Liberal Talk Radio

In attempt to “demystify” the Jeff Gannon situation, Tim Graham at the National Review attempts to show us examples of White House reporters lobbing softballs at Bill Clinton.

I see two problems here:

1. If Graham is attempting to show that the media went easy on Clinton during Monica, I have one question: What planet is he living on?

2. This is classic FOX News moral equivalence. “Yeah, our guy did something, but your guy did something sort of similar under Clinton, so we’re even!” Even if the two things were nowhere near equal in magnitude, they attain equality in right-wing rhetoric. At least enough to make the issue one sentence too complicated for Americans to really care.

It’s bunk. As this article in Media Matters shows, Gannon had a habit of quoting verbatim from GOP talking points. Show me one White House press reporter who does the same with the Democratic talking points. Then we can have a conversation.

UPDATE: As Ryan points out, many reporters might have liberal sympathies in their personal lives. We know that most journalists contribute to Democratic candidates, for example. But to assume that this makes them unprofessional hacks is akin to racial profiling. A poll taken before the 2004 election said that people who owned passports supported Kerry over Bush by a 2-to-1 margin. That has all sorts of implications, but the most obvious is that being exposed to life outside the U.S. gives you a perspective that makes you less inclined to support conservative policy. I guarantee most journalists have passports. And I also guarantee that most journalists live in cities, which makes them many many times more likely to be Democrats. But again, to make the leap that because they’re international-traveling urban-dwellers they must be liberal stooges, is wrong.