Matthew Sheffield, along with brother Greg, created the NewsBusters blog for the Media Research Center in 2005. Before that, the Sheffields had run a blog attacking Dan Rather, which led to the MRC job.
Sheffield left the MRC in 2014 to work on other projects, which include a media strategy consulting firm. But one other project is unlikely to be mentioned — or, if so, certainly not in a positive way — when MRC employees are talking about him these days.
Sheffield is currently writing about media, politics and technology for the liberal-leaning site Salon, which Sheffield’s former compatriots at NewsBusters like to dismiss with intended epithets as “far-far-left” and “uber-liberal.” What’s more, some of his articles are calling out the behavior of his fellow conservatives.
In April, for example, Sheffield reported on the network of sock-puppet blogs controlled by former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, which were used to attack Fox News critics, and that this Fox News black-ops group helped subsidized the work of pro-Fox News blogger Mark Koldys and his Johnny Dollar’s Place blog.
He’s also written about the financial woes of iHeartMedia, the radio station owner that syndicates the shows of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity; the protest by torch-wielding alt-right folks opposing the removal of Confederate monuments; how the never-Trump rantings of Louise Mensch, former editor of the right-wing, Murdoch-owned blog Heat Street, may just be an act to trap gullible liberals; and the creeping moderation at generally liberal-leaning MSNBC, which has added conservative commentators and former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren.
You won’t be reading about any of this at any MRC website. And for all we know, that may be why he left. We’ve noted a previous attempt to sneak in (albeit perhaps not intentionally) a little truth at NewsBusters, in a 2013 post implicitly conceding — by begging conservative billionaires to invest in media outlets — that conservative newspapers need deep-pocketed, ideologically driven sugar daddies to stay afloat. This was proven further last year when the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review shut down its print edition to become an online-only publication following the death of conservative benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, who had sunk $300 million into the paper’s operation.
So, congratulations to Sheffield for discovering balanced journalism. It’s too bad he had to leave the MRC to do it — for both him and the MRC.