When The New York Times reported last week on a new attack book about Barack Obama, it cited a critique by Media Matters for America, the liberal watchdog group, which identified numerous falsehoods.
CNN weighed in on the book’s charges that Obama is a stealth radical with Muslim ties,under the headline “Book on Obama blasted for vicious innuendo” - a quote straight from Media Matters.
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Which is just the way David Brock envisioned it would work when he founded the group in May, 2004, with funding from leading liberal philanthropists, including Susie Tompkins Buell, founder of the Esprit fashion line; Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corporation; and New York psychologist Gail Furman.
Brock, depending on your perspective, is the most credible person to act as a conservative watchdog – or the worst, having admitted to lying and distortion in service of a political agenda himself.
A former right-wing hatchet man by his own description, who authored The Real Anita Hill, and The Seduction of Hillary Clinton, Brock famously reversed course in the mid-1990s.
He was working as a reporter for American Spectator where he had written about “Troopergate,” Bill Clinton’s alleged motel-hopping while governor of Arkansas. But in 1996, when his much-anticipated book about Hillary Clinton landed like a dud in conservative circles, Brock had a crisis of conscience.
“I discovered that as word filtered out that The Seduction of Hillary Rodham not only failed to deliver the death blow to the Clintons that everyone had expected but was in some respects sympathetic to its subject, I was suddenly no longer welcome in my old circle,” he wrote in a 1997 Esquire piece, “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man.”
That was a turning point for Brock. He said he would not adjust the facts to fit his ideology - just what many critics to his left have contended he had been doing all along – and he declared his service as a right-wing warrior over.
For the next few years, as conservative writer Noel Sheppard put it, Brock “launched something of a fire sale on his own credibility,” confessing to lying in his earlier books and going so far as to apologize to Bill Clinton over his Troopergate stories in American Spectator.
But Brock’s confessions posed a classic dilemma. After someone admits to being a liar, how do you believe anything he has to say afterward?
Slate’s Timothy Noah parsed that issue in his Chatterbox column after the release of Brock’s 2002 book Blinded by the Right:
Chatterbox has noted before … the unique difficulty posed by any narrative that begins, “I’m a liar, here’s my tale.”
…The hopeful liberal narrative about David Brock, peddled by Hertzberg, Rich, Tomasky, and Brock himself, is that the conservative movement made Brock a distorter and a liar, and that the distortions and lies were all in the service of that movement. But Blinded by the Right offers plenty of evidence that for Brock, lying has been a lifelong habit.
Brock’s confessions notwithstanding, Media Matters’ critiques have become a staple for staff-starved media outlets trying to separate fact from fiction.
The reasons are easy to understand. For starters, they are often well-documented with citations and even video references, so users can make their own judgments.
In addition, Brock has hired a sizeable staff, ranging from former Democratic Party operatives to well-respected writers and journalists to legions of researchers, most of them recent college graduates in journalism or political science. Among them:
To the degree they manage to shed light - in the form of transparent, footnoted analyses - as opposed to more smoke on the claims and counterclaims shaping the presidential campaign, that will be a good thing.
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