Shills, Paid or Otherwise

So Sebastian muses about the Joyce Tagline that’s appearing under anti-gun articles and blog posts as of late. It reads as such:

This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.

Sebastian suspects that it has to do with the allotment of funds. There have been many instances where people placing that tag on a post have been questioned about the transfers of funds. So far all but ONE have been ignored to my knowledge. That response is here insinuated by Thirdpower . The response was this:

Thanks for asking. I am paid nothing, am a board member of the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort and have been writing about firearms violence issues for years.

I’m curious about this. Is there no exchange for this tag? If so why is the tag used so intermittently? Go have a look at Joan Peterson’s site. She has intermittent posts with and without tags. ALL of her posts are anti-gun, and the tag appears on her more essay-like posts as well as her aggregation of “Gun Death” and “Gun Crime” posts. So why some and not others?

Note that the above quote says HE is paid nothing, but he does talk about his affiliation with the Joyce foundation. I suspect maybe the astroturf org is being paid, such as WAVE or Protect Minnesota in the case of Joan Peterson.

The fact that the text is IDENTICAL in both text and location on the post that there must be some policy email from the Joyce Foundation or its subordinate Media Matters floating around. If anybody has, or can acquire that email I think everybody would love to read it.

I’ll also note that sadly there is no such entity for the pro-gun side. If I could get paid to do this I’d quit my job today.

**UPDATE**Joan Has a new post up this morning and no tag. There has got to be SOME exchange for this.

This entry was posted in Guns, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

0 Responses to Shills, Paid or Otherwise

  1. Bubblehead Les says:

    Funny how the Commies were Raising Cain when some Bush-era people came out and said they were Paid to say Nice things, yet no one form the IRS or the DOJ is touching Media Matters. A “Fellowship Grant?” Since when did Media Matters Qualify as a .EDU?

  2. Bubblehead Les says:

    Sorry, that’s “from”. BTW, The Miller has questions about Shoulder Holsters. Help a brother out, okay?

  3. Pingback: Fun with Antis : Newbie Shooter

  4. 45er says:

    Weird! (I mean, Weer’d!) Circular search result is circular. The link you sent took me to a results page that had a link that brought me right back here. Queue Twilight Zone music.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *