"What happened after the Obama election, I think, is that Fox morphed into something that isn’t even recognizable as a form of media."

"It looks more like a political committee than what it looked like pre-Obama, which was essentially talk radio on television. It’s more dangerous now; it’s more lethal. And so as Fox has doubled down, we’ve doubled down."

We  = David Brock and his Foxophobic enterprise Media Matters for America.

Brock has used his buck-raking ability to turn Media Matters into a political force. What began in 2004 as a ten-person shop with a $3 million annual budget now has around 90 employees and plans to spend $15 million this year. In a fancy office building on Massachusetts Avenue, the organization’s researchers work in six-hour monitoring shifts, from five in the morning till one at night, watching Fox or listening to talk radio in the hope that Rush or Sean or some other conservative yakker will step in it. They’re seldom disappointed. “I knew that as soon as you started shining a light on these people,” Brock says, “there was enough outrageous and despicable and offensive and false commentary that you could make a splash.”

I appreciate their work! Keep clipping those clips and serving them up. As you monitor FoxNews and Limbaugh, I'll monitor you and whatever the hell you've morphed into. To me, it's all recognizable as media. And I'm always looking for juicy bits to chew on.

Part of Media Matters’ strength is its staff’s almost unfathomable endurance. “People who work here have to have a personality that enjoys getting angry watching Fox for six hours every day but then being patient enough to want to fact-check every second of it,” explains Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters’ executive vice-president. 

Ha. I love the way New York Magazine, writing this lengthy piece, goes to the Media Matters executives. I'd like to hear from those employees who do the detail work, "getting angry" for the rich execs. They're supposed to be all about truth and anger and for the left...  always for the left. How does that feel, as you comb through all those video files, looking for trouble truth — but only one perspective of the truth — and cull the clips that make the truth that your bosses want to tell as truthy as possible? Are you angry enough all the time, angry in the right way, angry about truth as you do the bidding of guys who are raking in money to get at the people you're paid to hate for them? What are you paid?

The group demands accuracy from those staffers. Last year, according to Rabin-Havt, Media Matters produced 20,000 pieces of content and issued only 24 corrections. “There’s the expectation that you can’t get something wrong,” he says. “There are consequences for mistakes. One person was fired for an error last year.”

Oh! How ineffably virtuous of you! Get to work, staffers! Stay angry, stay truthy, cut clips that stoke hatred of the right, but don't cut them to the point where we have to issue a correction, or we will cut you.

(Hey, that guy who got cut should write an exposé of what goes on inside Media Matters.)