David Brock

David Brock (born July 23, 1962) is an American liberal political consultant, author, and commentator who founded the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. He has been described by ''Time'' as "one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party".

Brock began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter during the 1990s. He wrote the book '' The Real Anita Hill'' and the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. In the late-1990s, he switched sides, aligning himself with the Democratic Party and in particular with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2004, he founded Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization which describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media". He has since also founded super PACs called American Bridge 21st Century and Correct the Record, has become a board member of the super PAC Priorities USA Action and has been elected chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Brock left Media Matters in November 2022.

Early life and education

David Brock was born in Hackensack, New Jersey and was adopted by Dorothea and Raymond Brock.Stated in Brock's ''Blinded by the Right'' He has a younger sister, Regina, who was also adopted. Brock was raised Catholic. His father, whom Brock has described as "a Pat Buchanan conservative", was a marketing executive.

Brock grew up in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, where he went to Our Lady of the Assumption School, and later attended Paramus Catholic High School in Paramus, New Jersey. During his sophomore year of high school, Brock's family moved to the Dallas, Texas, area where Brock attended Newman Smith High School. Brock became editor of his high school newspaper, which he says he "fashioned into a crusading liberal weekly in the middle of the Reaganite Sunbelt".

Brock attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked as a reporter and editor for ''The Daily Californian'', the campus newspaper. Brock arrived at college as a liberal Democrat, but at Berkeley he was "repelled by the culture of doctrinaire leftism" and turned to the political right. The turning point came with a column supporting the US invasion of Grenada that he wrote for ''The Daily Californian'' and that led to demands he resign from the newspaper staff. "I thought it was McCarthyism of the left", Brock later said. "I thought it was extremely intolerant." He then founded a neoconservative weekly, the ''Berkeley Journal''.

He graduated from Berkeley with a B.A. in history in 1985.

Journalism career

Conservative journalism

While he was at Berkeley, Brock contributed an op-ed to ''The Wall Street Journal'' entitled "Combating Those Campus Marxists". It drew the attention of John Podhoretz, who at the time was the editor of ''Insight'', a weekly newsmagazine published by ''The Washington Times''. Podhoretz flew Brock to Washington, D.C., for an interview and hired him as a writer of the weekly conservative news magazine ''Insight on the News'', a sister publication of ''The Washington Times'', a job Brock took up in 1986.

After working at ''Insight'', Brock spent some time as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

''The Real Anita Hill''

In March 1992, in a 17,000-word article for ''The American Spectator'', Brock challenged the claims of Anita Hill, who had accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Shortly thereafter Brock became a full-time staff member at that publication. In 1993, Brock expanded his article into a book, ''The Real Anita Hill''. Brock's description of Hill in the book as "a bit nutty and a bit slutty" was widely quoted.

The book became a best-seller. It was later attacked in a book review in ''The New Yorker'' by Jane Mayer, a reporter for ''The New Yorker'', and Jill Abramson, who was at that time a reporter for ''The Wall Street Journal''. The two later expanded their article into the book ''Strange Justice'', which cast Anita Hill in a much more sympathetic light. It, too, was a best-seller. Brock replied to their book with a book review of his own in ''The American Spectator''. In that review, he asserted that Mayer and Abramson had no evidence to claim that Clarence Thomas was a habitual user of pornography. Later, in his book ''Blinded by the Right'', he wrote, "When I wrote those words, I knew they were false. I put a lie in print."

Troopergate

In a January 1994 ''The American Spectator'' story about Bill Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas, Brock, by then on staff at the magazine, made accusations that bred Troopergate. Among other things, the story contained the first printed reference to Paula Jones, referring to a woman named "Paula" who state troopers said offered to be Clinton's partner. Jones called Brock's account of her encounter with Clinton "totally wrong", and she later sued Clinton for sexual harassment, a case that became entangled in the independent counsel's investigation of the Whitewater controversy, and set in motion a series of developments that led to the exposure of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and, ultimately, to Clinton's impeachment trial. The story received an award later that year from Joseph Farah's Western Journalism Center, and was partially responsible for a rise in the magazine's circulation. Brock later recanted much of what he had written about Clinton and Jones.

''The Seduction of Hillary Rodham''

After the success of ''The Real Anita Hill'', Simon & Schuster's then-conservative-focused Free Press subsidiary paid Brock a large advance to write a book about Hillary Clinton. The expectation was that it would be a takedown in the style of his writings on Anita Hill and Bill Clinton. The project, however, took a different turn, and the resulting book, ''The Seduction of Hillary Rodham'', proved to be largely sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton. Given the large advance and tight one-year deadline by Free Press, Brock was under tremendous pressure to produce another bestseller. However, the book contained no major scoops. In ''Blinded by the Right'' (2002), Brock said that he had reached a turning point: he had thoroughly examined charges against the Clintons, could not find any evidence of wrongdoing and did not want to make any more misleading claims. Brock further said that his former friends in right-wing politics shunned him because ''Seduction'' did not adequately attack the Clintons. ''National Review'' proposed another theory: since "no liberal source in the world would talk to Brock", he could not collect the kind of information he was after. ''National Review'' also suggested that while writing the book, Brock had been "seduced" by Sidney Blumenthal, a champion and friend of the Clinton circle.

