ABC News' Terry Moran transparently sides with Bill Donohue with his "When did you stop beating your wife?" approach to Donohue's attack on the John Edwards campaign. Even worse - from an objective, best-journalistic-practices viewpoint - is the breathlessness with which Moran parrots the tired "lefty bloggers are evil because they curse!" meme. Listen to enough journos and you come away believing that the "profanity" of liberal bloggers represents the gravest threat to the Republic imaginable, truly the worst thing in the world.
Never mind that calls for the imprisonment or execution or intimidation of politicians or other public figures - including reporters! - has long been a matter of routine for right-wing bloggers. Never mind that such "calls to action" and more oblique threats have often been promoted by more prominent figures in the righty blogosphere, the knd of people who wind up interviewed on talk shows or quoted as authoritative sources in the paper.
And yet the mainstream media - of which Moran is both member and symptom - not only ignores these very public and unequivocal expressions of right-wing hatred, but often willfully serve their political ends.
Somewhere in the depths of the DSM-IV, there must be a clinical term for this kind of pathology. I'm just not sure if there's a treatment.
(Cross-posted.)
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