Censors Now Calling for Free Speech!

Jared Taylor

But only when their own deceit is exposed.

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Media Matters is a nasty organization. It’s a non-profit that got a tax exemption to correct errors in mass media reporting, but is now an anti-free-speech machine. It tried to throttle Fox News through what it called “guerilla warfare and sabotage,” and it is now trying to destroy Elon Musk’s X.

The anti-X campaign has been so vicious and deceitful that X sued, and attorney generals in Texas and Missouri are investigating. Media Matters is now claiming that these actions are – you guessed it – an attack on free speech. It’s comical to see people who have dedicated their lives to shutting people up – including your servant – suddenly discovering the First Amendment.

Media Matters was set up by a conservative-turned-lefty named David Brock.

By 2003, he had become a worshipper of Hillary Cllinton, calling her “a woman with a steadfast commitment to public service, a clear political vision and a deep well of personal integrity.”

The same New York Times article says Hillary invited him to her home so he could make a pitch to her donors so he could start Media Matters.

Which he did the next year, with millions of dollars and fancy digs on K Street in Washington, DC. He told the Times the group would “closely monitor conservative commentators and journalists and, when they make erroneous or misleading claims, to point them out and set the record straight.”

Nothing wrong with fact-checking, and since the liberal media are so scrupulously truthful, Mr. Brock would keep an eye only on conservatives. In its latest IRS filings, 2021, Media Matters continues to claim that its sole business is “monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation.”

It still runs articles with titles that begin with “Right-wing media” do something dreadful.

And Media Matters has mentioned your servant by name in no fewer than 85 articles, most recently in October.

I guess it has to spend its $17 million annual budget on something – that is, when it’s not spending it on David Brock’s 2021 compensation of nearly $375,000 for just 27 hours of work a week.

Lefties aren’t shy about getting rich. That same year CEO Angelo Carusone picked nearly half a million.

It helps when “Soros Donates $1 Million to Media Matters.”

But back around 2011, the group shifted from “monitoring and correcting” to destroying. Even Politico wrote about “Media Matters’ war against Fox.”

Mr. Brock said he wasn’t just “containing” the network; the new approach was “guerrilla warfare and sabotage.” It was even “developing campaigns among News Corp. shareholders [the Fox parent company] and also . . . looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network.”

That’s pretty serious sabotage.

Even now, Media Matters runs a site called Drop Fox to bully advertisers into pulling their ads. Here’s the message: “Fox News isn’t just toxic, it’s deadly.” (No explanation why) And even though Fox got rid of Tucker Carlson, it has “no intention of backing away from the venomous strain of white nationalism and conspiracy theories he fed to Fox’s prime-time audience.”

Its appeal to advertisers: “Stop funding lies and hate; don’t buy ads on Fox News.”

Sabotage is a far cry from Media Matters’s tax-exempt purpose of correcting media errors. And this brings us back to Mr. Brock.

He is an open homosexual who, for 10 years, had a live-in named William Grey. According to this story, they had a spat, and Mr. Grey blackmailed him with threats to expose him to the “scorn or ridicule of his employees, donors and the press.”

“Next step is I contact all your donors and the IRS,” Mr. Grey wrote. “This is going to stink for you if you do not resolve this now.”

Mr. Brock forked over $850,000 – and then sued to try to get it back.

I mention this, not as commentary on Mr. Brock’s family life, but to note that even his nearest and dearest seemed to think the sleaze campaign against Fox was conduct unbecoming a non-profit. I’m sure it is just a coincidence that the president of Media Matters I mentioned earlier who makes almost half a million, Angelo Carosone, is married to a man. The “Advocate” featured him as one of its Forty under 40 influential homosexuals.

Media Matters’s latest war is against X under Elon Musk. Last month alone it ran more than 20 articles roaring about X. The worst was on November 16: “X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content.”

There were screenshots to prove it, with one of an IBM ad next to a tweet explaining that a real spiritual awakening would be a Nazi meeting.

Here is Oracle next to Hitler saying he believes the truth will prevail.

And IBM showed up next to these photos of American anti-war activists.

When I first heard of “pro-Nazi” content, I wasn’t thinking of historical photos and quotations, but that is what Media Matters calls hate. It deliberately gave the impression that this pairing of national brands and Nazi images can crop up any time.

The plan was to scare off advertisers. And it worked. Some of X’s highest-profile advertisers jumped ship.

X sued Media Matters, and here is the heart of the complaint:

Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform.

X figured out that Media Matters set up an account uniquely for this purpose. It followed only 30 other accounts – half of them the most flagrant Nazis it could find, and the rest of them accounts of brand-name advertisers. This was a completely artificial scheme designed to make ads for those companies appear. Since everything else was Nazi tweets, any ad was going to show up next to one. Media Matters made the account private so no one could see it was trying to fool the advertising algorithm.

Still, the ads wouldn’t appear. By looking at the account from the back end, X figured out Media Matters’s other trick: “excessive scrolling and refreshing generated between 13 and 15 times more advertisements per hour than would be seen by a typical user, essentially seeking to force a situation in which a brand ad post appeared adjacent to fringe content.”

X determined that:

“IBM’s, Comcast’s, and Oracle’s paid posts appeared alongside the fringe content cited by Media Matters for only one viewer (out of more than 500 million) on all of X: Media Matters. Not a single authentic user of the X platform saw IBM’s, Comcast’s, or Oracle’s ads next to that content, which Media Matters achieved only through its manipulation of X’s algorithms as described above.”

Media Matters scared off advertisers by pretending these pairings could happen any time. This is so malicious that two state attorney generals have announced investigations, with possible civil and criminal penalties.

The Missouri AG’s letter refers to the X lawsuit, which “alleges that you lied to the public, falsely suggesting that fringe, extremist content regularly appears next to content from corporate advertisers when in fact the opposite is true.”

The letter says Media Matters may be defrauding the public by raising funds based on this deception, and warned the company not to destroy any records related to the deception.

The Texas AG says it started its investigation “to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.”

Media matters sued to stop the Texas probe. Millionaire Media Matters president, Angelo Carusone was invited on lefty TV to explain that “free speech is on the line in Media Matters’ lawsuit.” He said the investigations have a “chilling effect” on speech, and went on to say, “We’re sort of the canary in the coal mine here. This is the new reality for the future is that you don’t just flood the zone with extremism and lies. You also then try to cut off the truth tellers.”

Media Matters is worried that “free speech is on the line.” There could be a “chilling effect.”

Truth-tellers will be cut off.

Incredible. Their raison d’être is to crush free speech. They declared war on Fox to snuff out conservative speech. They are trying to destroy X because it believes in free speech.

And they, with this utterly phony report, are truth-tellers?

Did I mention that this is a nasty organization? If someone who worked for me used trickery like this, I’d fire him. If I worked for such an underhanded company, I’d quit. But I haven’t seen one peep of criticism from the Left. Instead, MSNBC has Julian Castro, who was in Barack Obama’s cabinet, interview Mr. Carusone as if he were a free-speech hero.