In her Newsreal column, Kathy Shaidle writes:

Media Matters (a.k.a. the George Soros Steno Pool) boasts a multi-million dollar budget and over 60 staffers — and this is the best they can do?

Just a few months ago, Media Matters delighted in mocking Fox News star Glenn Beck’s latest novelty: a red phone set up to take calls from the White House, should it ever care  to correct Beck’s alleged “falsehoods” about its Mao-loving, 9/11 Truther staffers.

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Then they snorted when new Fox Business hire John Stossell “shamelessly” copied Beck, and set up a green “Al Gore phone.”

Media Matters even approvingly quoted Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank assertion that Beck’s red phone “really symbolizes a new kind of ignorance”:

What Mr. Beck’s silent phone really symbolizes is a new kind of ignorance, a coming high-tech dark age in which people can choose to blow off professional standards of inquiry; in which they can wall themselves off with cable TV and friendly Web sites, dismiss what displeases as liberal bias, and demand that any contrary view be transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself.

Uh huh.

Oh, and Media Matters just semi-famously declared Glenn Beck its “Misinformer of the Year: 2009″.

Well, guess what? Media Matters has just unveiled… it’s own Glenn Beck Phone! They want him to phone them if they say something inaccurate about him or something. Get it?! Yep, it took them three months to think of that idea.

As Mediate’s headline put it — anticipating my response and yours — yes, “this is real.”

And so very, very sad.

Kathy’s article is titled, “Media Matters stealing ideas from people it hates now”, but that’s not exactly new — Media Matters began in 2004 as a leftwing, reactionary clone of Reed Irvine’s 40 year old Accuracy in Media and especially, as its founder David Brock explicitly acknowledged, Brent Bozell’s 20 year old Media Research Center. Of course, as James Taranto wrote in 2004, unlike conservative sites that monitor for liberal bias in self-described “objective” news organizations:

See the problem here? Brock’s new shop is devoted to faulting conservative opinion journalists for expressing conservative opinions. What the Media Research Center does is entirely different; it analyzes liberal bias in the news media, which are supposed to be objective.If liberals are willing to spend $2 million funding a Web site that does nothing more than expose conservative commentators for engaging in conservative commentary, can we really afford to trust them with our tax dollars?

As a commenter wrote on Tim Blair’s blog when the NFL’s scandalous treatment of Rush Limbaugh broke:

How is it that when Righties quote Lefties, they have video, audio, and notarized confirmation from the Pope, but when Lefties ‘quote’ Righties, they have Wiki entries contributed by ‘Cobra’?

Which neatly sums up Media Matters’ “Fake But Accurate” approach to inventing quotes, unlike items at the MRC’s Newsbusters blog or the MRC’s main site. And Media Matters have since been revealed themselves to be remarkably dishonest, acknowledging they cooked the books on Limbaugh.

Incidentally, you just know that Beck’s going to do a segment where he tries to call the Moonbat phone. I’d suggest a tape delay or even prerecording this one, just in case the conversation turns scatological, or these gents answer:

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