MRC Weirdly Quiet About Musk’s Lawsuit Against Media Matters

The Media Research Center loves it when Elon Musk gets all litigious — it cheered when Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate for exposing how hate and lies on Twitter (well, X) have spread since Musk took it over, and it so eagerly hyped Musk’s threat to sue the Anti-Defamation League for pointing out anti-Semitism on Twitter that it called in racist cartoonist Scott Adams as backup. So you’d think it would be all over Musk’s threat to file a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters, which he ultimately made good on (though past his original declared timeline), for its research showing ads from major advertisers being placed next to tweets filled with hate speech and neo-Nazi views, which caused several of those advertisers to drop their ads. The presumed goal of Musk in suing his critics, of course, is to intimidate them into silence and to play victim so right-wingers will come to the defense of the world’s richest man (mission accomplished).

But the MRC has remained silent about the lawsuit. Media Matters is the liberal counterpart to the MRC (though it produces trustworthy and better quality content), so you’d think it would want to take the opportunity to knock its competition down a peg. The MRC, though, has an odd habit of trying to pretend Media Matters doesn’t exist, so references to it are relatively sparse, and it doesn’t refer to Media Matters unless it feels it has to. A Nov. 5 post by Tim Graham, for example, is all about the defensive response of right-wing radio host Mark Levin to a report from “the leftist site Media Matters” quoting him claiming that the parents of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer “weren’t victims in one way or another, of the Holocaust” though his parents were, in fact, Holocaust survivors; when CNN hyped that bogus claim, Graham sneered that “CNN and Media Matters are closely aligned.” (By contrast, the MRC and Fox News are so closely aligned that several former MRC employees now work for Fox News — something that cannot be said about Media Matters and CNN.) A Nov. 8 column by Graham, meanwhile, complained that Media Matters, “a passionate LGBT advocacy group,” pointed out that violent threats against people and organizations often follow the highlighting of them on the virulently homophobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok.

That, as of this writing, is the most recent mention of Media Matters at the MRC’s NewsBusters; Musk’s lawsuit was filed Nov. 20. Its further-right counterpart, MRCTV, didn’t do a story on the lawsuit itself, but there was a Nov. 21 post by Nick Kangadis on how Texas attorney general Ken Paxton opened a partisan investigation into the group. Kangadis labeled Media Matters as a “far-left outlet” without explanation, and he uncritically quoted Paxton calling it “a radical anti-free speech organization.” If the MRC thinks Media Matters is “far-left,” can we call the MRC “far-right”?

So why the silence? Perhaps because it knows that, by the same logic Musk used to sue Media Matters, the MRC could be sued by its targets — particularly Google.

Over the past year or so, it has deliberately misinterpreted the results of a study about how Gmail works, claiming that it shows how Gmail’s spam filter marks more conservative-related fundraising emails as spam than liberal lines — even though the study authors say that’s not what the study found, and even though the alleged bias goes away as Gmail learns from user behavior. It also whined when the lawsuit got tossed out of court. The MRC has also issued another partisan attack on Google, alleging that using a specific search term that no normal human would actually use, the results didn’t rank Republican candidates high enough or that certain presidential candidates weren’t ranked highly enough. One key claim in Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters was that its finding of prominent ads next to hate speech was not the experience of the typical user and Media Matters gamed things to achieve its results. The MRC can similarly be sued by Google for gaming its so-called research to crafting a search term to achieve the biased results it wanted, which it then exploited for partisan gain, which then may have had the effect of driving customers away from Google.

The MRC presumably doesn’t want to be sued by Google over its shoddy, partisan work designed for political gain over actual fairness, and so it would not like to remind people of said shoddy, partisan work that — one might call it fraudulent manipulation, as Paxton accused Media Matters of doing — may have opened it to legal exposure. That, along with its general reluctance to acknowledge that there’s competition in the media-monitoring space, is the likely reason it doesn’t want to get much prominence to Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Media Matters.)