Why Media Matters is Good for Everyone

Can the success of an ultra-partisan pressure group possibly be a good thing for objective journalism? My answer is yes.

The group I have in mind is Media Matters, which has got conservative panties in a bunch after recent campaigns against Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Don Imus.

Jonah Goldberg calls the three-year-old entity "a cog in the larger Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy." Blogger Gary Gross calls it "essentially the Clinton War Room on steroids." I don't dispute either of those characterizations, but I also think Media Matters is pretty brilliant (and certainly not the "most vicious element in our society today," as O'Reilly would have it.)

Its brilliance lies in its canny grasp of the information economy. Journalists like me would like to know everything interesting or potentially scandalous that O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. says, but don't have time to listen to all their shows or read all the transcripts. So Media Matters hires an army of interns to do it, then offers us the choicest tidbits, packaged in left-wing cant, which we're free to keep or discard as we like. (I don't have to think Bill O'Reilly is an evil racist to find it funny and newsworthy that he was amazed to see black people behaving themselves at a restaurant.)

There's nothing unique about this, by the way. Newsbusters has been doing the same thing for the other side since 2005, and there are also groups like FAIR and ThinkProgress. Media Matters just happens to have been getting the big scores lately.

Right-wingers can accuse Media Matters of Stalinist tactics and fraud all they want. But information's a market. And when conservatives bitch about the success a group like Media Matters is having in that market, they sound an awful lot like their own caricatured versions of the liberals who can't stand to see anyone profit from the free enterprise system.

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