David Brock is an American liberal political consultant, author, and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He has been described by Time as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party".
Brock began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter during the 1990s. He wrote the book The Real Anita Hill and the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. In the late 1990s, he switched political sides, aligning himself with the Democratic Party and in particular with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
In 2004, he founded Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization which describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media". He has since also founded super PACs called American Bridge 21st Century and Correct the Record, has become a board member of the super PAC Priorities USA Action, advised The 65 Project, and has been elected chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Brock left Media Matters in November 2022. After leaving Media Matters, he founded Facts First USA, a 501(c)(4) group designed to counter Republican-led congressional investigations.
Brock grew up in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, where he went to Our Lady of the Assumption School, and later attended Paramus Catholic High School in Paramus, New Jersey. During his sophomore year of high school, Brock's family moved to the Dallas, Texas, area where Brock attended Newman Smith High School. Brock became editor of his high school newspaper, which he says he "fashioned into a crusading liberal weekly in the middle of the Reaganite Sunbelt".Brock, David. Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, p. 14. Random House, 2003. . Retrieved January 30, 2011. "when I arrived at my all-male high school, Paramus Catholic High School in Paramus, New Jersey, I was singled out and ridiculed for being different."Brock, David. Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, p. 11. Random House, 2003. . Accessed November 25, 2017. "For instance, I remember walking to my Catholic elementary school, Our Lady of the Assumption, in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, a suburb just outside New York City, each morning with a neighbor, Lynn, who lived up the street a few houses away."Lei, Richard. "The Reliable Source", The Washington Post, August 1, 2004. Accessed November 25, 2017. "David Brock ... Born: July 23, 1962, in Hackensack, N.J.; grew up on Windsor Street and Sussex Road in Wood-Ridge, N.J."
Brock attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a B.A. in history in 1985. He also worked as a reporter and editor for The Daily Californian, the campus newspaper. Brock arrived at college as a liberal Democrat, but at Berkeley he was "repelled by the culture of doctrinaire leftism" and turned to the political right. The turning point came with a column supporting the US invasion of Grenada that he wrote for The Daily Californian and that led to demands he resign from the newspaper staff. "I thought it was McCarthyism of the left", Brock later said. "I thought it was extremely intolerant." He then founded a neoconservative weekly, the Berkeley Journal.
The book became a best-seller. It was later attacked in a book review in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, a reporter for The New Yorker, and Jill Abramson, who was at that time a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The two later expanded their article into the book Strange Justice, which cast Anita Hill in a much more sympathetic light. It, too, was a best-seller. Brock replied to their book with a book review of his own in The American Spectator. In that review, he asserted that Mayer and Abramson had no evidence to claim that Clarence Thomas was a habitual user of pornography. Later, in his book Blinded by the Right, he wrote, "When I wrote those words, I knew they were false. I put a lie in print."
When the book came out, it was widely criticized for not breaking any new ground. John Balzar, reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times, called it "exhaustive to the point of exhaustion" and "predictably critical but unexpectedly measured, at least in comparison to what Beltway gossips anticipated". James B. Stewart, reviewing the book in The New York Times, said that Brock had "tried to do his subject justice in the broadest sense" but added that "at times he goes too far", often "echoing her apologists" and "dismissing or rationalizing the sometimes powerful evidence that Hillary Rodham Clinton has lied ... by invoking a relativism rooted in Republican precedents."
Writing again for Esquire in April 1998, Brock apologized to Clinton for his yellow journalism about Troopergate. In 2001, Brock accused one of his former sources, Terry Wooten, of leaking FBI files for use in his book about Anita Hill. Brock defended his betrayal of a confidential source by saying, "I've concluded that what I was involved in wasn't journalism, it was a political operation, and I was part of it. ... So I don't think the normal rules of journalism would apply to what I was doing". Wooten denies the accusation.
