Media news derivatives:

In case you missed it---Yesterday was themed around the Daily Caller and the conservative media. A look at the Daily Caller’s slam on various reporters who “take” material from the left-leaning Media Matters for America. And a stubborn impediment to the force of conservative media as truth tellers.


Elsewhere:
*Dave Davies tries to get a comment from Ed Rendell on this question:

If the local heavyweights associated with Ed Rendell buy Philadelphia’s daily papers, will they keep the management team that’s showed it’s willing to use them as mouthpieces for their owners interests?

Alas, Davies gets a response that Rendell is subject to some confidentiality agreement and cannot answer the question.

*“March of Progress” illustration of Obama gets taken down by New York magazine, which had used the classic evolutionary drawing to illustrate the prez’s progress on gay rights. Think it’s racist?

*Even since the phone-hacking scandal erupted last summer, speculation has centered around the possibility that News Corp. officials would get prosecuted under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which proscribes the bribery of overseas officials by U.S.-based companies. News Corp. is based in New York, and there are allegations o’plenty that its people bribed police officials in Britain. Hence, a significant lawyering-up has taken place at News Corp. John Coffee of Columbia University tells the Guardian:

As part of its response to the billowing phone hacking scandal, News Corp has amassed the most formidable team of FCPA lawyers ever assembled. “They have appointed not just one of the best lawyers in this field, they have appointed most of the best lawyers,” Coffee said.

One thing all those great lawyers cannot do: Change the evidence.
*Jon Stewart gets rather serious in this slam against Washington’s ongoing discussions over contraception and health care.

February 14, 2012 FEATURED ART

Liberal Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz says Media Matters could become the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of 2012 for the Obama campaign if the White House and the Democratic Party don’t clearly distance themselves from the organization.


“Well I think if swing voters in the pro-Israel community had any idea how extreme Media Matters was on issues of Israel and supporters of Israel, they would regard Media Matters as another, you know, Rev. Wright,” Dershowitz told The Daily Caller.

“And for many, many in the pro-Israel community, it would be a game changer.”
Dershowitz went so far as to suggest that Media Matters’s rhetoric on Israel, particularly from Media Matters Action Network senior fellow M.J. Rosenberg, is similar to what one would find on a neo-Nazi website.
“When I started reading their stuff it sounded like the kind of stuff you see on neo-Nazi websites,” Dershowitz said. “Or on Hezbollah-supporter websites. It is so extremist. The thing that shocked me is that anybody regarded it as mainstream.”

Media Matters did not respond to a request by TheDC for comment.
Dershowitz said he is not on Media Matters’s email list and is only aware of the language they use when discussing Israel and Israel’s supporters because of emails sent to him from what he identifies as a neo-Nazi website, ReportersNotebook.

“You know where I get their stuff? I read their stuff mostly on a neo-Nazi website that sends it to me,” he explained. “Somehow I am on their mailing list. I am not on Media Matters’s mailing list. But I tend to read Media Matters articles when they’re sent to me by a neo-Nazi website.” (RELATED: Read the ‘Inside Media Matters’ investigative series)

The man behind ReportersNotebook, Michael Santomauro, denied that his email or blog is neo-Nazi in orientation, though he admits to questioning the narrative of the Holocaust and says he believes that Israel is a fascist state.

Though Dershowitz says he doesn’t think the Obama administration and Media Matters are close, he believes the White House has to clearly distance itself from the organization because Democrats like him cannot exist within a tent that tolerates Media Matters.

“The Obama administration cannot have Media Matters and me or people who look to me for advice,” Dershowitz told TheDC. “We cannot be in the same tent. The tent is not big enough to include us.”
When informed of TheDC’s report that the White House is in regular contact with Media Matters, Dershowitz said that if true it had to stop.

“They should have no connection whatsoever to organizations that are so virulently anti-Israel,” he said.
“Let nobody confuse Media Matters with J-Street or anything like that. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about virulently bigoted, anti-Israel rhetoric that begins to border on anti-Semitism at some point.”
Dershowitz said those fellow liberals he knows that are aware of what Media Matters puts out are “furious” and if it became more widely known it could hurt President Obama’s re-election prospects.

