For some time, “fair and balanced” news coverage and commentary has been on the media endangered species list. Now, with the current “Ground Zero Mosque” flap, it seems to have become extinct.
Most concede that Fox News falls far short of their nonpartisan boast. Liberals relish mocking it as a propaganda machine and purveyor of infotainment at best. But, have their own standard-bearers – Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow – become any less guilty of the same thing? Indeed, it seems that they have upped Fox’s ante, turning infotainment into spinfotainment.
Consider Rachel Maddow’s recent drive-by on Rep. Eric Cantor. In the course of a longer National Review interview covering multiple issues, the Republican minority whip briefly commented on the proposed Islamic center. While acknowledging a constitutional right to build, he added that it would be “the ultimate in insensitivity” to 9/11 families to do so. Thinking this self-evident, he concluded rhetorically and with exasperation, “I mean, come on!”
Maddow did not invite Cantor on to explain his position more thoroughly though, according to recent polls, 70% of Americans seem to agree. Nor did she interview liberals who side with Cantor: Sen. Joe Liebermann, New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, etc. Nor did she allow airtime to someone like Raheel Raza or Tarek Fatah, Muslim Canadian Congress members who stated: “We Muslims know the ... mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation, to thumb our noses at the infidel.”
Instead, she replayed the Cantor “come on!” video clip three times, repeating the words with rolls of the eyes, and exclaiming each time, “That’s his argument???” She concluded that Cantor had “casually opened the door for Big Bigotry.”
By extension, her denunciation would also apply to the Anti-Defamation League itself. This would be the same group which for nearly a century, according to its mission statement, has exposed and combated “hatred, prejudice, and bigotry” against any and all minorities. “Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site,” the ADL wrote. “The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right.”
Maddow called this question of “sensitivity” and of “what is right,” the ugh factor. Even if a person is "ughed-out,” she explained, the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment are inalienable for all groups.
In fact, First Amendment rights are not inalienable in the case of hate crimes, riot, defamation, among other things. And presumably, if the American Nazi party petitioned to build a cultural center outside the Holocaust museum, high-minded constitutional evangelists such as Maddow would not be defending their right to do so.
The New York Times’ Clyde Haberman goes further. “Nobody, regardless of political leanings, would tolerate a mosque at Ground Zero,” the columnist pointed out in his “Prepositions and Fear-Mongering” piece. But, if he concedes that building right at Ground Zero would be intolerable even to First Amendment purists, what about six feet away? Sixty feet? Six-hundred feet (the actual distance)? Where does one draw the line to satisfy both constitutional conscience and victim sensitivity?
Keith Olbermann picked up where Haberman left off and hammered bigots on their prepositions.
