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The liberal group Media Matters has quietly transformed itself in preparation for what its founder, David Brock, described in an interview as an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel.

The group, launched as a more traditional media critic, has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the “nerve center” of the conservative movement. The shift reflects the centrality of the cable channel to the contemporary conservative movement, as well as the loathing it inspires among liberals — not least among the donors who fund Media Matters’ staff of about 90, who are arrayed in neat rows in a giant war room above Massachusetts Avenue.

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.”

In an interview and a 2010 planning memo shared with POLITICO, Brock listed the fronts on which Media Matters — which he said is operating on a $10 million-plus annual budget — is working to chip away at Fox and its parent company, News Corp. They include its bread-and-butter distribution of embarrassing clips and attempts to rebut Fox points, as well as a series of under-the-radar tactics.

Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor. (In the interest of full disclosure, Media Matters last month also issued a report criticizing “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy’s criticism of this reporter’s blog.)

Brock said Media Matters also plans to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp., an effort which most likely will involve opening a United Kingdom arm in London to attack the company’s interests there. The group hired an executive from MoveOn.org to work on developing campaigns among News Corp. shareholders and also is looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network.

The group will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests — whether that be here or looking at what’s going on in London right now,” Brock said, referring to News Corp.’s — apparently successful — move to take a majority stake in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB.


A more extended attack came in February on the freewheeling late night show Red Eye, which conducted a mock interview with a purported Media Matters employee.

“It’s horrible. All we do is sit and watch Fox News and make up stuff about Fox News. It is the saddest place I have ever seen in my life. I think about it, and I want to throw up,” the mock employee said. “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.

“If there was no Beck, George Soros would come down and demand we make it up,” the “interviewee” continued. “I would watch the “Flintstones” and transcribe Fred Flintstone’s words and attribute them to Beck. It was the only way to get Soros to stop hitting me.”

(A Soros associate said the financier, who gave Media Matters $1 million last year, did not earmark it for the Fox campaign. Soros suggested in a recent CNN interview that the Fox depictions of him as a sinister media manipulator would better be applied to Murdoch.)

In some views, the war between Media Matters and Fox is not, necessarily, bad for either side. Media Matters has transformed itself into a pillar of the progressive movement with its aggressive new brand of media campaigning. And the attacks cement Fox’s status on the right.

“Fox is happy about it — and it makes their position more vivid among their supporters,” said Paul Levinson, a media studies professor at Fordham University. “One way of keeping your core supporters happy is to be attacked by people your core supporters don’t like.”

But Media Matters says its digging has begun to pay off. The group has trickled out a series of emails from Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon, leaks from inside the network, which show him, for instance, circulating a memo on “Obama’s references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists.”

The leaks are part of a broader project to take advantage of internal dissent, Media Matters Executive Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt said.

“We made a list of every single person who works for Fox and tried to figure out who might be disgruntled and why, and we went out to try to meet them,” he said. “Clearly, somebody in that organization is giving us primary source documents.”

Media Matters, he said, is also conducting “opposition research” on a dozen or so “mid- and senior-level execs and producers,” a campaign style move that he and Brock said would simply involve recording their public appearances and digging into public records associated with them.

JohnStOnge wrote: But it is disturbing that so much of their strategy is based on personal attack. If they were attacking the message, that's one thing. But they seem devoted to attacking the messengers. Very low class. And apparently they're pretty open about it.

Skjellyfetti wrote:

JohnStOnge wrote: But it is disturbing that so much of their strategy is based on personal attack. If they were attacking the message, that's one thing. But they seem devoted to attacking the messengers. Very low class. And apparently they're pretty open about it.

Yup. Fox News is awful.

kalm wrote:How dare former Conk spin meister operatives who were charged with smearing the opposition now turn and apply the same tactics to right wing infotainment networks. Oh the humanity.

Chizzang wrote:See bandle
There are so many great reasons not to own a television...
please add this latest one to the ever growing list





(I did mention that I don't have a TV right..?)

dbackjon wrote:Good! Somebody needs to call out the anti-American channel that is Fox

Ivytalk wrote:

kalm wrote:How dare former Conk spin meister operatives who were charged with smearing the opposition now turn and apply the same tactics to right wing infotainment networks. Oh the humanity.

For once, kalm, you scored an oblique hit. David Brock has no credibility on any issue whatsoever. He's worse than Kevin Phillips.

dback o'brien wrote:"Good! Somebody needs to call out the anti-American channel that is Fox"

TwinTownBisonFan wrote:

Ivytalk wrote:
For once, kalm, you scored an oblique hit. David Brock has no credibility on any issue whatsoever. He's worse than Kevin Phillips.

Not accurate at all.

