|
Media Matters has documented and corrected
1,531 instances of conservative misinformation
Media Matters
A letter from David Brock
December 23, 2005
Dear Friends:
As 2005 comes to a close, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank each
and every one of you -- the readers, activists, and contributors who have made
Media Matters for America the nation's leading progressive media research and
information center. Because of your support for our efforts to monitor,
analyze, and correct conservative misinformation, we're making a
difference.
Since January 1, Media Matters has documented and corrected 1,531 instances
of conservative misinformation -- and more than 2,834 since we launched in May
2004. Here's a look at the year's highlights.
JANUARY: Drawing attention to journalists involved in government payola
scandal
While the year began with Bill O'Reilly accepting our 2004 "Misinformer of
the Year" award on his prime-time Fox News program, our focus quickly shifted
to revelations that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams was paid nearly
a quarter of a million dollars under the table to promote a Bush administration
education initiative. We immediately called for all news organizations to
review their relationships with Mr. Williams, and he lost his syndicated
column. Despite his statements to the contrary, we documented that Williams had
originally criticized aspects of the education initiative he was later paid to
promote. Later in January, The Washington Post revealed that conservative
commentator Maggie Gallagher had received federal funds to promote a so-called
"marriage initiative." One day later, Salon.com discovered that a third
conservative commentator, Michael McManus, was paid to promote Bush's "marriage
initiative." Media Matters joined the Human Rights Campaign and the Campaign
Legal Center at the National Press Club to amplify these stories and to demand
from our government that it will never again break the law by paying
journalists to promote a political agenda.
FEBRUARY: Exposing Jeff Gannon
On the heels of revelations that the Bush administration was secretly paying
conservative writers to promote administration policies, Media Matters broke
the news that White House press corps member Jeff Gannon was "Washington Bureau
Chief" not of a legitimate news agency but of a phony journalistic enterprise,
Talon News, created by longtime Texas Republican operative Bobby Eberle. Media
Matters also documented Gannon's lack of journalistic credentials and the fact
that several of Gannon's articles were lightly edited versions of press
releases issued by the Bush administration and the Republican National
Committee. Within days, Gannon's presence in the White House press room became
a national scandal. Gannon was ejected from his post, and the right-wing "news"
service was shut down.
MARCH: Fact-checking the Social Security debate
The Social Security debate heated up following Bush's State of the Union
address and raged through the spring. Media Matters pushed the media to report
the facts -- not conservative spin -- on Social Security and the radical
proposals to change it. Media Matters' analysis of State of the Union coverage
brought to light the administration's success in pressing reporters to use the
misleading term "personal accounts" (rather than "private accounts") in
reporting on Bush's social security privatization plan. We redressed numerous
instances of exaggerated public support for private accounts and repeatedly
countered the false claim that private accounts would address the solvency of
the Social Security system.
Media Matters did not allow Fox News host and Washington managing editor
Brit Hume to get away with falsely claiming that President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt advocated replacing Social Security with private accounts. After we
documented Hume's falsehood, Roosevelt's grandson called Hume's statement an
"outrageous distortion" and called for his resignation.
APRIL: Monitoring coverage of the Terri Schiavo case
Media Matters closely watched the Terri Schiavo case, showing how media
coverage of the issue was slanted and factually inaccurate.
For example, Media Matters revealed that a Florida neurologist who declared
that Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state and could be helped, Dr.
William Hammesfahr, falsely claimed to be a Nobel Prize nominee. His false
claim was repeated by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Fox News anchor Martha
MacCallum, and eight times during a one-hour broadcast by Fox News host Sean
Hannity.
In another instance, Media Matters uncovered a CNN.com graph of polling
results that falsely conveyed the impression that Democrats far outnumbered
Republicans and independent voters in thinking the Florida state court was
right to order Schiavo's feeding tube removed when in fact, a majority of all
three groups agreed with the court's decision, and the gap between Democrats on
one hand and Republicans and independents on the other was within the poll's
margin of error. In response, CNN corrected the misleading graph and guaranteed
that such an error "will never happen again."
