Take note of the way the leaders inside left wing Media Matters view the world:
A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.
“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”
“The progressive movement is in need of an enemy…” If Frisch had substituted an a for a y at the and of that last word he would’ve been closer to the truth. But isn’t it interesting that in a post 9-11 world, leaders of the “progressive movement” have to go casting about to manufacture an enemy? Couldn’t find one in Tehran or the caves of Pakistan? They chose to go after a news network that posed no mortal threat, it just wasn’t toeing the leftist line.
The extent to which Frisch proposed going, to take down this “enemy,” ought to — but won’t — disgust everyone but far and away those on the left who claim the mantle of “tolerance.” What Frisch proposed is about as illiberal as it gets.
“We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” he wrote.
Take away their privacy to destroy their lives, in other words.
After that, Frisch argued, should come the legal assault: “We should look into contracting with a major law firm to study any available legal actions that can be taken against Fox News, from a class action law suit to defamation claims for those wronged by the network. I imagine this would be difficult but the right law firm is bound to find some legal ground for us to take action against the network.”
That’s lawfare — using the courts as a weapon to destroy one’s enemies. Was Frisch’s memo carried out? Was he fired for suggesting such insane tactics? We don’t know the answer to the first question, but we do know the answer to the second: No. And we do know that smears of Fox have come from above the top at Media Matters, on down to the minions.
Frisch went on to suggest getting a mole placed inside Fox, using trackers to follow Fox personalities and pester them at public events, and generating a public PR campaign against them. This is all classic police state stuff, funded by George Soros, whose own history with one of the world’s most notorious police states doesn’t get discussed enough. And Media Matters works hand in hand with both the Obama White House and the mainstream media. Media Matters has become the rip-and-read wire service for MSNBC.
This isn’t just about Fox. This is the kind of stuff they propose doing to the rest of us when they assume we aren’t looking.
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