Brock's book in 2003 exposed to the world an alarming relationship - one that was known in operative circles (mostly told around the bar) but not much believed for it's sheer cynicism.

Most people had never heard of DCI, the GOP strategy firm behind a lot of this garbage until that book. Most people hadn't heard of Richard Mellon Scaife, Judge Silbeman, or even Roger Ailes. Brock exposed all of it (including the decidedly un-conservative lifestyle of Ann Coulter - which, while largely immaterial - was damn funny)

However - this tactic, is no different than what the right has been doing for fifteen years. IMO it represents something of a dangerous escalation... I know it's only a matter of time before every operative becomes a news story and is slandered by hatchet-job bloggers (****, it's already happened to me in MN) - it's part of why I'm trying very hard not to work campaigns any more... because once people that far down the chain become targets, it's only a matter of time and opportunity before someone, somewhere resorts to violence.

houndawg wrote:

TwinTownBisonFan wrote:
Not accurate at all.

Brock's book in 2003 exposed to the world an alarming relationship - one that was known in operative circles (mostly told around the bar) but not much believed for it's sheer cynicism.

Most people had never heard of DCI, the GOP strategy firm behind a lot of this garbage until that book. Most people hadn't heard of Richard Mellon Scaife, Judge Silbeman, or even Roger Ailes. Brock exposed all of it (including the decidedly un-conservative lifestyle of Ann Coulter - which, while largely immaterial - was damn funny)

However - this tactic, is no different than what the right has been doing for fifteen years. IMO it represents something of a dangerous escalation... I know it's only a matter of time before every operative becomes a news story and is slandered by hatchet-job bloggers (****, it's already happened to me in MN) - it's part of why I'm trying very hard not to work campaigns any more... because once people that far down the chain become targets, it's only a matter of time and opportunity before someone, somewhere resorts to violence.

Back in '79 I boned a girl at a Dead concert at San Jose State that was a dead ringer for Ann Coulter except she was about 6'1". I don't mean looked like her, I mean dead ringer.

TwinTownBisonFan wrote:

houndawg wrote:
Back in '79 I boned a girl at a Dead concert at San Jose State that was a dead ringer for Ann Coulter except she was about 6'1". I don't mean looked like her, I mean dead ringer.

she's done every club drug and every club goer in DC going back at least 20 years.

do you still get occasional "reminders" of that little fling?

also - WTF? that broad has an adams apple - even SH wouldn't find her attractive (well, hopefully not)

ALPHAGRIZ1 wrote:My guess would be hes the guy with the camera, who will be jerking off to the dude on the left later on tonight.

houndawg wrote:

ALPHAGRIZ1 wrote:My guess would be hes the guy with the camera, who will be jerking off to the dude on the left later on tonight.

Ann would be reading Thoughts of Chairman Mao and quoting Noam Chomsky if she had taken a ride on Houndawg's Rodeo of Love.

ALPHAGRIZ1 wrote:

houndawg wrote:

Ann would be reading Thoughts of Chairman Mao and quoting Noam Chomsky if she had taken a ride on Houndawg's Rodeo of Love.

Probably.........................until the drugs wore off. She was fu*king Bill Maher so nothing would surprise me.

Ivytalk wrote:Brock is a world-class fraud. He's never forgiven American Spectator for canning him from his six-figure gig, and he's playing the "gay card" against everyone who dares to criticize his late-blooming leftiness.

TwinTownBisonFan wrote:

Ivytalk wrote:Brock is a world-class fraud. He's never forgiven American Spectator for canning him from his six-figure gig, and he's playing the "gay card" against everyone who dares to criticize his late-blooming leftiness.

yet nobody has been able to refute a word of what he said in "blinded by the right"

they've turned their entire machine on the guy for almost a decade and come up with almost nothing.

"playing the gay card" as you call it coincided with the GOP's decision to declare open and hostile warfare on gay Americans for votes

as someone who switched parties only a few years before him - I can tell you that the changes in the right between even 1995 and 2003 are shocking. the kind of change that motivates someone to write a tell-all...

TwinTownBisonFan wrote:

Ivytalk wrote:Brock is a world-class fraud. He's never forgiven American Spectator for canning him from his six-figure gig, and he's playing the "gay card" against everyone who dares to criticize his late-blooming leftiness.

yet nobody has been able to refute a word of what he said in "blinded by the right"

they've turned their entire machine on the guy for almost a decade and come up with almost nothing.

"playing the gay card" as you call it coincided with the GOP's decision to declare open and hostile warfare on gay Americans for votes

as someone who switched parties only a few years before him - I can tell you that the changes in the right between even 1995 and 2003 are shocking. the kind of change that motivates someone to write a tell-all...