Welcome to another installment of my series exposing the techniques of “watchdog group” Media Matters for America. If you are new, please take a second to watch this video I made discussing why I think debunking Media Matters is important.
One of Media Matters main techniques in creating the illusion of objectivity is what I call The Pile On. Media Matters does this all the time. Here’s how it works: they pile on “fact” after “fact” in neatly typed paragraphs that start with a sentence in bold type, often with the helpful word FACT typed in easy to read capital letters so you might think what you’re reading is in fact, a fact.
You end up with something looks like this:
FACT: Media Matters Doesn’t Like Andrew Breitbart: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
MMfA Often Lies And Their Readers Don’t Call them On It: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum
They like to mention FOX News. A lot. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum
It often goes on for pages like that. It’s the equivalent of the old attorneys trick of “burying someone in paper” by giving them so much information – much of it irrelevant – that just slogging through it become something most people simply won’t do.
Media Matters’s goal here is not the truth. Their goal is to discredit their enemies, not to assemble facts and arguments in such a way as to arrive at a correct conclusion.
A great real world example of this is 2010 Media Matters article “Fox News’ Long History of Race Baiting”, — a long series of disconnected “facts”, almost none of which actually prove their conclusion. (Apparently, any time anyone talks about race on Fox, it’s race-baiting.)
I’ll be talking about that article in a future blog post but check out how Media Matters uses this technique of simply stacking up paragraphs that give the appearance of a factual recitation.