• Self-described “progressive” media “monitor” which tracks content that “forwards a conservative agenda.”
• Creation of Democratic Party funders and operatives and former conservative writer David Brock

Established in May 2004, Media Matters for America is a "web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center" seeking to "systematically monitor a cross-section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation." But in addition to "news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible," the organization’s concept of “misinformation” includes anything that "forwards the conservative agenda." Thus political differences of opinion are often portrayed by Media Matters as lies or worse.

The principal method by which Media Matters pursues its stated mission is by posting summaries of its ”research” on its website. This amounts to reading and watching the media and then writing rebuttals to what conservatives and Republicans say.

Sometimes Media Matters actually does play the role of fact-checker for right-leaning pundits by pointing out genuine errors. More commonly, it draws attention to what it depicts as examples of wild, angry rhetoric by conservatives. In its earlier years, Media Matters would highlight such rhetoric alongside its examples of “conservative misinformation.” By so doing, it blurred the distinction between opinion and research.

Eventually Media Matters recognized this error and began to list factual challenges in a designated research section, while attacks on rhetoric were relegated to the Media Matters blog. In spite of this improvement in organization, however, the practical effect was essentially unchanged.

Media Matters' founder and CEO is David Brock. A reporter for the conservative magazine The American Spectator in the 1990s, Brock (in the aftermath of his biography of Hillary Clinton that brought disastrous reviews) engaged in a public self-denunciation, characterizing all his past writings critical of liberal figures as a confection of lies and slanders. In Brock's present judgment, the mainstream media have fallen under the sway of conservative ideology. He believes that conservatives have moved the mainstream media “to the right and therefore they've moved American politics to the right. … I wanted to create an institution [Media Matters] to combat what they're doing." 

Standing behind Brock was John Podesta, a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration and the head of the "progressive" Washington, DC think tank, the Center for American Progress. In 2004 Podesta provided Brock with office space for his fledgling enterprise. Soon after, Media Matters received over $2 million in seed donations from a roster of affluent donors including Leo Hindery Jr., a former cable magnate; Susie Tompkins Buell, a co-founder of the fashion company Esprit and a close ally of Senator Hillary Clinton; James Hormel, a San Francisco philanthropist who nearly served as ambassador to Luxembourg during the Clinton administration; Bren Simon, a Democratic activist and the wife of shopping-mall developer Mel Simon; and New York psychologist and philanthropist Gail Furman. Media Matters, which can accept tax-deductible contributions under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, has also benefited from the patronage of Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corporation and a longtime consort of billionaire financier George Soros.

Media Matters has not always been forthcoming about its high-profile backers. In particular, the group long labored to obscure any financial ties to George Soros. But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) detailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros "affiliates"—among them MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, and Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, a spokesman for the organization explained that "Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros" (emphasis added), a transparent evasion.

Nor were groups cited by CNS the only connection between Media Matters and Soros. As investigative journalist Byron York has noted, another Soros affiliate that bankrolled Media Matters was the New Democratic Network. In addition, Soros is reported to be involved in the Democracy Alliance, a partnership of some 80 affluent financiers who each vowed to contribute $1 million or more in order to build up an ideological infrastructure of leftist thinks tanks and advocacy groups. News reports list Media Matters as a main beneficiary of the Alliance's funding. By August of 2004, Media Matters' operating budget had already doubled to $4 million.

To summarize, Soros and his Open Society Institute has poured millions of dollars into the coffers of MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, and Democracy Alliance. In turn, these organizations have funneled some of that money to Media Matters.

In October 2010, Soros openly announced that he was donating $1 million to Media Matters, which would use the money to hold “Fox [News] host Glenn Beck and others on the cable news channel accountable for their reporting.”

Prior to founding Media Matters, David Brock met with a number of leading Democratic Party figures, including Senator Hillary Clinton, former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and former Vice President Al Gore. In 2007, Mrs. Clinton told the YearlyKos convention of leftwing bloggers that she "helped to start and support" Media Matters. More than a few of the organization's roughly 30 staff members were Democratic operatives. Among these are Media Matters' chief communications strategist Dennis Yedwab, who is also the Director of Strategic Resources at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Brock's personal assistant, Mandy Vlasz, is a Democratic pollster and a veteran consultant to Democratic campaigns, including the 2000 Gore/Lieberman campaign. Katie Barge, the Director of Research at Media Matters, formerly presided over opposition research for Senator John Edwards' unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign.

