Nicky Cheese

I really just don’t get the purpose of Media Matters. Are they for anything beyond thrashing (anything and everything associated with) conservatism? I mean, I’m no conservative but — jeesh — the empty, yellow-journalism that comes out of that organization is ridiculous. Seriously, any affirmative values whatsoever?

The Media Matters Who We Are section states that they’re:

“a progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media”.

But everything I’ve witnessed is either a.) worthless, pedantic nit-picking or b.) blatant misrepresentation.

Let’s begin with the nit-picking. On Tuesday, Denver-based Fox 31 reported the following:

[quicktime]http://colorado.mediamatters.org/static/video/fox31-20080311.mov[/quicktime]

Colorado Media Matters then goes off the deep end because “besides not identifying the Independence Institute as a ‘free-market, pro-freedom’ policy research organization, Fox 31 failed to mention the think tank’s campaign against the FasTracks referendum in 2004″.

No value judgment on the actual content of the story. The fact that the government is forcibly taking private property and turning it over to private developers, that a voter-approved transportation project has turned into a illegal redevelopment scheme — it doesn’t get a response from the organization. (One can only assume they support it.) But the fact that the local Fox affiliate dared mentioning II and the Colorado Property Rights Coalition without additionally providing both biographies and a response by the RTD, by all accounts unnecessary — that gets a huge write-up.

Worthless, pedantic nit-picking.

Of course, this is small beans compared to the national organization. Moving on to the blatant misrepresentation…

On Tuesday, March 4th of this year, Glenn Beck made fun of conservatives freaking out about Obama’s popularity, and in jest asked Pastor John Hagee: “Odds that Barack Obama is the Antichrist?”. Hagee answers “No chance” and they both laugh, acknowledging of the silliness of the question.

Then, Media Matters and Co. effectively spin this innocent exchange as a serious diatribe, managing to even get it in a New York Times piece. Nothing short of incredible. You really have to check it out; the whole step-by-step process is conveniently (and legitimately) documented on Beck’s site with video.

Even in the rare instance where there is philosophical agreement between MM and the conservative punditry — like, say, in mutual opposition to racism — the former instinctively finds a way to denigrate the latter. Late September of last year, Bill O’Reilly had an uncommon radio broadcast of constructive, argumentative clarity, advocating for racial equality, multiculturalism and uplifting black pop-culture. Media Matters then stripped a few key sentences out of context — out of the overall positive message — and, in doing so did a public smear-job on O’Reilly.

After the MSM blindly blew the story up, Matt Lauer took Media Matters to task:

[youtube]eIP1SjYfjQ0[/youtube]

My favorite line from Lauer:

“Have we gotten into a situation in this country where its the gotcha mentality, where basically we look at every little thing and we look for the negatives because the negatives make headlines? Even if we don’t think that in the bigger picture Bill O’Reilly is at all a racist, we like these little negative comments just because they make headlines?”

Hit the nail on its head. That “gotcha mentality” is what Media Matters is all about. That is their modus operandi. They are out to discredit anything that may indirectly or incidentally “forward the conservative message”. And that includes instances where conservatives appear to be normal (Glenn Beck making a joke) or, worse yet, uplifting (in the case of O’Reilly).

It’s parasitic intellectual dishonesty for the purpose of idealogical gain.

Really, Media Matters deserves — and I’m not the first to think of this — the nickname Menial Matters.

Menial, meaning “unskilled”, “tedious”, “demeaning”, and by association, worthy of complete avoidance.