OPINION:
America’s least-honest media “fact-check” organization is having a tough time. Media Matters, the nonprofit with a mission of “correcting conservative misinformation,” is laying off staff by the dozens as it battles for survival on several fronts.
Late last month, the Federal Trade Commission reaffirmed its decision to proceed with a full antitrust investigation of the far-left outfit. It will compel Media Matters to hand over all communications related to schemes “facilitating boycotts or other collusion or coordination” intended to discourage advertisers from working with X.
A proven violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act means felony penalties of up to 10 years in prison and million-dollar fines for participants. Yet the faux fact-checker isn’t the only one on the hot seat.
Apple, Disney, IBM, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros. each pulled ads from Elon Musk’s social media platform after Media Matters published a report insisting that pitches from the firms were displayed alongside racist content.
According to an X Corp. analysis, Media Matters achieved this result by creating special accounts that followed a handful of nefarious people, the famous brands and nobody else. The pretend watchdog then kept scrolling the feed well beyond an ordinary person’s tolerance level until big-name advertisements appeared near disreputable tweets.
No actual users saw plugs for Comcast next to neo-Nazi slogans, but Media Matters President Angelo Carusone claims otherwise. “What we did was use Twitter the way a normal user would and then log the advertisements that were received,” he said on MSNBC.
As it looks for evidence of coordination, the FTC will review communications from anyone who may have asked Media Matters to label a news outlet or website as “misinformation or hate speech.” Relevant records must be produced in a highly specific format outlined in a 16-page explanatory letter from the commission.
While busy assembling five years’ worth of internal emails and memos, Media Matters executives will be sitting for depositions in separate litigation from X Corp. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, turned aside offers to settle the defamation lawsuit out of court.
In a desperate ploy to have its cause transferred to a friendly jurisdiction, Media Matters dispatched a team of attorneys to the courthouse in the District of Columbia to beg U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of President Biden, to quash the FTC’s demand.
The agency denied it was singling out Media Matters for retaliation. To the contrary, Media Matters is merely “one of seventeen” entities under investigation in the boycott conspiracy, according to a filing last week.
That’s not much comfort to Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Dimiero, who told Judge Sooknanan that Media Matters has a “culture of fear.” Authors who remain on staff, including the researcher behind the racist advertising article, find themselves paralyzed.
“[Eric] Hananoki has also had to scale back communications with other journalists outside of Media Matters out of fear that their messages, emails, or any other correspondence could expose their colleagues to the same kinds of risks Media Matters journalists are now facing,” Mr. Dimiero said.
Media Matters had a good run, bilking left-wing donors and fooling Fortune 500 companies into backing a $20 million annual budget that allowed Mr. Carusone, for example, to pocket a $400,000 annual salary. It’s fitting that these political activists are now caught in a censorship web of their own making.
Notably, however, the web could ensnare more than just Media Matters.
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