A notable figure at Media Matters is senior fellow Eric Boehlert, who was among the most passionate defenders of University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian after the latter was accused of having been the North American leader of the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In an article titled "The Prime-time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian," Boehlert charged that: "In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, all four media giants, eagerly tapping into the country's mood of vengeance and fear, latched onto the Al-Arian story, fudging the facts and ignoring the most rudimentary tenets of journalism in their haste to better tell a sinister story about lurking Middle Eastern dangers here at home."

Media Matters' Senior Advisor Jamison Foser wrote on May 26, 2006: "The defining issue of our time is the media. ... The dominant political force of our time is the media. Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.”

Media Matters' Editorial Director is Marcia B. Kuntz, who formerly headed the Judicial Selection Project of Alliance for Justice.

In September 2006, Media Matters became the sponsor of Eric Alterman's media, politics, and culture blog, Altercation.

In June 2007, Media Matters released a report titled The Progressive Majority: Why A Conservative America Is a Myth. According to this study, the “conventional wisdom” which “says that the American public is fundamentally conservative,” is “fundamentally false.” “Americans are progressive across a wide range of controversial issues, and they’re growing more progressive all the time,” the researchers conclude. The report examines public attitudes regarding the economy, social issues, national security, the environment, energy, health care, and the proper role of government.

On January 14, 2008, the Canada Free Press identified the Treasurer of Media Matters, Rachel Pritzker Hunter, as a Board member of Democracy Alliance (which helps to fund Media Matters). A generous donor to Democratic candidates and causes, Hunter in recent years has given money to the presidential campaigns of Sherrod Brown, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and Wesley Clark.

In August 2009, Media Matters launched its Progressive Talent Initiative (PTI), a boot camp designed to train leftist pundits to maximize their effectiveness in articulating their positions during media appearances. David Brock conceived of PTI as an effort to counter the "chronic imbalance" favoring conservatives in the media, and as a way to “professionalize the training and booking” of media spokespeople for the left. During its first 19 months, PTI trained nearly 100 pundits who appeared some 800 times on television and radio.

Media Matters has some notable ties to Al Jazeera. For example, the Media Matters Action Network's senior foreign policy fellow, M.J. Rosenberg, has a profile on Al Jazeera's website, where his articles attacking Israel and the United States regularly appear. As reported by the Daily Caller, Rosenberg represented Media Matters at the first Al Jazeera “Unplugged” forum on social media in Qatar in May 2010. At the forum, he praised Al Jazeera as a “mainstream network” and a “factual” source while attacking Fox News as a “very, very dangerous force in the United States.” Rosenberg also charged that Al Jazeera had been “bombed by orders of the United States government.”

The same year that Al Jazeera was hosting Media Matters’ senior foreign policy fellow in Doha, the then-director general of Al Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar, visited Media Matters’ offices in Washington. There he met with David Brock and Media Matters’ president, Eric Burns.

By early 2011, Media Matters had an annual budget exceeding $10 million and employed a staff of approximately 90 people.

According to a March 2011 report in Politico.com, Media Matters had "all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks," preparing instead to wage "what its founder, David Brock, described ... as an all-out campaign of 'guerrilla warfare and sabotage' aimed at the Fox News Channel [FNC] ... and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the 'nerve center' of the conservative movement." Brock explained that whereas previously “[t]he strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment” -- i.e., challenging FNC's factual claims and trying to keep them out of the mainstream media -- the new strategy would be “war on Fox.”

In that "war" effort, said Politico, Media Matters was "assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials"; had "hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show"; was "assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy or other causes"; "hired two experienced reporters ... to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network"; planned, in collaboration with an executive from MoveOn.org, "to run a broad campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp."; and planned to "disrupt [the] commercial interests" of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

In December 2011, M.J. Rosenberg, a senior foreign policy fellow at Media Matters Action Network (a sister site to Media Matters), set off a media firestorm by calling Israel’s supporters “Israel firsters.” Media Matters’ use of the term, which implied loyalties to Israel first and America second, was widely panned by the Jewish community and by newspapers like the Washington Post. But neither Rosenberg nor Media Matters abandoned the slur.

In February 2012, Media Matters was the subject of a damning exposé by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, which revealed the extent to which Media Matters had become successful in dictating the content of left-liberal media. As documented by the Caller, newspapers like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times all take their editorial cues from Media Matters’ talking points.

