Sunday, April 14, 2019

In Six Weeks, Media Matters for America Tweets About Fox News 167 Times

    Media Matters for America describes itself as "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." But a review of MMFA's tweets finds that a single network receives the lion's share of MMFA"s attention.
    In an article picked up widely across the media, MMFA reported under the headline "Six weeks of Fox's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez obsession": "In the six weeks from February 25 and April 7, her name was mentioned 3,181 times on Fox News and Fox Business[.]"
    Now a review of the Twitter account of Media Matters for America by The Script finds that during the same time period (2/25-4/7/19) Fox was reviewed by MMFA for Ocasio-Cortez references, MMFA tweeted about Fox 167 times. In contrast, other news networks were mentioned by MMFA as follows: CNN, 13; NBC, 4; ABC, MSNBC, and CBS, 2 times each.
    As of 1:45 PM on Sunday, April 14, there were 39 references to Fox on the website homepage of Media Matters. Other news networks mentioned on the page: NBC, 3; CBS, MSNBC and CNN, 1; ABC, 0.
    While MMFA's description of its mission is "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting... U.S. media," it does limit itself to weeding out "conservative misinformation."