In a June 12 article, FrontPageMag.com senior editor Jacob Laksin falsely claimed that a Media Matters for America study of right-wing activist David Horowitz's book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery, January 2006) “concede[d] that nearly half the professors [Horowitz profiled] do in fact use their classrooms for political agendas.” In fact, Media Matters conceded no such thing; the study simply categorized, as inside or outside the classroom, the purported evidence Horowitz cited of professors using their classrooms to advance political agendas, and found that Horowitz listed only out-of-class activities for 52 of the 100 professors that he deemed “dangerous.” The Media Matters study did not concede the validity of any claims Horowitz made regarding the professors he profiled. Indeed, many of his accounts of professors' classroom activities were based on unverified student descriptions gleaned from such sources as RateMyProfessors.com. In other instances, his entire case rested on the title of a course or a book assigned by the professor.

In point 8 of his “point-by-point refutation” of a Free Exchange on Campus report titled “Facts Count: An Analysis of David Horowitz's The Professors,” Laksin took issue with a portion of the report that referenced the Media Matters study. The Free Exchange on Campus report paraphrased the Media Matters study as follows:

Overall, the majority of the profiles in Mr. Horowitz's book contain no evidence of professors' in-class conduct whatsoever. As an analysis by Media Matters shows, 52 of the 100 profiles in Mr. Horowitz's book are based exclusively on things professors have said or written outside of their classrooms.

Laksin then countered: “But even if the findings are accurate, they undermine their own critique, since they concede that nearly half the professors do in fact use their classrooms for political agendas.” Laksin also asserted that Media Matters “routinely attacks conservatives ... and misrepresents their ideas, treating differences of opinion as differences of fact.”

The Media Matters study of The Professors was in response to comments Horowitz made on the April 6 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, when he stated, as Media Matters noted, that although he has criticized what university professors teach in the classroom, he has refrained from criticizing “professors' political speech” outside of the universities at which they teach. Horowitz added that he makes “a very clear distinction between what's done in the classroom” and “what professors say as citizens.” Media Matters subsequently conducted a wider review of The Professors debunking Horowitz's claim that his book does not rely heavily on professors' activities and speech outside of the classroom but, rather, merely mentions extracurricular activities as part of a broader profile of each academic's “general perspectives.” Contrary to Laksin's claim, the review did not accept Horowitz's interpretation of the in-class evidence he cited for the professors.

As Media Matters previously documented, in an August 29, 2005, article, Laksin criticized Media Matters as “a clearinghouse for leftwing outrage.” He also described Media Matters President and CEO David Brock as a “Media Liar” in a September 21, 2005, column. Both articles also appear in Horowitz's DiscovertheNetworks.org database, which bills itself as a “guide to the political left.”

From Laksin's June 12 FrontPageMag.com article:

8. “Overall, the majority of the profiles in Mr. Horowitz's book contain no evidence of professors' in-class conduct whatsoever. As an analysis by Media Matters shows, 52 of the 100 profiles in Mr. Horowitz's book are based exclusively on things professors have said or written outside of their classrooms. Our own count of Mr. Horowitz's footnotes reveals that overall, approximately 80 percent of the evidence he presents relates to things professors have said or written outside of the classroom.”

Media Matters is a self-described “progressive” organization that routinely attacks conservatives, including David Horowitz, and misrepresents their ideas, treating differences of opinion as differences of fact. But even if the findings are accurate, they undermine their own critique, since they concede that nearly half the professors do in fact use their classrooms for political agendas. As previously indicated, moreover, The Professors is not merely about in-classroom indoctrination, nor is it always about individual styles of teaching. A professor in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz is indoctrinating students as a part of her departmental responsibility quite apart from any individual commitment she may have to using the classroom for political agendas. To repeat: The Professors makes four distinct critiques, two of which focus on in-class conduct and two of which do not. In other words, half the critique is about activities that violate academic standards that are not confined to in-class presentations. These include the promotion of professors beyond their qualifications and the teaching of courses beyond their expertise. Professor Hamid Algar, to take another example, told Armenian students at the University of California, Berkeley, “You deserve to be massacred.” This happened on campus but not in the classroom. Researchers who cannot detect these nuances can hardly be trusted to know whether 80 percent of the evidence presented in The Professors relates to one thing or another.