MAY: Calling attention to the Downing Street Memo
Media Matters -- together with dozens of members of Congress, Air America
Radio, and the progressive blogosphere -- brought attention to the Downing
Street Memo, which provided new evidence that the Bush administration lied
about its reasons for going to war in Iraq. This was a big story in Britain but
unreported in the United States until Media Matters and others drew attention
to it -- and to the failure of the U.S. media to cover it -- after which it was
given blanket coverage on the cable channels and the influential Sunday talk
shows. The Washington Post's ombudsman favorably wrote about Media Matters'
criticism of the paper's failure to cover the memo; five days later, the Post
ran a major piece on the memo's revelations, jump-starting the U.S. news cycle.
CNN's Wolf Blitzer covered the memo for the first time three days after Media
Matters took him and CNN to task for ignoring the story.
JUNE: Discrediting Edward Klein's Hillary attack book
Media Matters pre-emptively discredited Edward Klein's slanderous book The
Truth About Hillary with hard facts exposing his history of shoddy reporting,
the publisher's political agenda, and the book's innumerable factual errors and
poor sourcing. In the wake of our work, Klein's promotional appearances were
canceled, and Klein himself eventually admitted to errors in his book. The
expressed intention of the publisher -- to "Swift Boat" Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton -- was thwarted.
JULY: Combating misinformation in the judicial nomination battle
Media Matters spearheaded the analysis of news coverage following Supreme
Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement announcement and the subsequent
Bush nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to be her successor. Immediately, Media
Matters noticed that C. Boyden Gray, a key activist for a group committed to
supporting President Bush's nominees to the court, was being featured on Fox
News as an impartial commentator and labeled as a "Fox Supreme Court Analyst."
Media Matters sent a letter of protest to Fox and followed up with an action
alert, which was distributed by Working Assets' Act for Change. The action
worked. Though Gray continued to appear on Fox, he was subsequently identified
as former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush.
Media Matters worked to prevent conservative misinformation from setting the
terms of the debate. We repeatedly discouraged the media from wrongly
attributing the term "nuclear option" to Democrats, because, in fact, it was
coined by Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) as a way to refer to the Republican-proposed
Senate rule change to prohibit filibusters of judicial nominations. We also
debunked claims made by numerous media outlets that a statement Roberts made in
2003 signaled that he would uphold Roe v. Wade as a Supreme Court justice.
AUGUST: Exposing Pat Robertson's call to assassinate Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez
August began with our documenting Focus on the Family chairman James C.
Dobson's analogy between embryonic stem-cell research and Nazi medical
experiments and ended with Media Matters breaking the news that right-wing
televangelist Pat Robertson, during a broadcast of The 700 Club, advocated that
the U.S. government assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Robertson's
remarks made international headlines and were swiftly condemned by Venezuela's
vice president, U.S. officials (including Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld), members of Congress, and clergy. Media Matters encouraged our
readers to lodge protests with the cable channel ABC Family, which airs The 700
Club three times daily. In response, ABC Family issued a statement that it is
contractually obligated to show The 700 Club but that the channel "strongly
rejects" the views Robertson expressed; ABC Family agreed to place a permanent
disclaimer on the broadcast.
SEPTEMBER: Tracking Hurricane Katrina coverage
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Media Matters was there when
conservatives took to the airwaves and, to the shock of many Americans,
repeatedly insulted the victims of Katrina, used false information to defend
President Bush against charges that the federal government's response was
inadequate (examples here and here), and mischaracterized the efforts of
Democrats to pursue a formal inquiry about failures in the government's
response to Katrina. When The Washington Post quoted an anonymous "senior Bush
official" lying in order to counter criticism of the administration's response
to Hurricane Katrina, Post ombudsman Michael Getler devoted a column to our
criticism of the paper's two sentence correction of the lie as inadequate.
OCTOBER: Sparking debate on Bill Bennett's comments linking race and
crime
Media Matters exposed and brought nationwide attention to former Secretary
of Education Bill Bennett's statement on his radio show that "you could abort
every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Numerous
public officials, including President Bush, criticized Bennett's comments after
Media Matters posted them. In the midst of the controversy, Bennett resigned
from K12 Inc., an education company of which he served as chairman and member
of the company's board of directors.
