Astroturf Progressive Media Critic Bill Menezes Attacks Conservative Media as “Astroturf”

by elpresidente | 10:34 am, June 18, 2010 | Comments Off

Last week, former Rocky Mountain News media critic and Colorado Independent contributor Jason Salzman profiled Bill Menezes, the former director of Colorado Media Matters. Salzman sought to elicit Menezes’ take on the current state of Colorado journalism–an ironic turn of events given that Menezes spent roughly three years beating up on traditional media outlets (and former employers) for demonstrating a bias of alleged “conservative misinformation” on behalf of CMM’s sponsors, including the Colorado Democracy Alliance and big-wig progressive donors (The Blueprint, Schrager and Witwer, p. 135). In return, Menezes was feted as a local media guru and paid handsomely for his efforts, something he fails to mention in his conversation with Salzman (though he has mentioned it elsewhere).

As part of his criticism, Menezes points to what he views as the failure of the Denver Post’s new political blog The Spot, which he views as replete with “full-time gossip columnists” and distinctly lacking in hard-hitting, story-breaking attentiveness. He also laments the lack of “interaction” with the blog’s audience. Both charges are interesting. CMM’s posts rarely attracted more than a handful of responses on the blog itself (that wasn’t the point–the press releases issued were far more important), and despite his calls for a focus on “breaking news,” CMM rarely did more than provide transcriptions of local radio commentators, with annotations alleging “conservative misinformation” and other charges of bias and distortion. While CMM called the personalities and media outlets to account publicly, this hardly constituted “breaking news.”

But Menezes’s charges are, of course, debatable, depending on your point of view. His goal for CMM was “fact-based research and activism” meant to “challenge local media every day.” (Blueprint, 136) Combatting alleged conservative bias was the raison d’etre of CMM, and among its chief tools was pin-pointed, highly detailed, fact-checking accuracy.

On that account, Menezes ultimately fails.

Menezes parts with a critique “right-wing” news outlets that have filled the media void as traditional outlets downsize or outright disappear:

“I believe the weaknesses in Colorado journalism have created a competitive void, one that ominously is filling up with what can only be described as “astroturf” new media outlets. The right-wing think tank Independence Institute alone accounts in one way or another for three of them — Colorado News Agency, Complete Colorado and Face the State. None of these three profess to adhere to a standard journalism code of ethics and their “work” sometimes gets aggregated by other “news” organizations such as State Bill Colorado that do not routinely identify the political and financial ties the three have with conservative donors. A State Bill reader who sees a Colorado News Agency article has no idea it’s being produced by a right-wing organization which actively is promoting and campaigning for its own political agenda.”

For someone like Menezes to cast aspersions–”astroturf new media outlets”–while having himself led the most well-funded and, until CoDA documents were released in 2008, well-hidden “astroturf new media outlet” on the left (well-hidden in terms of its relationship to other left-wing organizations and progressive funders) draws his judgment into serious question. After this accusation, however, Menezes’s fact-checking prowess suddenly evaporates. The Colorado News Agency does, in fact, explicitly mention its affiliation with the Independence Institute–”a project of the Independence Institute”–on its “about” page, as does Complete Colorado. CMM, in (shocking) contrast, never mentioned its affiliations, CoDA or otherwise, on its “about” page, except for the obvious link to Media Matters for America.

Finally, Face the State has never been affiliated or operated under the auspices of the Independence Institute. There may have been overlaps in staff, but the new media outlet run by Brad Jones (in its original or newly relaunched format) can not be accounted for “one way or another” by I.I.

“I’d love to have Face the State run out of I.I. so I can take credit for all the great work they’ve done!” quipped Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute. In fact, even CMM highlighted Jones’s refusal to name his political benefactors in 2007, when he appeared on Caldara’s Independent Thinking television show.

Jones adds, “”As much as I love Caldara, he’s not my boss. Besides, he’s notoriously cheap and couldn’t afford me.” He continued, “FTS and Independence are completely separate entities, which Menezes would know if he bothered to ask.”

So much for that vaunted fact-checking.

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