Many critics responded with skepticism to Brock's claim to have reformed himself. The reviewer for The Washington Post wrote that Brock "quotes the worst things critics said about him, and agrees with every word". Christopher Hitchens, in The Nation, called Brock's book "an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation", and declared that Brock was failing to state the truth. These and other critics noted that Brock, while claiming to feel remorse for his attacks on the Clintons and professing to have put personal assaults behind him, now seemed as eager to go after targets on the right as he had once gone after targets on the left. Hitchens responded with disgust, for example, to Brock's "coarse attack" in the book on Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused Bill Clinton of rape, but denied the rape under oath. Hitchens was particularly harsh, stating that Brock "inserts a completely gratuitous slander against a decent woman, all of whose independent assertions have survived meticulous fact-checking".
Many readers on the left greeted the book with enthusiasm, and eagerly welcomed Brock. This was especially true of the Clintons. Shortly after the book's publication, Bill Clinton phoned Brock at home and praised it lavishly. Later, according to Politico, "Brock was invited to the former president's Harlem office where he was shocked to discover Clinton had purchased dozens of copies — and stuffed them into a big cabinet". Clinton, it turned out, was mailing them to friends across the country. Clinton "insisted" that Brock contact his speaking agent and give talks around the country attacking conservatives. According to The Nation, Democratic donors "loved Brock's conversion story, particularly since he'd been inside the machine they hoped to replicate." Brock's book is seen as having propelled him into a favorable position among the Democratic Party establishment.
When Brock proposed the idea of Media Matters, Hillary Clinton invited him to the Clintons' Chappaqua home to pitch the idea to potential donors. MMA, according to a 2015 article in The Daily Beast, "operates from a posh Washington office space with a multi-million-dollar budget and nearly 100 employees." In 2014, The Nation stated that "Brock, in partnership with fundraiser Mary Pat Bonner—often described as his secret weapon—has turned out to be unparalleled at maintaining rich liberals' loyalty and support." An insider told The Nation that Brock and Bonner "are probably the most effective major-individual-donor fundraising team ever assembled in the independent-expenditure progressive world."
It was reported in June 2015 that when the House Select Committee on Benghazi questioned Sidney Blumenthal, committee members asked no fewer than 45 questions about Brock and Media Matters. The committee was reportedly interested in Sidney Blumenthal's paid work for Brock's nonprofits, and in the question of "whether Blumenthal and Brock did anything improper as they helped Clinton manage the political fallout from the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, while she was secretary of State."
The group had more than 80 staffers as of 2014. It has researchers based in Washington, D.C., plus "a national network of professional trackers" who follow the moves and statements of every conceivable contender for the Republican nomination. The Nation has described American Bridge as "the natural next step" after MMA, explaining that "Brock took the Media Matters method—which involves monitoring virtually every word uttered by the right-wing media—and transferred it to the realm of Republican politicians." Democratic operative Paul Begala told The Nation that in 2012 American Bridge "produced for us a 950-page book of every business deal of Mitt Romney's career. We spent something like $65 million 2012, and I believe every single ad was in some ways informed by Brock's research."
While CREW operates as a 501(c)3 nonprofit prohibited from engaging in partisan activity, Brock made clear he intends to create a more politically oriented arm registered under section 501(c)4, and also form a new overtly partisan watchdog group called The American Democracy Legal Fund registered under section 527, allowing it to engage in direct political activity. Along with Brock's election, consultant David Mercer and investor Wayne Jordan joined CREW's board of directors. When asked if CREW would still continue pursuing complaints against Democrats, Brock responded, "No party has a monopoly on corruption and at this early juncture, we are not making categorical statements about anything that we will and won't do. Having said that, our experience has been that the vast amount of violations of the public trust can be found on the conservative side of the aisle."
Calling the book a "trenchant j'accuse", Publishers Weekly said that parts of it "read like a fund-raising prospectus" for MMA but concluded that while "Brock's rhetorical venom and naked partisanship will alienate some readers ... his sharp-eyed reporting makes for a spirited challenge to business-as-usual political discourse." The Daily Beast described the book as "partly a sanitized summary of Brock's already exhaustively-chronicled personal history, partly an attack on the journalism establishment, and partly a call to arms on behalf of his favorite presidential candidate."
