David Brock (born November 2, 1962) is an American journalist and author and the founder of Media Matters for America. He was a conservative journalist during the 1990s.
During that time he was best known for his book The Real Anita Hill and authoring the Troopergate story, which led to Paula Jones filing a lawsuit against Bill Clinton. He tells his personal story in his memoir Blinded by the Right and criticizes the "conservative media machine" in his book The Republican Noise Machine. His work on the latter book led him to found Media Matters for America, a non-profit organization that describes itself as a "progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."
Brock graduated from Paramus High School in Paramus, New Jersey and then attended the University of California, Berkeley. There he worked as a reporter and editor for The Daily Californian, the campus newspaper, sometimes expressing conservative views. He was an intern at The Wall Street Journal. He graduated from Berkeley with a B.A. in History in 1985.
In 1986, he joined the staff of the weekly conservative news magazine Insight on the News, a sister publication of The Washington Times. After a stint as a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, in March 1992 Brock authored a sharply critical story about Clarence Thomas' accuser, Anita Hill, in The American Spectator magazine, in which he said Hill might be "a bit nutty and a bit slutty." A little over a year later, in April 1993, Brock published a book titled The Real Anita Hill which expanded upon previous assertions that had cast doubt on the verity of Anita Hill's claims of sexual harassment.
The book became a best-seller. It was later attacked in a book review in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, a reporter for The New Yorker, and Jill Abramson, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The two later expanded their article into the book Strange Justice, which cast Anita Hill in a much more sympathetic light. It, too, was a best-seller. Brock replied to their book with a book review of his own in The American Spectator.
In the January 1994, issue of The American Spectator, Brock, by then on staff at the magazine, published a story about Bill Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas that made accusations that bred Troopergate. Among other things, the story contained the first printed reference to Paula Jones, referring to a woman named "Paula" who state troopers said offered to be Clinton's girlfriend.
Jones called Brock's account of her encounter with Clinton "totally wrong," and she later sued Clinton for sexual harassment, a case which became entangled in the Independent Counsel's investigation of the Whitewater scandal and eventually led to the impeachment of the president. The story received an award later that year from the Western Journalism Center, and was partially responsible for a meteoric rise in the 25-year-old magazine's circulation, from around 70,000 to over 300,000 in a very short period.