“People who know about it are furious but the problem is most people don’t know about it. You know, Media Matters doesn’t matter for the most part,” he explained.

He continued: “If this has any influence on the White House and that becomes widely known, it will — I mean, I cannot imagine, I’m down in Florida now, and I cannot imagine and the Jewish community in Florida and the pro-Israel community, which includes a lot of non-Jews as well down here. Many of them are on the fence. And if this were to become well known that would push them off the fence.”

Earlier this month Dershowitz reportedly made a similar call for Democrats to distance themselves from Media Matters while speaking at the University of Pennsylvania.

Media Matters

A friend of mine has been insistent for a few years that I set up a Google News Alert about myself. It was very interesting to watch it last week. On my radio show I’d laughed about that Occupy guy in McPherson Park who was tearing down police fliers and cussing out the police until they shot him with a taser.


One day last week, Media Matters posted one of their typically outraged outrageous posts about it. Within two hours, BuzzFeed had posted on it. Two hours or so after that, the Politico had it up too. A couple hours after that, the Huffington Post had it. It was like clockwork. It was as if they were on a Journolist or something coordinating their outrage and timing to circulate the story. Every few hours a new outlet chimed in with outrage, all going back to the original Media Matters story.

It is no secret that a lot of folks in the Media read Media Matters and rely on it in a way they never would a partisan site of the same kind on the right. But today, Tucker Carlson and Vince Coglianese along with Alex Pappas and Will Rahn are shedding new light both on the operations and coordination between Media Matters, the “objective” press, and the White House.

Media Matters memo reportedly detailed plan to target Fox News staff

Liberal media watchdog group Media Matters once contemplated harassing Fox News employees with yard signs in their neighborhoods, hiring private investigators to dig into their personal lives and retaining a "major law firm" to study legal action against the network, according to a report Tuesday in the Daily Caller.

t's unclear to what extent the organization, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt nonprofit group, followed through on the detailed suggestions, but they would appear to comport with Brock's early 2011 claim that he planned to prosecute a "war on Fox." 

 

The tactics floated by Frisch were likened to a "presidential-style campaign," one which he hoped would "discredit and embarrass the network." 

He suggested hiring "trackers" to "stake out" events with Fox News employees, sending "anti-Fox News literature" to employees' homes and even convincing director Michael Moore to make a documentary about the network. Frisch also suggested establishing a "front group" of shareholders to target parent company News Corporation. 

At least one of the ideas appears to have come to fruition -- a suggestion that Media Matters publish an anti-Fox News book under Brock's name. "The Fox Effect," co-written by Brock and the Media Matters organization, is due for release next week. 

The memo is the latest revelation in a Daily Caller series about Media Matters' campaign against Fox News. The online news outlet also reported that when ex-Politico writer Ben Smith wrote about Media Matters' "war" in 2011, he left out certain parts of a 2010 Media Matters planning memo. 

The memo, according to the Daily Caller, also suggested targeting the libertarian Cato Institute and conservative Heritage Foundation, as well as Republican officials like House GOP Leader Eric Cantor, and websites including Newsmax. 

Smith, who now works at the website BuzzFeed, has since posted most of the memo online, minus a five-page budget section that Smith said he never received.

A former Media Matters employee told the Daily Caller that several mainstream media reporters were known to reliably incorporate Media Matters items in their own reporting. Smith, the source said, would "take stories and write what you want him to write."

Politico frequently picked up Media Matters items in its articles, a rough list of which can be seen here.

Smith has defended his own work, tweeting that he's both "used ... & rejected tips from MM, just as from conservatives."

Politico continues to write about Fox News, as recently as Tuesday offering a top story on its web site about what it deemed a course correction leftward in Fox News' political reporting. The outlet's media blogger, Dylan Byers, who used to work for Smith, also wrote two rebuttals to the DC story on Monday suggesting that the piece and DC founder Tucker Carlson, a principal writer in the Media Matter series, did not back up the criticism of Politico with examples and was not accurately reporting the story.