Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell has been quietly building a political action group on the side. Called For America, it claims to be "a non-profit 501(c)4 organized to educate Americans about traditional and contemporary American values, to relentlessly fight the growth of government, to oppose any substitute to freedom and self-government, to promote individual liberty and excellence, to promote economic opportunity, and to move America toward her founding principles."
For America launched its first major public action -- a malicious one. During President Obama's Facebook town hall, For America directed its followers to overwhelm the Facebook page hosting it by repeatedly posting a message to "repeal Obamacare," which caused the page to crash and make it unavailable for actual participants.
Bozell and his group are proud of their malicious prank. From the Daily Caller:
“As the comments grew on the town hall page we marveled at the speed and volume of posts from ForAmerica supporters,” said Bozell. “Within a few minutes, the town hall page was taken down and labeled ‘unavailable,’ and it was down for at least 39 minutes. When it was restored no new comments were allowed for several more minutes. We are only beginning to see the untapped power of this growing, formidable online army.”
According to Greg Mueller, an adviser for the group, “ForAmerica has amassed a very active and engaged online conservative army that engaged in a Facebook bracketing operation. The Obama folks have proven they are very good at new media, but there’s a new team in the game. We overloaded it with comments from that grassroots operation, which we believe disrupted the site for close to 40 minutes.”
The group urged supporters to post their own messages, but a number of people used their recommended language, which was “It’s not a tough choice, Mr. President. You have added $3.5 TRILLION to the debt already, the first thing we should do is repeal Obamacare!”
A post on For America's Facebook page reads:
You did it ForAmerica! Did you hear?! ABC News, LA Times and other media reports show how ForAmerica FB fans crashed Obama's Facebook Townhall page today. Read it for yourself! Not to shabby for a days work! Congrats and thank you for getting involved!
Bozell's CNSNews.com even promoted the malicious prank in an April 21 article by Fred Lucas, noting that it asked questions of Facebook but not that informed Facebook that CNS is run by the same guy who deliberately tried to crash their website.
So it seems Bozell is no longer satisfied with his shoddy brand of "media research" -- he's moving on to intentionally destructive attacks on the president of the United States.
Can we stop taking him seriously as a so-called media analyst now?
UPDATE: Americablog raises questions about the For America/Daily Caller version of events, points out that you really can't crash a single Facebook page through the de facto denial-of-service attack For America claims it launched. The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis responds by stating he only reported what he was told.
Regardless of what actually happened, the fact that For America is taking pride in its claimed disruption of Obama's town hall is sufficient evidence of the group's malicious intent.
