David Brock - Shift To The Left

Shift To The Left

Three years later, Brock surprised conservatives by publishing a somewhat sympathetic biography of Hillary Clinton, titled The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. Having received a $1 million advance and a tight one-year deadline from Simon & Schuster's then-conservative-focused Free Press subsidiary, Brock was under tremendous pressure to produce another best-seller. 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. He also argued that his "friends" had not really been friends at all, due to the open secret that Brock was gay.

In July 1997, Brock published a confessional piece in Esquire magazine titled "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 contributions to Troopergate, calling it simply part of an anti-Clinton crusade. He told a more detailed story of his time inside the right wing in his 2002 memoir, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, in which he settled old scores and provided inside details about the Arkansas Project's efforts to bring down Clinton. Later, he also apologized to Anita Hill.

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."

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. Also in 2004, he featured briefly in the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, where he stated that the Arkansas Project engaged in political terrorism.

About the same time he founded Media Matters for America, an Internet-based progressive media group "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

Brock announced in 2010 that he was forming a super-PAC, American Bridge, to help elect liberal Democrats, starting with the 2012 election cycle. In describing Brock's intentions for the super-PAC, The New York Times referred to Brock as a "prominent Democratic political operative" (mirrored by The Washington Post's characterization of him as a "former journalist-turned-political operative") and New York Magazine referred to Brock's "hyperpartisanship."

On February 27, 2012, it was revealed Brock had paid his domestic partner $850,000 "after being threatened with damaging information involving the organization’s donors and the IRS – a deal that Brock later characterized as a blackmail payment".