Month: February 2012

One of the strategies Media Matters employs in trying to make sure that all reporters only provide a left-leaning vision of America is to release the hounds on smaller reporters working for regional papers. They throw the weight of their nationwide fundraising and contact list, as well as the bloggers who carry their water, onto reporters who are just trying to cover the news as it relates to the towns around them.

Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,” a Media Matters source said, “all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”

It’s not a surprise at all, but it is useful to be reminded when it is coming straight from the mouths of former employees.

I highlight this because I think this shows why we should recognize when local papers get the stories on Second Amendment issues right. With Media Matters accepting funds specifically to attack any remotely fair or even slightly pro-rights reporting, they have an incentive to try and scare or shut down reporters who give gun owners a fair shake. (Meanwhile, it would be interesting to know how much of the Joyce Foundation money for anti-gun reporting went to paying the salaries of those who carried guns for the organization illegally.) They simply cannot handle the idea that anyone in the press would even acknowledge the Second Amendment as an individual right or be fair and balanced. If that happens, Media Matters would rather see those reporters “melt down” than keep writing.

Miguel discovers another case of mayors who are on the MAIG list, but claim to have never joined the organization. This isn’t the first time this has been uncovered.

Anti-gun Bingo

With all of the Media Matters attacks on gun bloggers, NRA News, and the Second Amendment in recent years, we just assumed that it was the money from the Joyce Foundation that inspired their attacks. Turns out there may be more to it than that…

David Brock was smoking a cigarette on the roof of his Washington, D.C. office one day in the late fall of 2010 when his assistant and two bodyguards suddenly appeared and whisked him and his colleague Eric Burns down the stairs.

Brock, the head of the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for America, had told friends and co-workers that he feared he was in imminent danger from right-wing assassins and needed a security team to keep him safe.

The threat he faced while smoking on his roof? “Snipers,” a former co-worker recalled.

“He had more security than a Third World dictator,” one employee said, explaining that Brock’s bodyguards would rarely leave his side, even accompanying him to his home in an affluent Washington neighborhood each night where they “stood post” to protect him. “What movement leader has a detail?” asked someone who saw it.

Um. Wow. Okay.

Daily Caller has a look at the world inside Media Matters, and the paranoia of politically-motivated snipers isn’t the only gun-related news they found about the founder of the organization.

By 2010, Brock’s personal assistant, a man named Haydn Price-Morris, was carrying a holstered and concealed Glock handgun when he accompanied Brock to events, including events in Washington, D.C., a city with famously restrictive gun laws. Price-Morris told others he carried the gun to protect Brock from threats.

Late in 2010, other Media Matters employees learned about Price-Morris’s gun, and he was fired due to their objections. No public announcement was made.

According to one source with knowledge of what happened next, Brock was “terrified” that news of the gun would leak. “George Soros and a lot of groups connected to gun control are funding this group, and they wouldn’t be too happy that an employee of Media Matters was carrying a gun, especially when it was illegal in D.C.”

So, let me get this straight. The attacks on lawful gun owners are coming from a group that is headed by someone who hires an armed driver, suffers from a questionable mental state, has publicly admitted to drug use, and had an assistant violate gun laws on his behalf. The organization leader isn’t actually concerned about the hypocrisy of it all, but rather that funding might dry up if his gun hiring habits are exposed.

There’s much more in the article about the absurdity that supposedly takes place in their offices – looking the other way while colleagues are having sex on a desk, while also trying to fire a researcher for the crime of being ugly – and just how many in the media have run with their stories while the White House ultimately uses the rhetoric that Media Matters writes and pitches.