UPDATED: National Journal profiles Media Matters as “rapid-response liberal cadre of misinformation hunters”
September 03, 2010 9:54 am ET by Karl Frisch
Out today is the latest edition of National Journal Magazine which includes a profile describing Media Matters as “the rapid-response liberal cadre of ‘misinformation’ hunters that for six years has been raising its visibility -- while also raising the volume of invective that flavors much of today's press criticism."
Some excerpts from Charles S. Clark’s piece (paywall):
The Media Matters view of Washington soared in January, when the nonprofit's nearly 70-member staff moved into the panoramic, glassed-in sixth floor of a new building a few blocks from the Capitol, on Massachusetts Avenue NW. Its "more collaborative" work environment features seven rows of newsroom-style desks; researchers sit in front of their computer monitors beneath fluorescent lights and exposed ceiling ducts.
[...]
To push an output of 350 to 400 pieces of content a week, the researchers work in three shifts beginning at 5 a.m. and ending after midnight. They are organized in five-person teams assigned to such beats as health care, energy and climate, and the Supreme Court. Each team has an editor with final authority on printed reports and statements, although Web-posting privileges are egalitarian.
Above the online sleuths and less-than-famous pundits is a bank of televisions that follow 17 networks. The center has a video archive going back six years and a custom-built suite for clipping and mounting video live on the Web in five minutes or less. At one end of the room is a radio booth that can transmit Media Matters's interviews to 100 participating stations.
A wall-mounted whiteboard summarizes the day's pending stories, labeled "smears." Those are assertions from news industry and right-wing sources for which rebuttals are in progress. On one recent day, the smear board included "Biden said 8 million jobs aren't coming back"; "Obama hates British due to torture of his grandfather"; and "Biden compared GOP to Nazis."
The casually dressed staffers are not short on self-confidence. "We have never made a major mistake as an organization," Rabin-Havt says, "and that has helped our reputation grow." Countering misleading rhetoric with hard facts and persnickety documentation, he says, shows "the respect we have for our readers."
Be sure to read the entire profile.
Kinda makes you guys sound like superheroes...
Keep up the good work guys.
You mean they AREN'T? But I've been imagining everyone there wearing tights and capes and such...
The staff listing and bios can be found on the website here:
http://mediamatters.org/p/about_us/staff_advisors
Hope that helps. The team does its best to catch typos but comments pointing them out are always appreciated.
If you are interested in seeing the office, you can catch glimpses of it in our new video podcast:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008270036
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008200015
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008130055
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008070018
Or in this edition of CSPAN's BookTV:
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/227401
Yeah, what do ya say Karl, what to hire on a few sycophantic go-fers/researchers? ;)
http://mediamatters.org/p/about_us/jobs/index
I actually like the smaller conversation threads because comments don't get burried like they do within seconds of posting on places like the Huffington Post.
I've been posting here for years, almost from the very beginning. Seems that they didn't even have a moderator at first. It's great therapy.
I don't know how many people post here, or read without posting, but I like the fact that I recognize most of the names here. It feels like a community.
I've noticed some of the typos in the MM posts. They need to be a little more careful before hitting the send button.
Need it!
Just like Politico is a GOP bulletin board, I really have to wonder about Nat'l Journal.
fabucat58, I share your wary doubts of Nat'l Journal's creditable veracity. Simply scanning the Homepage and Hotwire there, headlines and selection of items during the latest week, I am undoubting and sure the convictions are preset wide to the right on which their facts are based.
MMFA has sussed them some before, this list, yet the latest transgression was over six months ago so maybe constructive criticism by statement of contradicting facts sort of straightened up N.Journal.
It is a considerate write-up about MMFA, although minced-word soft without high praise for MM's truth-telling. They say "persnickety," I say true facts -- reporters should try it somewhere sometime, 'persnick' some facts fully, rightly, and true.
The massmedia are completely rotten and false, in my estimation now since Dumbo embedded rightwing-groomed propagandists in NPR, PBS, and more over in BBC. Even friggin' C-Span leans way right with topic and guest selection, and of course out of fear from right-wacko threats starting and increasing from Ari Fleischer's "you better be careful what you say." That, plus several careerist and literal corpses littered across the realm of massmedia, who didn't stand and fight against the liars advancing fascism. Dan Rather, as an example.
None but the internet published the false tallies and true crimes in the Florida 2000 election fascism, and the truth of mass murder in Nine-Eleven Op (not done by either hijackers or Muslims or Muslim hijackers, but by planted explosives; yet still, being limited to internet-only publication of true findings, over 80 percent polled Americans disbelieve the Dumbo-administered 'official' version and we persist seeking a public re-examination asking so-far-unanswered questions of N.E.O.), and none massmedia but the internet published the findings of rigged computer programming making fraud counts and false results in touch-the-TV voting machines instituted through H.A.V.A.