Hanna Rosin wrote that it reads like "pages that bullet-point Hillary's accomplishments as secretary of state or the achievements of the Clinton Foundation." Rosin alleged that the book attempted to whitewash any criticisms surrounding the Clintons. Rosin stated: "So dogged is Brock's devotion to Hillary that it often gets in the way of his being credible, not to mention interesting." Responding to Brock's criticism of The New York Times, Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the newspaper, told CNN: "David Brock is an opportunist and a partisan who specializes in personal attacks." Murphy complained that Brock's "partisanship has led him to lash out at some of our aggressive coverage of important political figures and it's unsurprising that he has now turned personal."
In October 2015, Brock gave a presentation at Georgetown University entitled "Is the Mainstream Media in Cahoots with Conservatives?".
Politico reported in January 2016 that Brock was preparing a new advertisement that would call on presidential candidate Bernie Sanders "to release his medical records before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1." Brock was subjected to a storm of criticism for this plan, and only hours after Politico's report, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta scolded Brock on Twitter. Later in January, Brock responded to a Sanders campaign ad by telling the Associated Press: "From this ad, it seems black lives don't matter much to Bernie Sanders", Sanders aides responded by accusing Brock of "mudslinging". Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement: "Bernie Sanders, as everyone knows, has one of the strongest civil rights records in Congress. He doesn't need lectures on civil rights and racial issues from David Brock, the head of a Hillary Clinton Super Pac." Briggs added: "Twenty-five years ago it was Brock – a mud-slinging, right-wing extremist – who tried to destroy Anita Hill, a distinguished African American law professor. He later was forced to apologize for his lies about her. Today, he is lying about Sen Sanders. It's bad enough that Hillary Clinton is raising millions in special-interest money in her Super Pacs. It is worse that she would hire a mudslinger like David Brock."
At a campaign event in Iowa in late January 2016, Bernie Sanders denied any plans to "bus in out-of-state college students to caucus for him", charging that this was a lie and attributing it to Brock. On February 8, 2016, after the near-tie in the Iowa caucuses between Clinton and Sanders, Brock told Politico that "Senator Sanders is trying to live in the purity bubble, and it needs to be burst." He described Sanders's efforts to link Clinton to Wall Street as an "artful smear", and, in a reference to the Democratic National Committee's passing of data to the Sanders campaign the previous December, said that Clinton "would've been hounded out of the race if her staff had done what his did, in stealing data and misleading the press about it, then raising money off it." Clinton's campaign, Brock insisted, "has stayed remarkably positive in the face of a relentlessly negative campaign from Sanders." As for Sanders's platform, Brock maintained that "a unanimous chorus of serious progressive commentators ... find almost nothing of any substantive value in his so-called policies."
In 2001, Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review that while Brock has been "hailed by liberals for 'coming clean,' they would never really trust him." He quoted reporter Jill Abramson as having said that "the problem with Brock's credibility" is that "once you admit you've knowingly written false things, how do you know when to believe what he writes?" Similarly, The Guardian referred in 2014 to "residual unease among some liberal operatives that Brock's conversion story fits into a pattern of opportunism and self-promotion rather than ideological transformation." Observing in 2015 that Brock had admitted to mudslinging before, The Daily Beast noted a difficulty in dispatching fears he would do it again. Brock's claim that the Clintons have never committed any wrongdoing has received criticisms from many, including fellow Democrats, who have cited instances of abuse.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks criticized Brock's negative coverage of the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, specifically the alleged invention of the "Bernie Bro" controversy. Uygur said that Brock's January 10, 2017, open letter of apology to Sanders and his voters, was disingenuous because it was motivated by a desire to raise money from wealthy Democratic donors and to foster a perception of himself as being a member of the U.S. progressive movement.
Journalism career
Conservative journalism
The Real Anita Hill
Troopergate
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham
Changing sides
Blinded by the Right
The Republican Noise Machine
Political operative career
Media Matters for America
Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign
American Bridge 21st Century
Correct the Record
Priorities USA Action
The American Democracy Legal Fund
American Independent Institute
CREW
Killing the Messenger
Purchase of Blue Nation Review
Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign
Activism to bring forth sexual assault allegations
Personal life
Reception
Books
External links
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