Powerhouse progressive watchdog Media Matters hunkers down amid legal, financial challenges

This story is the third in a four-part series this month by Just the News on watchdogs who promote censorship.

Beginning Sunday, a meeting of something called Democracy Alliance kicks off with attendees and presentations from powerful Democrats including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the party’s wealthiest donors, including George Soros. 

On the agenda, according to The New York Times, is a discussion about Democrats, who this election lost the White House and Senate, needing to “go on offense in a splintered media environment where conservatives have amassed more influence.”

Hence the existence of the "Two Plus Two Coalition" which is seeking a minimum investment from each donor of $1 million in order to “target the hidden sources of disinformation and expose them for what they are,” the newspaper also reports.

Its senior adviser is Rick Wilson, a former Republican who founded the Lincoln Project, which endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and whose motto posted on X is, “Never Trump means Never Trump.”

“A lot of people in the center and on the left have for a long time sort of bemoaned Fox, but they haven’t done anything about it,” Wilson told the Times. Other would strongly disagree, and at the top of the list of well-funded groups attacking Fox News and other is Media Matters for America, the topic of our third in a four-part series about watchdogs who censor: Big Censorship, if you will.

Media Matters for America

The group is best known for creating studies,reports, and directives, that it sends to thousands of journalists nationwide. For example, after Olympian boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria beat Angela Carini of Italy, the group told reporters that “the U.S. right quickly seized on the match and plugged it into their obsessive anti-trans hysteria, falsely declaring Khelif a man who had beaten up a woman.” 

The group strategically instructs journalists on how to frame stories -- often in a far-left narrative -- and what not to report on, in this case asking them to report that “weirdo right-wingers” whipped themselves into “a hateful frenzy” over the match.

Three months later, some outlets reported on a leaked medical report from 2023 concluded Khelif had the male XY chromosome, no uterus and a condition that affects the sexual development of males. Khelif is reportedly preparing a lawsuit to refute the claims.

None of these latest developments is available through MMFA, which instead has focused on accusing conservative media personalities such as Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham and Megyn Kelly of misgendering Khelif.

Unlike the others in this series, MMFA doesn’t even pretend it’s neutral, hence, its myriad missives about Trump’s allegedly dangerous rhetoric and rebukes against media for downplay it. 

But when Wilson, the Lincoln Project founder, said on MSNBC in 2015 that “they’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump,” he earned no rebuke from MMFA, nor did the media for “downplaying” it.

The group appears to always advances the progressive narrative, even when it’s wrong, as was the case when Nicholas Sandmann stared at native American drummer Nathan Phillips near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 2019.

MMFA, as did some news outlets and journalists, ignored the full video showing that Phillips approached Sandmann, who initially moved out of his way before simply standing in place, and portrayed the then-Covington Catholic High School student as the aggressor. (This reporter was at a legacy media outlet at the time and was told not to write about what the full video revealed).

In 2020, CNN settled for an undisclosed amount with Sandmann who sued the network for defamation over its coverage of the encounter. MMFA never apologized for, or retracted, its initial assertions, though the only mention of Sandmann on its website nowadays is one that criticizes Fox News for discussing his incident with Phillips on more than 100 episodes of its shows. 

That same year, MMFA repeatedly slammed Fox News and Trump as "conspiracy theorists" over assertions that COVID-19 emanated from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“Right-wing media push conspiracy theories about coronavirus, including that it was created in a lab,” read one headline in March, 2020. Two months later, another headline read: “Right-wing media still pushing conspiracy theories about the origins of coronavirus.”

MMFA was founded in 2004 by conservative-turned-progressive former journalist David Brock, and his work was so impactful that Time magazine in 2015 called him, “One of the most influential operatives in the Democrat Party.”

Buoyed by funding from left-wing donors such as Soros and the Tides Foundation, MMFA has attacked the late-Rush Limbaugh, conservative media such as Breitbart News and especially Fox News, labeling the latter effort its “War on Fox” or “Drop Fox” campaign.  A hallmark of its campaigns are to call out companies that dare advertise on such outlets.

Fox News declined to comment for this report, but media critic and contributor Joe Concha on air in October called MMFA “a patently dishonest, activist organization whose No. 1 mission, outside of taking out this network, is to squash any and all free speech through astroturf campaigns, online, against anyone or anything that they consider to be conservative.”

One thread among the left-leaning media watchdogs are attacks on X, the social-media firm that was known as Twitter before Elon Musk rebranded his acquisition with the intention of turning it into a haven for free speech.

"guerilla warfare and sabotage"

Thus, when MMFA produced a study that claimed ads from major companies were appearing alongside pro-Nazi and other hateful content on X, Musk sued, claiming that MMFA manipulated the pairings. 

Among the alleged damages are that Apple, Comcast, NBC Universal, IBM and others featured in the MMFA ad-pairings yanked their ads from X. Also, a slew of entertainment companies not included in MMFA’s report said they’d no longer advertise on X, including Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and Sony. According to the lawsuit, paid posts cited by MMFA appeared for just one viewer out of more than 500 million on all of X, and only through MMFA’s manipulation.

The lawsuit describes MMFA as “a self-proclaimed media watchdog that decided it would not let the truth get in the way of a story it wanted to publish about X Corp.” The lawsuit, filed 12 months ago, also states “this November alone Media Matters released over 20 articles (and counting) disparaging both X Corp. and Elon Musk – a blatant smear campaign.”

Since launching, MMFA “has engaged in an all-out campaign of guerrilla warfare and sabotage,” says the lawsuit, borrowing verbiage used in a Politico article. 

