Credit Where It's Due: Mediaite On MMfA's "Irrelevance"

Colby Hall over at Mediaite published a well-written takedown of a MMfA story last week that went ignored because it sounded Onion-esque and was completely un-sourced. The headline is the first sucker punch:

Last Thursday, Media Matters published an extensive (and somewhat breathless) account from an anonymously sourced individual that was only identified as a former Fox News Insider.

[…]

While the story made some ripples in like minded sites like Think Progress and The Young Turks, the story made barely any mention in mainstream news outlets, and ended up serving as a stark reminder of Media Matters’ growing irrelevance in the world of media criticism.

[…]

Why would such a provocative and interesting piece get lost in shuffle? Perhaps because, in the current hyper-partisan landscape of opinion media (and watchdogs) it’s difficult to take seriously a post that alleges that “stuff is just made up” from a story that is unwilling to identify its source. Boehlert’s lack of a primary focus on journalism (versus agenda) undercuts the story as well as the fact that his sourcing narrative is often confusing …

[…]

something unfortunate happened, as Media Matters seems to have become exactly the sort of blindingly partisan, subjective, and even misleading site that it was created to monitor.

Ouch.

If MMfA ever existed as a journalism review, any vestige of that disappeared. It’s now seen as nothing more than an activist wing of Soros, Inc., and their acceptance of his dollars, money from a man who has vowed to take down America in one way or another, sort of compromises their objectivity as an outlet focusing on media inconsistencies. They’ve become the very thing which they apparently set out to critique, at one point.

Read the entire thing.

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