Today, Media Matters for America has a new look. We've tried to make our website easier to read, search, and navigate, as well as a friendlier destination for first-time visitors and a more powerful tool for longtime users. We've reorganized our home page and souped up our search engine. We've also begun to categorize our coverage so that you can easily find all items about, for example, Rush Limbaugh or MSNBC.

Since I last wrote on July 20 -- when Media Matters for America launched its activism network, designed to ensure that your views about the accuracy and integrity of political media coverage can be registered directly with media institutions -- some 17,000 of you are receiving MMFA material directly via email, 3,034 have signed up to be alerted to MMFA's activism calls, and more than 10,500 have participated in our online user forums, creating a vigorous dialogue about media accountability and providing much-needed tips to the MMFA staff.

Conservative attack machinery has poisoned the media climate for most of the summer. As political media coverage intensifies in the coming weeks, I'm writing today to encourage you to help us expand our reach as we redouble our efforts to stamp out conservative misinformation in the media.

Please register on the subscription page on our website, www.mediamatters.org; pass the link onto your friends; and write us at mm-tips@mediamatters.org when you hear or read right-wing lies masquerading as fact.

Your participation is critical, for nothing less than our democracy has been imperiled by recent malign developments in the media, beginning with the efforts in August of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, guided and financed by conservative political ideologues, to inject their lies and smears into the media coverage of the U.S. presidential election. These lies and smears continue even now to be flogged relentlessly by conservative anchors, hosts, and pundits across all cable channels, and by right-wing radio show hosts in every media market in the country. This era was recently described by The New York Times, as one in which “so much unsubstantiated or even false information can reach the public through so may different forums, be it blogs or talk-show radio.”

But as Salon.com's Eric Boehlert wrote recently, those seeking to use conservative misinformation to sway voters “need the help of the mainstream press corps to reiterate their attacks and create a negative narrative.” So where was the mainstream media? According to Jonathan V. Last, writing in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, it was “strong-armed into covering [the Swift boat story] by the 'new' media: talk-radio, cable television, and Internet blogs.”

Last concluded that he sensed “a sign of capitulation” by the mainstream media in the face of growing right-wing media power. I'm afraid he may be right about that.

As I wrote at our launch in early May, for three decades now the conservative movement has lavishly funded efforts like Brent Bozell's Media Research Center to attack the media for alleged “liberal bias” -- and the result has been a mainstream media cowed by such orchestrated criticism and increasingly accommodating of the conservative agenda. At a symposium in late July sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw publicly acknowledged the conservative pressure tactics. “But these are the pressures that come with the business, they've always been there,” Brokaw said. “It's just now that there are all these tools that make them a kind of tsunami, if you will, when they want to have it happen. Also, there are organized interest groups out there. There is a guy by the name of Brent Bozell who makes a living at taking us on every night. He's well organized, he's got a constituency, he's got a newsletter, he can hit a button and we'll hear from him.

”What the conservatives in this country have learned in the last 10 years especially," Brokaw continued, “is they feel they have to go to war against the networks every day. I think it's what Rush Limbaugh does every day; it's what Brent Bozell does every day. As I say, there are those organized constituencies that are out there that can be mobilized and that is part of the political give and take of the time in which we live.”

Unfortunately, the right wing's efforts to chill and intimidate the media to toe their ideological line probably will be bolstered by the recent admission of CBS News that the network cannot authenticate documents used in a recent 60 Minutes broadcast on President George W. Bush's National Guard record. The political right has deftly used the issue to thwart media coverage of Bush's murky record, while seeking to further undermine the authority of the entire professional media corps to report the news without fear or favor. Just this past weekend, CBS said it was shelving a report investigating the Bush administration's rationale for going to war in Iraq because it was too close to a presidential election.

As Media Matters has found, the CBS story received far more media attention than the more consequential admission of journalistic malpractice regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by The New York Times earlier this year. In the first 48 hours, the CBS admission was reported 167 times in U.S. newspapers and 57 times on cable news broadcasts. Yet in the 48 hours after The New York Times published its mea culpa, that story was reported only 38 times in U.S. newspapers and seven times on cable news. No FOX News Channel primetime program reported the Times acknowledgment during those 48 hours, while every FOX News Channel primetime program addressed the CBS memo story. As MMFA has also pointed out, the right-wing groups and media figures that have been hyping the CBS story most zealously are, ironically, the least responsible elements in our media. For example, the ways in which the FOX News Channel lies and distorts the news for political purposes has been extensively documented, yet FOX continues to play host to frantic ravings about journalistic standards at CBS. The difference between FOX and CBS is that CBS had standards to violate.

With the mainstream media succumbing to right-wing pressure groups like Brent Bozell's and to the presence of conservative propaganda organs like FOX News Channel posing as legitimate media, that's where you -- and Media Matters for America -- come in. MMFA was founded five months ago to document and correct the conservative misinformation pumped out by both the right-wing and mainstream media, and to make sure that “capitulation” to right-wing power is no longer such an easy option for the mainstream media. In just the last few weeks, your participation in the MMFA activism network helped ensure that CNN gave progressives prominent platforms to respond to conservative convention spin, and pushed syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak to acknowledge his family's ties to Regnery Publishing, publisher of Unfit for Command, the deeply flawed book Novak has been uncritically promoting for weeks. Almost 46,000 of you have signed our petition to remove Rush Limbaugh from the taxpayer-funded Armed Forces Radio and Television Service -- where he propagandizes U.S. troops at our expense. Congressional action on providing balance to Limbaugh on the service is pending as I write. Last week, after CNN's senior political analyst Bill Schneider asserted as fact the dubious Republican claim that Al Qaeda “would very much like to defeat President Bush,” both MMFA and Moveon.org launched e-mail campaigns protesting the comment to CNN.

The Swift Boat tide may have ebbed, but if history is any guide, this won't be the last attempt by the right to destroy their opponents, confuse voters, and deprive the public of an honest debate on the critical issues facing the country. At Media Matters, we will be vigilantly watching these developments, but we need your help -- and the sustained support of our readers, many of whom have generously contributed to our work via the MMFA website -- to get accurate information to the public. We also must work harder to see that the media, rather than capitulate when the next smear surfaces, rejects the canard that there must be two sides to every story when the record backs up only one side, and accepts its role as adjudicator of fact before damage is done by the smear artists.

Let's begin anew this week, with vigorous monitoring of media coverage and pundit spin of the first presidential debate in Miami. Last week, ABC's The Note observed: “Percent chance that the Gang of 500 [top reporters] will declare the presidential race over if John Kerry 'loses' the first debate: 70%.” As I say, Media Matters, more than ever.

Thank you.

David Brock

> Click here to give us feedback on our new design