Prominent columnists like the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne have been among the most receptive to Media Matters spin. Indeed, it is remarkably easy to trace a direct line from Media Matters to Dionne. In March 2007, Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert charged that Republicans and Fox News were waging “a smear campaign against NPR.” Just a few months later Dionne was reprising the charge of a Fox News “smear campaign against NPR” during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press and denouncing Fox as a “Republican propaganda network.” The latter attack echoed Media Matters founder David Brock’s charge that Fox was part of a “Republican noise machine.”

Even as it was denouncing Fox as Republican propaganda, Media Matters was putting its own propaganda on the air via left-wing networks like MSNBC. So minimal was the fact-checking and editorial supervision at MSNBC, that a Media Matters source boasted to the Daily Caller, “We were pretty much writing their prime time.” Left-wing bloggers were even more willing to serve as mouthpieces for Media Matters, most notably Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent. Embarrassingly for Sargent, Media Matters sources described him as being so eager to rehash their editorials that the organization considered him a reliable dump for its content. As one source boasted to the Daily Caller, “If you can’t get it [printed] anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game.”

Even more significant than the leverage it wields over left-wing outlets and columnists is the influence that Media Matters exerts on the Obama administration. The Daily Caller reports that Media Matters has “regular contact with political operatives” inside the Obama White House. In June 2010, for instance, David Brock and former Media Matters president Eric Burns had a meeting at the White House with Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett and then-communications director Anita Dunn. Dunn in particular welcomed Media Matters, even parroting its claim that Fox News is “more a wing of the Republican Party.” For its part, Media Matters became one of Dunn’s most determined defenders, as demonstrated in its attack on Fox News host Glenn Beck for what it called a “ridiculous smear of Anita Dunn.” The alleged “smear” turned out to be nothing more than Beck’s accurate highlighting of Dunn’s professed admiration for Mao Zedong.

Throughout the Obama presidency, Media Matters, joined by the Center for American Progress, has participated in a weekly strategy call with the White House.

In early 2012, as the presidential election season was gearing up, Media Matters was planning to spend $20 million – double the organization’s reported $10 million annual budget – on efforts to influence media coverage prior to the election. This was a fulfillment of David Brock’s spring 2011 pledge to enlist Media Matters into a campaign of “guerilla warfare and sabotage” against Fox News. According to the Daily Caller, Brock’s animus against Fox was so extreme that Media Matters considered harassing individual Fox News employees at their homes, hiring private investigators to look into their private lives, and hiring a law firm to pursue lawsuits against the network. In February 2012, Brock and co-author Ari Rabin-Havt released a book titled The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine.

In March 2012, Politico.com reported that although Media Matters was originally "launched as a more traditional media critic," it "has all but abandoned its monitoring of newspapers and other television networks and is narrowing its focus to Fox and a handful of conservative websites, which its leaders view as political organizations and the 'nerve center' of the conservative movement."

Media Matters chairman David Brock confirmed that whereas “the strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” the new strategy would be a “war on Fox.” Brock stated that Media Matters was assembling opposition research files on Fox’s top executives and mid-level officials; that it had hired an activist who led a successful campaign to press advertisers to shun Glenn Beck's program; that it was assembling a legal team to help people who had previously clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for such offenses as defamation and invasion of privacy; and that it was planning to run (with the help of a recently hired executive from MoveOn.org) a negative campaign against Fox’s parent company, News Corp.

From 2003 (a year before its formal incorporation) through 2011, some 120 charitable foundations supplied Media Matters with more than $28.8 million in funding -- a sum representing 54 percent of every dollar the organization had raised in its history. Among these donors were the Tides Foundation ($4,384,702), George Soros’ Open Society Institute ($1,075,000), the Ford Foundation ($966,466), the Sandler Foundation ($400,000), and the Schumann Fund for Media and Democracy ($600,000), the Barbra Streisand Foundation ($85,000), the  Stride Rite Charitable Foundation ($25,000), the Lear Family Foundation ($55,000), and the Joyce Foundation ($400,000). The leftwing activist group MoveOn.org also gave $50,000 to Media Matters during that period.

In 2006, the Arca Foundation gave Media Matters a $50,000 grant “to support a Religious Broadcasting Project to expand the monitoring and fact checking of religious broadcasts,” according to its tax return that year.