It appears that Media Matters (disclosure: our former employer) is living rent-free inside the head of Media Research Center executive Tim Graham.
Back in February, Graham called Media Matters a “creepy censorship group” because it has pointed out the far-right extremity of Fox News’ content to advertisers, which tends to make companies not want to advertise there. Never mind, of course, that Graham’s MRC has its own (less effective) clone of that operation and tags every post with the advertisers of the segment they’re attacking with links for readers to contact them and, well, do what Media Matters does.
Graham devoted an entire March 30 column to complaining that the New York Times used Media Matters research on a story about anti-transgender content in right-wing media: “Suddenly, the Times is outsourcing its research on conservatives to a hard-left organization – one of the most toxic character assassins of the cancel culture — and boasting about it. The Times is swimming in revenue, but somehow it needs help discovering that ‘targeting transgendered people’ is a hot conservative topic.” Graham didn’t explain what, exactly, Media Matters did to be smeared as a “character assassin” — never mind, of course, that the MRC engages in character assassination pretty much all the time; indeed, it pays Gabriel Hays specifically to assassinate the character of people he doesn’t like.
There’s also the unspoken implication that Media Matters’ research is such good quality that outside organizations consider it reliable — not something that can be said for the “research” of the MRC, which is so biased and opaque as to be nearly worthless outside of its use as a partisan weapon, and certainly no sentient person treats as an objective measure of anything.
And in an April 12 podcast devoted to bashing an episode of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” for talking about Fox News, Graham groused that host Brian Stelter “turned to Matt Gertz from Media Matters because we had to conclude the whole half-hour ripping into Fox.” Perhaps that’s because, again, Media Matters does its Fox-monitoring job better than the MRC does in going after the so-called “liberal media.”
Yep, rent-free.