X and Musk are a critical target of Media Matters because “X is the most prominent online platform that permits users to share all viewpoints, whether liberal or conservative,” Musk’s attorneys wrote. A trial is set for April 7, 2025.

MMFA did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. Among the questions asked by this reporter were: 

• How much funding has MMFA received from George Soros? 
• From the Tides Foundation?
• What other individuals or entities have supported MMFA? 
• Did MMFA manipulate pairings to show that ads routinely show up next to hateful, even pro-Nazi, content on X?

As Constitutional Law professor Jonathan Turley noted in The Hill newspaper in August, Musk’s lawsuit comes at a time when “media organizations and journalism schools have expressly abandoned objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism.” 

Examples he lists are former New York Times writer and now Howard University journalism professor Nikole Hannah-Jones being lionized for declaring that “all journalism is activism” and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, announcing that, “Objectivity has got to go.”

No surprise, then, that trust in legacy media is at a low, with Gallup reporting that 72% had a “fair amount” or “great deal” of trust in 1976 though it has fallen to 31% ,while zero trust in media rose from 4% then to 36% now.

After X sued MMFA, Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into the group for potential fraudulent activity. Paxton’s office said he “was extremely troubled by the allegations that Media Matters, a radical anti-free speech organization, fraudulently manipulated data on X.com.”

Paxton said his goal was “to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.”

In December, MMFA responded by suing Paxton. And in April, a judge, citing MMFA’s right of free speech, granted a preliminary injunction, thus pausing Paxton’s investigation until settled by an appellate court. A similar investigation into MMFA by Missouri GOP Attorney General Andrew Bailey was shut down by a judge in August.

Unlike many media watchdogs on the left, MMFA calls itself “progressive,” though many journalists appear to treat it as an unbiased source of information. 

In October, a New York Times reporter appeared to reveal in text messages that they were using MMFA data for a yet-to-publish story about alleged disinformation spread by conservative podcasters. “I wanted to give you an opportunity to comment for an upcoming article that takes a look at how political commentators have discussed the upcoming election on YouTube,” the reporter sent in a text to Daily Wire star Ben Shapiro.

“We rely on an analysis conducted by researchers at Media Matters for America,” the reporter continued in the text, which Shapiro posted on X for all to see. The text asserts Shapiro spread information that has been “debunked,” evidence being that he said that Democrats in 2020 “rigged many of the voting rules in advance of the election in order to ensure an extraordinary number of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting …”

The reporter sent a similar text to Tucker Carlson and he, too, posted the image to X.

Carlson and Shapiro are regular targets of MMFA, and so are their advertisers. 

“Right-wing YouTubers and Daily Wire personalities with millions of subscribers regularly misgender and deadname trans people in content with ads,” screamed a sub-headline on one of its studies in March.

Some defenders of MMFA argue the group is at least somewhat fair-minded in that it occasionally criticizes left-wing outlets, though it does so from the prospective that they’ve veered to near the center. 

Such was the case when MSNBC allowed Trump to appear a few times eight years ago on “Morning Joe,” the cable news outlet's show hosted by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. And, more recently, when the left was pushing the narrative that Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump due to misogyny, MMFA attacked Scarborough for suggesting that some of the alleged misogyny came by way of Black and Hispanic voters. 

He also occasionally runs afoul of MMFA by suggesting Democrats are overly focused on transgender issues. “You never know why people are going to vote,” he said last year, earning him a rebuke from MMFA.

“It may be the swimmer at Penn, the trans swimmer at Penn, which Democrats don't talk about, but Republicans are littering mailboxes across America with fliers on it. You never know why people are going to vote.”

In May, the organization laid off about a dozen staffers with President Angelo Carusone saying: “We’re confronting a legal assault on multiple fronts and, given how rapidly the media landscape is shifting, we need to be extremely intentional about how we allocate resources to stay effective.”

Carusone is also an occasional guest on left-wing media outlets. On Nov. 16, for example, he appeared on MSNBC to disparage Pete Hegseth, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary.

Hegseth, said Carusone, “is poisoned by this grand narrative that presents the military as an instrument, not just for sort of Trump's authoritarianism, which is extremely scary and he is fully obedient, but also for this broader sort of, you know, Christian worldview.”

MMFA also is occasionally called in by lawmakers to represent the progressive side of the censorship debate, arguing that there’s no evidence that conservatives are targeted by the likes of Facebook and YouTube.

“We anticipate GOP members will invoke this false and repeatedly debunked narrative, claiming that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias,” MMFA said in written testimony last year at a Congressional hearing “on preserving free speech and reining in big tech censorship.”

Just as MMFA relied on its own internal study to claim X manipulated ad pairings, its written statement to Congress last year relied on several studies its own employees generated.

In an analysis typical of MMFA, it told members of Congress that “the most glaring evidence disproving the idea that Facebook has an anti-conservative bias was the decision by Meta – the company that now owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – to allow former President Donald Trump to return to its platforms, ignoring his continued ‘risk to public safety,’ which was the bar the company purportedly set for his return.”

While Trump hasn’t mentioned MMFA recently, in 2017 he wrote on Twitter: “Media Matters is a radical left group that promotes lies and fake news against me.” 

Such sentiments suggest when Trump said earlier this month that, “We need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling myths and disinformation,” he may have had MMFA in mind.

(In the fourth and final part of this series on watchdogs who censor, Just the News explores the Center for Countering Digital Hate.)