Out of everything the Daily Caller has published about Media Matters this week, the following sentence might be the most significant. It’s from Jamie Weinstein’s report on Alan Dershowitz condemning the organization:
“Media Matters did not respond to a request by TheDC for comment.”
They haven’t responded to any of TheDC’s requests for comment. There isn’t a word about any of it on their site. All those millions, all those minions, and yet David Brock has nothing to say about any of this stuff? Media Matters isn’t exactly known for clamming up when criticized. The lack of a denial, or a non-denial denial, or anything, is glaring.
Jim Geraghty summed it up on Twitter: “The Weiner scandal reinforced the guideline of DC allegations: If no reasonable explanation comes out within 48 hours, it’s probably not coming… Nobody with a reasonable explanation of odd behavior (tweeting their schlong, carrying an illegal gun) sits on it for three days.”
The closest thing I’ve seen to a response has been at Mediaite, in response to the first story in the series:
A source at Media Matters, meanwhile, notes that the Caller’s report “comes one week before our book, The Fox Effect, comes out, and Tucker Carlson is a Fox News contributor. This is an anonymously-sourced Daily Caller story, and that’s how we’re treating it.”
All those big brains under Media Matters’ roof, all that expertise, and the best they can come up with is a non sequitur and a “no comment”? To Mediaite?
Ouch.
On a personal note, I’m really enjoying the Twitter silence of Media Matters “senior fellow” Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert). He’s never missed an opportunity to lash out at people who say things he doesn’t like. (Why, once he even used his platform at tax-exempt Media Matters to lie about me as I lay in a hospital bed after getting hit by a car.) On Twitter, his tone seems to aspire to lighthearted mockery of his targets, even if more often he’s just aggressively cheerless, witless, and pointless. If past performance was any indication, he’d be all over this, proving those rotten right-wingers wrong and congratulating himself all the while. But he hasn’t said a single word about any of these stories. Because he can’t. I can only imagine how frustrating this must be for him. I find it quite pleasant.
So, to Boehlert and everybody else at MMFA, a gift from me to you. Whenever I’m going through tough times and it seems like there’s nothing I can do, I just look up at this on my wall and it always lifts my spirits:
