48 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
I
F YOU BELIEVE former Fox
News host Bill O’Reilly,
Media Matters for America
is the nation’s “most dan-
gerous organization,” which
would be quite a feat for a mod-
estly funded nonprofit whose 80
employees spend a lot of their
time quietly watching cable
news at their desks. The 15-year-
old, left-leaning news-watchdog
group’s mission of combating
“conservative misinformation” ex-
tends to minute-by-minute scru-
tiny of right-wing media — Fox
News, in particular — and its stars,
who do not, as a rule, enjoy the
attention. Sean Hannity accused
MMFA of “liberal fascism,” and
said it’s pressuring his advertisers
to drop his show; the second part
is entirely accurate.
Jeffrey Lord, the mega- MAGA
former CNN personality who
once inspired Anderson Coo-
per to blurt that if Trump “took
a dump on his desk, you would
defend it,” called Media Matters
“anti-free press... the tip of the
spear in the arsenal of the Leftist
State Media” in a screed published
after CNN fired him for sarcastical-
ly tweeting the phrase “Sieg Heil!”
at Media Matters’ president. The
organization’s staff can’t help roll-
ing their eyes at it all. “They ei-
ther think we’re in our parents’
basements,” says senior research-
er Andrew Lawrence, “or we’re a
nefarious group trying to control
the world.” Much of the right is
also convinced that MMFA is sub-
sidized by left-wing billionaire
George Soros; though he has con-
tributed, it relies on a network of
donors and constant fundraising
for its $14 million annual budget.
“We are reporting on commen-
tary happening on national news
outlets,” says senior fellow Mat-
thew Gertz, who won attention
for documenting the astonishing
extent to which Trump’s tweets,
many of them policy-setting, are
direct responses to Fox News seg-
ments. “This is not some sort of
sinister act. This is pretty basic.”
Media Matters’ headquarters
is a single floor of a downtown
Washington, D.C., office building.
Its rows of desks, under exposed
ductwork and fluorescent lights,
could belong to any media com-
pany or tech startup, as could the
youngish, earnest, business-casu-
al staff. A Pride flag decorates one
workspace, an American flag an-
other. By the windows, a life-size
cardboard cutout of Chris Evans
as Captain America keeps watch.
The employees work in actual
shifts monitoring the media,
with the morning crew logging
in at 6 a.m. and the evening team
coming in around 4:00 and leav-
ing at 11. A “media intelligence”
team tracks just about everything
broadcast on cable news; its di-
rector, Lis Power, can tell you
how many times Alexandria Oca-
sio-Cortez’s name was uttered onFox News in a random two-week
period in April (the answer: 299).
On a spring afternoon, Media
Matters’ president of three years,
Angelo Carusone — a trim, fast-
talking law-school grad who
comes off as a light-side-of-the-
Force Michael Avenatti — is gath-
ering a group of senior staffers
for a six-month planning meet-
ing. In front of each attendee is a
box lunch from Jimmy John’s and
a printed list of 2019 organization-
al goals. One top goal couldn’t be
clearer: “Successfully execute and
complete Phase 2 of campaign to
neutralize/undermine Fox News’
destructive power.” That’s where
the “dangerous” part comes in. “I
don’t think they’re wrong to be a
little scared,” says Carusone.
In addition to monitoring
broadcasts in real time, Media
Matters has a history of unearth-
ing damning past comments by
conservatives. Fox’s Tucker Carl-
son became the latest target in
March, when MMFA published
his early-2000s sexist and rac-ist on-air banter with shock jock
Bubba the Love Sponge (in one
clip, Carlson called Iraqis “semi-
literate primitive monkeys”). He’s
been losing advertisers ever since,
which was the goal.
Media Matters has been at war
with Fox News since May 2004,
when the watchdog was found-
ed by David Brock — the singular
D.C. fixture who went from right-
wing anti-Clinton muckraker to
left-wing Clinton insider. He en-
visioned MMFA as a fact-based,
progressive counterweight to the
Media Research Center, the con-
servative group that spent dec-
ades claiming to find liberal bias
in the media. Working the refs
paid off for the right in credu-
lous coverage of everything from
the Iraq War to Paul Ryan’s pur-
ported policy prowess: “The right
wing... has dominated the debate
over liberal bias,” Brock said at the
time. “They’ve moved the media
itself to the right and therefore
they’ve moved American politics
to the right.”
Brock stepped back in the
wake of the 2016 election and
accusations that Media Matters
had transformed itself into a Hil-
lary Clinton fan site, to the point
of bringing on James Carville as
a guest columnist. But the orga-
nization’s core battle is more ur-
gent than ever, to say the least.
The Trump presidency is argu-
ably the end result of years of re-
ality manipulation by Fox News
and its ilk, with Trump’s support-
ers convinced he’s rescued them
from migrant caravans, Obama’s
assault on American values, and
the war on Christmas, while
any contrary information is, of
course, fake. Trump, once a sup-
posed Democrat, seems to have
reshaped much of his worldview
over the past decade to conform
to Fox News’ opinion hosts, even
as they now adapt some of their
views to match his heterodox
ideas. (Talking to dictators with-
out preconditions, for instance, is
now double-plus-good.)
“Fox News’ prime-time hosts
are Trump’s advisers,” says Law-
rence. “It became extremely im-
portant to keep up with what
they’re saying, because the presi-On the front lines
with Media Matters
— the conservative
network’s worst
nightmare
By BR I A N H I AT T
MEDIA WATCH
The Fight Against Fox News
TOP WATCHDOG
“I don’t think
[Fox News] is
wrong to be a
little scared,”
says Angelo
Carusone,
president of
Media Matters,
which is taking
aim at the
network’s
advertisers.PHOTOGRAPH BY Gabriella Demczuk