Ever heard of Media Matters, the character assassination site masquerading as a left-wing media watchdog group?
It’s in big trouble.
Rod Martin has an excellent thread about it on X today.
Media Matters is run by David Brock, author of The Real Anita Hill, an expose on the woman whose accusations against Clarence Thomas created a media frenzy in 1991.
Brock later regretted writing that book, and began his move to the left, at which point he’d engage in character assassination against the right. Here he is on MSNBC:
You may recall the conflict Media Matters had with Elon Musk, which is what led to the disastrous situation it now faces.
It alleged that the platform was so out of control that major brands were seeing their ads appearing alongside Nazi content.
Media Matters pointed to screenshots of such pairings in its report as evidence of a severe and widespread problem on the platform, without disclosing the lengths to which they’d had to go in manipulating the algorithm to get the system to generate these anomalous results.
According to X, these juxtapositions of large companies alongside objectionable content were so rare that essentially nobody except Media Matters itself ever saw them. For brands like IBM, Comcast, and Oracle, only one viewer, Media Matters itself, saw the pairing out of over 500 million users; for Apple, it was just two views, at least one of which was by Media Matters.
Since the platform has 5.5 billion daily ad impressions, to call these pairings unrepresentative would be a gross understatement.
The result was what Media Matters had hoped for: an exodus of advertisers from the platform.
So Elon Musk sued.
When Media Matters tried to negotiate, Musk laid out his terms:
- Retract the report about antisemitic content on X.
- Pay X all the money remaining in Media Matters’ bank account.
- Shut down operations entirely.
Needless to say, Media Matters didn’t accept those terms. But life has grown ever more challenging for the organization since then.
Their law firm, friendly to progressive causes, demanded $4 million (eventually lowered to $2.25 million) in unpaid fees. Media Matters has had to lay off a significant portion of its staff and is dealing with donors who have been described, understandably, as “skittish.”
Ain’t that a shame.
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