When the book came out, it was widely criticized for not breaking any new ground. John Balzar, reviewing the book in the ''Los Angeles Times'', called it " haustive to the point of exhaustion" and "predictably critical but unexpectedly measured, at least in comparison to what Beltway gossips anticipated". James B. Stewart, reviewing the book in ''The New York Times'', said that Brock had "tried to do his subject justice in the broadest sense" but added that " times he goes too far", often "echo ngher apologists" and "dismiss ngor rationaliz ngthe sometimes powerful evidence that Hillary Rodham Clinton has lied ... by invoking a relativism rooted in Republican precedents."

Changing sides

''The Nation'' has described Brock as a "conservative journalistic assassin turned progressive empire-builder" while ''National Review'' has called him a "right-wing assassin turned left-wing assassin" and ''Politico'' has profiled him as a "former right-wing journalist-turned-pro-Clinton crusader".

In July 1997, ''Esquire'' magazine published a confessional piece by Brock entitled "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man" in which he recanted much of what he said in his two best-known ''American Spectator'' articles and criticized his own reporting methods. Discouraged at the reaction his Hillary Clinton biography received, he said, "I ... want out. David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead." Four months later, ''The American Spectator'' declined to renew his employment contract, under which he was being paid over $300,000 per year.

Writing again for ''Esquire'' in April 1998, Brock apologized to Clinton for his yellow journalism about Troopergate.

In 2001, Brock accused one of his former sources, Terry Wooten, of leaking FBI files for use in his book about Anita Hill. Brock defended his betrayal of a confidential source by saying, "I've concluded that what I was involved in wasn't journalism, it was a political operation, and I was part of it. ... So I don't think the normal rules of journalism would apply to what I was doing". Wooten denies the accusation.

''Blinded by the Right''

Brock's book ''Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative'' was published in 2002. In this book, an "outgrowth" of ''Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man'', Brock charted what the ''Daily Beast'' called his "remarkable metamorphosis to ardent acolyte from sworn enemy of Bill and Hillary Clinton." Brock apologized for his attacks on the Clintons and Anita Hill and claimed that he had now risen above character assassination. He wrote that he had been "a mad dog, an emotional monster", "a whore for the cash", "a Jew in Hitler's army", and "a witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine", and asserted that he hadn't known "what good reporting was".

Many critics responded with skepticism to Brock's claim to have reformed himself. The reviewer for ''The Washington Post'' wrote that Brock "quotes the worst things critics said about him, and agrees with every word". Christopher Hitchens, in ''The Nation'', called Brock's book "an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation", and declared that Brock was failing to state the truth. These and other critics noted that Brock, while claiming to feel remorse for his attacks on the Clintons and professing to have put personal assaults behind him, now seemed as eager to go after targets on the right as he had once gone after targets on the left. Hitchens responded with disgust, for example, to Brock's "coarse attack" in the book on Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused Bill Clinton of rape, but denied the rape under oath. Hitchens was particularly harsh, stating that Brock "inserts a completely gratuitous slander against a decent woman, all of whose independent assertions have survived meticulous fact-checking".

Many readers on the left, however, greeted the book with enthusiasm, and eagerly welcomed Brock. This was especially true of the Clintons. Shortly after the book's publication, Bill Clinton phoned Brock at home and praised it lavishly. Later, according to ''Politico'', "Brock was invited to the former president's Harlem office where he was shocked to discover Clinton had purchased dozens of copies — and stuffed them into a big cabinet". Clinton, it turned out, was mailing them to friends across the country. Clinton "insisted" that Brock contact his speaking agent and give talks around the country attacking conservatives. According to ''The Nation'', Democratic donors "loved Brock's conversion story, particularly since he'd been inside the machine they hoped to replicate." Brock's book is seen as having propelled him into a favorable position among the Democratic Party establishment.

''The Republican Noise Machine''

Brock directly addressed the right-wing "machine" in his 2004 book, ''The Republican Noise Machine'', in which he detailed an alleged interconnected, concerted effort to raise the profile of conservative opinions in the press through false accusations of liberal media bias, dishonest and highly partisan columnists, partisan news organizations and academic studies, and other methods.

''Publishers Weekly'' (''PW'') described it as a "blistering j'accuse" that, compared to ''Blinded by the Right'', was "a less gossipy and more systematic assault on the right-wing media juggernaut." Brock, according to ''PW'', depicted the mainstream media as being "cowed by spurious charges of 'liberal bias'" and as therefore having "abandoned their role as objective arbiters of truth in favor of an uncritical airing of partisan ideology in the name of 'balance.'" ''PW'' stated that Brock could not "be accused of nonpartisanship".

Also in 2004, he featured briefly in the BBC
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