Missouri's ridiculous lawfare against Media Matters
Missouri's ridiculous lawfare against Media Matters
AG Andrew Bailey is punishing the watchdog group for making Elon Musk sad.
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Move over Ken Paxton! There’s a new crazy state attorney general in town, and he’s coming for your crooked crown.
Last week, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey “sued” Media Matters for America (MMFA) in the Circuit Court of Cole County. Then he raced to the microphone to congratulate himself all over conservative media for being a brave little warrior for free speech.
"What we can’t have is a market manipulation in the form of a corporate pressure campaign based on lies to destroy one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech,” he crowed to podcast host Benny Johnson, before launching into an extended ode to Elon Musk, larded with rightwing meme mongering.
In reality, AG Bailey didn’t sue MMFA to protect free speech. He went after MMFA to punish it for saying things that pissed off the increasingly unstable owner of X (or twitter). And he didn’t really sue MMFA at all — he just asked a judge to enforce a subpoena immediately, before MMFA had even been served, to prevent it from asking a federal judge to intervene and protect its First Amendment rights.
Which actually makes AG Bailey the government censor he pretends to be fighting.
The world’s most thin-skinned billionaire
The trouble started back in November 2023, just a year after Musk’s cringeworthy attempt to memify his takeover by wandering into Twitter’s headquarters carrying an actual sink.
The billionaire’s increasingly erratic behavior had advertisers edging toward the door, particularly his embrace of the racist “Great Replacement” theory. But then MMFA, a progressive media watchdog group, published a story by senior investigative reporter Eric Hananoki showing screenshots of explicitly pro-Nazi content on the site next to ads from major corporations like Apple, Xfinity, IBM, and Oracle. (The images below show how ads for the companies like were served next to Nazi content.)
Twitter’s putative CEO Linda Yaccarino had assured nervous brands that they would be “protected” from this sort of thing, and in the days that followed, multiple major companies, including Apple and IBM, paused their ad spending on the platform.
As is his habit, Musk responded by throwing a very public tantrum.
“The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company,” he tweeted, accusing MMFA of seeking to “manipulate the public and advertisers” by screwing with twitter’s algorithm.
Essentially, MMFA created a new account and followed a lot of Nazi content while simultaneously blocking ads for the janky shower scrubbers and pancake makeup that clog the normal twitter feed these days. That’s not fraud; it’s doing exactly what twitter users do — following certain accounts while blocking annoying ones.
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“Once they curated their feed, they repeatedly refreshed their timelines to find a rare instance of ads serving next to the content they chose to follow,” Musk fumed. “Our logs indicate that they forced a scenario resulting in 13 times the number of ads served compared to the median ads served to an X user.”
Musk’s insistence that almost no one saw the ads juxtaposed with pro-Hitler posts only served to confirm the accuracy of Hananoki’s reporting. Nevertheless, twitter did actually file a complaint against MMFA the next day in the federal courthouse in Fort Worth.
The lawsuit is offensively stupid, not least because the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not allow a plaintiff from California to drag a defendant from DC all the way to Texas on the theory that posting something online subjects the speaker to jurisdiction in any courthouse in the country. It’s part of a pattern of abusive litigation by Musk’s companies, forcing his targets to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight off garbage lawsuits. The process itself is the punishment, even if the victims ultimately prevail in court.
The PICK ME AGs
Back in November, as Musk was raging, Trump’s former hate speech writer Stephen Miller demanded to know why Republican state prosecutors weren’t rushing to defend Saint Elon’s sacred honor.
“Fraud is both a civil and criminal violation,” he tweeted pointedly. “There are 2 dozen+ conservative state Attorneys General.”
Of course, there was no fraud, as Musk himself had just confirmed. But when Musk responded to Miller, “Interesting. Both civil and criminal …” the Missouri AG replied within hours that his office was “looking into this matter.”
But first … Texas
AG Bailey has only been in office for a year, so he’s a little less quick on the evil draw than Texas AG Ken Paxton, who’s held the office since 2015.
On November 20, Paxton announced that “We are examining the issue closely to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.”
And he meant it! Paxton’s office issued an immediate subpoena for “all documents related to internal and external communications relating to [Hananoki’s] article,” including internal reporting documents, as well as demands to paw through MMFA’s finances.
MMFA responded by seeking an injunction in federal court in DC, along with a court order declaring that Paxton’s subpoena “constitutes a First Amendment retaliatory action in violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution” and ruling that “courts in the State of Texas cannot exercise personal jurisdiction over Plaintiffs in any imminent action to enforce the Demand.”
In its complaint, MMFA alleged that Paxton’s saber-rattling “chilled Media Matters’s and Hananoki’s speech and press activities.”
Draft articles [Hananoki] intended to publish about extremism on X were cut for fear of generating documents that would be subject to Paxton’s Demand and further retaliation from Paxton. In fact, since Paxton launched his investigation, Hananoki has not published any stories about the rise of extremist rhetoric in the wake of Musk’s ownership after consistently doing so for months.
Hananoki’s diminished reporting output is not for lack of story ideas. Since Paxton’s investigation began, Hananoki has continued generating potential story ideas regarding extremist content on X but has not pursued them for fear of retaliation.
That action remains pending before Judge Amit Mehta. But in the meantime, AG Bailey wasn’t going to get tripped up by those fancypants MMFA lawyers trying to assert their client’s constitutional rights.
The best defense (against the First Amendment) is a good offense
Last Monday, March 25, AG Bailey issued a subpoena to MMFA demanding financial information on all the nonprofit’s donors in Missouri, including their names and banking institutions. The civil investigative demand (CID) had a return date of April 15, but the very same day Bailey marched into court and asked a judge to preemptively find the nonprofit in default.
