Rabid watchdog

While attacking what it sees as a vast, right-wing media conspiracy, an anonymous Web site has led to a growing media mystery: Who is behind Media Whores Online?

By Jennifer Liberto

June 3, 2002 | CNN's Aaron Brown discovered he was the target of an organized campaign against him one morning in early May, when his Blackberry started vibrating with the fury of hundreds of e-mails. "It was like magic fingers at a cheap motel," he says.

He had run afoul of the online media critics at Media Whores Online, an anonymously run Web site whose writers and readers share a conviction that the mainstream media (aka "media whores") is dominated by a right-wing agenda, slavishly praising President Bush and viciously attacking all things related to Bill Clinton, Al Gore or Democrats in general. So MWO devotees, in turn, attack back.

The site's gimmick is to activate its readers, directing them to the latest offending "whore" to spam with e-mail arrows. And in its nearly three-year history, MWO's profile has steadily risen, meriting increasingly frequent television and newspaper citations. All by ruffling the feathers of those easily wounded egos in journalism.

Oddly, Brown, the high-profile anchor of "Newsnight with Aaron Brown" and resident Mr. Nice Guy, prompted this particular attack himself by refusing a round of valentines from MWO readers. The compliment? That unlike most of his peers, Brown was not a "whore." Or more precisely, Brown says, that "I was probably a whore, too, but I wasn't in this instant."

And what had Brown done to win MWO's affection? He had merely offered a mild note of skepticism following a gaffe by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who blamed failed Middle East peace talks by President Clinton for ratcheting up violence in the region. Fleischer retracted the statement quickly, but while others characterized it as a slip-up, Brown seemed to wonder aloud if Fleischer had simply taken the fall for administration talking points that went over badly. MWO viewers cheered.

But Brown took offense at the raft of cookie-cutter e-mails that started trickling to him the next day, and responded to some of them. He neither liked the implication that his colleagues were "whores," he wrote back, nor accepted the notion that they were dedicated to a right-wing agenda. His responses soon made their way onto Media Whores Online. That's when he became a subject of the site's wrath -- and his Blackberry really started buzzing.

"I was just blown away by the nastiness of it all," he says now. "There was this sense that this was a perfectly responsible way to talk to people." The battle escalated when Brown made reference on his show to the "nasty barrage of e-mail from people who believe the media slants the news to favor conservatives," and dismissed them as "small stuff from small people." The anonymous voice behind MWO deemed Brown's statements to be those of a man trying to muzzle criticism -- an odd complaint, considering Brown gave their complaints an exponentially greater audience by mentioning them on his show.

"At long last, Mr. Brown, have you no shame?" the site asked. Brown says the episode reached its nadir when one e-mailer wrote to tell him he "hoped my daughter was raped by a Republican so that I would know what the rest of the country was going through."

Eventually, Brown penned a surprisingly magnanimous open letter to the site, in which he warned that its "tone and language," was comparable to "anti-abortion protestors [who] call doctors murderers and satanic on their web sites," which "emboldens people of like mind to cross the line, sometimes with tragic results." He ended it by saying he still wanted to hear criticism, if delivered "civilly."

A few months later, Brown still sounds rattled by the ordeal. "I'm a pretty gentle soul in a lot of ways," Brown says. "I was just distressed that there's this place and they throw language like this around when it usually just comes down to a disagreement with editorial policy."

But that's exactly Media Whores Online's tactic: personally browbeat journalists who stray from what they deem a fair (usually meaning partisan Democratic) point of view. In addition to Brown, MWO has managed to rankle reporters and editors at the Washington Post, ABC's George Stephanopoulos and CNN "Crossfire" host Tucker Carlson, who describes the MWO rationale as: "So anybody who doesn't share our political opinions is a traitor, or a sellout or a whore? That's not media criticism, that's revolting."

On the other side of the aisle from Carlson, literally, MWO has its admirers. His "Crossfire" co-hosts from the left, James Carville and Paul Begala, both frequently plug the Web site on air. "I just think they're great. They generate a lot of buzz, they come with a lot of attitude, and they go against the conventional corporate media," says Begala.

Of course, it's hard to take MWO seriously as a media watchdog, when it remains completely free of any accountability. But the site's anonymity has only fueled interest in it, and has prompted an increasingly popular Washington guessing game. Because no one, it seems, knows for sure who is behind MWO, even those who have been closely affiliated with the site since the very beginning.

Next page: The emergence of JennyQ