Is Media Matters run by the selfsame David Brock who wrote
The Real Anita Hill and used to be a reporter for the
Washington Times and the
American Spectator?
If so, you shouldn't throw stones at Hitchens's apparent lurch to the right.
Anyway, I went back and read the original articles in question.
Here's the column Brock is responding to (posted because registration is required):
Liberal counterattack starts unfair, gets worse
During the past year, a number of liberal groups have begun to move aggressively to counter conservative influence in the media. One of the newest participants in this effort, a group called Media Matters for America, has already demonstrated its willingness to use unfair standards and faulty evidence to attack its opponents.
In one of the group's first analyses, Media Matters examines attempts by conservatives to claim that President Bush "inherited" a recession from Bill Clinton. They are correct that a respected committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research dates the start of the recession to March 2001 - contrary to those who suggest it began before Bush took office.
However, the group attacks several Republicans who suggested in late 2000 and early 2001 that a recession might be approaching. In December 2000, for instance, then-Vice-President-elect Dick Cheney stated that "we may well be on the front edge of a recession here," and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said, "I think there is a very severe danger of a recession."
At the time, of course, no one knew for sure whether the economy was in recession (NBER's finding that the recession began in March 2001 was released the following November), but there were signs of economic decline. Given that a recession began only a few months later, Cheney and Gingrich's comments seem prescient, not deceptive.
Media Matters also commissioned a poll that supposedly demonstrates that "62 percent of Americans hold the false belief that the recession began under Clinton." But respondents were actually asked whether they thought the statement that "statistics show that the current economic recession actually began during Bill Clinton's administration, before George W. Bush took office" was true. By asserting that "statistics show" the recession began under Clinton, the group's wording stacks the deck in favor of its preconceived conclusion.
This analysis is not an encouraging sign. The last thing the American political media need is another critic adding to the barrage of spin.
In an election year, it's always guilt-by-association season
In the last few weeks, the Bush administration has twice attacked political opponents by connecting them to hated figures. Most recently, in a letter to the editor in the Washington Post on Saturday, Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, compared the newspaper to the soldiers accused of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison outside Baghdad. His evidence? A recent Post editorial questioning the relationship between administration policies and the abuse scandal.
The May 12 editorial argued that new U.S. government procedures for "harsh" prisoner interrogation violate the Geneva Conventions and "contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq." The paper criticized congressional testimony by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, who argued that the actions of the guards at the prison were the fault of individual soldiers and commanders, not the larger intelligence-gathering system.
Di Rita responded by comparing the paper itself to the prison guards, stating that "the Post's continued editorializing on narrow definitions of international laws and whether our soldiers understand them puts the Post in the same company as those involved in this despicable behavior in terms of apparent disregard for basic human dignity."
This attack echoes a recent statement by Bush adviser Karen Hughes. During an April 25 appearance on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, she connected support for the right to abortion to the beliefs of al-Qaeda.
Hughes described President Bush's desire to decrease the number of abortions and increase adoptions. Then she declared, "I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life.... Unfortunately, our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own."
These guilt-by-association tactics are a sad substitute for honest political argument.
Here's the Media Matters
article
While the SS piece doesn't mention the attacks on Hannity, O'Reilly, etc., neither does it misstate or misquote the article in question. The SS piece is correct in stating that the MM article does attack Cheney, Daniels, etc.
Something that surprised me though is that SS doesn't mention that while the recession
officially started just two months after Bush took office, the groundwork for it was laid long before with the stock market crash of 2000 and the resulting loss of both equity and consumer confidence.
If nothing else, the fact that is started less than 2 months (sworn in on January 20) after he took office is proof that he had little to do with it because at that point he was still getting his adminstration confirmed by the Senate and settling in and hadn't had a chance to get any legislation passed by that point.
His tax cut package (his economic centerpiece) didn't even pass until late May.
Brock is spinning at about the speed of my 7200rpm Seagate hard drive on this issue.
(at least in the world they inhabit). 
