meet these new challenges as we recommitted to our core mission: taking the fight to the right, wherever they are, and speaking truth to their lies.

  Today, our Media Matters staff has grown to eighty people, working from our newsroomlike open offices near Capitol Hill. Also residing there are servers that, as of this writing, store five hundred thousand gigabytes of archived material, forty times what the entire Library of Congress would take up if it were digitized. Instead of relying on an external cloud, we built our own, essentially a gigantic DVR, one that also tracks radio broadcasts and web traffic. We take a lot of precautions (including keeping tape backups offsite), because we’re constantly facing denial-of-service attacks—although our IT department would proudly relate that, apart from one incident where our office Internet ran a little slow for a few hours, we’ve successfully fended off each one.

  Our diligent researchers are still at the core of what we do. They still sit in long rows, listening and watching and occasionally raising a ruckus when they spot something really egregious. But we now have dozens of them, trading off eight-hour shifts so we can be up and running, rotating in teams, from 5 a.m. until after midnight most days.

  One team monitors incoming material—anything from cable news to right-wing radio to conservative activists on social media. When someone on that first line sees or hears or reads something we could potentially go after, they send a brief report out flagging it (say, “Allen West just accused Obama of providing aid and comfort to terrorists on Neil Cavuto”). A second team is responsible for reviewing the tape, making sure we have the full context. Conservatives would be surprised how often we debate whether we’re being completely fair to the likes of Rush Limbaugh. And they do whatever research needs to be done to debunk the lie. Then a third team generates published content based on that work, beginning with clipping the video and writing up our findings.

  To answer an often-asked question: Yes, our researchers can take bathroom breaks. We build redundancy into the system to make sure w
e don’t miss anything. But, still, you might find yourself wondering what kind of people would choose to do this sort of thing for a living. Fox’s late night show, Red Eye, once broadcast a mock “interview” with an actor pretending to be one of our employees:

  It is the saddest place I have ever seen in my life. I think about it, and I want to throw up…. I get to work and I take off my clothes, and they strap me into a chair in front of a TV with [Fox News Channel] on. They keep my eyelids propped open like in Clockwork Orange, and I sit and type all day.

  The truth is, Media Matters is actually a fun place to work. And rest assured that our staff is fully clothed. Sure, everyone hits a wall once in a while; it can be frustrating to listen to people lie all day. A show like Fox and Friends, which features a roundtable of conservative talking heads gleefully making things up, can be especially difficult to get through. But our researchers are passionate about what they do. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for a researcher to have had his or her own watchdog blog before coming to work with us. They understand that truth telling is critical to advancing progressive priorities. They know that caring about the environment, or gender equality or economic justice means caring about the way these issues are refracted through the media.