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The Republican National Committee has gained an unlikely ally in its effort to get CNN and NBC to nix their plans for Hillary Clinton programming: Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog group known best for its attacks on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
On Tuesday, Media Matters founder David Brock told reporters that he sent letters to NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt and CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker in support of letters from RNC chairman Reince Priebus asking that CNN ditch plans for a documentary film on Clinton and NBC cancel a planned miniseries on the same topic.
Brock wrote that since the projects “could coincide with a potential Clinton presidential campaign, the timing raises too many questions about the fairness and conflicts of interest ahead of the 2016 election.”
On Monday, Priebus threatened to blackball CNN and NBC from Republican primary debates if they didn’t give up their quests to air programming it assumed would be flattering to Clinton just ahead of her presumed run for president in 2016.
That Priebus and the GOP would find solidarity with Media Matters is unusual, to say the least, since the organization routinely makes war on conservatives like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and others. It was particularly harsh on the GOP’s most recent presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
On the flip side, talk-radio hosts and conservative pundits in general routinely belittle Media Matters as a tax-free mouthpiece for the Democratic party and especially for President Barack Obama, as well as for one of its donors, billionaire investor George Soros.
In his letter to Greenblatt, Brock writes: “How will your network respond to the right-wing noise machine that is already pressuring you to adopt its ideological lens on Clinton. Fox News has already done segments suggesting the miniseries will be ‘airbrushed’ or ‘revisionist history’ if it doesn’t include phony scandals like ‘Travelgate,’ ‘Filegate,’ and ‘Whitewater.’ The threat of misinformation and distortions is too high.”
E-mail: Paul.Bond@THR.com
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