First he made scurrilous claims about MMFA defrauding its donors, while praising Musk for his dedication to the First Amendment.
Media Matters, a self-styled not-for-profit “progressive research and information center,” envisions itself monitoring, analyzing, and correcting “conservative misinformation” in the U.S. media. In fact, this description falls far short of reality for this political activist organization. Instead, rather than passively “monitoring,” Media Matters has used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to trick advertisers into removing their advertisements from X, formerly Twitter, one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech in America.
Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy X, because they cannot control it. And because they cannot control it, or the free speech platform it provides to Missourians to express their own viewpoints in the public square, the radical “progressives” at Media Matters have resorted to fraud to, as Benjamin Franklin once said, mark X “for the odium of the public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.” Missourians will not be manipulated by “progressive” activists masquerading as news outlets, and they will not be defrauded in the process.
Bailey didn’t say exactly what “fraud” he was talking about — possibly because “MMFA followed a bunch of Nazis and refreshed the feed a lot” is not fraud. Instead he gestured vaguely in the direction of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, an ordinary consumer protection statute which allows the AG to regulate charities, and insisted that it empowered him to harass MMFA for hurting poor ‘widdle Elon’s feelings.
But that wasn’t even the craziest part!
Explicitly citing MMFA’s efforts to fight the Texas subpoena, Bailey insisted that “Media Matters has expressed its intent not to comply with CIDs like this one.”
“For example, the State of Texas served on Media Matters a virtually identical civil investigative demand in December of 2023, which Media Matters refused to comply with and instead filed a lawsuit to block compliance and disclosure of information and materials,” he wrote, urging the court to preemptively treat MMFA as if it were out of compliance.
All of which occurred before MMFA had even been officially served. The Attorney General for the state of Missouri has literally asked a state judge to treat MMFA’s efforts to vindicate its Constitutional rights as an act of defiance, and demanded an order barring the nonprofit from seeking federal redress.
Which is nuts, but AG Bailey has been far too busy ranting to his pals at Newsmax about MMFA’s “coercive or fraudulent algorithms or advertising” and gushing that “Elon Musk has done so much to protect our rights to First Amendment free speech, so we’re going to stand with him and make sure to hold wrongdoers accountable.”
"Missouri has been a champion of free speech since I took office,” Bailey said during a hit last November, seemingly impervious to the irony of the state’s top law enforcement official seeking revenge on a media outlet. (Watch a clip below.)
On March 26, Bailey headed over to his pal Benny Johnson’s show to sing another ode to Elon. Calling MMFA a “radical progressive tyrannical group” he accused it of “bullying” twitter, where Musk has worked tirelessly to “ensure fairness.”
Bailey even got an attaboy from the big man himself.
Meanwhile, back in DC …
AG Bailey’s shenanigans did not go unnoticed in DC, where MMFA’s lawyers urged Judge Amit Mehta to hurry up and rule on the requested injunction before any other red state AG takes up the Musk mantle.
“Bailey’s actions starkly underscore the need for prompt injunctive relief in this matter,” they wrote, noting that, under Paxton and Bailey’s reasoning, MMFA would have to defend itself in any state with a Republican AG intent on hauling it into state court. “In addition to further chilling Plaintiffs’ speech, and burdening them with yet more meritless litigation, Bailey’s conduct illustrates the risk of finding that District of Columbia courts are powerless to provide relief to D.C. residents targeted by retaliatory state actors.”
They also note that Bailey has conceded that his demand is “virtually identical” to Paxton’s, so an injunction against the Texas subpoena should functionally preclude Missouri as well.
But in some sense, the damage is already done. Hananoki was forced to back off reporting on twitter and Musk, and other outlets who don’t want the smoke have likely been warded off entirely.
“If you’re a newsroom, especially a resource-starved one, you have to start making decisions: is it worth it to write this one piece on Elon and X if it means that you’ll be stuck in a million-dollar legal battle?” MMFA president Angelo Carusone told The Guardian. “Most newsrooms do not have the resources to pay legal fees to fight Elon Musk, especially now that state AGs are stepping in.”
Musk’s garbage lawsuits against small media outlets are a win, even when he loses, because they serve as a warning to anyone who might write mean, true things about him. But if he can get his goons in the state AG’s offices to step in, that’s just icing on the cake. And since red state AGs like Paxton and Bailey have decided that scoring culture war points and sucking up to a deranged billionaire is their actual job, the assault on free speech seems likely to continue.
That’s it for today
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A: I’m pretty sure this is the same MO official who tried to say a ballot measure restoring abortion rights in MO would cost the state 51 billion $$.
B: The clit has over 8000 nerve endings & still isn’t as sensitive as Elon Musk.
A CA judge threw out Musk's lawsuit against CCDH on similar grounds, saying Musk was trying to punish CCDH for criticizing Twitter. As mentioned here, Bailey is the genius who who tried to stop a ballot initiative on abortion rights claiming it would cost MO billions of dollars of lost revenue. He lost this battle in court and the initiative is currently gathering votes for November. MO Attorney General prior to Bailey was Eric Schmidt (got elected to Senate) and prior to Schmidt it was running man Hawley. The pattern is unmistakable. Get elected AG, file idiotic lawsuits, get on conservative TV and then run for higher office all at the expense of MO taxpayers. But, never fear, the Republican House just passed a bill to eliminate the corporate income tax in MO (it's only 4%) because even though this was done next door in Kansas and caused catastrophic financial damage, stupidity can be contagious. MO has one of the lowest levels of teacher salaries, shortages of teachers and many rural districts have 4-day school weeks due to lack of funding. Our Republican legislators are pushing vouchers to drain more funds from education. But, yesterday, St Louis voted against all 13 right-wing candidates for school board positions. It's slow and exhausting work to fight this, but I think people are finally getting fed up.