Author: Bitter

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.

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.

According to CSGV, anyone who questions the strategy of gun control groups lighting candles in order to achieve a political change is just a big old mean person. And a jerk. Well, I look forward to their condemnation of Michael Bloomberg.

In what is otherwise a fawning piece over Bloomberg’s financial and political sacrifices for gun control, there’s an entire section called “NO MORE CANDLES.”

In the past, advocates for stricter gun controls held marches, rallies and candlelight vigils. MAIG has taken a far more activist approach, conducting undercover investigations and sting operations that are then dramatically revealed to the press.

So, now that Bloomberg is publicly throwing CSGV & Brady tactics under the bus, will they condemn him?

There are a few notes from this USA Today web piece on the new Brady president, and I decided to turn it into a game.

Youth anti-violence advocate Daniel Gross has been elected to head the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center, the Washington-based organization promoting gun control plans to announce Monday.

In the opening sentence, we have two already. He was hired, not elected. There may have technically been a vote by the Board on whether to extend an offer, but he was hired. We know this because the Board hired a recruiting firm (multiple times, it seems) to find someone for the job. When a recruiter finds a candidate for a job and that applicant then interviews with multiple people who mutually come to a decision on extending an offer, we don’t say they were elected to do their job. They were hired.

Also, we know they announced last week. Although, to be fair to Dan Gross, it would seem that they didn’t plan to do so, so maybe it doesn’t count as an outright lie. I’ll count it for half.

Gross is cofounder and executive director of the Center to Prevent Youth Violence and was elected to the Brady post by the organization’s board of trustees. He replaces former Brady president Paul Helmke, former mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., who announced in June he would step down on July 10. Helmke’s resignation followed a five-year commitment he’d made to serve the organization starting in 2006.

This bring our tally to 4 1/2 lies. First, we have the elected crap again. The Board came to agreement to extend a job offer, not hold an election of Brady Campaign members. Second, Paul Helmke & the Brady Campaign were all quite vocal that he wasn’t stepping down, they weren’t welcoming him back. Along those same lines, the third sentence is an outright fabrication that he resigned since it has been reported by mainstream media outlets when Helmke was giving interviews left and right last year that he didn’t want to leave the Brady Campaign, the Board refused to renew his contract.

After this paragraph, the rest of the story is the standard gun control manipulation counting suicides as the same as crime, and talking about how many children (many of whom do not meet any definition that a regular person defines as a child) die by guns. Following that, it’s all about feelings. I’m not exaggerating when I describe his quotes as sounding like Bette Midler in Beaches.

“Policy is a big part of the solution but people have to realize that this isn’t a political issue, this is an issue that’s claiming the lives of 30,000 people every year and eight kids every day and we need to approach it with that kind of urgency,” Gross said.

“The bottom line is making people care about this issue and care about it personally and deeply,” he added.

“Now, tell us the truth. I want you to pull out all the stops. We know the performer. Who is the person? Who is C.C. Bloom?”

“Oh, Marla. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself that very same question. Well, first and foremost, I would have to say that C.C. feels things – deeply. C.C. is a deeply feeling person. And, because of this, is deeply emotional. Do you understand?”

I would like to thank Dan Gross for inspiring me to pull out my copy of Beaches which I haven’t watched in far too long. I admit that I teared up even fast forwarding to get to the interview scene.

Back to more serious issues, his comments definitely highlight that the Brady Campaign is likely to make themselves even more scarce on Capitol Hill. It looks like we need to focus on MAIG’s efforts in DC since they are the new and upcoming gun control group looking to pass actual policy instead of just trying to make you feel deeply like C.C. Bloom.

Also of note, he had a random foundation director from Beverly Hills email the reporter about himself. I guess he is trying to highlight that he’s bringing a fundraising network to the table, but those funds are going to be pretty well restricted to the (c)3 that can’t lobby much.