Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit against censorship organization Media Matters, alleging it has engaged in fraudulent business practices.
“My office has reason to believe Media Matters used fraud to solicit donations from Missourians in order to bully advertisers into pulling out of X, the last social media platform dedicated to free speech in America, so we launched an investigation to get to the bottom of it,” Bailey said in a press release. “However, Media Matters has a sordid history of refusing to cooperate with investigations. I’m not going to let this activist group stonewall us. If there has been any attempt to defraud Missourians in order to trample on their free speech rights, I will root it out and hold bad actors accountable.”
Bailey is seeking to force Media Matters to “turn over documents related to his investigation into its fraudulent business practices,” the press release explains. The lawsuit follows a November 2023 investigation that revealed that Media Matters “solicited donations from Missourians under false pretenses to target X, formerly known as Twitter, in direct violation of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act.”
“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,” the lawsuit reads. “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,” the suit adds. “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’s office issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to Media Matters to investigate any potential violations of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act.
The attorney general has also sought a court order to compel Media Matters to observe the CID within 20 days.
