August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 49
dent of the United States is watch-
ing this shit. And MSNBC and CNN
are just not as important. Like, the
guy with the nuclear codes isn’t
taking advice from Don Lemon.”C
ARUSONE WAS ON his way
to a law career circa 2010
when he found himself ob-
sessed with Glenn Beck, then a ris-
ing star on Fox News whose rat-
ings seemed to climb the more he
pushed toward the conspiratorial,
Obama’s- FEMA-camps fringes.
Carusone, a college debate cham-
pion, recognized Beck’s rhetori-
cal skill. “He was dangerous and
effective,” Carusone says. “And
there was a perverse incentive for
him to get worse.”
Part of it, Carusone admits, was
pure procrastination — anything
to put off law-school homework.
But he also found Beck “uniquely
terrifying.” He started a @stop-
beck Twitter account and began
publicly shaming advertisers, be-
coming so obsessed with the cru-
sade that he quit a Wisconsin
Supreme Court clerkship to focus
on it. In May 2011, Media Matters
made Carusone its director of on-
line strategy; by that point, more
than 300 advertisers had dropped
Beck’s show, and he would be off
the air the next month.
In 2012, Carusone found anoth-
er extracurricular mission. Ap-
prentice host Donald Trump had
become a vocal Obama birther,
and Carusone launched a cam-
paign for Macy’s to drop his cloth-
ing line. Trump would prove a
more formidable opponent than
Beck. Carusone says Trump’s
reps accused him of forging peti-
tion signatures and threatened a
$25 million lawsuit, leaving Caru-
sone struggling to find a lawyer
willing to take the case. “It was a
really good lesson in how effective
Trump was,” Carusone says. “And
how scared he made people.”
Macy’s kept its deal with Trump
until 2015, when his comments
about Mexicans at his presidential
campaign launch finally crossed
the line for the company. Caru-
sone considers it a victory and has
a huge framed article on the bat-
tle in his office. “Not many people
beat Trump, truly, in a head-to-
head fight,” he says. “And so I take
great pride on a personal level.”
In the 2016 campaign, Caru-
sone became convinced that few
in the media were taking Trump
seriously enough. MMFA would
flag calls to violence from Trumpis pushing news organizations to
stop putting Trump’s false claims
into headlines and tweets, unchal-
lenged. According to a May MMFA
study, “Outlets amplified false or
misleading Trump claims without
disputing them 407 times over the
three weeks of the study, an aver-
age of 19 times a day.”
Social media is another target.
Media Matters argues that Face-
book and Twitter are facing
the same bad-faith accusations
of bias from the right that the
mainstream media always has
— witness how much time Mark
Zuckerberg spent in his 2018 con-
gressional appearance addressing
Facebook’s apparently accidental
ban of the right-wing personalitiesDiamond and Silk. The platforms
end up working so hard to avoid
perceptions of left-wing bias that
they make nonsensical decisions,
e.g., reports of Twitter declining
to algorithmically remove racist
accounts because some Republi-
can politicians could be flagged.
Far more daunting is the broad-
er internet. Fox News, with its
shareholders, corporate struc-
ture, and advertisers, is an easy
target compared with an entire
universe of disintermediated dis-
information, from QAnon You-
Tube videos to alt-right Twitter
personalities. “It’s terrifying,”
Carusone admits. Media Matters
has a department coming up with
strategies to at least monitor the
threat, with, for instance, a new
tool that archives posts on 4chan
and 8chan. “Having the technical
capability to scrape those boards,
and then search that content
makes a huge difference to our
ability to track the food chain,”
says Cynthia Padera, who leads
those efforts. “And the food chain
is no longer just a ladder — it’s a
circle.” A right-wing narrative, she
says, will “start on 4chan, then
hit Facebook, and then end up on
Tucker. And that’ll start a second
wave of it back on Facebook.”
All of this data collection and
scolding may add up to morethan preaching to the converted.
