Fox Nation Uses Deceptive Editing To Smear Media Matters

For more than a month now, Fox News has been engaging in a smear campaign directed at Media Matters. The obvious takeaway from their obsession is that Media Matters Has Fox News Scared And Desperate. Why else would they devote so much air time and web space to falsely disparaging them?

Fox Nation vs. Media Matters

The latest episode involves a posting on Fox Nation with the headline: Media Matters’ Salaries Exposed. The post links to an article on Mediaite which references data from the Poynter Institute. Both of those sources used the headline: What it pays to monitor the media. The data includes salary information of five principles at Media Matters. However, it also includes salary information of five principles at the conservative Media Research Center.

The Fox Nationalists copied the text from the Mediaite article verbatim except that they skipped over the Media Research Center data completely and posted only the Media Matters data. Since their purpose was to cast Media Matters in a negative light, they were only concerned with revealing what they imply is inordinately high compensation. Here is the Media Matters data:

David Brock; chairman/CEO; $286,804
Eric Burns; president; $240,579
Tate Williams; chief of staff; $162,812
Eric Boehlert; senior fellow; $115,000
Ari Rabin-Havt; VP-communications and strategy; $134,484

What they left out was the data from the Media Research Center. So in the spirit of fairness and balance, here is that data:

Brent Bozell; president/director; $422,804
Brent Baker; vice president; $126,300
David Martin; executive vp/asst. treasurer; $215,000
Dan Gainor; Business & Media Institute vice president; $122,400
Terry Jeffrey; CNSNews.com editor-in-chief; $122,400

As you can see, the folks at Media Research Center earn significantly more than their Media Matters counterparts. Brent Bozell earns about 47% more than David Brock. The average for all five at Media Matters is about $188,000, while the average for all five Media Research Center execs is over $200,000.

What’s more, the Media Research Center, with an annual budget of $11 million, receives far more funding, mostly from from radical right-wing sources affiliated with the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers, and the Scaife family foundations. Media Matters has a more modest budget of $2.7 million and funding from reputable patrons like cable executive, Leo Hindery and Esprit founder, Susie Tompkins Buell. In addition, they just received their first donation from the conservative’s favorite bogeyman, George Soros, despite claims from Beckian conspiracy theorists that Soros has been pulling the strings from the beginning.

This is another example of Fox distorting the information they present because the truth would only make them look bad. It’s a pathetic exercise that reveals just how unethical and dishonest they are. Sadly, their audience just keeps getting misinformed, which means they just keep getting dumber. It makes it difficult to maintain a democracy when a major so-called news enterprise simply doesn’t care about the truth.

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3 thoughts on “Fox Nation Uses Deceptive Editing To Smear Media Matters

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  2. I’ve heard the blond bubble-brains go so far as to say the MMFA is ‘Funded’ by the Administration / ‘supported with your tax dollars’, without the ‘reasoning’ noted that the claim is made by way that they don’t pay income taxes ~

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