Politics

Brock responds to Daily Caller’s Media Matters exposé, sort of

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC host Ed Schultz’s radio show, Media Matters for America founder David Brock finally broke his silence about The Daily Caller’s investigative series on the liberal media watchdog organization’s tactics.

Brock, promoting his book “The Fox Effect,” questioned the timing of the series and accused Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson, others at The Daily Caller, and the Fox News Channel of collaborating “to dampen the effect of his book.” (RELATED: Read more in the investigative ‘Inside Media Matters’ series)

“The noise from The Daily Caller, which was picked up and trumpeted by Fox News, happened all in the week in the run-up to the publication of this book,” Brock said. “And so I think you have an effort here on the part of Tucker Carlson and The Daily Caller and Fox and folks near to Tucker Carlson, as a paid contributor of the Fox News Channel, to dampen the effect we think the book is going to have.”

Brock cited a Feb. 14 blog post by Jack Shafer at Reuters criticizing The Daily Caller’s reporting as the reason why his organization didn’t need to respond to the series.

“I don’t think they have succeeded,” Brock said. “We haven’t responded. Reuters said that The Daily Caller piece was bad journalism and lame propaganda, and we don’t feel like we need to respond to that.”

However, Shafer responded on Twitter to Brock’s claim that perhaps he should rethink that decision based on his blog post alone. “Maybe Brock shld respond *bc* [because] I called theDC story bad journalism,” Shafer tweeted.

(h/t Kerry Picket, The Washington Times)

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