James Burnham - Managing Partner, King Street Legal Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven, twenty two, now here on Houston's Morning News. All right,
so if you ever heard of Media Matters, if you
haven't heard of Media Matters, I'll let our guests explain
to you exactly what media Matters is before we get
into some of these legal issues. James Burnham Joints US,
Managing partner of King Street Legal. Media Matters loves to
report on conservative media, but they support all causes liberal. They're,

(00:25):
for lack of a better term, James, they're a left
wing advocacy group. How would you describe them?

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I think what you just said is pretty much accurate.
I mean, they're a left wing advocacy group. Their nominal
purpose is to expose, you know, bias and other problems
in conservative media. But of course they are, at least
my understanding is they're incredibly biased in doing so.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Of course they are. They're just biased, biased to the
left exactly instead of to the right. There there have
been suits filed against them by X for example, for
some of the things that they've said about their organization,
some of the that they've reported. Yet they've had a
lot of luck. I don't know if they're shopping judges
or what, but they've had a lot of luck in

(01:06):
liberal courts in getting out from under the allegations.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah. So the suit by Axis was filed in Texas,
and Media Matters has not not had great success there
at least so far, and they've not been able to
get some other liberal judge or other judge to get
in the way of that one. I think what you're
talking about is the Federal Trade Commission is investigating them.
I'm happy to explain the sort of background to that,
but they filed a lawsuit in DC to get the

(01:31):
investigation in joint. Would you like me to kind of
talk about please do?

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
So basically, during after the Black Lives Matter summer of
twenty twenty, there was at least there's alleged to have
been a sort of group boycott by advertisers of certain
conservative social media or certain conservative media outlets and also
some social media platforms, most famously X in the post
Elon acquisition version of X. And so the allegation was

(01:59):
all the advertise just got together, they agreed to not
advertise on X. And the allegation is further that Media
Matters helped organize the boycott, having different companies competitor companies
get together and decide not to do business with a
particular company like X or whatever. Is itself a violation
of the anti trust laws. You're not allowed to agree

(02:19):
with your competitors to not engage in a certain type
of economic activity. Okay, So that's the backdrop. So there's
a credible allegation that Media Matters organized an illegal group
boycott of, among other platforms, x X. The suit about
that in Texas, in that case is proceding. Fast forward
to twenty twenty five. President Trump takes office. There's a

(02:40):
new chairman of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson. The FTC's mission
is to enforce the anti trust laws. As we just discussed,
group boycotts can violate the anti trust laws.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
So what do they do.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
They launch an investigation into the allegation that there was
an illegal group boycott and they investigate, among other people,
the alleged ring leader of the investig and of the
group boycott, Media Matters. And so what does Media Matters
do Rather than sort of provide evidence and say, oh,
you know, we did do this, you didn't break the law,
We're totally fine, all we do is advocate whatever they

(03:11):
filed a lawsuit in DC and drew a Biden appointee
judge and got that judge to enjoin the investigation itself
to say, you can't even investigate because you are too
biased against media matters basically based on a collection of
public statements from like random people who are thought to

(03:32):
be friends and supporters of the FTC chairman, and a
few things. The chairman himself is that it's totally extraordinary
what happened.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
It is amazing to me all of these liberal judges
who want to make nationwide laws. The Supreme Court, I thought,
was pretty clear that you can't do that. As a
federal judge. You cannot. You're responsible for your district, your jurisdiction,
you're not responsible for the entire country. But these judges
are routinely ignoring the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
I think that's right. I think there's a decent chance,
or maybe even a good chance, that this case is
going to go up to the Supreme Court of the
United States and soon, because you know what really I
find striking about it is, you know, the idea that
you can't investigate a person who are in a company
or an entity that's thought to have violated the law
because you have a political bias against that person or entity.

(04:23):
Is not something that you know, anybody cared about or
was saying at all before in the Biden administration, right,
I mean, think about all the different things that the
Biden Justice Department did where they were obviously politically biased
against the target, like, for example, the current president who
they investigated and prosecuted in Florida and DC. Do you
think there was some political bias there from the Biden people.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
I don't know. Probably, Yeah, James will run on time,
but thank you, yeah, thank you so much for your time.
James Burnham, Managing partner, King Street Legal,