You can almost hear the death rattle emanating from Media Matters for America (MMFA), the unofficial (wink-wink) media arm of the Democrat Party, which unironically calls itself the “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
The organization, which is funded by some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, has racked up about $15 million in legal fees over the past 20 months to defend itself against lawsuits by Elon Musk, in addition to investigations by Mr. Trump’s Federal Trade Commission and Republican state attorneys general.
The group has slashed the size of its staff and scrambled to raise more cash from skittish donors, according to documents and interviews with 11 people familiar with the organization’s fight to survive.
Elon Musk, you may recall, sued MMFA for manipulating X’s algorithm to falsely claim that the site was placing ads near anti-semitic and pro-Nazi content. MMFA thought it could get away with its dishonest attempt to shame advertisers into fleeing the site.
More from the NYT:
The new legal team in April worked to reach a settlement with X’s lawyers. X demanded that Media Matters retract its report about antisemitic content, pay X all the money left in the group’s bank account and shut down. Media Matters proposed explaining its methodology in its report, adding a statement from X and donating to a mutually agreed charity. [Emphasis added]
The deal fell through, and MMFA’s legal woes continue.
Meanwhile FTC is going after MMFA for conspiring with other organizations to illegally pressure advertisers into pulling their ads from X. Earlier this week, MMFA sued the FTC, demanding that it quash its investigation.
What’s perhaps most astonishing is that MMFA “raised nearly $250 million in the two decades between its creation in 2003 and the end of 2023, establishing itself as a force in Democratic politics by effectively undermining major right-wing media figures and politicians.”
And now they’re broke. How is that even possible? Here we are at PJ Media begging people to chip in $20 a year to support our work, and MMFA was blowing through cash like it was Monopoly money. It’s somehow lucrative to push critical race theory, DEI, COVID vaccines, gender mutilation for minors, and every other loony-tunes theory and policy the Left comes up with. It helps to have wealthy donors like George Soros.
According to a Pro Publica report, MMFA raised $19 million in 2023 alone — and spent $20 million (Democrats are terrible at math). As the managing editor of this humble website, I cannot wrap my mind around that kind of money. Oh, what we could do with just a fraction of that!
Looking back, the organization’s initial legal troubles began in 2016, when it hitched its wagon to the desperate Hillary Clinton.
The left-wing New Republic wrote in the wake of Clinton’s embarrassing loss:
The organization [MMFA] had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned itself at the center of a group of public relations and advocacy outfits whose mission was to help put Clinton in the White House. Seen in this light, the shift to focusing on the country’s much-discussed fake news problem, which allegedly facilitated Donald Trump’s victory, is a way of keeping in business after Media Matters and its founder David Brock had little to show for years of being Clinton’s first line of defense.
In our numerous conversations with past Media Matters staff, there was a consensus that in the lead-up to Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy in 2015, the organization’s priority shifted away from the mission stated on its website—“comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation”—and towards running defense for Clinton. The former staffers we spoke to largely felt that this damaged Media Matters’s credibility and hurt the work it did in other areas. “The closer we got to the 2016 election the less it became about actually debunking conservative misinformation and more it became about just defending Hillary Clinton from every blogger in their mother’s basement,” one former staffer told us. This was, moreover, a repeat of what Media Matters did in 2008, when there was a rift between staffers and management over the favoring of Clinton in her race against then-Senator Barack Obama.
On August 13, 2020, conservative nonprofit Patriots Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) for not acting on complaints it had issued to the FEC in April against political operative David Brock and four of his organizations for illegally assisting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Campaign.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. As far as we can ascertain, that case is still bumping around in the bowels of the courts and our federal agencies.
As much as I’d like to believe that MMFA is going belly-up, I suspect another billionaire donor will step up and bail them out. (Don’t the Left fool you into believing that they hate billionaires. They only hate the ones who support our side.)
At any rate, it’s gratifying to watch them scramble to make payroll with OPM—other people’s money. May they continue to squander it on hopeless causes.
Yeah, Media Matters may be a cash cow, but they can’t compete with my talented team of writers. If you’d like to help in our mission to tell the truth, every single day, please become a VIP member today. You’ll be directly supporting our writers and the work we do here. Many people don’t realize that we publish an average of 30 articles a day — that’s almost 1,000 per month! — and do it on a shoestring budget, largely supported by our faithful readers. You’ll get lots of great perks for around $20 per year, including access to our insightful comments section, where you can connect with our writers, who regularly hang out there. Sign up here and use the promo code FIGHT for 60% off.
