Digging in the Dirt with David Brock

Battleground with Amanda Litman and Faiz Shakir

The Recount

Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“In conservative media, there’s an incentive to put out misinformation, and to essentially lie.” David Brock, founder of Media Matters — a rightwing media watchdog group — knows exactly how the conservative media ecosystem works, because that’s where he cut his teeth. For the first half of his career as a journalist, David got caught up in what he now describes as a cult, working at places like the Washington Examiner and the Heritage Foundation, until he managed to break ranks and turn against them. David joins Amanda this week to discuss the unconscionable actions of Fox News, his efforts to create robust media infrastructure for Democrats and progressives, and the struggle to get investors on the left to pay attention to Virginia’s elections, despite their massive importance to the Democratic party heading into 2022. Plus: while the rest of the world enjoys an average of 26 weeks paid maternity leave, the great USofA and our highly functional legislative branch can’t even manage a measly four. Cool.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Amanda Littman and this is Battleground, a podcast from the recount.
0:11.3	My guest this week is David Brock, who's the founder of both Media Matters for America,
0:15.7	a progressive media watchdog group, and American Bridge 21st century, a Democratic Superpack.
0:22.1	I wanted to talk to David because one of the ongoing issues we'd come up against with
0:25.9	this podcast is the failure for Democrats to build a broad media ecosystem that will go
0:31.2	up against Trump.
0:33.0	And media matters, while not exactly apples for apples, does a really good job of tracking
0:38.3	what's going on on the Republican right, and at least giving both reporters and activists
0:42.4	the tools they need to combat it.
0:44.4	And American Bridge is one of the largest spenders of ads and trackers and upper research
0:49.9	in a way that I thought was really interesting to ask David about how that even matters in
0:54.5	a world where Republicans no longer feel shame.
0:57.5	But before we get to my conversation with David, I want to talk about paid leave.
1:02.6	Right now the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to not guarantee any
1:07.4	paid leave for workers and one of only six total not to have any paid maternity leave.
1:14.2	Only about 20% of private sector workers have access to paid family leave.
1:18.8	There are a few states that have programs California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York,
1:22.8	Washington, DC and Massachusetts.
1:25.3	But we know research has shown that paid family paid maternity and paternity leave helps
1:29.8	parents establish bonds with kids.
1:31.5	It improves on time vaccination rates.
1:33.2	It reduces infant house bill admissions.
	...

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