And more, so much more, including Nat'l Journal since they don't say they're not. It is by the self-set rotten ruin of truth and facts and questioning investigation, that massmedia entire is expiring. Any 'media property' survivors into the future are, ipso facto, preserved propaganda puppets of fascism -- opposition is eliminated.
-
A lack of invective on MMfA's part is one of the main reasons I visit this site.
I think that's why the Troglodytes hate Rachel and MMFA so much. They can't hide from their own hypocrisy and dishonesty.
The answer is easy: It's not news. It's propaganda meant to promote a rw POV on the issues. Many of the trolls seem to lack the ability to separate truth from propaganda that has its basis in lies.
They've got a terrific example of people on the right who refuse to accept reality!
Snopes says "Case example: Information is useless to those determined not to read it."
The mainstream media doesn't deserve the tiniest sliver of respect or decorum. It is the most abominably terrible profession in the world. Their mistakes are on the level of a physicist not knowing algebra.
Bingo!
Media outlets that complain about MMFA want to silence its writers only because the organization provides the kind of reporting that most of them fail to do.
Respect for the readers... Just the sort of suspicious ideology that will instantly make MMfA irredeemable in the current climate.
... continuing and extending my rant through Nat'l Journal to defame massmedia whole-hog; (in a Reply comment upthread) ....
First, a good word for Nat'l Journal: it seems to be sustained by subscription fees and donations, not by paid advertising.
Accepting paid advertising is the root of the corruption in which massmedia is fallen in ruin of itself. The same paid-ads involvement by some websites corrupts and ruins the internet in that way.
Even so for Nat'l Journal's abeyance, its reports content falls way short of the best veracity standards established by the examples of MMFA and WMR, (Wayne Madsen Report .com )
Moreover, American politics and its society is corrupted similarly. For all the shouted disdain of Congress, Executive administrations and (so) the Judiciary, one simple enactment can reform and improve all of it for the better.
BAN paid-broadcast political ads. In effect, limit political ads to print media.
Like we already BAN paid-broadcast cigarette ads. BAN broadcast political ads for the same reasons broadcast cigarette ads are prohibited: 1) the product is addictive, (powerlust), and 2) product usage causes a debilitating public health plague, (mental health dumbs down, mental acumen recedes into cerebellum-level 'reptilian brain').
In the concerns of political news and information, or public policy / sentiment / consensus, broadcasters say, "why give it away when you can get paid for it?," (i.e., don't say information in news content when the interested parties will pay to say it in ads). This single precept -- keep news uninformative and uninformed -- corrupts massmedia and thus politics and thus society.
BAN paid-broadcast political ads and so refit broadcast news. Reporters doing reporting; coverage. Then if a politician means to be on TV, have him or her give a public speech or make a public appearance and TV news can cover it and report it in free broadcast. BAN paid-broadcast political ads and consequently end broadcasting Rush Limbaugh and his imitators' subversive sub-genre of hate-filled politics talk. They must put it in writing, or on a website (where individual initiative may choose to not click-on or click-on).
BAN paid-broadcast political ads and then political campaign dollar-costs plummet, reduced to reasonable expenses which ordinary persons or groups can obtain. We regulate political campaign income, from fundraising, now we should regulate campaign outgo, in spending -- it barely matters how much money a politician has or where it came from, when it cannot be spent to buy broadcast air time.
Political campaign giving/withholding money for broadcast time is the sledgehammer that squishes information for voters. ThinkProgress.org presents two recent cases of hammer-down:
- Jan Brewer Pulls Campaign Ads Off Network That Investigated Her Ties To Prison Lobbyists
- BP Pulls Ads On ThinkProgress After Wonk Room Reports On Its Greenwashing Campaign (update: BP to resume ads on ThinkProgress. -- still, ThinkProgress, however fair and truthful, invites corruption of itself coming in inside the bundles of ad money paid from its advertisers.)
Besides those two particular stories about political campaign advertising dollars aimed to influence control of massmedia information, scan the list of all stories on ThinkProgress or MM-CountyFair blog in the last two weeks and consider which ones -- so many! -- issue from the single root effect of political campaign spending in broadcast massmedia. Then stop it.
Ban paid-broadcast political ads like we already ban paid-broadcast cigarette ads, because the product is addictive and the usage of the product cause public health mental-illness epidemic.
Political campaigners should put their rationales and reasons-for-being in writing.
-