David_Brock

A leader in the burgeoning progressive movement, David Brock is the founder and CEO of Media Matters for America, a progressive media research and information center dedicated to holding our news media accountable. Brock’s leadership at Media Matters has had a profound impact on the national media debate.

Media Matters uses fact-based analysis and research to provide much needed accountability over a conservative dominated national media. Since its inception in 2004, Media Matters has released over 23,000 detailed research items debunking conservative misinformation in the media.

Brock is also the author of five books, including The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (Crown, May 2004). In his preceding book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (Crown, March 2002), a 2002 New York Times best-selling political memoir, he chronicled his years as a conservative media insider. Brock's latest book, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media (Vintage Anchor, April 2008), co-authored with Paul Waldman, was a case study of the national media's uniquely favorable treatment of Sen. John McCain over the course of his career and was named a Washington Post best-seller.

Brock was the recipient of the New Democrat Network's first award for political entrepreneurship. He currently serves on the board of the Progressive Legislative Action Network, an organization that supports progressive state legislators, and on the editorial advisory board of the Progressive Book Club.

Brock began his career among conservative media in the late 1980s as a writer and senior editor at Insight magazine, a sister publication of the Washington Times. In 1991 Brock returned to the Washington Times as an editorial page writer after serving as a John M. Olin Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. In 1993 he joined The American Spectator as an investigative writer. He formally renounced his ties to the conservative movement in June 1997 and, in 2002, published Blinded by the Right.

Brock is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.