NYMag Exposes Much About George Soros's Money Pit Media Matters

I expected that Media Matters head David Brock’s descension to progressivism occurred for some sort of principled reason.

No, Brock’s political conversion was a vanity project.

Brock’s decision to abandon conservatism was a gradual one–and, unlike other famous apostates’, more personal than ideological. “I didn’t wake up one day and say, you know, ‘Supply-side economics doesn’t make sense,’ ” he says. In fact, his move from the right began after he failed to deliver the goods in a book about Hillary Clinton and some of his conservative friends expressed their displeasure with his efforts.

[…]

No amends were more important than the ones he made to Bill and Hillary Clinton. “It wasn’t that he wanted forgiveness from the Clintons,” one Brock friend says. “He wanted in. He wanted to be part of this progressive restoration, and the only way he could do that was to seek reconciliation from the Big Dog and his wife.”

He got his feelings hurt when his book flopped? He expected his conservative friends to blow smoke up his rear and fawn over his book because he was a conservative? He later says that he thinks his friends were only friends with him because he was a “liberal killer,” but what I see here is someone who only valued those friends by the gratification and appreciation they could show him.

He didn’t change positions because of policy, he changed positions because of feelings. And because he wanted to be popular.

He also alleges that conservatives couldn’t handle him being gay (Er, GOProud, anyone?) but has no problem with calling Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham “fag hags.”

Awkward.

The most entertaining thing about the article is the overstated influence of Media Matters, the site ran by the man that Paul Begala called only “‘almost’ indefensible.”

Nope. Penning a soft, glowing portrait of Brock is one thing, but vastly overstating Media Matters influence is far more biased. After all, media…matters, am I right?

First he points out that “What began in 2004 as a ten- person shop with a $3 million annual budget now has around 90 employees and plans to spend $15 million this year.” That is striking and demonstrates the enormous fundraising operation that they have created. But that is not translating into readers. With that budget and staff, they should be about the size of a site like Politico, but the numbers tell a far different story. According to web traffic evaluator, Quantcast, Politico averages 5.6 million monthly unique visitors, Media Matters a mere 646,200. Even if you give Media Matters the benefit of the doubt and double that number, they are still doing a fraction of the traffic of sites its size (at 1.3 million, it would still be far smaller than little Mediaite, with ten times the staff). That’s something that clearly should have been pointed out in the story.

NYMag‘s assertion that Media Matters took out Glenn Beck is hyperbole. Media Matters chomped at the ankles of the other progressive organizations that campaigned against free speech and in the end, a business move was to blame rather than the fists of fascist fury.