{"id":6413,"date":"2012-02-14T19:13:59","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T03:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=6413"},"modified":"2015-06-15T10:56:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T17:56:56","slug":"exposed-the-reason-fox-news-declared-war-on-media-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=6413","title":{"rendered":"EXPOSED: The Reason Fox News Declared War On Media Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller (TDC) posted what he said was the first in a series of articles that would reveal the inner workings of Media Matters for America (MMfA). It was a pathetic little screed<\/a> that proved nothing but how desperate the right-wing noise machine is to prevent the world from knowing what they are up to.<\/p>\n

Today TDC posted a second chapter with even less substance than the first. So far as I can tell, the entirety of their problem is that MMfA revealed in a memo that they were considering…<\/p>\n

“…hir[ing] a team of trackers to stake out private and public events with Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors and senior network\/corporate staff.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, MMfA was plotting to do precisely what media watchdog groups always do.<\/p>\n

More interesting is the extent to which Fox News has been promoting this astonishingly thin expose. Yesterday they broadcast three segments with their star anchors, Steve Doocy, Megyn Kelly, and Bill O’Reilly. They also posted four separate articles linking to the same TDC piece on Fox Nation. Today they added four more items on Fox Nation, an article on FoxNews.com, and two more Fox News broadcasts, including an interview of Carlson by Doocy that featured this startling exchange:<\/p>\n

Doocy:<\/strong> They [MMfA]<\/em> seem to be an extension of the Democratic Party. And now for this tax exempt organization to do this, where they’re gonna hire private investigators to dig into people’s backgrounds, that seems crazy.<\/p>\n

Carlson:<\/strong> It’s pretty over the top. I would use the term Nixonian, because that’s what it is. The memo compares it to a presidential campaign, but no presidential campaign, no sane politician would ever engage in something like this because in some cases it might be illegal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So digging into people’s backgrounds is crazy? Nixonian? Yet it is exactly what Carlson is doing with his intrusive and unsubstantiated article that accuses MMfA’s founder, David Brock, of everything from drug addiction to media manipulation to mental illness. It’s pretty personal stuff. Never mind that MMfA has never done anything remotely similar. In their monitoring of Fox News they have always focused solely on the delivery of the news – or whatever it is that Fox calls news.<\/p>\n

The massive amount of attention that Fox is paying to a single column on an Internet blog is a curious affair. What could possibly motivate this outburst of bad publicity? Well, now we know.<\/p>\n

David Brock and his colleague Ari Rabin-Havt have written a book that is scheduled to be released next week:<\/p>\n

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine<\/a><\/p>\n