Media Matters for America

Website

In Brief:

The leading progressive news watchdog organization and plays an increasing role in providing proactive messaging for the progressive community. It comprehensively monitors, analyzes, and corrects conservative misinformation and inaccuracies in the media, and it holds the media accountable for how it presents policy initiatives at the heart of the progressive agenda. Media Matters also generates content through its original research and analysis and disseminates messages and frames.

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Launched in May 2004, Media Matters put in place, for the first time, the means to systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation – news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda – every day, in real time.

Using the website mediamatters.org as the principal vehicle for disseminating research and information, Media Matters posts rapid-response items as well as longer research and analytic reports documenting conservative misinformation throughout the media. Additionally, Media Matters works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and to take direct action against offending media institutions.

The Resistance

Following the 2016 election, under new leadership, MMFA set its sights on countering the fake news/disinformation crisis as well as better understanding the implications of audience fragmentation for the movement. Accordingly, MMFA made significant investments in technology and infrastructure and also reorganized internally to more flexibly respond to requests for research, information, and statistics from partners as they fight against anti-choice efforts, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim policies, white nationalism, “men’s rights” activism, and more. Notably, as the right wing takes aim at social media platforms with cries of bias, MMFA continues to hold the platforms accountable by debunking conservative lies and thwarting their attempt to game the refs in order to rig the system in their favor.