America’s history has been shaped by storytellers. Mark Twain formed ideas of American boyhood; Walt Disney’s princesses still inspire little girls’ dreams.
Less famous than Twain or Disney, for the past 30 years, Media Matters kingpin David Brock has spun and sold bestselling tales that are to U.S. democracy as Donald Duck would be to little kids if Disney cartoons portrayed Uncle Scrooge McDuck as kindly and generous.
Brock is a survivor who knows how to reinvent himself along with public opinion. Before he became Goebbels to Hillary Clinton’s Hitler, he masterminded the smear campaign against law professor Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony during Clarence Thomas’ 1991 Senate hearings. Famously calling Hill “a little bit nutty, and a little bit slutty” in his 1993 bestseller, The Real Anita Hill, by 2001, Brock had recanted his work trashing Hill on behalf of conservatives.
Brock’s 1996 book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, with title (if not content) worthy of one of Clarence Thomas’ pornos, was his first move to switch teams from “conservative” to “liberal.” The book may have helped Brock to be better friends with the Clintons, but its sales were literary kryptonite, leading to the termination of Brock’s editor at Simon & Schuster and a broken reprint deal with Newsweek.
