CNN's Greenfield falsely suggested Media Matters is “extremely angry” at Democrats for not filibustering Alito

Written by Andrew Seifter

Published

CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield falsely suggested that Media Matters for America “ha[s] been extremely angry” at Senate Democrats for being unwilling to pursue a filibuster against Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. In fact, Media Matters is “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” and has not taken a position on whether Alito should be confirmed or on whether senators should filibuster his nomination.


Appearing on the January 26 edition of The Situation Room, CNN senior analyst Jeff Greenfield falsely suggested that Media Matters for America “ha[s] been extremely angry” at Senate Democrats for being unwilling to pursue a filibuster against Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. In fact, Media Matters is "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." We have not taken a position on whether Alito should be confirmed or on whether senators should filibuster his nomination.

From Greenfield's exchange with host Wolf Blitzer on the January 26 edition of CNN's The Situation Room:

BLITZER: I want to bring in our senior analyst, Jeff Greenfield, who's trying to digest, together with all of us, what's going on. Jeff, it sounds like [Sen. John] Kerry (D-MA), he really wants to position himself right now with the Democratic base, potentially looking ahead to 2008.

GREENFIELD: Yeah, I just unfortunately lost you, Wolf, but if you're asking about the politics of this, if you look at the liberal left blogosphere, at the core activists of the party, on websites like Daily Kos and Media Matters, they have been extremely angry at the apparent unwillingness of the Democratic Party centrists and moderates to engage in all-out filibuster. For them, Alito is a bridge too far. They see him as com -- they believe he's committed to overturning Roe [v. Wade], they see him as part and parcel of the Bush attempt to move the court to the right, and they want an all-out fight. You have had people even who are going to vote against Alito, people on the Judiciary Committee, I believe, like [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein [D-CA], suggesting it's very skeptical, that she's very skeptical about the idea of filibuster. Not to mention the fact that I believe we have three Democratic senators who affirmatively are going to vote for Alito.

But if you want to look at this, and I guess this is almost inevitable, in terms of future presidential politics, I'd have to say that if you're John Kerry, the thing you most want to avoid is being considered as irrelevant to 2008, you know, as somebody who blew the chance to beat George Bush. And I think the idea of rallying the Democratic base behind a fight that they regard as substantively and politically critical, to try to block Judge Alito -- which I don't see how that's going to happen -- if that's how it's analyzed, I think that whether or not John Kerry succeeds in mobilizing the filibuster may be the least relevant part of the conversation. It positions him as the man carrying the banner behind which the core of the Democratic Party would choose to march in terms of trying to stop Sam Alito.