How I got here
My interview with the American Prospect’s Rick Perlstein
Those of you who’ve been following Flux and my other endeavors for a bit are likely familiar with my past as a right-wing media activist (thanks for sticking around!), but I haven’t talked as much publicly about the earlier part of my life when I was born and raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family. That’s largely by design since I’m saving the full story for a memoir that I have been working on over the past few years.
But I decided recently to tell part of the tale to my friend Rick Perlstein, a historian who also works as a columnist for the American Prospect. Besides being an outstanding person, Rick has been a leading figure in trying to get non-Republicans to understand the deep pathologies that created the present-day phenomenon of Trumpism.
There’s a lot more that I hope to tell you soon, but if you’re so inclined in the meantime, please check out Rick’s essay. Here’s an excerpt:
“There were times we were homeless,” Matthew Sheffield told me. “One of my brothers was born in a tent. My mother gave birth to my sister by herself, in our apartment, with two kids around.”
He corrects himself: “No, three kids. Right next to her.”
Busking became a family profession. (“The Dark Osmonds,” I propose. “Yeah,” Matthew replies, “but we were classical.” He played French horn.) He grew interested in politics, in part from family connections (a grandfather was the Republican whip in the Utah state Senate), in part because the family did a lot of performing in the streets of Washington, D.C., because it was easy to scavenge food that vendors on the Mall threw away.
He and a brother developed computer proficiency, and he picked up a college education in dribs and drabs. […] He was around 20, and still on the road with his family, when he and his brother decided that CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather was too mean to Kenneth Starr, the special counsel investigating Bill Clinton. His brother came up with the idea to put some quotes of Rather’s on the internet to reveal his stealth liberalism. Matt said they should aim higher, and build a comprehensive website. So they did. “But we were afraid to put our names on it because we were two college kids. So we didn’t. And, um, the CBS people accused us of being a secret operation funded by Republican donors!”
The exclamation is a rare touch. He explained the rest nonchalantly at the Szechuan restaurant where we’re lunching in Chicago’s South Loop during the Democratic convention. Sheffield’s typical mien is sardonic bemusement at the strangeness of the world he managed to escape—as when he explains a second reason why he and his brother kept themselves hidden.
“Also, we were afraid because my mom had a dream that Bill Clinton was going to try to kill us.”
Sheffield’s faculty profile at the Leadership Institute, a right-wing clearinghouse for what they call “journalism training,” is no longer online, but it had noted that RatherBiased.com was “credited by the New York Times as being the most influential blog in taking down Dan Rather during the famous ‘Memogate’ scandal. Since that time, Matt has worked with … groups such as the Media Research Center where he created NewsBusters, Rush Limbaugh’s favorite blog. He also works with the Washington Examiner, helping them increase their traffic by over 600 percent to over a million visitors per month.”
Sheffield has long since become a committed leftist. I’m writing about him not just because he fascinates me. I’m writing about him because the lessons he learned on the road to becoming a right-wing media operative, and what he has learned since in his almost entirely frustrated efforts to impart those lessons to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, are so crucial for all of us to know.
Sheffield’s career on the right was rather doomed from the start. Because he cared about the truth.
His damnable allergy to propaganda had already shown out by the time he came up with an idea for a study during a stint at Virginia Commonwealth University. It asked: Where Do Columnists Come From? “And my general thesis was that newspaper columnists who are on the right come out of political operations, and ones from the left come out of—journalism.” That is to say, they carry with them journalistic values of fairness and accuracy, by which conservative columnists remain blessedly unburdened.