Bill O'Reilly commented on the Bennett controversy by calling Media Matters
"assassins" and "the worst" among the country's "most vicious" political
websites. He falsely claimed that we misquote conservative commentators,
thereby ignoring the fact that we supply a transcript (including the full
context) of each comment with which we take issue; further, these transcripts
are often accompanied by video and audio clips. A few weeks after O'Reilly
attacked us, we documented him encouraging Al Qaeda to attack San Francisco. In
criticizing a ballot measure passed by 60 percent of San Francisco voters
discouraging military recruiting in public schools, O'Reilly said, "And if Al
Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it.
We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you,
except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." O'Reilly
was roundly condemned by officials in San Francisco, where his comments were
front-page news.
Media Matters also worked tirelessly to counter the onslaught of
misinformation surrounding the CIA leak investigation, which reached a boiling
point in October with the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. We highlighted the media's repeated distortion
of special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's mandate in investigating the case,
including the false claims that his probe was originally limited to the
violation of a single law and that he had sought authorization from the
Department of Justice to expand this scope in early 2004. Further, when
numerous conservatives asserted that the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's
identity was trivial because it had already been common knowledge to her
neighbors, Media Matters noted their complete failure to produce even one
neighbor who claimed to have known of Plame's CIA connections before she was
outed.
NOVEMBER: Ensuring accurate coverage of GOP scandals
As Republican scandals escalated in November, Media Matters corrected
numerous national media figures who wrongly cast these GOP-laden scandals as
nonpartisan. In covering Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) indictment, we debunked the
false but oft-repeated claim that DeLay prosecutor Ronnie Earle is a partisan;
we worked successfully to get media outlets to report the fact that Earle has
prosecuted more Democrats than Republicans. We repeatedly criticized the
media's failure to report that Karl Rove, in order to gain access to classified
information, likely violated the terms of a nondisclosure agreement when he
spoke with columnist Robert D. Novak and journalist Matthew Cooper about CIA
operative Valerie Plame. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter later wrote about this
aspect of the CIA leak investigation under the headline "Is Rove a Security
Risk?" Media Matters also pushed back when some media figures continued to
rewrite the White House's original, broad promise to fire anyone involved in
the Plame leak. Further, we combated conservatives' unfounded claim that
Fitzgerald's probe had determined that the leak itself did not represent a
crime.
Referencing his role in the Plame scandal, Media Matters wrote to CNN asking
the network to refuse to renew Novak's contract. A few weeks later, members of
the Media Matters staff hand-delivered almost 5,000 letters from individuals
around the country concurring with Media Matters' call to not renew Novak's
contract. On December 16, CNN announced that "Bob Novak's tenure on the network
will come to a close (effective 12/31)."
DECEMBER: Fighting the "war" on Christmas
Throughout December, Media Matters led the way in documenting the
right-wing's latest manufactured outrage: The so-called "war" on Christmas.
Beginning in October, Bill O'Reilly mounted a crusade to defend Christmas from
forces he said were anti-Christian. Media Matters exposed how O'Reilly
fabricated evidence (here and here) to support his claim of a "war" on
Christmas, including his utterly groundless assertion in one instance that a
Texas school district banned red and green clothing. Unlike last year, when
Media Matters first pointed out how the right was trumping up this divisive
theme, this year the so-called "war" on Christmas became a national
controversy, and many in the press, relying on our research, exposed it as
fraudulent. Throughout 2005, we also closely monitored coverage of ongoing
stories like the Iraq war and the state of the U.S. economy. And 2006 will
quickly heat up with comprehensive monitoring of media coverage of the
nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court.
From all of us at Media Matters for America: Thank you for looking to us as
a trusted source to separate conservative misinformation from fact and to
continue to bring to light the hate speech that is simply antithetical to
American values. Finally, a special thanks to our friends at Air America Radio,
the Center for American Progress, and the progressive blogosphere for helping
us spread the word. Stay tuned ...
David Brock
President and CEO
Media Matters for America
|