Never-Trump Republicans who
spent years bashing Media Matters
now admit to finding it useful.
And once in a while, an unexpect-
ed source will use Media Matters
info in culture-shaking ways, as
when podcaster Joe Rogan cited
its data to pin down Alex Jones on
his Sandy Hook denialism. “You
might disagree with our point of
view,” Power says, “but you can’t
disagree with our data.”SPENDING YOUR EVENINGS log-
ging cable news is a weird job.
Media Matters’ night-shift crew
is a younger and looser group, at
least by D.C. standards. There are
some baseball caps, and among
the button-downs, two
dudes wearing P-Funk
T-shirts. And there’s
Madeline Peltz, 25, in a
gray sweater and gothy
lipstick. She watches
Carlson’s show every
night and argues he’s
slipped into full-blown
white nationalism (a
label he has vociferous-
ly rejected) — she’s also
the one who dug up the Bubba the
Love Sponge recordings.
At 8 p.m. it’s airtime for Tucker
Carlson Tonight. Peltz and her col-
league Rebecca Martin are at their
desks, ready to watch. Tonight,
Carlson has a guest who claims
polar bears are doing just fine;
two seconds of Googling reveals
that her work has been widely dis-
credited by experts. “That hap-
pens all the time,” Peltz says. “An-
other extreme example was when
O’Reilly brought on someone he
said was a member of the Swedish
government, and he was literally
just some random guy.”
No one at Media Matters admits
to much psychological wear and
tear from their immersion in an
ocean of alternative facts. “Since
the 2016 election, I’ve felt like
we’re on the front lines,” says dep-
uty editorial director Pam Vogel.
“I’m coming to work every day
and I’m doing something. That
helps. And a lot of us have a sort
of warped sense of humor about
it. It’s like a coping mechanism.”
It all might be more amusing, if
not for the bizarre importance of
these shows in our current reality.
“Fox News not only regained its
agenda-setting role in the conser-
vative media,” says Martin. “Fox
News has become the agenda-FOX NEWS setter for everyone else.”
at rallies — or the time a voter
asked if he would “get rid” of Mus-
lims and he responded, “We’re
going to be looking at a lot of dif-
ferent things” — but Carusone felt
most reporters went into reflex-
ive denial. After November 8th,
2016, the days of underestimating
Trump were over, and Carusone’s
history with him helped fuel his
rise to the top of MMFA. (Caru-
sone faced his own scandal when,
ironically enough, right- wingers
found racial and transphobic
slurs on his old blog; he’s repeat-
edly apologized and claimed they
were satire.)
Media Matters’ efforts to ham-
mer away at Fox News’ advertiser
base picked up speed after found-er Roger Ailes left in 2016. For all
the extremism he allowed, Ailes
also kept the network on message,
and periodically pulled the reins
in on his hosts. Without him, they
ran wild. Hannity provided grist
for a boycott by pushing the dis-
credited theory that the DNC hack
was an inside job by the late Seth
Rich, victim of a still-unsolved
murder; Laura Ingraham com-
pared detention centers for child
migrants to “summer camps.”
Media Matters estimates that
Fox News has lost as much as
$200 million in potential ad reve-
nue since 2017. (Fox News denies
it, providing data that show some
year-to-year growth in their ad
revenue.) Carusone hopes share-
holders will sue Fox for breach
of fiduciary duty, arguing its pro-
gramming is so irresponsible it
represents inadequate steward-
ship of the business. “Fox doesn’t
have their entertainment side to
bury these losses anymore,” says
Carusone, referring to the March
sale of Fox’s movie and TV assets
to Disney. “If I’m a shareholder,
I don’t want to subsidize Rupert
Murdoch’s political agenda.”
Media Matters also monitors
the mainstream media, which
it views as highly susceptible to
right-wing story lines — one of the
goals on the 2019 planning memoFOX & ENEMIES
Fox News hosts
Laura Ingraham
and Tucker
Carlson are
among the
network
personalities
targeted by
Media Matters.