By Kevin Foley
You’d think C. Boyden Gray, the high-powered Washington attorney and conservative insider, would have better things to do than try to silence a progressive web site.
Gray, who served in both Bush administrations, now runs a D.C. law firm. In July, he petitioned the Internal Review Service, charging that MediaMatters for America was “engaged in a pattern of unlawful conduct” and demanded that MMA’s tax exempt status be revoked.
The law-breaking, says Gray, is a partisan “war on Fox News” aimed at eviscerating the network’s advertising income.
Founded by reformed conservative operative David Brock in 2004, MMA is “dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
MMA, which is tax exempt, accomplishes this by posting video and audio clips of conservative commentary in full and in context. And, yes, Fox hosts and guests regularly appear on MMA’s web site along with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart and many other conservative pundits and pols.
Gray thinks tax payers shouldn’t subsidize MediaMatters because he maintains MMA “attacks” Fox News and the Republican Party, infringing on their First Amendment rights. But what Gray calls an attack, others see as holding conservatives in the media accountable for what they say.
For example, if you baselessly call the President Obama a “racist,” as Glenn Beck did on Fox, MMA wants everyone in America to see and hear you do it. The former shock jock lost his gig after advertisers abandoned his Fox show in droves due in large part to MMA’s relentless coverage of Beck’s scurrilous rants.
So what’s Gray’s real problem? Why would a guy paid many hundreds of dollars an hour waste his legal brain on Brock’s web site? The answer comes when you begin to sift through Gray’s C.V.
Gray, it seems, serves on the FreedomWorks Foundation Board. FreedomWorks is one of the conservative PR outfits behind the faux “grass roots” Tea Party movement. It’s fronted by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers who despise the limelight along with Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, the EPA, the Department of Education, and government regulation of any kind.
FreedomWorks’ mission is to convince middle and working class voters they should be against the same things, too, even though many of the same folks benefit from these and other government programs, agencies and regulations.
Getting people to vote against their own best interests is no mean trick, but FreedomWorks manages to do it by exploiting fear, anger and ignorance through the ever pliant conservative media.
MediaMatters routinely exposes FreedomWorks’ machinations, which is no doubt annoying to Armey and his benefactors and also explains Gray’s out-of-the-blue interest in MMA’s tax status.
So it was ironic when C. Boyden himself showed up on Fox News August 5 to discuss his IRS petition. During the interview, neither Gray nor the host mentioned the attorney’s affiliation with FreedomWorks, a glaring omission.
Within hours, Gray’s entire segment was posted on MMA’s web site because it’s precisely the sort of conservative deception MMA wants Americans to see.
Marcus Owens, a former director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the IRS, says Gray’s complaint is going nowhere: “…we have MediaMatters and we have Brent Bozell and the Media Research Center (a conservative media watchdog, also tax exempt), and we have all kinds of (tax exempt) organizations doing the same thing.”
If he really believes in FreedomWorks’ principles, the way for Gray to make MediaMatters irrelevant isn’t to undermine its tax status. It’s to be honest and transparent about what FreedomWorks really is and who it really represents.
Then let the voters decide.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |