David Brock

David Brock was a prominent conservative journalist of the 1990s who in 1998 became a liberal and now works to dismantle the conservative media "machine" of which he was once a part. He tells his personal story in his memoir Blinded by the Right and describes how it operates in The Republican Noise Machine. His work on the latter book led him to found Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization that describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."http://mediamatters.org/etc/about.html

Transformation

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 dollar advance and a tight one-year deadline from Simon & Schuster's 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 claimed 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 claimed 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.

Related Topics:
Biography - Hillary Clinton - The Seduction of Hillary Rodham - Simon & Schuster's - 2002 - Gay

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In July 1997, Brock published a confessional piece in Esquire magazine titled "I Was a Conservative Hit Man," in which he recanted much of what he said in his two best-known Spectator articles, as well as 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.

Related Topics:
1997 - Esquire - Hillary Clinton

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