On December 6, exactly four weeks after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election, Media Matters for America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating conservative misinformation in media, announced it would be undergoing a makeover. In its twelve-year history, Media Matters’s main antagonist had been Fox News—a worthy, if unsurprising target for an organization devoted to conservative bias. But after surveying the media landscape in the aftermath of Clinton’s surprising defeat, Media Matters decided that it would focus on exposing falsehoods circulated online. “It used to be simple, Fox News was the gatekeeper ... but now there are so many potential bad actors,” Angelo Carusone, who was made president of Media Matters at the time of the announcement, told Politico. “Now there are places like Facebook who aren’t bad actors but can be enablers of misinformation.”

It would seem to be a logical next step for the media watchdog. In an interview, Carusone told the New Republic that Media Matters was already pivoting in this direction. But in a subtle way, the shift was actually a significant reinvention. The organization had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned itself at the center of a group of public relations and advocacy outfits whose mission was to help put Clinton in the White House. Seen in this light, the shift to focusing on the country’s much-discussed fake news problem, which allegedly facilitated Donald Trump’s victory, is a way of keeping in business after Media Matters and its founder David Brock had little to show for years of being Clinton’s first line of defense. In fact, this wasn’t even the first time Media Matters had declared it was going to stop focusing on Fox News.

The allegiance to the Clintons has always sat uncomfortably beside Media Matters’s ostensible goal of holding media accountable. Any journalist on Twitter knows that even mild criticisms of Clinton would almost instantaneously raise the hackles of some Media Matters staffer, giving the distinct impression that the whole project was about protecting Clinton from unflattering press rather than ensuring journalistic integrity. But Media Matters depended heavily on its association with the Clintons. Brock, a formerly conservative journalist who wrote a biography of Clinton that portrayed her as a hardcore leftist Lady Macbeth, has always been an object of suspicion among liberals, his conversion reeking of snake oil. His elevated stature in the world of Democratic politics comes not from any deep roots in liberalism, but the fact that the Clintons blessed his enterprise. That Media Matters both checks conservative media and protects the Clintons has been instrumental in Brock’s ability to raise money for his network of organizations, which also includes the website Shareblue (formerly Blue Nation Review) and the super PACs Correct the Record and American Bridge. (Brock did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)

That tension, according to more than half a dozen former staffers of Media Matters, comes from Brock, despite the fact that he was rarely involved in day-to-day operations. (Most staffers agreed to talk about Media Matters and Brock only on condition of anonymity, due to the fact that they were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement.) Media Matters faces a series of questions going forward. What is its identity now that Hillary Clinton’s political career is effectively over? Will liberal donors buy into this new identity, fashioned by a group whose leaders have shown no real investment in liberalism as a governing project? And can it fulfill its core mission—which nearly every former staffer we spoke to believes is important—with Brock at the helm?

In our numerous conversations with past Media Matters staff, there was a consensus that in the lead-up to Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy in 2015, the organization’s priority shifted away from the mission stated on its website—“comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation”—and towards running defense for Clinton. The former staffers we spoke to largely felt that this damaged Media Matters’s credibility and hurt the work it did in other areas. “The closer we got to the 2016 election the less it became about actually debunking conservative misinformation and more it became about just defending Hillary Clinton from every blogger in their mother’s basement,” one former staffer told us. This was, moreover, a repeat of what Media Matters did in 2008, when there was a rift between staffers and management over the favoring of Clinton in her race against then-Senator Barack Obama.